After proclaiming that the son of the assassinated Ayatollah Khamenei will be the new leader of the Revolution (a fact that, curiously, turns the Republic of Iran into a kind of hereditary monarchy), the voice tasked with announcing this to the Iranian people invoked the obligatory "Allah is great." Days earlier, thousands of miles away, Donald Trump, seated in his presidential office, was surrounded by evangelical pastors who placed their hands on his shoulders while offering prayers for the guidance and protection of the US president and his troops during these difficult times.
Nothing new under the sun, because, as Yuval Noah Harari observed in Sapiens (Ediciones 62), "the crucial role of religion throughout history has been to give superhuman legitimacy" to political structures.
But despite the fact that, in the Middle East, religion permeates everything and is used politically and militarily to justify everything, this is not a war of religions. The existential threat to the State of Israel due to Iran's nuclear programs, the control of Iranian oil, the negative consequences of the conflict for geopolitical actors as relevant as China or Russia, or the convergence of interests and personalities of Netanyahu and Trump, who are shaped by each other by their constant mention of God.
Even though it is 2026, the US president uses medieval language to justify that others are bad when he says that in Iran "they cut off babies' heads and cut women in half." This is said by the same president who separates immigrant families when he detains them. What they're doing in Iran, Israel, and the US is called taking God's name in vain.
