Fatwas, Iran, and the Path Forward

Prologue: Look in the Mirror First

In 1776, thirteen colonies declared independence and set about building a nation. The total population was approximately 2.5 million—excluding the indigenous peoples who had inhabited this continent for millennia. Those native populations, once numbering over five million at the time of European contact, had been devastated by disease, displacement, and violence to perhaps 600,000 by the time the Founders put pen to parchment. Another 460,000 of the 2.5 million were enslaved Africans who would wait another 89 years for legal emancipation and far longer for anything resembling equality.

The Founders had one enormous advantage that is rarely acknowledged: there were no legacy issues. In business terms, they were a startup. No centuries of codified religious law to untangle. No entrenched tribal governance structures spanning three thousand years of civilization. No theocratic infrastructure cemented over decades. No revolutionary guard with its own economic empire. They wrote on what was, for their purposes, a relatively blank slate—and they wrote something extraordinary.

Today we are 342 million people across fifty states. And we are regressing. We have become a nation led not by servant-leaders dedicated to the wealth of the nation, but by figures serving their own greed for wealth and power. We have a citizenry that too often lacks the courage to demand better—to vote, to organize, to hold leaders accountable, to do the difficult and unglamorous work of self-governance.

We look around the world with harsh criticism of other nations' failures while avoiding the self-examination that would confirm how badly we have managed this democracy for the past fifty years. Our infrastructure crumbles. Our public education system has declined from world-leading to middling. Our political discourse has degenerated into tribal warfare between parties more interested in defeating each other than in governing. Our national debt is staggering. Our healthcare system costs more and delivers less than those of peer nations. We preach democracy abroad while our own institutions erode from within.

And now, with the toppling of Khamenei, we wring our hands and ask: how do we fix Iran?

The honest answer begins with humility. The answer is the same in both instances. The citizenry of the United States, Iran, the European Union—and solemn voices like the Pope—must stop pontificating and start doing the hard work. That means seeking out the excellent minds in our communities and nations. Not the loudest voices. Not the most politically connected. Not the wealthiest donors. The excellent minds—the engineers, educators, scientists, community leaders, entrepreneurs, and moral voices who understand that building a functioning society is patient, unglamorous, generational work.

Iran needs to rebuild. So do we. The prescriptions in this document apply to both.

Part One: A Brief History of Fatwas

A fatwa is a non-binding legal opinion on a point of Islamic law, issued by a qualified jurist called a mufti. The word comes from Arabic meaning 'clarification' or 'explanation.' Most Westerners encounter the word only in the context of death sentences and terrorism. This is like understanding the entire American legal system solely through the lens of death penalty cases.

The overwhelming majority of fatwas throughout 1,400 years of Islamic history have been routine advisory opinions on everyday matters: Is this food permissible? How should I pray during travel? Can I use a credit card? Is vaccination acceptable? These mundane rulings constitute 99% of all fatwas ever issued. The sensational ones that make headlines represent a statistically invisible fraction.

Five Stages of Fatwa History

Stage 1 — Revelation (7th Century): The Prophet Muhammad is considered the first mufti. He issued rulings based on Quranic revelation in response to questions from his followers.

Stage 2 — Early Jurists (7th–9th Centuries): After the Prophet's death, companions and early scholars used independent legal reasoning (ijtihad) to address new questions. From the accumulated mass of these individual fatwas, the first Islamic legal manuals were compiled.

Stage 3 — The Great Scholars (9th–13th Centuries): Approximately ninety major scholars established the foundations of Islamic jurisprudence. Four dominant Sunni schools of law solidified: Hanafi (Iraq, South Asia, Turkey), Maliki (North Africa), Shafi'i (Egypt, Southeast Asia), and Hanbali (Arabia). Legal pluralism became the norm—different regions applied different interpretations, all considered equally valid.

Stage 4 — Codification & Empire (13th–19th Centuries): As social change slowed, scholars relied increasingly on precedent. During the Ottoman Empire, muftis were absorbed into state bureaucracies. The chief mufti of Constantinople (Shaykh al-Islam) wielded enormous power—issuing fatwas to legitimize wars, sanction printing presses (1727), approve vaccination (1845), and even dethrone sultans.

Stage 5 — Institutional & Digital Era (19th Century–Present): Formal fatwa institutions were established. Egypt's Dar al-Ifta (1895) was the first. Today, approximately 16 countries have state-appointed Grand Muftis. The internet has exploded access—fatwa websites distribute thousands of queries daily. This has also created what scholars call 'chaos' in modern fatwa practice, as unqualified individuals issue rulings that reach millions.

