Later this month, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will conclude his second term as president of the Islamic Republic of Iran. It's anyone's guess how he'll spend his time thereafter—the Ahmadinejad Global Initiative, anyone?—but it's probably safe to say that he's ready to leave Tehran’s presidential palace. The past year, after all, has been an extended lame duck period during which he has been berated in parliament, castigated by the Iranian press, and forced to watch as his chosen successor, Esfandiar Mashaei, was disqualified from even participating in the June 14 election. This past week, Ahmadinejad was reduced to expressing wan hopes that “God's grace” will intervene to reverse this latter “injustice.”

For someone who presided over the imprisonment of his competitors in the last presidential election, and routinely trolled sensible people everywhere by denying the Holocaust, this has been a humbling decline. Having arrived with a bang, Ahmadinejad now seems fated to depart with a whimper. But if that comes as a disappointment to the president's supporters in Iran, it really shouldn't come as a surprise. Ahmadinejad, after all, was an unrepentant populist in a country where authentic populism has enormous odds stacked against it. It’s not that Ahmadinejad wasn’t effective at expressing a mixture of religious fealty and crude nationalism—it’s that Iran’s political system discovered it simply couldn’t tolerate the combination.

In truth, that combination has always been tenuous. Islam and nationalism are distinct—and often conflicting—strands of Iranian identity. Iranians won't deny that Islam is a powerful force in their country, but most also insist on staking claim to the country's long pre-Islamic culture; this is a country where people still denounce the “Arab invasion” that introduced Islam a millennium ago, and carefully tend to a language that survived the long era of Arab imperialism.

The tumultuous events of the 1979 revolution managed to intertwine nationalism and Islamism in a way that briefly obscured the tensions between them. Among the revolutionaries were secular nationalists ands religious zealots; westernized liberals and chauvinist Marxists. It's not just that these people didn't agree on a vision for Iran's political future—they didn't even agree on what it meant to be an Iranian. That should have been evident to anyone who read the contradiction-riddled constitution adopted in the revolution's early going: It established a parliament and an elected presidency—institutions which implied the sovereignty of the Iranian public—but it placed them alongside clerical bodies which depended entirely on religious authority. (The crisis that dominated the early years of the Islamic Republic, Iran's war with Iraq, helped elide the tensions by presenting a general state of emergency—one that could both be portrayed as a nationalist retaliation against an Arab foe and as a religious crusade.)

If this doesn't seem like a tenable arrangement, that's because it wasn't (and still isn't). Over time, it's become clear that the clerics, and their allies in the Revolutionary Guard, have acquired the majority of power—and the monopoly of violence—in Iran, with the intention of using it to their own ends. But they would also prefer not to entirely alienate Iranians for whom religion is only an aspect, and not the entirety, of their lives. (Not to mention the many Iranians who support campaigns to “purify” the language of Arabic words and names.)