We all will expire. We are like the clouds that creep over the Alborz mountains to reach Tehran and do a modest dance before the wind drives them towards the central desert and scatters them into oblivion. But the raindrops that fall in that brief shimmy land on the tangled curls of lady Tehran, roll down to the tips of her hair, and drip into the heart of the soil, into history, into Tehran’s underground, where our minds survive.

— Mohammad-Ali Sepanlou, Lady Tehran

In Muʿjam al-Buldān, the “Dictionary of Countries” he compiled between 1224 and 1228, the Byzantine geographer Yaqut Hamawi provided one of the earliest descriptions of Tehran: “An honest man from Rey told me that Tehran is a large village built underground, and you are not allowed to visit it without permission.” Above ground, he wrote, there were only gardens, which served as a cover for the neighbourhoods hidden beneath – one village shielding another.

Rey was one of the most cultured and affluent cities on the Iranian plateau, which made it a prime target for invading armies, most notably the Mongols, who repeatedly looted and destroyed it. Nearby Tehran’s move underground must have been a defensive response to those threats. Over time, it became the village’s defining feature, even likely giving it its name: “Tehran” seems to derive from “tahran” (ته-ران), which in Persian literally means “the bottom-goer”.

For most of its history, Tehran remained a poor, peripheral village overshadowed by Rey, a dynamic that engendered lasting tensions. The denizens of Rey looked down upon Tehranis as unruly and backward, violent bandits willing to do anything for money. The Tehranis were especially troublesome for tax collectors: evading cash payments, at times forcing the state to accept chickens instead, while burying their gold.

Tehran’s population grew slowly but steadily. New generations dug tunnels and pits. A traveller passing through Tehran in those early years would have been baffled to see expansive gardens and farmland, enough to sustain a sizeable town, but only a small number of scattered shacks, and little hint of the population beneath the ground.

Tehran’s fortunes changed in the sixteenth century, when the Safavid Shah Tahmasb I took a liking to the obscure village because of its strategic location and the presence of important Shiʿi shrines. He ordered the construction of walls and gates around Tehran, along with mosques, baths and schools, effectively transforming it into a city. Then, about 250 years ago, in a move that surprised many, the first Qajar king, Agha Mohammad Khan, declared Tehran the capital of his empire. This decision largely had to do with the proximity of Tehran to his home province of Mazandaran, and its strategic location at the meeting point of the Iranian plateau and the Alborz mountains.

From that point on, Tehran began to grow mainly above ground, and the underground Tehran slowly transformed into a realm of the outcast and the homeless, where seedy businesses such as opium dens and brothels flourished. This duality shaped early literary representations, most notably Moshfegh Kashani’s The Terrible Tehran (1922), in which a large cast of characters wander through the city’s maze, which is reflected in their tangled minds and relationships. When the demands and complications of life above ground become overwhelming, they descend underground in search of reprieve. Here is how one of the characters makes his way to an opium den in the heart of the city: “The alley is long and meandering with a big bend in the middle, all of it descending like a flight of stairs […] there is a door at the very end of it, which is rather short because the end of the alley has gone beneath the ground, so you have to bend your head if you want to enter. The corridor behind this door goes farther down and ends at a yard. To the north of the yard one could see the old building.”

As part of his aggressive modernisation project during the 1960s and 1970s, the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, destroyed those underground slums. But the notion of a subterranean refuge never entirely died.

I have migrated three times in my life: from Ahvaz to Tehran in 1998, from Tehran to Brisbane in 2011, and from Tehran (after returning there in 2015) to New York in 2016. The first was the most disorienting, partly because of my age – I came to Tehran as a college student. But the shock had more to do with the city itself.

I was raised in a scientific environment, steeped in maths and physics. Our family lived in Ahvaz, a city on the south-western tip of Iran, in a housing complex owned by the National Oil Company, where my father and nearly all our neighbours worked as engineers or technicians. It was a given that their children, especially the boys, would follow the same path.

