On 8 February 1971, Marxist revolutionaries attacked the gendarmerie outpost at the village of Siyahkal in Iran’s Gilan province. Barely two months later, the Iranian People’s Fada’i Guerrillas officially announced their existence and began a long, drawn-out urban guerrilla war against the Shah’s regime. In Call to Arms, Ali Rahnema provides a comprehensive history of the Fada’is, beginning by asking why so many of Iran’s best and brightest chose revolutionary Marxism in the face of absolutist rule. He traces how radicalised university students from different ideological backgrounds morphed into the Marxist Fada’is in 1971, and sheds light on their theory, practice and evolution. While the Fada’is failed to directly bring about the fall of the Shah, Rahnema shows they had a lasting impact on society and they ultimately saw their objective achieved.

Iran's prison system is a foundational institution of Iranian political modernity. The Incarcerated Modern traces the transformation of Iran from a decentralized empire with few imprisoned persons at the turn of the twentieth century into a modern nation-state with over a quarter million prisoners today. In policing the line between "bad criminal" and "good citizen," the carceral system has shaped and reshaped Iranian understandings of citizenship, freedom, and political belonging. Golnar Nikpour explores the interplay between the concrete space of the Iranian prison and the role of prisons in producing new public cultures and political languages in Iran. From prison writings of 1920s leftist prisoners and communiqués of 1950s militant Islamists, to paintings of 1970s revolutionary guerrillas and mapping projects organized by contemporary dissident prisoners, carceral confinement has shaped modern Iranian political movements. Today, mass incarceration is a global phenomenon. The Incarcerated Modern connects Iranian history to transnational carceral histories to illuminate the shared architectures, economies, and techniques of modern punishment.

Lenin. Mao. Castro. Mugabe. Khomeini. All sparked movements in the name of liberating their people from their oppressors—capitalists, foreign imperialists, or dictators in their own country. These revolutionaries rallied the masses in the name of freedom, only to become more tyrannical than those they replaced. Much has been written about the anatomy of revolution from Edmund Burke to Crane Brinton Crane, Franz Fanon, and contemporary theorists of revolution found in the modern academy. Yet what is missing is a dissection of the revolutionary minds that destroyed the old for the creation of a more harmful new. Revolutionary Monsters presents a collective biography of five modern day revolutionaries who came into power calling for the liberation of the people only to end up killing millions of people in the name of revolution: Lenin (Russia), Mao (China), Castro (Cuba), Mugabe (Zimbabwe), and Khomeini (Iran). Revolutionary Monsters explores basic questions about the revolutionary personality, and examines how these revolutionaries came to envision themselves as prophets of a new age.

A presentation of scholarly work that investigates Iran's experiences with colonialism and decolonization from a variety of perspectives. How did Iran’s unique position in the world affect and define its treatment of decolonization? During the final decades of Pahlavi rule in the late 1970s, the country sought to establish close relationships with newly independent counterparts in the Global South. Most scholarly work focused on this period is centered around the Cold War and Iran's relations with the United States, Russia, and Europe. Little attention has been paid to how the country interacted with other regions, such as Africa, Asia, and the Americas. Adding to an important and growing body of literature that discusses the profound and lasting impact of decolonization, Iran and Global Decolonisation contributes to the theoretical debates around the re-shaping of the world brought about by the end of an empire. It considers not only the impact of global decolonization on movements and ideas within Iran but also how Iran’s own experiences of imperialism shaped how these ideas were received and developed.

Maral Jefroudi presents a comprehensive picture of one of the largest migration waves in contemporary history by analyzing refugees' interactions with the Turkish State, the UNHCR, and within the community of Iranians in transit after the 1979 revolution. Iranian Refugees in Transit unveils the rich history of political engagement among Iranian refugees before their arrival in Turkey, contextualised within Turkey's own landscape of political and ethnic conflicts. Jefroudi expertly examines the intersectional distribution of precarity among refugees. By bringing together interviews with refugees from the period, analyzing cultural products by and on them, and tracing their footsteps in newspapers and scholarly literature, this book fills a significant gap in Turkey's migration history. Through a critical historical analysis of the international asylum system, Iranian Refugees in Transit offers valuable insights into the dynamics of the current 'refugee crisis'.

