Abstract

_Abstract_ The title of this essay owes it to Slavoj Žižek. In 2009 Žižek published an essay in _London Review of Books_titled: ‘Berlusconi in Tehran’. It was an ingenious title. He wrote his provocative essay shortly after the ‘Green movement’ in Iran which protested against the rigged election which secured a second term of ‘presidency’ for Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Žižek aptly called him “a corrupt Islamofascist populist, a kind of Iranian Berlusconi”. At that time, millions of protesters poured onto the streets of Tehran, marching in silence, holding up placards with noticeable words that read ‘where is my vote?’ Only fifteen years later, that silence has turned into a loud and courageous voice: ‘_We do not want the Islamic republic_’. It is on the occasion of this radical political motto that I have emulated Žižek’s title but going beyond it by bringing it to date and calling the entirety of the Islamic Republic of Iran as a ‘fascist theocracy’. In this essay, I attempt to analyze the Islamic fascism in the structure of the Islamic Republic by tracing its roots to the historical fascism in Europe. __.