Part Two: The Academics and Institutions Trying to Do Good

Within Islam, a significant body of credible scholars and institutions has actively worked to counter extremist fatwas with theological rigor. These are the principal counter-voices:

Part Three: Make No Mistake — The Threat Persists

The existence of counter-fatwa scholarship does not neutralize the danger. Ideas, once released, have lives independent of their authors. Ayatollah Khomeini died four months after issuing his 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie. Khamenei, who upheld and reaffirmed it, was killed on February 28, 2026. Yet someone still stabbed Rushdie in August 2022—33 years after the original ruling. The bounty is held by an Iranian foundation, not a person. The ideology is embedded in networks, not an office.

Hitler's Mein Kampf was published in 1925. Hitler died in 1945. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and extremist movements still cite it a century later. The same propagation pattern applies to extremist fatwas: once they enter the ideological ecosystem, eliminating the source does not remove the poison. It metastasizes independently.

Osama bin Laden's 1996 and 1998 'fatwas' against the United States inspired the 9/11 attacks and continue to serve as foundational texts for jihadist recruitment. Bin Laden was killed in 2011. Al-Qaeda and its ideological descendants remain operational.

Some part of the world will always pursue terrorist acts in the name of the Ayatollah, just as neo-Nazis cite Mein Kampf and white supremacists cite the Turner Diaries.

This is not defeatism. It is realism. The question is not whether extremist violence will stop entirely—it will not—but whether it can be diminished, contained, and countered over time through the patient work of the scholars, institutions, and communities described in Part Two.

Part Four: Iran — A History of Tribes, Empire, and Theocracy

Three Thousand Years of Civilization

Iran is not a young nation struggling to find its identity. It is one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth. The Persian Empire under Cyrus the Great (550 BCE) was the largest the world had yet seen, stretching from Egypt to India. Cyrus authored what many consider the first declaration of human rights. Persia gave the world algebra, astronomy, poetry (Rumi, Hafez, Omar Khayyam), medicine (Avicenna), and architectural wonders that still stand. This is a civilization with a profound intellectual tradition—one that predates Islam by over a thousand years.

The Ethnic Mosaic

Iran is not a Persian nation-state. It is a mosaic of distinct ethnic and tribal groups, many of whom predate the modern Iranian state by millennia. Persians constitute roughly 60% of the population. The remaining 40% includes Azerbaijani Turks (~16%), Kurds (~7%), Lurs (~6%), Arabs (~2%), Baloch (~2%), Turkmen (~1%), Qashqai, Armenians, Assyrians, Jews, and others. The territories of indigenous nomadic peoples alone cover nearly 59% of the country's land area.

These groups speak different languages (Azeri Turkish, Kurdish, Luri, Balochi, Arabic, Turkmen), maintain distinct cultural identities, and in many cases have historically resisted centralization from Tehran. The Kurds have fought for autonomy or independence since before the 1979 revolution. The Baloch of the southeast have been systematically marginalized. The Khuzestani Arabs of the oil-rich southwest have long grieved that resource revenues flow to Tehran while their province remains impoverished.

The 1979 Revolution and Theocratic Consolidation

The Islamic Revolution replaced the Shah's authoritarian monarchy with Ayatollah Khomeini's velayat-e faqih—guardianship of the Islamic jurist. This placed a single Shia cleric at the apex of all power: military, judicial, legislative, and executive. Khomeini immediately used military force to crush Kurdish, Arab, and Turkmen uprisings in 1979, killing thousands. His successor Khamenei ruled for 36 years, entrenching the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) as the regime's economic and military backbone.

March 1, 2026: The Current Moment

Khamenei was killed on February 28, 2026 in coordinated U.S.-Israeli strikes. A three-member transitional council—President Pezeshkian, Supreme Court Chief Justice Mohseni-Ejei, and Guardian Council cleric Alireza Arafi—has been formed. The 88-member Assembly of Experts must select a new Supreme Leader. No successor was designated. The IRGC commander-in-chief was also killed.

Key transition figure Ali Larijani has already warned 'secessionist groups' of harsh consequences, and Iran has launched retaliatory strikes. The Council on Foreign Relations identifies three near-term trajectories: regime continuity ('Khamenei-ism without Khamenei'), military takeover by the IRGC, or regime collapse. None of these scenarios envisage positive transformation in the year following transition.

Part Five: We've Seen This Before — Iraq and Afghanistan

Before prescribing solutions for Iran, we must honestly confront what happened the last three times Western military intervention toppled a regime in the Muslim world.

