A recurring problem with contemporary books about the Islamic Republic is that authors often deny Iranians the agency they deserve. Especially on the left, Western and Iranian journalists and scholars can embrace this crippling sentiment since it has been a way to cast off blame for the ugliness—the primitiveness—of the Islamic revolution and the theocracy that followed.
How many times, for example, do conversations on Iran quickly gravitate to the 1953 coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh, either saying or suggesting that if Mossadegh hadn’t fallen, that if the Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s MI6 hadn’t conspired against him (ignoring the wide array of his domestic opponents), his downfall and the Islamic revolution would never have happened? Rewrite that moment, as guilt-ridden progressive revisionists are wont to do, and Iran would be what no other Muslim country in the Middle East is today: a functioning, rather liberal democracy. A right-wing version of this, not uncommon among expatriate Iranian monarchists and American conservatives, also exists: America (Jimmy Carter) and Britain (the BBC) actually gutted Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi when he needed them the most.
For better or worse, Iranians have been agents of their own destiny. Under the Pahlavis and especially under the mullahs, Iranians, like the postwar French, have punched way above their weight. They have been among the most consequential Third Worlders in great part because, even when they have been mired in conspiracies, they haven’t been helpless. And since 1979 they have seized history and done their damndest to bend the arc toward them—now much to the displeasure of a vast majority of Iranians who surely would prefer to lead less eventful lives.
Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran does a fine job of showing Iranians who were intent on making a difference, first through the Islamic revolution or later in opposition to ever-worsening despotism. There aren’t any “buts” in this book, digressions about American “misunderstandings,” and foreign-policy malpractice. Nineteen fifty-three passes in a paragraph. The CIA gets four fleeting mentions.
The book’s coauthors, the American-born Washington Post-turned-New York Times reporter Yeganeh Torbati and Bozorgmehr Sharafedin— who left Iran in 2008 and now writes for Iran International—give us an unapologetically Iranian story about practical idealism slamming into Islamist autocracy. They capture well the complexity of the Islamic Republic, its contradictions where good and evil can so closely reside, sometimes in the same people.
In Stolen Revolution, the hope of Iranians who tried to make their homeland better gives way to regret and reflection and, at least with some, a perdurable belief that they, or the next generation, will finally overcome.
The book sketches principal characters and events gracefully. One such character is Hila Sedighi, a passionate young woman who as a girl once impressed her teachers by her ability to recite the Quran and later became a poet, artist, and an ardent reformist swept up in the aspirations of the 1990s. In 2012, after she had become an internationally recognized dissident, enduring numerous interrogations by the intelligence ministry, the former reformist president Mohammad Khatami Skyped in to officiate at her wedding since Sedighi’s fiancé had left Tehran for a safer and more prosperous life in Dubai. By then her hope in Khatami, if not the country, had faded:
For a time, [Sedighi] could maintain that even within a system built to dehumanize, there were still people who remembered their humanity. She and her friends had encountered them in the halls of city government, within the military barracks, and even in courtrooms, interrogation rooms, and prison cells. An interrogator had once helped her avoid spending the night in jail by detaining her long enough for her family to deliver her bail money. Another time, an escort officer had hassled prison and judiciary officials so that Sedighi would be released more quickly. There was some give to the system, a flexibility that did not redeem it, yet reminded one that there were always choices to be made.
The book begins in 2022 with the Women, Life, Freedom protests, which began after Iranian-Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini was murdered by the morals police for improperly covering her hair. This eruption became the most pivotal rebellion in the Islamic Republic’s history. It terrified the ruling elite by bringing into the limelight what the regime had known since the presidential election of Khatami in 1997: A lot of women, both rich and poor, even the daughters of the ruling elite, weren’t happy and were politically showing their anger.
These protests also fundamentally changed Western commentary on Iran, diminishing if not banishing the apologias that so often appeared on the reverse side of even the most severe criticisms of the Islamic Republic. Stolen Revolution is a product of the revulsion and empathy that this female-centered uprising sparked in the West.
The book’s captivating portrayals of brave Iranians against a brutal system may also spring from the fact that Torbati and Sharafedin knew they were going to write this book outside Iran. Distance gives freedom. Journalists still dreaming of visas or a trip home to see Iranian relatives just don’t wander through the past with such sharp eyes.
Following the model used in Children of Paradise: The Struggle for the Soul of Iran, Torbati and Sharafedin string together complementary vignettes of Iranians. All but one are compelling young women and men who gave their all, got hurt, sometimes shot, and eventually fled their homeland. Among the good-hearted, intellectually inclined dissidents standing a bit apart are the young tech entrepreneurs, on whom Torbati and Sharafedin do first-rate, original reporting. The techies learn that without a civil society and laws they can’t flourish and can even, perversely, just end up abetting oppression.
The authors vividly convey the ruling elite—a mafia of clerical families and the Revolutionary Guards—feeding on the country. Their accounts of relatives of the powerful who end up in Evin Prison because of disputes and jealousy among the elite, in refurbished suites and bathrooms, supplied with booze, prostitutes, and servants, are eye-opening. The book also describes the dismal presidency of Hassan Rouhani, who delivered the nuclear accord with Barack Obama but discovered how little the proceeds of that deal could even matter to an economy dominated by poorly managed state enterprises and semi-public foundations, both often controlled behind the scenes by the Revolutionary Guards and clerical cliques.
Torbati and Sharafedin’s most insightful choice is Mehdi Karroubi, a famous revolutionary cleric, a deeply loyal follower of Ruhollah Khomeini. Karroubi starts to dissent under the rule of Ali Khamenei. He was instrumental in pushing forward Khatami for the 1997 presidential election—a surprise to Khamenei, Karroubi, and especially Khatami himself. In 2009, after a tumultuous presidential election that saw Mahmoud Ahmadinejad win through a clearly rigged vote, Karroubi decided to stand as a hybrid reformist-establishment candidate but ended up under house arrest. During his confinement—until 2025—he evolves further and Torbati and Sharafedin show both his “ideological shift” and his continuing intellectual dissonance:
One day, [Karroubi] summoned his sons. He informed them that they should expect little inheritance. He planned to give away most of his remaining wealth. It was one way, he felt, he could make up for the unjust government he had helped to create. “This clerical establishment behaved so poorly that we left behind deeply damaging consequences,” he told them.
The book also covers Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former prime minister who fought constantly with Khamenei during the Iran-Iraq War and by the early 2020s clearly wanted to tear down the theocracy. By 2023, after the Women, Life, Freedom movement had broken out, Mousavi declared that “the Islamic revolution had become for him the people’s revolution of 1979.” He’d deleted both Islam and Khomeini.
Stolen Revolution was written before the current conflict broke out. It ends after the much less damaging 12-Day War in June 2025. Its insights are still pertinent. The book describes Round One: That any Iranian would welcome such an assault was stark evidence of how deeply the Islamic Republic had alienated most of its people. Many Iranians viewed the government itself as an occupying force that did not care about the country. And it showed how little hope they had in their ability to change the situation for the better.
The repression after the 12-Day War is surely a small foretaste to what’s going to happen when the current conflict draws to a close if the Islamic Republic is still standing: “At least twenty-one thousand people were swept up in mass arrests, often charged with espionage or national security crimes. Arrests of ethnic and religious minorities spiked. Prison officials carried out a string of speedy executions. There would be no attempt to mend rifts, only the settling of scores.”
But these are small complaints against a wonderful book. Anyone who is curious about Iranians, about how they have absorbed modernity, and why they have been the center of so much controversy in the West and in the Middle East, would do well to read Stolen Revolution.