Tyrant of the year 2025: Ayatollah Ali Khamenei
A further crackdown on dissent this year continues the Supreme Leader’s bloody rule
The price to be paid for making films in Iran
The line between fact and fiction often overlaps in Jafar Panahi’s films.
Take Taxi Tehran from 2015 for instance. The film takes place inside a cab with three hidden cameras. Panahi, an internationally acclaimed award-winning Iranian director, plays himself. He just so happens to be driving a taxi around the Iranian capital. What initially seems like an improv documentary eventually turns out to be a satirical conceit. Namely: the director is using the safe space of a private car to freely discuss what would ordinarily be off limits to discuss publicly in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Among the passengers that Panahi picks up is the Iranian human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh. Over the last 15 years she has been imprisoned twice in her native country. Her last stint was for defending women prosecuted for appearing in public without a hijab. Sotoudeh’s husband, Reza Khandan, is also now serving a three-and-a-half year prison sentence for voicing public opposition to Iran’s compulsory hijab laws. In Taxi Tehran, Sotoudeh speaks about defending human rights and free speech in a theocratic-totalitarian-police state. “First they mount a political case,” Sotoudeh explains. “They beef it up with a morality charge, then they make your life hell.”
In that same scene, Sotoudeh notices the director looking at his back window.
“Looking for someone?” she asks.
“I heard a voice … I thought I recognised my interrogator,” Panahi replies.
Sotoudeh mentions how her clients often say this. “They want to identify people by their voices,” she says. “Advantage of blindfolds.”
“This reference in Taxi [Tehran] to prisoners hearing sounds is a communal experience shared by all prisoners of conscience,” Panahi told Index from Los Angeles, via a Farsi translator. “In my current film I wanted to talk about a [similar] experience. This time, however, the sound is coming from a disabled [prosthetic] leg, which becomes the moving engine of the film.”
Panahi’s latest movie, It was Just an Accident, won the Palme d’Or at this year’s Cannes Film Festival and opens in UK cinemas this coming Friday, 5 December. The story begins in a mechanics’ workshop, where a man named Vahid is convinced he has just encountered Eghbal – a prison inspector who once caused him great pain and suffering. Vahid hears Eghbal before he sees him. He can never forget the eerie squeaking sound Eghbal’s prosthetic leg makes in motion. He remembers it from prison, where “Peg Leg” was known as a sadistic torturer. The traumatised Iranian mechanic later kidnaps Eghbal and even considers killing him. But has he got the right man? To tease out his doubts, Vahid rounds up a group of former prisoners to seek their advice.
What follows is a brilliant farcical black comedy-road trip movie. Despite the light-hearted banter, the film poses two serious ethical questions. One, how far will an individual – or a group – go to seek revenge on former enemy? Two, at what point does revenge violence make the victim the victimiser?
It was Just an Accident has been selected by France as its official nomination for the Academy Awards this coming March. It may be Panahi’s most overtly political film to date. But the 65-year-old Iranian moviemaker disagrees.
“I don’t make political films, which typically tend to divide people into good and bad,” he insists. “I make social films, where everyone is a human being.”
The film’s script was inspired from several conversations Panahi had with inmates he befriended while serving time in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. In March 2010, Panahi was convicted by a Revolutionary Court in Iran of propaganda for his film-making and political activism. He subsequently spent 86 days behind bars, he explained: “For the first 15 to 20 days I was in a small cell in solitary confinement, where I was interrogated.”
That same year, the Iranian regime handed Panahi a 20-year ban that forbade him from directing films or writing screenplays. “This [censorship] I experience presents many challenges to keep making films, but a social filmmaker is inspired by the circumstances in which they live,” said Panahi. “If I lived in a freer society what would inspire me? I don’t know.”
Despite the ban, Panahi is a prolific filmmaker who never stops creating. Many of his films have focused on the complications of making films with a state-imposed censorship hanging over his head. They include the ironically titled, This Is Not a Film (2011), which was smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick concealed inside a birthday cake, and No Bears (2022).
No Bears has two stories in it. The first is about migrants heading off to Europe and the second is about Panahi, who is stuck back in Iran, as his film crew attempt to complete the film they are shooting just across the border in Turkey. The film won the Special Jury Prize at the 2022 Venice Film Festival. Panahi was unable to collect the prize. He was then back in Evin prison, after a Tehran court ruled he must serve the six-year sentence he was handed more than a decade before for supporting anti-government demonstrations.
“According to the law [in Iran] if a sentence is issued but not gone into effect for ten years, it should not be executed,” said Panahi. “However, [the regime] said that this is not true about political prisoners. They were lying though.”
