Dawn at Dusk

This morning, when the sun came up, the Islamic Republic hung two men who participated in the January 2026 protests, in public. I thought of many ways to phrase this, many ways to highlight the atrocity of this act; whether it is more horrendous that they hung people, that they punished protestors, or that they did it in public. With every dusk in the prisons of Islamic Republic, the wards where they keep political prisoners, the morning call to prayer is Gabriel blowing into his horn but the victims are not known, not minutes before they are picked up from their cells. Lucky ones get a last meeting with their families the night before, if they can be called lucky.

Hanging an innocent man is not a one-person job. It requires someone to set up the stage, someone else to install the guardrails around the square, another person to prepare the rope, and one final man to pull the chair. It is far from a one person system, what everyone thought about the structure of the IR back in February. It is an intricate system of violent thugs, blinded agents, hungry soldiers, and greedy tyrants.

Human life is so fragile. The fact that any one of us is alive at the moment is a surprise. Human lives lost are commemorated by just a few lines in a news outlet or some random person’s Substack, and that is even not commemoration. In the Islamic Republic, life is even more so fragile. It reminds me of the game I used to play as a child where the characters could die from falling in the subway track, getting fried by the toaster, or getting eaten by the bear. It is not that dying under the hands of the IR is dumb, it is anything but that. But the silly game rather a reminder of all of the small and big ways the crushing hand of the tyranny can take your life as you’re not watching.

I write these with reluctance because as difficult as it is, I have tried to maintain a distinction between my home and the system, the machine, the regime that carries out these atrocities. In my mind and in the minds of those around me, I have tried to keep alive the image of the Iran that I want to remember, one that is not replete with ugliness and brutality. But it took me some time to realize that whether or not I chose to acknowledge the ugly feelings they persist, take lives, and shatter families.

As the sun comes up in my favorite place on Earth around this time, some new innocent lives are lost. Whatever the reason for the existence of the human condition, be it suffering or finding divine meaning or achieving ultimate pleasure, I don’t think any system of thought can ever give a why.