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Meit’s hard in 2026 to say Iran without encountering the worst certainty. Non-Iranian middlemen get their information in bits and pieces, filtered by algorithms. Iranians are too broke and depressed to educate anyone. And the government has stifled voices within its borders, responding to every major riot with an internet blackout that masks public anger and its violent response. Meanwhile, his disinformation network spreads propaganda – that the protesters are foreign instruments, that the unrest is orchestrated by foreigners – exploiting legitimate Western concerns about interventionism, Islamophobia, sanctions, oil and Israel.
Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati’s powerful history of the Islamic world is worth checking out because it is at once a fascinating and well-researched account of modern Iran (the best I’ve ever read). And it is surprising, personal and often heartbreaking, told through the lives of six people who have been at the forefront of the struggle of the Iranian people for almost XNUMX years against a corrupt government that has robbed them of their rights, votes and thousands of lives.
During the 1979 revolution that overthrew the Shah, religious leaders united many of Iran’s disaffected factions by promising independence from Western influence and economic prosperity (the first supreme leader, Ruhollah Khomeini, “declared that ‘no one should be homeless in this country’ and promised to ensure free electricity and water for the poor”). But, instead of a monarchy, Khomeini and his acolytes built a mafia state that created discrimination, increased all social injustice, killed the arts, weakened living standards, and isolated Iranians from the world culture and economy.
When Khomeini came to power, he quickly abandoned his promises of reform. After only seven months, he said: “No sane person would think that we gave our blood so that watermelons would be cheap, (that) we gave our youth so that a house would be cheap… One former student said it was like “watching my father slowly turn into an alcoholic. . .
In June 1989, when Khomeini died, a new supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, took over the reins. Sharafedin and Torbati use their six lives wisely to turn this time into a rest.
In the 1990s, Mehdi Karroubi, a reformist pastor turned dissident, acknowledged the mistakes of the 1979s and his distaste for the concept of monotheism. He rose through the ranks, often opposing Khamenei’s hardliners. Young poet and activist Hila Sedighi, too, believes that change can come through elections and dialogue. But those who want to change things have little power. “They don’t listen to me,” says the popular president, Mohammad Khatami, who is too scared to even talk to United States President Bill Clinton in the UN corridor. He went into the bathroom and hid until Clinton left.
As they slowly push for reform, the hard-liners stop pretending to be running a democracy. Top companies display their wealth boldly. The religious leaders empower the “Guardians (revolutionaries) to enrich themselves”, turning the military into a business that competes for government contracts and runs smuggling networks to break sanctions.
“Khamenei’s alliance with the military (was) a point of no return. ‘With this amount of power, he will not lose the elections,’ said the pragmatic former president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. ‘We should not have allowed this to happen.'” The 2005 and 2009 elections proved him right. He apparently cheated Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (his vote count in 2005 in one constituency reached 137% of eligible voters). In June 2009, Sedighi became the leading voice of the Green Movement, when millions of peaceful protesters took to the streets to ask: “Where is my vote?” But the protest has been called off. The reformists, Karroubi and Mir Hossein Mousavi, have been imprisoned. The time for change is over.
Amir Moghadam (an executive who goes against his corrupt boss) and Said Rahmani (a tech entrepreneur who tries to keep his operations running smoothly) represent an unknown subject for me. At the beginning of the mid-2010s, young, Iranian students returning from Europe and North America are speaking corporate patois, with English words such as “ecosystem”, “platform” and “runway” peppering Farsi, and in short the brain drain in Iran seems to be slowing down. It doesn’t take long. Soon the government makes its anti-profit design clear and many of them leave.
Then, in the difficult 2020s, the religious, social movement wants nothing to do with religious ideas or the promise of reform. The internet has shown them “that they were banned from simple and profound activities that their peers elsewhere took for granted: kissing their loved ones in public, walking on the beach”. After years of economic protests and mismanagement of the Covid pandemic, Death of Mahsa Amini 2022 in prison starting the Woman Life Freedom movement, the most widespread movement since the revolution. Rozhin Yousefzadeh and Kosar Eftekhari are among those who take to the streets and publicly refuse to wear the hijab. They all pay a heavy price. Yousefzadeh was one of the first to be arrested for speaking out about Amini’s death and Eftekhari was blinded in one eye by the Revolutionary Guards.
These movements are regular and deep, everything is based on the lessons and mistakes of previous generations. In today’s Iran, it is no longer religious minorities or women or liberal youth who are protesting: it is Muslims, old men, parents, the poor. Stolen Revolution is a careful and unflinching account of the follies and misdeeds of the government. It should be read by anyone who cares about human rights or justice in the Middle East.
Sharafedin and Torbati end with Attack on Israel in 2025. Khamenei, he hides when the Iranian people are in trouble, rallying to survive and hoping that this time something will knock the beast off their backs. “Is it still busy out there?” Rozhin and the jailers interview new prisoners during the Woman Life Freedom protests, wanting to be reassured that the protests are still going ahead. They are not. A prison worker travels in a “joy cart”, dispensing diazepam and clonazepam.