During this second prison term Panahi was in a public ward with 300 or so prisoners, of whom roughly 40 were prisoners of conscience, he said: “On that occasion I did not face interrogations or solitary confinement, which meant I could speak and listen to the prisoners’ stories.”
Panahi remained in prison until the following February. After his release, he noticed many changes in Iranian society. The previous September, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini, was beaten to death in Tehran by Iran’s so-called morality police after being accused of defying the country’s hijab rule. The state sanctioned homicide inspired the Woman Life Freedom uprising, which saw an estimated two million take to the streets across Iran. Many ripped and burnt posters of their political leaders, while others openly chanted, “Death to the Islamic Republic!” Iranian security forces, meanwhile, responded by killing hundreds of protesters.
“The history of the Islamic Republic [will eventually] be divided into before and after the timeline of this movement,” said Panahi. “The impact has been enormous and even made its way into cinema.”
Specifically, Panahi was referring to the fact that many women who appear in It Was Just an Accident – including actors and extras – are not wearing the hijab. “Much of what you see in the background of the film is people being filmed as they are in daily life in Iran today,” said Panahi. “For example, one woman who agreed to be in the film as an extra said to me: ‘If you are going to force me to wear the hijab, I am not going to do that.’ I told her: ‘You appear as you wish’.”
It’s not a view the authorities in the Islamic Republic endorse. Just days after Index spoke to the Iranian director, he was sentenced in absentia to one year in prison and a travel ban over “propaganda activities” against Iran. The news was broken via the French news agency, Agence France Presse (AFP), who cited Panahi’s lawyer, Mostafa Nili, as a source.
At the time of writing, Panahi remains outside Iran. Prior to news of his new prison sentence being issued, Panahi told Index he could not imagine living somewhere in which he has only a touristy outlook and superficial understanding of the people and culture: “I have lived in Iran for 65 years and I make films about Iranians. I don’t want to stop making films because life without cinema has no meaning to me.”
“[In Iran] when you work you will have problems as a filmmaker there and anywhere in the world the Iranian authorities can get their hands on you,” Panahi concluded. “But you accept this is the price to be paid, and you get through what you have to in order to make the film you want to make.”
History is being written by the AI victors
This article first appeared in Volume 54, Issue 3 of our print edition of Index on Censorship, titled Truth, trust and tricksters: Free expression in the age of AI, published on 30 September 2025. Read more about the issue here.
We are right to be concerned about what artificial intelligence is doing to our present and what it might do to our future. But I am more worried about what it can do to our past.
Access to archives is becoming harder. Manuscripts are fragile, and verifying historical evidence contradicting established narratives is time-consuming. Technology makes history seem fun and exciting by enabling direct communication with historical figures and using visuals that simplify the past, but it weakens our understanding. Artificial intelligence reshapes research by digitising archives and analysing data quickly, but it poses risks. AI often lacks academic rigour, drawing from biased sources and oversimplifying complex events. It presents information with unearned authority, spreading errors rapidly. Unlike historians, AI cannot evaluate credibility, weigh accounts or identify gaps in records.
The result is that our history runs the risk of being skewed towards what’s most accessible online: mainstream narratives drawn from popular databases, digitised books, encyclopaedias, widely-read history books and even crowd-sourced portals. Marginalised voices – Indigenous people, minorities, or communities without digitised records – risk being erased further. When AI amplifies the dominant version of events, alternative interpretations fade into obscurity.
For all its potential, AI cannot replace the human historian. Critical judgment, contextual thought and insights, and the ability to navigate conflicting evidence and picking plausible theories remain essential to safeguarding the integrity of the past.
Consider a recent experiment by Indian historian Anirudh Kanisetti. A trained engineer, Kanisetti has written two engrossing books on the Chaulukyas and the Cholas, two medieval-era dynasties of southern India. Despite his background in engineering, or perhaps because of it, he is sceptical of the use of AI in history. He decided to challenge the Goliath. He sought AI assistance and then wrote about his experience on Instagram. He calls AI “language calculators, and not very good ones”. He asked Copilot, Microsoft’s AI tool which uses OpenAI’s ChatGPT, to write an essay based on his work about a medieval regiment in India.
In its references, the tool produced a paper by an academic Kanisetti knew of, but he had never heard of this paper. He called out Copilot, and it immediately admitted it had made up the fact. Its subsequent apology was insincere. Kanisetti then posed another query, instructing Copilot to cite primary sources. This time, the bot confidently misquoted primary sources and, again, admitted the fabrication when he called it out.
