Long read. But I hope you’ll stay with it.

I’ve been thinking a lot about anger.

About what it does to people.
About what it turns into.

When people lose their country, their safety, sometimes their loved ones, anger is not surprising. It’s human. It doesn’t belong to one nationality, one religion, or one region. Pain produces anger everywhere.

The real question is not *who feels anger*.
The real question is: *what does that anger become?*

Over the past years, I’ve watched many Iranians in the diaspora protest, organize, lobby, write, speak, march. I’ve seen grief in their faces. I’ve heard stories of prison, of loss, of exile. The anger is real.

And yet, what stands out to me is this:

That anger rarely turns into destruction of the societies that hosted them.

It turns into something else.

It turns into demands.
Into petitions.
Into organized rallies with permits.
Into meetings with lawmakers.
Into carefully written op-eds.
Into human chains and candlelight vigils.

It turns into claim‑making.

Why?

Part of the answer lies in political identity. Many Iranians who left after the revolution — and especially those who left more recently — did not simply migrate for economic reasons. They left because of political repression. Because of compulsory ideology. Because of a system where religion and state were fused, and dissent was punished.

When you experience political Islam as a governing force, it often changes how you think about religion in politics. For many in the diaspora, identity becomes less about religious belonging and more about civil rights, citizenship, and dignity.

“Iranian” becomes cultural, historical, linguistic.
Not theological.

That shift matters.

When your political framework is rooted in secular democratic ideals — even if you are personally religious — you don’t see the host country as a civilizational enemy. You see it as a space. An imperfect one, yes. But a space where speech is possible. Where protest is legal. Where the police are not automatically instruments of ideological enforcement.

And something subtle happens in that space.

A social contract forms.

When people feel that their dignity is recognized, that they can speak without disappearing, that their children can grow up without fear of morality patrols or prison sentences for tweets — they don’t want to burn that space down.

They want to use it.

To advocate.
To pressure.
To persuade.
To mobilize public opinion.

A migrant who feels protected often becomes protective of the system that protects them.

We saw a powerful example of this recently in Australia. During a violent attack, a Muslim man put himself at risk to help disarm the attacker. Afterwards, the Prime Minister described him as “a true Australian.” In that moment, identity was defined not by origin or religion, but by action — by the choice to protect the very society that had offered protection.

This doesn’t mean anger disappears. It doesn’t mean trauma evaporates. It means anger is channeled.

Disciplined.

Directed.

There’s another layer too: integration.

Many Iranian migrants, particularly in Europe and North America, are highly educated and professionally integrated. They build businesses. They work in medicine, academia, tech, art. They are economically woven into the fabric of their host societies.

Belonging changes behavior.

Where belonging is weak, alienation can grow. Where alienation grows, identity can harden. In some communities around the world, especially among second- or third-generation migrants who feel neither fully accepted nor fully connected to ancestral homelands, anger can become untethered. Ideology can step in to provide clarity, pride, even superiority.

But where belonging is stronger, anger is more likely to be translated into civic participation.

And this is what fascinates me most:

The transformation.

Grief becomes organization.
Rage becomes rhetoric.
Trauma becomes testimony.
Exile becomes advocacy.

Instead of attacking the nearest symbol of power, the energy is redirected toward the source of injustice back home — through sanctions debates, human rights campaigns, media work, coalition building.

This is not moral superiority. It’s political culture shaped by experience.

When you flee a system where power was absolute and unaccountable, you begin to understand the value of institutions, however flawed. You understand courts. Due process. Free press. Civil society.

You don’t romanticize them — but you recognize their absence.

And so anger becomes structured.

It becomes a demand for accountability.
A demand for freedom.
A demand for dignity.

Not a fire for the sake of fire.

I don’t think this transformation is about ethnicity. Or about being inherently “better.” And it certainly isn’t about painting entire religions or populations with a single brush. Human beings are more complex than that.

I think it’s about what framework holds your anger.

If your framework tells you the world is divided between believers and enemies, anger may look one way.

If your framework tells you legitimacy comes from citizens, rights, and law, anger looks different.

It becomes civic.

And maybe that is one of the most powerful — and least discussed — stories of exile:

That people who were pushed out by repression sometimes become some of the most disciplined practitioners of democratic claim‑making.

Not because they are calm.
Not because they are not hurting.

But because they have learned, painfully, what happens when anger is monopolized by power instead of channeled by rights.

And so they choose — deliberately — to turn rage into a voice.

Not a riot.

A demand.

#nostr #iran