A multi-disciplinary approach, placing the 1979 Iranian revolution within global and transnational contexts, showing how the revolution became possible and consequential.

Debates about Islam and Muslim societies have intensified in the last four decades, triggered by the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran and, later, by the events of 9/11. Too often present in these debates are wrongheaded assumptions about the attachment of Muslims to their religion and the impossibility of secularism in the Muslim world. At the heart of these assumptions is the notion of Muslim exceptionalism: the idea that Muslims think, believe, and behave in ways that are fundamentally different from other faith communities. In Sacred as Secular Abdolmohammad Kazemipur attempts to debunk this flawed notion of Muslim exceptionalism by looking at religious trends in Iran since 1979. Drawing on a wide range of data and sources, including national social attitudes surveys collected since the 1970s, he examines developments in the spheres of politics and governance, schools and seminaries, contemporary philosophy, and the self-expressed beliefs and behaviours of Iranian men, women, and youth. He reveals that beneath Iran’s religious façade is a deep secularization that manifests not only in individual beliefs, but also in Iranian political philosophy, institutional and clerical structures, and intellectual life. Empirically and theoretically rich, Sacred as Secular looks at the place of religion in Iranian society from a sociological perspective, expanding the debate on secularism from a predominantly West-centric domain to the Muslim world.

The Iranian People's Fada'i Guerrillas have received little dedicated scholarly investigation in the shadow of the Iranian Revolution. This unique collection combines scholarly analysis of the movement, with first-hand accounts from those within the movement, in order to shed light on the experiences, organisation and history of this group during the 1970's. The volume is partly composed of eyewitness accounts from veteran Fada'i members on themes such as everyday life in safehouses, the activities of the small but active Fada'i representation abroad, the experience of Fada'i men and women who were subject to long imprisonment in the 1970s or perspectives on military organisation. Alongside these accounts are scholarly investigations into the various aspects in the history of the organisation, which cover elements such as its ideological foundations and political orientation, the importance of the Iranian labour movement in Fada'i thought and praxis and the impact of guerrilla activism in the arts.

Originally completed mere months before the Iranian Revolution of 1979, Fred Halliday’s study of twentieth-century Iran was not only incredibly timely but a deeply researched, thought-provoking work. It masterfully surveys the country’s uneven capitalist development, state-building and class structure, security and military apparatus, dissent and opposition movements, and foreign relations. Even decades later it remains among the most sophisticated and compelling analyses of this period of Iranian history. Halliday persuasively argues against crude interpretations of the Pahlavi regime as an enlightened and modernising monarchy or merely a dependent client state. Instead, he contends that to make sense of the Pahlavi regime and its vulnerabilities, it is crucial to understand the dialectic of dictatorship, development and the imperial geopolitics of the global Cold War. This new edition also includes six of Halliday’s essays on the Islamic Republic, demonstrating how his thinking on Iran and the revolution evolved over time.

On 8 February 1971, Marxist revolutionaries attacked the gendarmerie outpost at the village of Siyahkal in Iran’s Gilan Province. Barely two months later, the Iranian People’s Fada’i Guerrillas officially announced their existence and began a long, drawn-out urban guerrilla war against the Shah’s regime. In Call to Arms, Ali Rahnema provides an exhaustive history of the Fada’is, beginning by asking why so many of Iran’s best and brightest chose revolutionary Marxism in the face of authoritarian rule. He traces how radicalised university students from different ideological backgrounds morphed into the Marxist Fada’is in 1971, and sheds light on the ideological theory and practice of the Fada’is, their evolution and internal disputes. While the People’s Fada’i Guerrillas failed to directly bring about the fall of the Shah, the political and psychological conditions they created, the ideals and archetypes they established, and the forces they put in motion, namely the student movement both in Iran and overseas, had a lasting impact on society and saw their objective achieved.