Kanisetti is worried because he knows the sources and can find out when AI is lying; other users may not be that knowledgeable and may rely on AI to do the grunt work of checking citations. As he puts it: “Large language models (LLMs) are trained to seem to be helpful, so you think they have value. But they are actually faffing, lying, fabricating … Engagement generates shareholder value.”
Our information ecosystem is being destroyed, he added.
He has grasped the essence of the problem that is bothering many historians in the global south.
The future historian’s skillset
Aanchal Malhotra, who has written a fascinating history about India’s Partition, told me: “This thought of AI rewriting history is new but a terrifying one, because of the scale it can achieve.”
Doyenne of Indian history Romila Thapar told Index: “What AI can do to history is in a sense already being done by what the Hindutva-vadis [right-wing Hindu nationalists] are doing to Indian history. It is an alternative, distorted history that they are propagating. So far, professional historians are dismissing it by showing that there is no reliable evidence to provide proof of what is being stated in the Hindutva version. One can predict that with the availability of AI there can be massive forging of many documents that will be put forward as proof. So training in professional history will require the ability to recognise forged documents, especially if they are documents that are said to belong to earlier times. The historian of today has to be a multidisciplinary person, but the historian of tomorrow will also have to be trained in the technology of verifying documents and publications.”
She wonders if the techniques of historical excavation will need to change, since the authenticity of three-dimensional artefacts gathered from sites will have to be proved. As soon as an artefact is discovered, will it need to be intensively photographed and marked and documented and a tiny sample be analysed? This will make excavation absurdly expensive if the veracity of every object has to be proved, she adds. And she is concerned about how AI’s apparent ability to bring characters from the past back to life would interfere with what we know to be true.
She also worries about what AI can do to historical questioning and education. If students start asking AI to write their papers and tutorials (as many are), they will become masters at writing prompts, but not at drawing their own analysis. They will know how to use a machine, but truth will elude them. “They won’t know why they have written what they have,” she said.
History abounds with examples of misinterpretations, such as the figurine of a horse in Mohenjo-daro in Pakistan, which suggested that the horse had been domesticated as early as the second millennium BC.
Peter Frankopan, who teaches history at Oxford, told Index: “The skill of a historian is to be able to deal with complex materials… The idea of lots of forgeries is as old as writing systems. Information has always been used and manipulated to embed hierarchies, to spread falsehoods and to manipulate people – whether literate or otherwise. So training historians in the present and future simply requires the right skills to be learned, and the discipline of asking the right questions. Clearly, we have some challenges ahead; but there have always been such problems in the past.”
The risks heighten with the seductive charm of AI-generated visual imagery. Manu Pillai, who has written thoughtful and engrossing books on the history of southern India and, more recently, about the making of modern Hindu identity, told Index it was only a question of time before we find sophisticated imagery or videos generated by AI that would make the crudely written WhatsApp messages appear believable. There are twin dangers in India, he said. There is high digital access but weak digital literacy, “which means large segments of people are likely to be misled. We also live in a time when more and more people have an appetite for conspiracy theories and for ‘alt’ facts, and many therefore would be predisposed to swallow some of the material that comes their way”.
AI for good…occasionally
AI does provide notable benefits, such as drawing patterns from vast amounts of data and deciphering handwriting. It helps restore and better understand complex historical texts. The Arolsen Archives use AI to catalogue documents related to Nazi persecution victims. Yad Vashem uses AI to identify unknown Holocaust victims. The USC Shoah Foundation and Illinois Holocaust Museum use AI-driven holographic displays, voice recognition and virtual reality to create transparent, immersive experiences for remembrance and education.
AI’s inability to separate truth from lies is the real danger. As an aggregator, if it finds a particular version of a story cited more often, it is trained to assume it is part of the mainstream discourse. It overemphasises the dominant narrative over alternative views, which reinforces misinterpretations and falsehoods.
Manila-based Singaporean historian Thum Ping Tjin (better known as PJ Thum) is wary. The founder of New Naratif notes that throughout human history, tools have emerged to make our communication and information exchange quicker, and these tools have raised alarms. They have inevitably been co-opted by those with money and power in order to get more money and power. “They have used those tools to present versions of history to further their own goals,” Thum said.
“In many cases, the worst-case scenario you fear already exists,” he told Index. “Southeast Asian governments have long used their resources to fabricate, censor and present their own version of history and their power to enforce it. Singapore has had an entire industrial complex of official historians repeating the ‘official’ version of history. Professional historians who seek to correct the record are treated as public enemies.”
Thum himself underwent hours of gruelling questioning by government officials when he critiqued Singapore’s official interpretation of how it got separated from Malaysia, and the government introduced a new law intended to attack disinformation but which in effect ensured that the dominant, state-approved narrative would prevail.