Afghanistan: Twenty Years, Two Trillion Dollars, Eleven Days

Afghanistan is, in effect, a federation of tribal and ethnic groups. The Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, Uzbeks, Turkmen, Baloch, and others have governed themselves through local structures—tribal councils, the Loya Jirga, elder authority—for centuries. The Taliban are a Pashtun minority movement. A minority ruling a majority is, as one analyst put it, a formula for failure in any government.

The United States spent 20 years and over $2 trillion in Afghanistan. American efforts were always top-down—they never penetrated to the local level where the real power lay. When the U.S. withdrew in August 2021, the Afghan government collapsed in eleven days. The Taliban retook power and immediately reimposed restrictions on women's education, public life, and civil society. The country reverted almost exactly to its pre-2001 state, with tribal structures reasserting themselves as the operative governance reality.

The Taliban have struggled to transition from an insurgency to a governing body. There is no functioning economy because of sanctions and the cutoff of international aid. Women and girls have been effectively erased from public life. International terrorist groups, including ISIS-Khorasan Province, operate from Afghan territory. No government in the world has recognized the Taliban regime, but no government is supporting a proxy war against it either—creating a frozen failed state.

Iraq: Sectarian Fracture and the Rise of ISIS

Iraq's post-2003 trajectory tells a complementary story. The U.S. dismantled Saddam Hussein's Sunni-dominated Ba'athist state and attempted to replace it with a democratic system. The catastrophic decision to dissolve the Iraqi military and ban all Ba'ath party members from public life threw hundreds of thousands of trained, armed men into unemployment and humiliation overnight. The resulting Shia-dominated government marginalized Sunnis, which directly fueled the rise of ISIS.

RAND's analysis concluded that 'almost nothing about the transition of responsibilities to the Iraqi government went as planned,' because assumptions and performance measures proved overly optimistic. Iraq had advantages Iran-watchers should note: oil wealth, a relatively educated population, and a military that was a composite of Kurds, Sunni, and Shia. Afghanistan had none of these. Yet even with these advantages, Iraq descended into sectarian civil war, saw the rise of the most brutal terrorist organization in modern history, and remains politically fragmented today.

Libya: The Third Warning

NATO's 2011 intervention toppled Gaddafi. Libya has not recovered. It remains split between two competing governments in Tripoli and Benghazi, with militia control, collapsed institutions, and no functioning national governance. Its stability scores dropped to among the lowest globally and have never recovered.

The pattern across all three cases is identical: external military intervention followed not by stabilization, but by prolonged chaos. Removing a strongman does not create a functional state. It creates a vacuum that tribal, sectarian, and militia forces rush to fill.

We pulled out, and they reverted to tribal instincts—because tribal instincts are what remain when imposed central authority is removed without organic replacement.

Part Six: What Can Be Done Differently — And a Caution That It Won't Happen Overnight

If the goal is to prevent Iran from becoming the next Afghanistan, Iraq, or Libya, the approach must fundamentally differ from all three precedents. The following framework draws on what went wrong in each case:

1. Work With the Tribes, Not Around Them

Iran's ethnic groups are not the problem—they are the governance reality. Any post-theocratic order must offer genuine federalism: regional autonomy for Kurds, Azeris, Baloch, Arabs, and Lurs over language, education, local administration, and resource allocation. Iran's constitution already contains Articles 15 and 19 guaranteeing minority rights—these have never been implemented. Start there.

Afghanistan failed because governance was imposed top-down. Power in tribal societies is local, and national governance must emerge from local legitimacy, not the reverse.

2. Preserve the Bureaucracy — Learn From Iraq's Catastrophe

The critical difference between Iran and Afghanistan is that Iran has a functioning deep state: a central bank, ministries, regional governorates, universities, a healthcare system, an industrial economy. If these institutions survive the transition intact, the state avoids the atomization that destroyed Libya.

The catastrophic mistake in Iraq was dissolving the Ba'athist bureaucracy and military overnight—throwing hundreds of thousands of trained professionals into the arms of insurgents. That mistake must not be repeated. Keep the machinery running. Purge the ideology, not the people.

3. Economic Investment Before Political Transformation

People living in economic desperation default to tribal loyalty for survival. Before demanding democratic elections, ensure food security, currency stabilization, sanction relief tied to concrete governance benchmarks, and infrastructure investment in minority-dominated provinces that have been deliberately underfunded for decades.

Work, food, and health must precede the ballot box. Afghanistan's economy collapsed when aid was cut off; there was no functioning economy for the Taliban to govern. Iran must not follow that path.

