STOLEN REVOLUTION

A modern history of Iran, told through the experiences of citizens across a range of sectors.

Journalists Torbati and Sharafedin open on Mehdi Karroubi, a cleric and activist who supported Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini’s rise to power in the 1960s. From there, the authors trace the excruciating stop-start of Iran’s struggle toward democracy, and its whiplash swings between opening to the world beyond its borders and succumbing to the tightening, isolating fist of corruption, moral censorship, and authoritarianism. There is Hila, a reformist poet; Said, a tech entrepreneur; Amir, a disillusioned bureaucrat; and Kosar and Rozhin, young women who join 2022’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests. These stories, embellished with anecdotes of peers, family members, and antagonizers, create a tapestry of the fractured opposition and failed promises of revolution, the tension between visionary ambition and self-serving, pragmatic strategy, and the extensive impact of the country’s economic and political volatility. A sort of “profiles in courage” approach captures the evolution of personal ideologies and allegiances and grants illuminating detail to global conversation: the particulars of election interference, the effects of economic sanctions and nuclear negotiations, the country’s tradition of youth civic participation, and its hunger for technology (along with the distinct hurdles facing its fledgling startups). Other pricks of familiarity become somewhat muddled; the broader changing tides of power grabs and “chaotic governance” under Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad happen mainly in the background. As one wave of activism and disappointment rolls into another, the authors honor but do not romanticize the struggle, highlighting the ongoing disagreements within and between movements, as well as the expanded mission—intensified and amplified—that emerges from sustained discontent. We are left with a portrait of a nation more nuanced, complicated, and promising than the world—and perhaps even its own leaders—have fully appreciated.

A consciousness-changing record of the oppression of extremism lived and resisted at the personal level.