Alarmed by the attacks on crucial aspects of American history, primarily dealing with race, the American Historical Association Council has issued guidelines based on principles that reinforce the need for historical thinking, reminding us that AI produces texts, images, audio and video, but not truth. It also warned about AI’s tendency to hallucinate and introduce false certainties.
AI’s biggest impact on history is deepfake technology. Erasing inconvenient truths or spreading lies isn’t new – Joseph Stalin famously airbrushed Leon Trotsky out of photos. In the late 1990s, a Malaysian newspaper altered photos to remove Anwar Ibrahim after he fell out with prime minister Mahathir Mohammed.
The problem of AI fakes
Forged documents have long confused historians; for example, Nazi era expert Hugh Trevor-Roper believed the fake Hitler diaries were genuine because of their voluminous content. The fabricated 1903 Protocols of the Elders of Zion fuelled antisemitism and conspiracy theories. Recently, AI-generated deepfake videos, such as one of US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, which depicted her in Congress arguing that a jeans ad featuring Sydney Sweeney was racist, have gone viral, highlighting new dangers in disinformation.
Kanisetti points out that many Indians consume historical materials now through videos. These don’t claim authenticity, but to the untrained mind the realistic-looking videos appear to be well-researched. “The right wing has no incentive to doctor primary sources yet, because the general public is already uninterested in the ambiguities of evidence-based history,” he said. Many viewers want affirmation of their beliefs; they no longer care if what they are seeing is accurate.
In What is History?, EH Carr wrote: “The facts speak only when the historian calls on them: it is he who decides to which facts to give the floor, and in what order or context.” The selection of facts is integral to historical research. Good historians must be aware of their personal biases and the context of their work. Only humans have the capability to understand the emotions involved and the ethical choices that need to be made; it is why at universities, history is part of the humanities department and not in a scientific lab.
Historians are quick to caution. One of the biggest risks is Holocaust denial and revisionism. Unesco published a report last year with the World Jewish Congress, which showed how hate groups could use AI to deny the Holocaust, including by fabricated testimonies and altered historical records. The Historical Figures app allows users to ‘chat’ with prominent Nazis such as Adolf Hitler and Joseph Goebbels, and it falsely claims that Goebbels (for example) was not intentionally involved in the Holocaust and had tried to prevent violence against Jews. Unesco has its own recommendations for ethics in AI, which it urges governments to follow. It has also asked tech companies to improve their standards and act responsibly.
But governments have neither the capacity nor, in some cases, the willingness to prevent disinformation from spreading widely. Can states be trusted? Can corporations, which are incentivised by maximising shareholder value? Open-source algorithms, digital watermarking and community-based content moderation are all necessary potential solutions, but none is sufficient. Educating the public, particularly young people, on how to critically evaluate information and recognise misinformation is crucial to combat the negative impacts.
Thum told me: “The only defence against this is by educating ourselves to be more sceptical and information-literate; by democratising the tools and skills of history; and by teaching people to be more sceptical and critical of those with information and power, so that we are less likely to be tricked by AI or whatever the next technology is.”
In 1987, I interviewed Salman Rushdie in Bombay, as the city was then known, when he had completed writing The Satanic Verses. Other than his editors, few knew what the novel was about.
When I asked him, he said: “It is about angels and devils and how it is very difficult to establish ideas of morality in a world which has become so uncertain that it is difficult to even agree on what is happening. When one can’t agree on a description of reality, it is very hard to agree on whether that reality is good or evil, right or wrong. When one can’t say what is actually the case, it is difficult to proceed from that to an ethical position. Angels and devils are becoming confused ideas … It is an attempt to come to grips with that sense of a crumbling moral fabric or, at least, a need for the reconstruction of old simplicities.”
AI makes us believe in simplicities, that truth is easy to access, and that answers to complex questions are just one click away. It is the product in our age of instant gratification. Reality, like history, is more nuanced. The challenge lies in our not being condemned to repeat it.
Breaking norms to survive in war-torn Yemen
On the outskirts of Sanaa, 28-year-old Badr Yaseen sits inside a four-square-metre salon. The interior wall is lined with full-length mirrors, and scissors, electric shavers, combs, and hair care products are neatly arranged on a cupboard and small shelves.
Yaseen greets each customer with confidence and warmth. Once they settle into the chair, he politely asks about their preferred haircut style before getting to work. As he cuts, he keeps up a friendly conversation, making the experience relaxed and personal.
Yaseen did not inherit his profession from his father or grandfather. He is the first in his family’s generation to take up this work. It has been a decision many in his family have called an act of “mutiny” against long-held traditions.
