<p>This article interrogates the Global South notion by foregrounding internal contradictions and stratifying dynamics in the Global South states and societies. It centers on Iranian sociology to examine how sovereign academic power took shape alongside the rise and expansion of Persian-Shi’a nationalism in Iran. Privileging metropolitan knowledge while marginalizing Kurdish, Arab, Baluchi, and other minoritized modes of knowledge, the discipline has actively contributed to the construction and consolidation of both epistemic and political silencing. Drawing on a range of canonical sociologists and sociological works from Iran, the study contends that the ‘South’ generates its own margins and centers. The article argues that Global South theory harbors a foundational blind spot. By confining coloniality to external impositions, it systematically fails to account for the endogenously manufactured colonial relations that the Global South state institutions reproduce internally. The Iranian case demonstrates that a sociology can be simultaneously subaltern on the world stage and hegemonic at home, that the epistemological practice of anti-colonial resistance does not inoculate against internal domination, and that any genuinely decolonial project must confront not only the North it faces outward, but the ‘inner North’ it embeds within.</p>