Dirty Purification in the Islamic Republic: Purity, Ummah, and Stain Immunity
How can the production of atrocity in Iran become politically possible—how can mass killing, dispossession, and extreme coercion be carried out, repeated, and defended without the regime experiencing it as a moral collapse? This essay approaches that question by using “dirty purification” as a theoretical lens for how violence can be re-coded as hygienic necessity, how guilt can be displaced onto victims as “stain,” and how a fantasy of moral coherence can survive exposure and contradiction.
Introduction
“Dirty purification” is a political mechanism in which violence that would normally register as morally contaminating is re-coded as hygienic necessity. The “dirty work” (harassment, expulsion, torture, killing) is not treated as a stain on the political order; it is narratively absorbed as the very means by which the order is kept “clean.” The consequence is what I call “stain immunity”: a capacity to commit or authorize atrocity while sustaining an internal sense of moral cleanliness, because “stain” has already been displaced onto the victim as contamination.
Developed in relation to fascism’s myth of total community and its recurrent conversion of exclusion into “restoration,” this mechanism specifies how purity logics can make violence morally inhabitable for perpetrators—how the fantasy of order can metabolize atrocity without internal collapse (Griffin, 1993; Paxton, 2004; Žižek, 1989). The goal here, however, is not to adjudicate regime-types or to force a one-to-one classification (“the Islamic Republic is fascist”), as if historical fascism and political Islam were interchangeable. It is to show how a logic often central to fascist projects (purity, impurity, cleansing, stainlessness, enjoyment) can be adapted by a theological–authoritarian state with its own institutions, vocabulary, and political economy. In Iran’s case, the regime’s political theology—its claim to represent a righteous community (ummat/ummah) and protect it from corrupting enemies—can make coercion appear as moral hygiene, converting the exposure of brutality into vindication rather than shame.
To ground the argument, I focus on two sites: (1) the 1988 prison massacres and documented patterns of sexual violence in detention, where purity-talk can coexist with (and at times justify) practices that appear, from the outside, maximally “dirty” (Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights [OHCHR], 2026); and (2) the recent nationwide crackdown and its accompanying moral rhetoric, including the now-notorious state-media mockery of victims.
Dirty purification, briefly: purity, the Real, and the production of stain immunity
Purity matters politically when it operates as a classification system rather than a private preference. “Dirt” is not a substance; it is “matter out of place”—a sign that a boundary has been disturbed (Douglas, 1966). Purity politics is therefore boundary work: it defines who belongs, who is ambiguous, and who must be expelled so the order can appear coherent.
Psychoanalysis helps sharpen what is at stake in that coherence. Fantasy is not merely an imaginary story; it is a frame that structures what will count as “reality,” by staging the relation between the subject, the social world, and the obstacle said to block wholeness (Lacan, 1978). In purity politics, the obstacle is condensed into a figure of impurity—an enemy who “explains” why the promised order is not yet present.
Here the Lacanian “Real” clarifies why purification escalates. A fully coherent community is structurally impossible. The symbolic ordering of social life generates a remainder—surplus, inconsistency, antagonism—that cannot be eliminated by decree (Lacan, 1978). When a regime refuses that impossibility, it tends to treat each return of the remainder as proof that purification was not thorough enough. The target then becomes replaceable: if one enemy is removed and contradiction persists, the category of impurity expands and a new enemy must be found (Lacan, 1978; Žižek, 1989).
This is the hinge where stain immunity becomes possible. Once the victim is installed as contamination, the perpetrator can be experienced as cleaner. Violence does not appear as moral failure; it appears as restoration. Julia Kristeva’s abjection helps explain the affective intensity of this displacement: the abject is what disturbs identity and order, provoking disgust and boundary panic (Kristeva, 1982). When an “other” is abjected—treated as boundary-dissolving—their expulsion can feel like relief. Disgust becomes certainty; cruelty becomes care.
Finally, this structure can generate a specific attachment: enjoyment located inside the act of cleansing. Ideology binds not only through belief but through jouissance—a surplus enjoyment that adheres to practices that enact the fantasy, even when those practices are destructive or contradictory (Žižek, 1989; Žižek, 1997). Under dirty purification, the subject can experience satisfaction not only in domination but in being the instrument of “necessary” hygiene.
Ummat and mellat: how the Islamic Republic’s form organizes inclusion and expulsion
A key reason dirty purification is analytically useful in the Iranian case is that the Islamic Republic is built on a dual form: republican institutions on the surface (elections, parliament, presidency) and a vertical sovereignty anchored in the Supreme Leader and unelected bodies that supervise the political field.