His brothers urged him to give up the job, and his uncles tried to dissuade him from continuing. Relatives frowned upon his choice, believing that Yaseen’s work as a barber “shames” the family. They all believe that this profession is only suitable for the “lower class”. Such beliefs run deep, woven into the fabric of social hierarchy and pride.
Yet Yaseen defied these norms. He has disregarded the opinions of his family, friends, and acquaintances. He has refused to bow to social censorship or the entrenched prejudices surrounding his choice.
In a country where a decade-long conflict has devastated the economy and wiped out countless jobs, Yaseen has prioritised survival over social status. Like him, many others have defied social norms and stereotypes, doing whatever they can to endure these harsh times.
“Not ‘wrong,’ not ‘obscene,’ not ‘immoral’.” These are the verbal bullets Yaseen fires back at anyone who criticises or disrespects him.
In Yemen, the law prohibits discrimination based on colour, origin or job. Despite that, discriminatory norms remain a prevalent plague in society.
Survival over status
Yaseen is classified as a tribesman. Married with four children, he was miserable when he was jobless two years ago, he recalls. Financial troubles darkened his life. He was willing to accept any job, except being a fighter for the war rivals in his country.
“I approached a salon owner and asked for work. He offered me a job, and I began as a barber,” Yaseen told Index.
When he started, he already had the know-how. “My brothers and close friends used to need a haircut, and I would do that. I did not do it for money. That is how I developed my skill.”
Yaseen was not planning to be a barber. It was just a favour or entertainment. Now, it is his money-making job.
“Had I been kept imprisoned by the social norms, my suffering would linger, and my children would starve. A barber is not a lower person. That is how hardships changed my mindset.”
Since 2015, a destructive civil war coupled with airstrikes has devastated Yemen, and it remains unresolved. Famine and food insecurity have prevailed, risking the lives of millions of people.
United Nations reports reveal that over 17 million people are going hungry in Yemen. This figure may rise to 18 million by February next year. Women and children are the most vulnerable.
With this bleak reality, Yaseen and countless of his like no longer disdain “lower class” jobs.
Yaseen has a friend named Nasser. Two months ago, Nasser shared his business idea with Yaseen: opening a chicken slaughterhouse. Although being a butcher is often considered a lower-class job among Yemenis, Nasser – himself a tribesman – doesn’t care about such judgments.
“Call him a butcher. That won’t cost him his life. Hunger and unemployment will,” Yaseen said with a serious tone.
The teacher-turned painter
Public employees in Yemen have not been immune from the economic consequences of the decade-long war. Those who were once proud of their job titles abandoned their careers and began entering fields they had never worked in before.
Before the war erupted in 2015, Yahia, 42, had been a passionate teacher in a government school in Sanaa. His passion died down and morale vanished as the war was prolonged. Salaries stopped coming as war rivals held one another responsible for paying public workers.
“I kept coming to the classroom for three years unpaid. I exhausted my savings and felt unprecedented financial pressure. I was compelled to take a U-turn in my professional life,” he told Index.
Over one million public employees have not been paid their regular salaries since September 2016. About 6.9 million people are estimated to live on that income.
In 2020, Yahia began working as a helper for a professional painter in Sanaa. Within six months, he learned enough about the job. Now, he considers himself as an “outstanding painter”.
Yahia feels no embarrassment when he puts on his paint-stained clothes and heads to work.
“I left the classroom and set aside the markers, picking up brushes and rollers instead. Surviving amid war is an accomplishment,” he said, his voice filled with gratitude.
The veiled seller in the qat market
The 2024 Humanitarian Response Plan for Yemen estimated that 18.2 million people required humanitarian assistance, including 4.2 million women and 4.8 million girls. But not every woman waits for assistance or surrenders to hunger.
Um Ahmed, 30, sits on the ground in a popular market in Sanaa selling bags of qat, a narcotic leaf ubiquitously consumed in Yemen. She begins at 11am and leaves at 2pm.
She places the qat bundles before and beside her. Customers stand or sit to pick and look at the product. Bargaining over the price begins. Eloquent and confident, she is a glib bargainer. Her face is veiled. Only her narrow eyes are visible.
Qat selling is dominated by men in Yemen. However, Um Ahmed and others of her like have tried it and fared well. Today, she does not fear what society thinks of her.
“When I started this work four years ago, few encouraged me and many found it weird. But the weird thing is to stay idle, starving to death,” Um Ahmed told Index.
She earns 5,000 Yemeni riyal ($20) a day. Her profit can increase or decrease.
“Today, I spend on myself and my three children and save some of my income. If I continued being ashamed of work and became obedient to unfair social norms, I would be a hungry loser,” she says.