ژورنال سایت خبری سیاسی ژورنال
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PDF-English Journal-17 October 2025-No34
Marziyeh and Morteza are the names of two soft, plastic anti-stress toys, shaped like a gorilla and a pig, that have recently become popular in Iran and are sold on online marketplaces. Yet these two toys have now become a headache for their makers and sellers—and, unexpectedly, a fresh threat to the Islamic Republic itself.
On Monday, 13 October, Tehran’s prosecutor’s office announced that it had instructed judiciary agents to “identify those involved in the production, distribution and promotion of offensive dolls insulting religious sanctities and refer them to the judiciary.”
The seminary news agency in Qom described the dolls as “blasphemous,” claiming that because they bear the names of Shia Imams, they are insulting to Islam. The ‘Enjoining Good and Forbidding Evil’ headquarters declared that it was pursuing a “serious and ongoing effort” to ban their sale.
The uproar over banning the Morteza and Marziyeh dolls—led by the morality headquarters and Tehran’s prosecutors—reveals less about ‘religious zeal’ and more about the regime’s official admission that religious symbols and values have lost all credibility among Iranians. The toy makers may have had no particular intention behind the names, but the hysterical fury of clerical and judicial institutions is itself direct proof of a social reality: in today’s Iran, religious names no longer carry sanctity. They have become objects of humour, satire and even protest.
This is precisely what the Islamic regime has inadvertently and loudly confessed. The government that once thundered about building an “Islamic society” and promoting a “religious lifestyle” now trembles before two stress-relief dolls shaped like a gorilla and a pig. It knows that the society it rules no longer looks to prophets, imams or clerics for guidance—it looks to freedom, secular life and human dignity.
More than that, this episode delivers a fatal blow to the cliché still circulating in Western media and academia that Iranian society is “Islamic.” The reality today is a complete rupture from the religious order. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement is the peak of this anti-superstition, anti-Islamic, anti-authoritarian renaissance that has shaken not only the regime’s symbols but its ideological foundations.
Morteza and Marziyeh are not just dolls—they are symbols. Symbols of a society that no longer fears mullahs or ayatollahs, that no longer believes in sacred taboos, and that boldly mocks what was once untouchable. It is a society that sees the path to ending superstition, poverty, discrimination and religious domination in the total discrediting of Islamic ideology itself.
Editor: Patty Debonitas
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