By Siyavash Shahabi on November 4, 2025
In the past 24 hours, security forces carried out coordinated raids on the homes of several left-wing researchers and translators in Tehran, arresting Parviz Sedaghat, Mahsa Asadollahnejad, and Shirin Karimi. They confiscated the belongings of Mohammad Maljoo and summoned him for questioning; the home of Heiman Rahimi was also searched, and he, too, was called in for “questions and answers.” Reports say the arrests were made without any charges being announced and involved sweeping seizures of laptops and books.
The repression of the left in Iran has a long, well-documented history. From the Shah’s regime to the present, left-wing, justice-oriented, emancipatory ideas have been consistently crushed, with the security apparatus particularly fixated on blocking their growth in universities and the labor movement. Even so, this latest wave pushes the old pattern of targeting activists into a new phase: it now reaches people whose work had, until recently, been tacitly tolerated. Who are they, and what have they done to be detained?
Five figures, five intellectual paths…
What these five do is more than “critique.” They’ve built the routes along which ideas travel: translating Harvey, Butler, Najmabadi, and Bayat into Persian and tying them to current economic/political life in Iran. When concepts about the city, gender, class, labor, and legitimacy enter public speech, the state and official media lose their monopoly over meaning. That’s why the raids target not just “people,” but “books, hard drives, and archives.”….
https://firenexttime.net/the-war-on-minds-inside-regimes-coordinated-arrests-of-left-scholars/
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