Every line of the rapper Toomaj Salehi’s song Rat Hole bristles with defiance and rage. His contempt is directed not only at the regime but at any Iranian who remains silent in the face of government oppression. As he puts it: “Don’t wait for a saviour, nobody’s coming.” Last month he was sentenced to death.
After the song was released in 2021, 12 intelligence agents raided his home in a working-class suburb of Isfahan, central Iran, and arrested him. Aged 30 at the time, with a neck tattoo of a hand holding a microphone, he would have known that to speak out in that way was to risk imprisonment. He was not deterred.
A year later, Salehi was arrested again, this time for supporting the uprising sparked by the death in custody, at the hands of the morality police, of the 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman Mahsa Jina Amini.
Salehi had goaded the authorities with videos on his Instagram page showing him with protesters, encouraging Iranians to take to the streets. On his release, he broadcast a video revealing he had been tortured and held in solitary confinement — and was promptly rearrested. The United Nations reported he had a broken nose, several broken fingers and damaged legs.
His death sentence, overturning a six-year prison term for “corrupting the Earth”, was a legal twist that surprised even Iranian lawyers. The regime chose to defy the Supreme Court, which had asked the lower court to drop some of the charges against him.
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Since the uprising, Salehi, a metalworker by trade, has become a national hero in a country where rap is now mainstream. Like pop music, sex and alcohol, it is everywhere in Iran.
Rap-e-Farsi — Farsi hip-hop — began as an underground movement in Tehran’s middle-class neighbourhoods at the beginning of the short-lived reformist era in 2000, when postwar Iran was connecting to the outside world thanks to the internet and satellite television.
It started with a few dozen people gathering outside Eskan, an apartment complex in north Tehran, to share lyrics. Soon hundreds were meeting in parks for rap battles. Internet chatrooms ensured that this new music spread.
If ever there were a genre of music that Iranians would hungrily adopt, it was always going to be rap. This is a country obsessed with poetry, where contemporary poets and Persian greats such as Hafez and Rumi are read aloud everywhere from dormitories to dinner parties. Lines are plucked from well-known verses and sold on the streets as prophecies.
The first Iranian rap album — The Asphalt Jungle, by Hichkas — caused a sensation when it came out in 2006, cementing the place of rap in Iranian culture. It was a searing social and political commentary on poverty and corruption.
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“In those early days, rap tackled issues no one else dared touch. We didn’t just speak about corruption, but about women’s rights and LGBT rights,” says a famed Iranian rapper now based outside the country. He needs to remain anonymous because the tendrils of Iran’s intelligence service reach into Europe and the US. In March, the Iranian dissident journalist Pooria Zeraati was stabbed outside his London home by eastern European mercenaries hired by the regime.
Hip-hop became a ubiquitous act of rebellion. Rappers refused to go through government censors and obtain the correct artistic permissions. They were arrested and studios were raided.
But the regime knew from experience that it could not win this war against popular culture. So it deftly co-opted the genre and engaged in its own mighty rap battle. Before long, pro-government rappers were spewing out messages defending Islamic values and nuclear energy.
The battle had begun and rap culture exploded. Female rappers emerged. Ethnic groups began rapping in their own languages. Exiled Iranians launched a dedicated Farsi rap channel. Gambling companies in Dubai sponsored Iranian rap artists. Rappers were depicted as characters on Iranian TV shows and rap was used in advertising jingles.
Millions of Iranian children wanted to be rappers, including Salehi, who had started rapping as a young boy. As a young man he sold his most valuable possession, a motorbike, to pay for studio time. He did not know then that he would become the voice of a generation.
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The regime quashed the mass uprising that began in 2022 by killing hundreds of protesters, arresting thousands and turning prisons into production lines of torture and rape. Several protesters have already been executed.
But the protest movement is not dead. It is a sleeping dragon — and Salehi’s case may be the one to wake it. Already demonstrators in the southern city of Ahvaz have begun chanting his name.
“Nobody can really understand this ruling,” says the British-Iranian activist Negin Shiraghaei of Salehi’s death sentence. “But Toomaj was influential during the protests. He rallied people, keeping the uprising alive.”
Fame on the scale that Salehi enjoys normally affords a layer of protection from the deadly wrath of the regime: it is generally the poor working class, the unknown and unconnected, who end up hanging from cranes. The regime understands the tightrope on which it walks: enough freedoms must be given to placate the right people — those with money, influence and power. Examples can be made out of the rest.
Salehi’s colossal popularity might have protected him for a while, but it now seems it might cost him his life. His death sentence is a sign of the regime’s growing concern over its own survival, a realisation that its worn playbook is not working any more.
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It is also a mark of Salehi’s courage to confront it head-on, whatever the cost, and to let it know that he was not scared. As he once rapped: “Hangman’s noose, I will take you in my embrace. Proudly.”
Ramita Navai is the author of City of Lies: Love, Sex, Death, and the Search for Truth in Tehran, and host of The Line of Fire podcast.
