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When Benny Sabti was a child growing up in Iran, he remembers receiving an unusual prize at school. “For being an excellent student, I received a Persian translation of Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler,” Sabti told Fox News Digital. “They translated Hitler’s book into Persian and distributed it to students.”
The experience stayed with him. Looking back, Sabti, now an Iran expert at the Institute for National Security Studies (INSS) in Israel, says it reflected a broader effort by Iran’s ruling clerical establishment to shape how young Iranians viewed politics, religion and the world around them.
Schools, mosques, workplaces and media all became part of an ideological ecosystem designed to reinforce loyalty to the regime. But critics of Iran’s leadership say religion itself was often not the ultimate goal.
“Faith for them is their tool,” Banafsheh Zand, an Iranian-American journalist and editor of the Iran So Far Away Substack, told Fox News Digital. “It’s not the end all to be all. It’s a tool that they can hide behind so that they can carry out all their criminalities.”
Primary school girls in traditional headscarves sit in a classroom, Tehran, Iran, Oct. 1, 1997. (Kaveh Kazemi/Getty Images)
Religion and power
The Islamic Republic was founded on the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, or “guardianship of the Islamic jurist,” which places ultimate political and religious authority in the hands of the country’s supreme leader.
But Zand argues that in practice the system functions less as a purely religious project and more as a mechanism of political control. “It’s more like a mafia,” she said. “They use faith in order to keep people down.”
According to Zand, ideology is reinforced through a mix of financial incentives and intimidation. “They tried by incentive and money and buying people,” she said.
Programs tied to the Basij, a militia affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), have often provided benefits such as jobs, housing and education to families aligned with the regime.
“If you are poor and you join the Basij, they give you benefits,” Zand said. “But you have to go along with whatever it is that they offer you.”
Ideology embedded in daily life
Sabti says the Islamic Republic built a vast network designed to reinforce ideology in everyday life. “In banks, offices, public spaces and even in the bazaars, regime representatives walk between shops telling people it is time to pray and checking who is not attending,” Sabti said.
Mosques themselves are closely integrated into the political system. Friday prayer leaders often deliver sermons aligned with government messaging.
“There are 16 propaganda bodies in Iran,” Sabti said, describing a network of state institutions responsible for spreading the regime’s interpretation of Islam and the ideals of the Islamic Revolution.
Some institutions also focus on exporting that ideology abroad. “There is a university dedicated to converting Sunnis to Shiism,” he said. “They bring people from Africa and South America to Iran, convert them to Shiism and send them back to export the Shiite Islamic revolution.”
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A Persian-language edition of Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
Indoctrination in schools
Schools play a central role in the regime’s ideological system.
“Schools are heavily indoctrinated,” Sabti said. “In civil studies books, Islam was promoted as superior to all other ideologies.”
Religious messaging appears across the curriculum. “You cannot separate any school subject from Islam,” Sabti said. “Not history, not geography. Everything is mixed with ideology. The only thing missing was adding it to mathematics.”
For Sabti, the Mein Kampf episode symbolized the ideological environment students were exposed to. The message, he said, reinforced hostility toward perceived enemies and embedded a political worldview from an early age.
Ideology and hypocrisy
Sabti says the credibility of the system is also undermined by the behavior of Iran’s own elites. “You can see it in the second generation,” he said. “Their children live abroad while the elites live in palaces in Iran and in other countries. It is hypocrisy.”
Zand says ideology has always been reinforced by intimidation. “They make examples out of people in the most vicious possible way,” she said. “It’s fear and manipulation.”
According to Zand, that atmosphere of fear shapes daily life for many Iranians. “Everybody is afraid of the police,” she said. “Everybody is afraid of their neighbors.”
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School children sit together in a classroom while mask-clad and distanced apart from each other, with Iranian national flags on the desk of each, on the first day of school’s re-opening, at Nojavanan school in the capital Tehran on Sept. 5, 2020. (Photo by Atta Kenare / AFP / Getty)
An ideology losing its grip
Despite the regime’s extensive ideological machinery, Sabti believes many Iranians never fully accepted the worldview the government tried to impose.
“Over the years, the indoctrination has stopped working,” he said. “Most of the public does not truly believe it.”
Still, the Islamic Republic remains in power. “The regime maintains control through money, weapons and propaganda,” Sabti said.
Zand agrees the system never fully reshaped Iranian society. Many people, she said, complied outwardly simply to avoid punishment.
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Iranian school girls wearing angel wings hold flags and portraits of Iran’s supreme leaders, past and present, as officials and security forces mark the 37th anniversary of the day in 1979 that the father of Iran’s Islamic revolution, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, returned from exile in France, at the shrine built to house his remains on Feb. 1, 2016 south of Tehran, Iran. (Scott Peterson/Getty Images)
“They won’t have a problem to transfer as long as they realize that the new Iran has no room for the violence and the horrifying characteristics of the Islamist regime,” Zand told Fox News Digital.
She said that beneath the surface, Iran’s cultural identity remained intact even after decades of pressure from the state.
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