Like other tyrannies before it, the Iranian clerical dictatorship, headed by “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the venomous demagogue Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seeks to frighten and intimidate its subjects by identifying a wide range of alleged internal and external enemies. But the Iranian authorities cannot definitively defeat their main domestic adversaries, because there are, by now, just too many of them.

Thus, the Iranian oppressors find it easier to marginalize and persecute dissenting elements that already appear meager and disadvantaged, than to take on the whole mass of angry citizens, or the array of its authentic external critics. While trumpeting a militant menace against a variety of internal foes and the world’s democracies, Tehran’s despot have increased their specific, real measures of repression against Iran’s Sufis.