Custodianship and Misrule in Iran

by Milad Milani

Free Iran demonstration, January 11, 2026, Washington, DC. Photo: Ted Eytan via Flickr. CC BY-SA 4.0.

When Power Turns against Belonging

There is a simple question that refuses to go away, no matter how often it is displaced by politics, ideology, or strategy. It is not a question of systems or outcomes. It is older than constitutions and more enduring than revolutions.

How does a ruler come to fear the people he claims to represent?

This is not merely a failure of governance. It is a moral break. When power turns against those from whom it draws its legitimacy, something more than injustice has occurred. A bond has been broken; one that is not written into law but carried in memory, custom, and the quiet expectation that those who rule do so in care of what they have inherited.

To govern a people is not first to command them. It is to belong to them.

Belonging is not a matter of blood or belief, but of fidelity: to the land one inhabits, to the lives entrusted to one’s care, and to the future that must remain possible for those who come after. A ruler who governs without this fidelity may retain power, but he no longer stands within the moral horizon of the place he claims as his own.

This essay grows out of my recent ABC Religion & Ethics article on Iran’s ethical reawakening but seeks to think more slowly and more fundamentally about the moral breach now shaping Iran’s political destiny.

The tragedy now unfolding in Iran is often misnamed.

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