Petroleum and the Political Theology of Apocalypse

When U.S.–Israeli strikes hit Iran’s Shahran oil refinery, toxic black clouds covered Tehran and turned daylight into an apocalyptic dusk. Media commentators described the scene using biblical imagery of a cosmic catastrophe. But who—or what—is the agent of this apocalypse? This paper offers a materialist rereading of Iranian political history by treating petroleum but as an active historical agent. Drawing on Reza Negarestani’s fictional demonology of oil in Cyclonopedia and Timothy Mitchell’s Carbon Democracy, it argues that petroleum has functioned as Iran’s most persistent adversary. From the Abadan oil strikes of the 1940s to the 1953 coup and contemporary geopolitical conflicts, oil has repeatedly structured political violence, economic dependency, and environmental devastation. Apocalypse is thus reframed not simply as a theological image or geopolitical narrative, but as a material condition produced by petroleum itself—a form of petropolitical destiny in which the nation’s adversary lies embedded beneath its own soil.