Introduction

In early 2020, when the news broke that the first confirmed cases of Covid-19 in Iran had occurred in the city of Qum, the paranoid religious state dispatched a special task force armed with tear gas and armoured fighting vehicles to suppress the epidemic’s growth in the country. Browsing through the state-sponsored media, one could hear them thinking, ‘How could this horrible biological disaster befall the city of Qum, the most sacred and holiest place in Iran, the centre of Shiite scholarship and the backbone of the Islamic Revolution?’ The threat posed by the epidemic was already unsettling, to say the least, for a regime facing protracted issues relating to security, legitimacy and power. In the months preceding the Covid-19 pandemic, a series of crises had ravaged the Islamic Republic. It was barely surviving the economic sanctions imposed by the United States and domestic public protests that broke out periodically around the country. Moreover, it lost its most important military commander, Qasem Soleimani, who had been in charge of the regime’s military operations in Syria and Iraq. Soleimani’s assassination led to the most astonishing turn of events. In perhaps the darkest comedy of the century, in avenging its commander’s death, the regime’s revolutionary guards shot down a passenger aeroplane, killing all of the 176 people on board, 167 of them Iranian citizens. This led to more protests and more crackdowns. It was in the wake of these events that Covid-19 visited the country.

By sending riot control units to Qum, instead of mounting a medical response, the regime treated pestilence as protest. Still, a few months later, once the disease had been declared a pandemic, the coronavirus began working to the advantage of the state. It might even be called a non-human ally. This was because the virus deterred protests, safeguarding the Islamic State, at least for a while. Entertaining a broad conception of fascism, it might be said that we are dealing here with an entanglement between a fascist religious state and a viral disease. As previous epidemics in human history testify, viruses and bacteria have an affinity with fascist machines.