In my teenage years, to ward off boredom, I would walk for hours through the city, applying to my surroundings the principles I had learned from science: searching for patterns, imposing order, stripping the place down to its bare bones and building it back up in my mind. Ahvaz is a settled city, still largely contained within the semi-colonial framework imposed by British and American oil companies in the twentieth century. Where I grew up, the boundaries were clear: workers lived in one neighbourhood, engineers and technicians in another, and top managers and executives in a third. The layout followed the hierarchy: the higher the pay grade, the larger the houses, the greener the front yards, the better the schools. You could have dropped me anywhere in those neighbourhoods, blindfolded, and within a second of seeing, I would have told you exactly where I was, down to the street name.

That was the mindset I brought to Tehran. From the moment I arrived, I tried to grasp its essence, to collect data, process it, and build a personal theory of the city. Most afternoons, I would leave my dorm on Amirabad Street and walk for hours, observing, memorising signs and symbols, trying to distill them into a coherent image. But Tehran never surrenders itself to that sort of impulse. It evades comprehension. It morphs, reshapes itself, draws you into the labyrinth carved by its history. A long walk through Yousef Abad, an affluent neighbourhood in the heart of the city, could bring you to a slum of rickety houses with broken doors and windows built haphazardly atop a hill. Pass through Saadat Abad, another well-to-do area, cross the Modiriyat Bridge, and you find yourself in a wasteland of drowsing heroin addicts and drug dealers. A house filled with black-clad mourners listening to a loud lament for Imam Hossein can stand beside another where people at a wedding in bright clothes dance to the music of Iranian singers exiled in Los Angeles.

Life in Tehran is unceasingly unsettling. It is hard to think of another place that expanded from a small village into a chaotic metropolis so quickly. The vestiges of that speed still linger, surfacing as a kind of identity crisis, an uncertainty about what Tehran really is, whether it has earned the right to be this vast, this boisterous, this variegated. Living in Tehran exposes one, body and soul, to this anxiety of a city grown too fast for its own good. The streets are disorderly, the architecture chaotic, the avenues puddle-streak, the air toxic and the traffic relentless. It is difficult to move through it all without feeling that something is fundamentally off, that so many small failures in the fabric of urban life will one day converge into catastrophe.

Iran’s history has been marked by invasions, uprisings, rebellions and civil wars. But throughout those incessant ordeals, it survived, and remains one of the oldest continuous nation-states in the world. In a series of lectures published in 2024, the Yale historian Abbas Amanat attempted to conceptualise this endurance through a set of dichotomies. He traced the relationship between opposing forces that have remained, more or less, in balance throughout Iranian history. Some of these dualities are: religion versus the state, the outside versus the inside, life versus the afterlife and, perhaps most intriguingly, bazm versus razm (بزم و رزم). There are no exact English equivalents, so the simplest translations will have to do: razm means war, bazm means feast.

Since the pre-Islamic era, Amanat explains, Iranian rulers divided their lives between these two modes. They were either engaged in razm, fighting wars to defend borders or suppressing internal revolts, or immersed in bazm inside their court, drinking copiously, throwing luxurious feasts or setting out on elaborate hunts. The same kings who could be shockingly ruthless and expansionist with their sworn or perceived enemies were also passionate patrons of poets, musicians, philosophers and architects, helping produce Iran’s extraordinary cultural legacy.

This equilibrium endured for millennia, far into the twentieth century. By the 1970s, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi had effectively formalised the division: bazm was entrusted to Queen Farah, while he retained full control over razm by being the sole decision-maker on political and military affairs.

The victors of the 1979 revolution set out to upend this balance. No ruler in Iran’s long history showed less interest in art, culture or anything that might fall under the rubric of bazm than Ayatollah Khomeini. He adhered to a strict interpretation of Islamic norms and rituals, and tolerated no deviation.