4. Bottom-Up, Not Top-Down

Every failed intervention followed the same pattern: impose central authority from above, assume it will trickle down. Municipal councils, tribal elder assemblies, local economic cooperatives, and community-based institutions must be supported first.

The Loya Jirga model from Afghan tradition—a council of regional powers—at least acknowledged tribal authority. Iran needs its own version: a mechanism for Kurds, Azeris, Baloch, Arabs, and Persians to negotiate shared governance from the ground up.

5. Seek Out the Excellent Minds

This is the lesson that applies equally to the United States, Iran, the EU, and every institution from the Vatican to the United Nations. Stop pontificating. Start building.

That means identifying the engineers, educators, scientists, community leaders, entrepreneurs, public health experts, and moral voices—not the loudest, not the most politically connected, not the wealthiest—who understand that rebuilding a society is patient, unglamorous, generational work.

Iran has an extraordinary diaspora of educated professionals. It has a young, literate, internet-connected population that has repeatedly demonstrated its desire for reform. The talent exists. The question is whether the power structures will allow it to be deployed.

6. Accept That This Will Take a Generation

This will not happen in an election cycle, a news cycle, or a military campaign. Germany and Japan took decades to rebuild after World War II, and both had the advantages of ethnically homogeneous populations, no tribal structure, and massive sustained investment through the Marshall Plan.

Iran is more complex ethnically, has a more entrenched theocratic infrastructure, and is currently under active bombardment. Anyone promising quick transformation is either naive or dishonest.

Patience is not weakness. It is the only strategy that has ever worked.

Part Seven: Will This Diminish the Harmful Messages of Islam?

This is the question that matters most, and it demands an honest answer.

The Cautiously Hopeful Case

The removal of Iran's Supreme Leader eliminates the single most powerful state sponsor of extremist fatwas in the Shia world. Khamenei's regime funded Hezbollah, Hamas, Houthis, and Shia militias across Iraq—all of which drew religious legitimacy from his authority. Without that state infrastructure, the financing, logistics, and institutional backing for Shia extremist messaging is severely degraded.

On the Sunni side, the trajectory over the past two decades shows genuine progress. The 2005 Amman Message, the 2010 Fatwa on Terrorism, the Spanish and Canadian counter-fatwas, and the collective declarations from Pakistan and India represent a growing scholarly consensus against extremist violence. The theological arguments against terrorism are more thoroughly documented and widely distributed than ever before in Islamic history.

The Sober Reality

But diminishment is not elimination. Several structural realities ensure that harmful messaging will persist:

First, Islam has no pope. There is no central authority that can declare a fatwa invalid across the entire Muslim world. Sunni Islam operates through four schools of jurisprudence with no hierarchy between them. Shia Islam has competing Grand Ayatollahs who may issue contradictory rulings. This decentralization—which historically protected Islamic jurisprudence from political capture—also means there is no 'off switch' for extremist interpretations.

Second, the grievances that feed extremism are real. Poverty in Balochistan, Kurdish suppression, Palestinian dispossession, economic desperation across the Middle East and South Asia—these are not theological problems, and theological solutions alone will not address them. As long as young men face hopelessness, recruiters will find audiences.

Third, the digital ecosystem has fundamentally changed the game. A single unqualified individual with a YouTube channel can reach more people than the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia. AI-generated content—deepfakes, synthetic sermons, fabricated fatwas—will make verification of authentic religious authority exponentially harder. This is precisely the problem that multi-model AI verification systems are designed to address.

The Pragmatic Answer

Will harmful Islamic messaging diminish? Yes, gradually, over decades, if three conditions are met:

1. Economic opportunity must replace economic desperation in the regions where extremism recruits. A young man with a job, a family, and a future is not a suicide bomber.
2. Education must include critical thinking, religious literacy, and media literacy. The counter-fatwa scholarship exists. It needs to reach the village level, not just Al-Azhar seminars.
3. Verification technology must evolve to distinguish authentic religious authority from fabricated extremism. As AI makes it easier to produce convincing disinformation—including synthetic fatwas and deepfaked clerics—the tools to detect and flag these become essential infrastructure for religious communities themselves.

The Final Word

We began this document by looking in the mirror. We end it the same way.

The harmful messages of Islam will diminish to the degree that all of us—American, Iranian, European, and every voice with influence—stop pontificating about what others should do and start doing the hard work ourselves.

Seek out the excellent minds. Fund the patient rebuilding. Accept that generational problems require generational solutions.

Iran needs to rebuild. So do we. The prescriptions are the same. The only question is whether we have the courage and the humility to follow them.