https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGUDgA-MR0I&t=1s

By Dr. Ali Mirsepassi

“The Loneliest Revolution” deftly weaves together Mirsepassi’s insights as a sociologist of Iran with his memories of provincial life and radical activism in 1960s and 1970s Iran to offer a first-hand account of the transformations leading up to the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Mirsepassi, the son of a traveling civil servant, found community not in the small towns where he was designated an outsider but in a world of books, radio, and the company of politically conscious high-school teachers. Eager to escape the conservatism of provincial Iran, Mirsepassi made his way to the University of Tehran, the epicenter of Iranian student protest, only to find the political scene there caught between the same poles of religious and leftist activism that marked provincial Iran. Attentive to the everyday struggles Iranians across this spectrum faced as they searched for ways to learn about and make history despite state surveillance and censorship, Mirsepassi honors the creativity and courage of his generation and of the educators, writers, and community members who set their thinking in motion. Moving from Iran’s provinces to the capital, and from personal reflection to scholarly analysis, “The Loneliest Revolution” revisits questions of leftist failure, Islamist victory, and the binary that separates the two. Yet rather than pass judgments of guilt or innocence on Islamists and leftists, Mirsepassi’s writing ultimately asks us all to probe the memories, personal and collective, that we leave unspoken in this memorable account.

Ali Mirsepassi is Albert Gallatin Research Excellence Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies, New York University. He was a 2007-2009 Carnegie Scholar and is the co-editor, of The Global Middle East, a book series published by the Cambridge University Press. He is the author of, The Loneliest Revolution: A Memoir of Solidarity and Struggle in Iran, Edinburgh University Press, 2023; The Discovery of Iran: Taghi Arani, a Radical Cosmopolitan, Stanford University Press, 2021; Iran’s Quiet Revolution: The Downfall of the Pahlavi State, 2019; Cambridge University Press, 2019; Iran’s Troubled Modernity: Debating Ahmad Fardid’s Legacy, Cambridge University Press, 2018; Transnationalism in Iranian Political Thought: The Life and Thought of Ahmad Fardid, Cambridge University Press, 2017, co-author, with Tadd Fernee, of Islam, Democracy, and Cosmopolitanism, Cambridge University Press, 2014; Political Islam, Iran and Enlightenment, Cambridge University Press, 2011; Democracy in Modern Iran, New York University Press, 2010; the co-editor, Localizing Knowledge in a Globalizing World, Syracuse University Press, 2002; and Intellectual Discourses and Politics of Modernization: Negotiating Modernity in Iran, Cambridge University Press, 2000.