In a country that had been notably liberal by regional standards, the Islamic Republic put in place draconian measures to punish the kind of activities people take for granted all over the world. Women were forced to wear the hijab, alcohol was banned, drinkers were whipped, writers were censored, house parties were raided and their participants were fined, jailed and brutalised – to name just a few. This is not merely a superficial lament over the loss of liberal freedoms. By debarring many of the practices that had sustained the flourishing of Iranian culture, the regime set out to extinguish the very vitality of society, its élan vital, to use Henri Bergson’s term: a creative force, experimental and unpredictable, an ongoing impulse that drives organisms, human and otherwise, to invent new forms.

In the first few years after the revolution, nothing served Khomeini’s aims better than the fellow dictator next door. In September 1980, Saddam Hussein declared war on Iran, with the backing of Western powers, especially the US, which was still reeling from the Iran hostage crisis a year earlier, and was fixated on retaliation. Thus a new external razm was unleashed. The war lasted eight years, and produced devastation on a scale that, thanks to the regime’s strict control of the war narrative, has yet to be fully reckoned with in historical accounts. It also had the effect – as wars often do – of setting back social resistance and boosting a totalitarian agenda: Iran’s post-revolutionary rulers were able to carry out mass arrests and executions of political prisoners, further trample civil rights, and advance their agenda of social control far more effectively than they ever could in times of peace.

This convergence of internal and external razm, which later took the form of economic sanctions, has continued into the present.

But the bazm impulse, so deeply woven into the fabric of Iranian culture, proved resilient. Tehran became a striking example of resistance. As if drawing upon the subconscious memory of their subterranean past, its residents turned their homes into bars, party venues, wedding halls, galleries, classrooms, literary salons and spaces for readings and teachings and performances. Around the omnipresent machinery of repression, they constructed a new kind of underground. It ebbed and flowed over the last four decades, and at times, especially during the late 1990s and the early 2000s, it held the state razm at bay.

I spent nearly a third of my 46 years in Tehran. In no other period in my life did I live with such intensity. I never drank more extravagantly, loved more fiercely, hated more passionately, worked more diligently or partied more recklessly than I did in those 15 years. For a long time, I attributed this to youth. But it was more than that.

Every small act of bazm in Tehran – be it holding a girl’s hand in public, drinking arak on a street corner at night, writing a political column for an online magazine or creating a new VPN to get around internet restrictions – felt like participation in a grand struggle. Generations of Tehranis have lived this way, pushing back, stubbornly and persistently, against the state’s intrusion into their lives. They endured the vicissitudes of government politics and some of the harshest economic sanctions in modern history, yet they never lost sight of the force that had kept Iran from fully succumbing to the forces of razm.

Iranians have spent more than half of 2026 in a communication blackout. From the outside, you can’t reach them – not by mobile phone or landline, let alone through messaging apps. A national intranet remains in place, offering access to a limited number of government-approved domestic websites, but even that is so slow as to be practically useless. By silencing the vast majority of its population and giving full access only to government and military officials and their devoted propagandists, the regime has tried to control the narrative, projecting an image of a nation united behind its leaders against external aggression.

A black market has emerged in response. Iranians, already strained by inflation and war, are paying exorbitant sums for minuscule amounts of data. Everything I know about Iran now comes via brief calls and voice messages from friends inside the country – fleeting moments of connection when they manage to access the internet, speak a few hurried words, and then disappear again into the dark.

The people I’ve been speaking with come from a range of political views, but their accounts of life in Iran converge on a single point: daily life is being torn asunder. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have vanished since the start of 2026. Inflation, already astronomical throughout 2025, has reached a point where, for many, even keeping up with prices has become meaningless. Small businesses are shutting down. The streets are nearly empty. Tehran’s familiar hustle and bustle has ground to a halt.

The indoor expressions of bazm have grown virtually impossible to maintain. I have a friend who ran a book club for teenagers, another who turned their living room into a venue for small theatre performances, and others who hosted philosophy, film and literature classes in their homes. I hear about people who have been running small businesses online, launching startups, managing shelters for animals or organising campaigns to support the poor. Most of that has stopped, along with virtually any opportunity for creativity and invention in other areas, whether it be business or medicine or technology – anything that once sustained that pulse of vitality that served as the countervailing force to the regime’s razm.