The constitution explicitly frames leadership in terms of the Islamic community (ummah/ummat). The Supreme Leader is positioned as guardian of the community’s religious–political direction, while popular sovereignty is routed through supervised institutions (Constitution of the Islamic Republic of Iran, 1979). In practice, the Guardian Council functions as a decisive gatekeeping mechanism through its “supervision” of elections and candidate vetting, repeatedly shaping who can meaningfully compete for office (Human Rights Watch, 2005; Iran Data Portal, n.d.). This architecture stabilizes a moral–political boundary often articulated as insider/outsider (khodi/gheyr-e khodi), where legitimacy is implicitly defined not by neutral citizenship alone but by proximity to, and compatibility with, the ruling order’s ideological criteria—casting pluralistic participants as outsiders (Human Rights Watch, 2005).
At the level of official self-description, the regime frequently performs pluralism rhetorically—affirming ethnic and sectarian diversity as a national “opportunity” while rejecting discrimination as a principle (Khamenei, 2017). The analytic point is not that such rhetoric is meaningless, but that it can function as a legitimating surface: diversity is affirmed as image, while operative boundary work happens through supervision, ideological admissibility, and selective permission—especially around organization, civic agency, and dissent (International Crisis Group, 2018; OHCHR, 2025). Through the lens of dirty purification, this is precisely the kind of setting in which coercion can be framed as moral hygiene: the “clean” community is invoked as an object of protection, and political exclusion is rendered as safeguarding rather than contraction of the political field (Douglas, 1966; Kristeva, 1982; Žižek, 1989).
At the same time, the regime’s ideology is not simply doctrinal rigidity. It has a long record of strategic reinterpretation, including the Supreme Leader’s concept of “heroic flexibility” (narmesh-e qahramananeh), a rhetorical move that recodes tactical concessions as principled strength (Khamenei, 2013). This matters for dirty purification because flexibility does not weaken purity logic; it can strengthen it. When policy shifts are framed as righteous tactics, the regime can preserve the fantasy of moral coherence while adjusting to pressure—maintaining the image of “clean” necessity even when the reality is messy.
Political economy as boundary reinforcement: dependence, proximity, and the privatization of belonging
The boundary between “inside” and “outside” is not sustained by institutions and rhetoric alone; it is reproduced materially through distribution, access, and networks. A substantial body of scholarship and policy reporting describes how parastatal foundations (bonyads), security-linked conglomerates, and patronage networks shape significant sectors of the economy and welfare distribution, producing systems of privilege often tied to proximity to power rather than neutral citizenship (Coville, 2017; Maloney, 2015; Saeidi, 2004; Congressional Research Service, 2024). In such a setting, “belonging” becomes practically administrable: access to jobs, contracts, permits, protection, and institutional mobility can be unevenly mediated by loyalty, affiliation, and reputational “cleanliness,” while dissent and “contamination” can be sanctioned through exclusion from opportunity or heightened exposure to enforcement (Congressional Research Service, 2024). This does not produce universal compliance; it produces a landscape in which boundary maintenance is constantly re-enacted in everyday life because livelihoods can be made contingent on perceived compatibility with the ruling order (Parsi, 2012).
This material logic also helps clarify the gap, noted earlier, between official inclusivity talk and lived experience in peripheral and minority-populated provinces. The point is not that minorities are automatically framed as ontological “threats” by virtue of difference; rather, deprivation and marginalization can be produced through central allocation and selective access, while the regime’s sharper threat perception often targets mobilization itself—unionization, student organizing, human rights work, local civil society, and any durable infrastructure of collective voice that could contest discriminatory distribution (OHCHR, 2026; International Crisis Group, 2025). In dirty purification terms, this is one way impurity becomes actionable without constant dramatization: administrative and economic levers discipline the broader nation while rewarding proximity to the moralized “inside,” allowing the regime to preserve an image of righteous order even when inequality, corruption, and coercion remain structurally visible.
1988 and the sexualization of purification: when defilement is framed as righteousness
With these institutional and material conditions in view, atrocity becomes legible not as a breakdown of the order but as one of its techniques. Violence is staged as hygiene, and the victim is made to carry the stain that would otherwise attach to the perpetrators.
The 1988 prison massacres remain one of the most documented and contested sites for understanding the Islamic Republic’s use of sovereign violence against internal enemies. Major human-rights reporting and advocacy has repeatedly called for accountability and described the events as involving large-scale extrajudicial executions of political prisoners (Amnesty International, 2018).
Within survivor testimonies and compiled reports, one of the most disturbing dimensions concerns sexual violence in detention and allegations that sexual assault and coercive “marriage” arrangements were used against female prisoners, including claims framed through religious reasoning about virginity and the afterlife (Justice for Iran, 2013). Because these claims are mediated through testimony and documentation rather than open judicial records, they must be handled with care. The aim here is neither sensational repetition nor dismissive skepticism, but precise attribution to bodies of evidence that have collected and analyzed such accounts. Contemporary UN reporting on Iran has also documented sexual violence in detention in later periods, underscoring that sexualized coercion is not an isolated rumor but a recurring allegation in accounts of repression (OHCHR, 2026).
