My Iranian friends take great pride in the enormous global influence of their cultural heritage. From the Taj Mahal in India to US greeting cards with quotations from Rumi, the markers of Persian civilization are ancient and modern, sublime and ridiculous — but above all, ubiquitous.
For the most part, this spread occurred organically: No state-sponsored advertising campaign was required to convince gourmands everywhere that fasenjan, a stew of duck or chicken in walnut paste and pomegranate molasses, tastes divine.
However, some cultural elements — the Shiite faith, most of all — have for centuries been promoted by Iran’s rulers.
Illustration: Yusha
The current theocratic dispensation in Tehran regards much of Persian culture with undisguised disgust, proscribing as impure any expression of Iran’s pre-Islamic history and condemning as sinful anything that does not conform to the regime’s dour worldview. Instead, it has patronized murder and mayhem as its instruments of influence, at home and abroad.
The attempted murder of Salman Rushdie, 33 years after then-Iranian supreme leader ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a religious edict calling for his death, is only the latest manifestation of the Islamic republic’s debased soft power.
Khomeini himself once aimed higher: He had a grand plan to internationalize the Shiite revolution that brought him to power in 1979. When that failed — the ayatollah was admired by many in the Sunni-majority Arab states, but he never won their fealty — his successors settled for exporting sectarian discord by financing and arming a network of Shiite militias and terrorist groups across the Middle East.
The task of setting up this matrix of menace was assigned to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, which evolved over the decades from Khomeini’s personal militia to the Iranian state’s most powerful security arm. No Guard commander did more to expand its influence than Qassem Soleimani, leader of a unit known as the Quds Force, who came to be designated a terrorist by the US and sanctioned by the EU and the UN.
Under his supervision, the Guard and its proxies seeded chaos in Arab nations from Syria and Lebanon to Iraq and Yemen. By 2020, when he was taken out by a US drone strike, Soleimani had his sights farther afield, with an assassination campaign against dissidents and detractors — and especially Israelis — in Europe and Asia.
Taking a leaf out of the post-9/11 al-Qaeda playbook, the corps also began to recruit sympathizers living in the West to target high-profile figures like the Saudi ambassador to Washington. Since Soleimani’s death, it has grown more ambitious and reckless, targeting top US officials like former secretary of state Mike Pompeo and former national security adviser John Bolton, as well as prominent anti-regime advocates based in the US, like Masih Alinejad.
So it is no surprise to learn, from Vice News, that Rushdie’s attacker, a New Jersey resident and admirer of Khomeini, had been in direct contact on social media with members of the Guard. Hadi Matar, US-born and of Lebanese ancestry, was also sympathetic to Hezbollah, the primus inter pares of all proxy groups in the Guard’s network. The name he used on his fake driving license is an amalgam of Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and a slain commander, Imad Mughniyeh.
The attack on Rushdie is unlikely to be the last. As an instrument of a regime that defines itself by what it opposes — the US, Israel and the West, generally in that order — the corps has a great deal to gain from such assaults, whether they are directly controlled or merely inspired and encouraged. The triumphant coverage of the attempt on Rushdie in the Iranian media, much of it controlled by the corps or its acolytes, has drowned out the foreign ministry’s denial of any involvement.
In the days ahead, expect Guard commanders to heap praise on Rushdie’s assailant. This is the dog whistle they use, a way not just of claiming credit without taking responsibility, but also of hyping their soft power, defined by Joseph Nye in another context as “the ability to influence others by attraction rather than coercion or payment.”
The sotto voce message is that the Guard has a long memory and a long reach. Even though Matar failed — Rushdie is, thankfully, alive — the signal from Tehran is that enemies of the regime can be attacked anywhere, even in the US, and at any time, even decades after the regime first put a target on their backs.
The Guard will count on this to enhance its image — among its own ranks, its proxies and potential recruits — as an international player, inviting comparisons with the US CIA and Israel’s Mossad. That, more than the quatrains of Omar Khayyam or the gorgeous rugs of Kerman, is the soft power that matters to Tehran.
Bobby Ghosh is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering foreign affairs. Previously, he was editor in chief at the Hindustan Times, managing editor at Quartz and international editor at Time.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
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