The Sound Before the Silence: Music and Faith in Post-Revolution Iran

The cassette store across the street was destroyed in the riots of 1979. A writer, nine years old at the time, watched the windows shatter and every piece of merchandise vanish. In a recent Spin essay, she returns to that image as a kind of origin wound—one that yoked together the loss of music and the loss of a certain kind of Islam.

She grew up in a Muslim household where faith was a casual comfort. Her father, an atheist who had once been devout, and her mother, who leaned toward Iranian folk superstition, still held a Quran above the family’s heads before a long journey. Islam was a name invoked at ignition, a ritual for safe passage, not a set of demands. Then the Islamic Revolution arrived, and with it the doctrine of Velayat-e Faqih, enshrining absolute clerical rule. The religion she knew turned punitive, severe. Mullahs—once peripheral figures at weddings and funerals—became enforcers.

Music, which had been at the center of the family’s life, became the substitute for a stolen faith. “Music was what kept my spirit lifted, my hope eternal, and my faith alive,” she writes. The regime understood this. Ayatollah Khomeini had declared: “If you want independence for your country, you must suppress music… Music is a betrayal of the nation and of youth.” The ban was total, deliberate. It aimed at more than silence; it aimed at inner autonomy.

The essay anchors its reflections in a chapter the writer contributed to the 2023 book The Life, Death and Afterlife of the Record Store. That work, and now this Spin piece, pull a single memory into a wider frame. When states attack music, they attack something more volatile than entertainment: a source of spirit that no law can entirely extinguish—though it can try.