How does this connect to dirty purification without collapsing into polemic? The connection is that purity politics can incorporate defilement when defilement is re-coded as discipline, punishment, or boundary enforcement. Douglas’s point is useful here: purity is not about cleanliness in the ordinary sense; it is about maintaining an order of classification (Douglas, 1966). Sexual violence, in that frame, can be weaponized as a technology of degradation that marks the victim as “ruined,” expelled, and unworthy—while still being narratively housed within the regime’s moral economy as righteous punishment of “impurity.”
Kristeva’s abjection names the affective logic. The abject is what must be expelled to stabilize identity and boundary (Kristeva, 1982). Sexualized violence can function as a brutal method of forcing the victim into abjection—making them represent contamination—so that the system can claim purification even while committing acts that appear, from any external moral standpoint, contaminating.
This is the deepest danger of stain immunity. Once the victim is made to carry the stain, almost anything can be done to them without “dirtying” the perpetrators inside the fantasy.
Cleansing as counterinsurgency: the recent crackdown and the conversion of killing into hygiene
Turning to the present, the recent nationwide unrest and crackdown provide a site where dirty purification becomes visible as procedure rather than exception. Multiple human-rights and news sources report that protests beginning in late December 2025 were met with escalating force, mass arrests, and a heavy death toll amid restrictions that complicated verification (OHCHR, 2026; Reuters, 2026).
Crucially, the point here is not only the scale of violence, but the moral coding that can accompany it. A purification regime does not say, “we kill because we want power.” It says, “we remove contamination to restore order.” Once dissent is framed as sedition, sacrilege, foreign plotting, or “enmity,” killing can be positioned as defensive hygiene—an act performed for the community rather than against citizens. Victims are narratively placed outside the moral community; they become stain.
This is why exposure often fails to produce shame internally. If the moral weight of the act has been displaced onto the target—constructed as contaminant—then images of brutality can be framed as proof of seriousness: “we did what had to be done.” Stain immunity is not ignorance; it is an ideological achievement.
The obscene underside: joking about bodies, and the normalization of stain immunity
The widely reported state-media segment mocking slain protesters—framed as a “which refrigerator holds the bodies?” joke—matters precisely because it dramatizes stain immunity at the level of tone. Coverage in Euronews, the Financial Times, and other outlets describes the backlash, the dismissal of personnel, and legal action against those involved (Euronews, 2026; Financial Times, 2026).
What is staged here is not “evidence that they enjoy killing” (a claim that would require a different evidentiary standard). What is staged is something more structural: the conversion of corpses into logistics and banter, and the attempt to keep that conversion compatible with an official moral surface. In a dirty purification regime, the obscene underside does not contradict the moral order; it parasitizes it. The joke works only because the victims have already been coded as non-innocent—already displaced into the category of stain. The laughter (or the attempt at it) is enabled by the prior moral work of expulsion.
Equally important, the outrage and disciplinary response show that stain immunity is never total. Even within such systems, there are moments when the obscene underside becomes too legible and damage control becomes necessary. But damage control often targets optics rather than structure: remove the presenter, cancel the segment, re-stabilize the fantasy.
Conclusion: why this lens clarifies the Islamic Republic without reducing it to a label
If “dirty purification” is treated as a stand-alone mechanism, the Iranian case shows how it can be utilized by a theological–authoritarian order whose political community is organized through supervised inclusion, ideological boundary maintenance, and selective distribution of life chances. Ummat/mellat is one useful way to describe the tension between a moral community claimed by the regime and a civic nation that is governed, filtered, and disciplined; but the deeper point is structural: a politics that insists on total coherence will repeatedly produce “impurity,” repeatedly convert coercion into hygiene, and repeatedly treat each return of remainder as proof that cleansing was insufficient.
That is why repression can persist without moral collapse inside the system. The system does not merely tolerate violence; it narratively cleans it. Violence becomes legible as duty. Where that duty is experienced as righteousness, it can generate a surplus attachment—an enjoyment that adheres to purification itself, not necessarily as explicit pleasure in suffering, but as satisfaction in being the instrument of “necessary” order (Žižek, 1989; Žižek, 1997).
This does not settle classificatory debates (“fascist or not?”). It offers a sharper diagnostic: when a regime consistently, in practice, codes pluralism as pollution, treats dissent as contamination, and frames coercion as hygiene, dirty purification is operating—whether the banner is ultranational rebirth, religious guardianship, or some hybrid formation. Once it is operating, brutality does not necessarily stain; it can become, inside the fantasy, proof of cleanliness.
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