Iran's many revolutions: A history of resistance, repression and hope

By Reza Aslan 

STOLEN REVOLUTION: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran

by Yeganeh Torbati and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin

Published by Doubleday

484 pages $35

 

Before the bombs began falling on Iran earlier this year, the war was sold by its advocates as a possible catalyst for regime change — a final blow against a government already weakened by years of economic crisis and political unrest. To many outside observers, the Islamic Republic appeared vulnerable to collapse. Yet the coordinated bombing campaign by the United States and Israel has only strengthened the most hard-line elements of the Iranian state. 

Those of us who have spent years studying modern Iran understood that this was always the more likely outcome. It is a recurring pattern that the New York Times journalist Yeganeh Torbati and the veteran Iran correspondent Bozorgmehr Sharafedin trace in Stolen Revolution. The result is one of the most perceptive books on modern Iran in years, capturing not only the machinery of repression but the fragile forms of hope that survive beneath it. 

 

The revolution of 1979 that gave rise to today’s Islamic Republic, the authors argue, was the culmination of tensions that intensified in the wake of the CIA-backed coup restoring the Shah to power after a brief exile in the 1950s. It was animated by competing promises of justice, freedom and moral order, as well as a fight against foreign domination that extended back to the Constitutional Revolution of the early 1900s. The coalition that finally toppled the Shah for good included clerics, leftists, students, nationalists and secular intellectuals, many united less by a shared idea of the future than by a shared rejection of the present. 

As power narrowed into the hands of a clerical elite around Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, what followed was not the triumph of one coherent ideology so much as the gradual exclusion of competing visions. “A revolution that was launched with egalitarian ideals and immense hopes,” Torbati and Sharafedin write, “has resulted in a mafia state.” 

The authors render the early years of the revolutionary movement through the life of one participant, the Islamic scholar Mehdi Karroubi. For decades, Karroubi helped distribute Khomeini’s speeches across Iran. Hounded and repeatedly arrested by the Shah’s secret police, he spent much of the 1960s and 1970s sleeping alongside dissident leftists and his fellow clerics on prison floors. 

Karroubi’s helped construct institutions that would support Khomeini’s government. He defended the revolution even as it narrowed politically and morally, enforcing a conservative dress code and banning Western music. 

But the regime eventually became something far harsher, resorting to mass execution and torture to assert control. The brutal Iran-Iraq War of the 1980s accelerated that transformation. Bolstered on both sides by US arms, the eight-year conflict empowered the paramilitary force known as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and normalised a politics of sacrifice, surveillance and permanent emergency that reshaped public life. 

By the 2000s, Karroubi was sitting in Parliament warning against the expanding power of the security state. When the Green Movement erupted in 2009 in response to the disputed re-election of the hard right populist president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, he became one of the regime’s most outspoken internal critics. 

If the first half of Stolen Revolution traces the consolidation of power, the second turns to the persistence of resistance. Here the book becomes especially alive in its portrait of younger Iranians who experienced the revolution not as a lived memory but as a political inheritance. 

The authors detail the re-emergence of civil society at the turn of the 21st century, during the presidency of Mohammad Khatami. Newspapers flourished. Student youth groups and literary circles proliferated, creating spaces in which democratic practice became part of daily life rather than abstract political theory. 

In one telling episode, the 17-year-old activist Hila Sedighi spends weeks planning a poetry night for an audience of 500 people, only to have it abruptly cancelled by local authorities. Refusing to abandon the event, the teenager navigates layers of bureaucracy until a nervous cultural official quietly signs a letter of permission, warning her, “I’m lighting this fire both for you and for me.” 

Torbati and Sharafedin also vividly evoke the mixture of exhilaration and improvisation that defined the Green Movement: campaign materials passed phone to phone by Bluetooth in subway stations, a human chain stretching for dozens of miles through Tehran, young organisers convinced that sheer turnout could overwhelm whatever fraud the state attempted. 

Millions poured into the streets demanding greater accountability. And once again, the state endured — not because dissent disappeared, but because the institutions built to contain dissent proved stronger than the forces challenging them. 

Torbati and Sharafedin are especially good at conjuring the fear and spontaneity that accompany the realisation that private frustration has suddenly become collective action. To elucidate the Women, Life, Freedom movement that began in 2022, they describe the Kurdish Iranian activist Rozhin Yousefzadeh as she walks through Tehran unveiled. She fully expects arrest at any moment, only to find strangers quietly emboldened by the sight of her. 

Read in the midst of the war, the book’s title takes on a double meaning. In a country forged through struggle against foreign influence, pressure from outside does not loosen the system. And yet Stolen Revolution  ultimately resists despair. What persists across its generations of activists and dissidents is not merely memory but political capacity: the ability to gather, to organise, to imagine otherwise. The revolution, in that sense, never fully ends. Like the forces it opposes, it recedes, hardens and returns.

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The reviewer is the author of An American Martyr in Persia: The Epic Life and Tragic Death of Howard Baskerville   ©2026 The New York Times News Service