Holy Smoke: why theocracies survive – with Peter Frankopan
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.3 • 826 Ratings
🗓️ 18 January 2026
⏱️ 25 minutes
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Summary
In the 21st century, the theocratic nature of the Iranian regime – ruled by senior Shia clerics – appears to be a rarity. The constitutional role of religion is perhaps matched only by the Vatican City and Afghanistan, though these vary in terms of autocracy – as evidenced by the brutal suppression of protests across Iran in the past few weeks. The regime, installed following the 1979 revolution and led first by Ayatollah Khomeini and now Ayatollah Khameini, has proven remarkably resilient; how has it survived so long?
Peter Frankopan – professor of global history at Oxford University – joins Damian Thompson to discuss the tensions associated with state control of public life, how to define theocracies and how those of us in the global west might not be as immune to their features as we would like to think.
Produced by Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Subscribe to The Spectator and get 12 weeks of Britain's most incisive politics coverage, |
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| 0:25.6 | www.foughture to claim this offer now. Terms apply. Welcome to Holy Smoke, the Spectator's Religion podcast. |
| 0:46.1 | I'm Damien Thompson. |
| 0:51.3 | As we speak, Iranian advocates for democracy are being moaned down in their thousands by militias employed by one of the world's most tyrannical dictatorships. |
| 1:02.8 | But the Iranian regime is more than that. It's a rare example of a theocracy, a government controlled by clergy. |
| 1:10.7 | Very rare example, in fact, the only other |
| 1:13.0 | surviving theocracies that spring to mind are Afghanistan, currently under the almost complete |
| 1:18.1 | control of the Taliban, and Vatican City, where the Pope is a supreme ruler over the administration |
| 1:25.7 | of civil as well as ecclesiastical law. Since 1979, we've come to think |
| 1:32.4 | of the theocracy imposed by Ayatollah Khomeini after the Iranian Revolution as, I suppose, |
| 1:40.4 | the ultimate embodiment of Shia Islam. |
| 1:50.3 | There's an assumption that Shias are ruled by clerics and Sunnis by monarchs who enforce Sharia law. |
| 1:53.2 | But actually, is that an accurate representation? |
| 2:00.1 | Is the political Islamic revolutionary theocracy actually quite a recent development? And given its surprising resilience in the 21st century, |
| 2:05.6 | in a country, Iran, where attendance at mosques has fallen catastrophically, |
| 2:11.6 | and two-thirds of the countries, mosques are supposed to have closed, |
| 2:15.6 | can we be certain that other theocracies won't spring up, |
| 2:19.2 | despite a lack of popular support? I'm joined by one of the world's foremost historians of the |
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