It all happened this year, at a dizzying pace. Within the span of 45 days, both internal and external forms of razm revealed their most cruel face.

In January, faced with unprecedented protests against unrestrained inflation and rampant corruption, the Islamic Republic declared war on its own people. The security forces fired on unarmed demonstrators, and whatever pretense of governance the regime had maintained for decades was shed. It reduced itself to its most violent core, to the most extreme representatives of razm within the system, giving free rein to its security apparatus, whose agents showed no compunction about killing their compatriots.

Not long after that, the imperial razm came to town. At the end of February, the US and Israel launched an intensive bombing campaign against Iran. It began with the targeted killing of high-ranking officials, from the supreme leader downward, then expanded to assassinations, and strikes on military bases, energy and industrial infrastructure, roads and bridges, schools and universities. Several medical centres have been destroyed, tens of thousands of residential and commercial buildings reduced to rubble, and thousands of people killed.

Tehran has borne the brunt of these two forms of razm. Over the past three months, the pressure that these assaults have exerted on Iranian society has been so pervasive, and so suffocating, that I sometimes wonder whether it will be possible for that vital balance to be restored anytime soon.

Back in 2011, a few days before my flight to Australia, I sat in my apartment, wracked with anxiety and uncertainty about what I was about to embark upon. At the time, I lived in the Bou Ali residential complex in northern Saadat Abad, known for its sweeping views over Tehran. When I needed to clear my head, I would walk to the lookout and sit watching the ocean of winking lights below. This was before the spot was discovered by clandestine lovers and pot smokers, back when I could sit there undisturbed, letting the vast expanse of asphalt and concrete calm my nerves.

That evening, the air was extremely polluted. In those nights of still weather and unbreathable air, darkness throws a peculiar blanket over the city. The smog absorbs and coagulates the blackness, thickens and fattens it, dimming all the lights.

The only sharp, clear flashes of light came from the planes. They flew in and out of Mehrabad airport, cutting in and out of the pollution. An arriving plane would first appear as a winking light far off in the sky. The dot would grow into a floating lantern, and then a distant, wavering projector, circling above the airport awaiting its landing instructions. On their descent, the lights of planes landing crossed those of planes taking off. Every time, they seemed to have crashed.

My optical illusion persisted for a reason. The economic sanctions had intensified, making it difficult to import spare parts for airliners. The number of plane crashes and technical issues that forced flights to make emergency landings was alarmingly high. From where I had perched in Saadat Abad heights, every flight looked like a tragedy waiting to happen.

But it never did. Planes landed and took off one after another, all of them safely, and with each landing, my anxiety softened a notch. After I had watched enough to convince myself that everything would be OK, I went back inside.

This is how I see Tehran today: a plane in the process of landing, forced to brave every imaginable danger. The weather is terrible. Fighter jets pursue it through the sky. Air-defence guns fire at it from the ground. It is worn down, ageing, deprived of spare parts. And yet it keeps descending, slowly, stubbornly, hoping for the best.

Can Tehran survive this double savagery, inflicted in such rapid succession? Faced with overwhelming violence from internal and external forms of razm, will there still be space for bazm to reassert itself, to flourish again and revive one of the dynamics that has kept this city, this country, in balance for so many years?

There is ample room for pessimism, for doomsaying. It is hard to witness the demolition of homes and factories, the psychological toll that the war and the massacre have taken on millions of Iranians, and still believe that this plane can land safely. And yet, the history of this country, of this city, shows that they have endured conditions just as harsh before. In any case, one thing is clear to anyone who has been paying attention: when this war ends, Iran will not be the same country. Tehran will not be the same city. New forms of razm and bazm will emerge, and new paths will be carved open, which most of us cannot yet see, or even imagine.