This concluding chapter compares and contrasts the Green Uprising with the Arab Spring revolts, underscoring connections between these historic events, and their strengths and weaknesses. Importantly, it also considers claims of the finality of the government’s defeat of the uprising on Revolution Day. For many, the uprising endures in one way or another. Long-term impacts on the government include shattered political taboos, issues of ideological legitimacy, and the subsequent conduct of the state. Despite claims of its failure by the state and more widely, the Green Movement continues to show signs of life. Once again, this uprising is situated in Iran’s genealogy of revolutionary upheaval—empowered by the past while also informing future protests. The book concludes, as it began, with a critique of the state’s preferred slogan that encapsulates its purposeful, one-dimensional understanding of the Iranian Revolution: “Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic.”

The ʿAshura protests of 2009 also warrant their own chapter because of the profound meaning with which history infused them. The chapter presents a case study of post-Islamism in the person of Ayatollah Montazeri, who was originally an architect of the Islamic system but had become one of its severest critics. After a period of trial and error, the goal of the post-Islamist trend had become to save Islam from the state by fusing it with plurality and rights instead of dogmatism and duties. Montazeri died in December 2009—six months after the initial uprising—by which time repression by the state had either radicalized protesters or suppressed more moderate voices. The seventh day of mourning for his death fell on ‘Ashura 2009, and the ensuing day of action fused the two events, drawing on both the Iranian Revolution and wider Islamic history to imbue the protests with particular meaning.