The War on Minds: Inside Regime’s Coordinated Arrests of Left Scholars

In the past 24 hours (November 3, 2025), 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

Parviz Sedaghat is an economist and political-economy researcher, Sedaghat has helped turn “Critique of Political Economy” into a central platform for public debate on Iranian capitalism. Through translating and introducing thinkers like David Harvey (from “Right to the City” to “Rebel Cities,” “The Capital Spiral”) and publishing dozens of analytical essays, he has brought complex critical political-economy ideas into everyday language. In recent years, he has foregrounded the notion of “structural blockage” in Iran’s economy and critiqued monetary–fiscal policy beyond day-to-day factional skirmishes. This tight link between theory in translation and analysis of the present is what cemented his place in the public sphere.

Shirin Karimi is a writer and translator whose work bridges feminist theory/gender studies and Iranian politics: from translating Asef Bayat (“Living the Revolution”) to works by Judith Butler and Afsaneh Najmabadi, as well as the “Philosophy for Teens” series. She has also undertaken a methodical rereading of a literary classic in “Fifty Years After Savushun,” and has published translations and essays in “Critique of Political Economy.” Her arrest targets the precise crossroads where gender theory, ideology critique, and public literacy converge.

Mohammad Maljoo is an economist and researcher whose academic work (including “The Chain of Capital Accumulation in Iran After the Revolution” in Critique) and public presence have brought serious debates on accumulation, privatization, the commodification of education, and the condition of the working class into mainstream discussion. His record includes a visiting research stint at the International Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, studies on labor and the petrochemical sector, and a recent article in Iranian Studies. In the latest sweep, his devices were seized and he was summoned—clear evidence of the security apparatus’s sensitivity to the systematic production of knowledge on labor relations and accumulation.

Mahsa Asadollahnejad is a political sociologist with peer-reviewed articles on charisma/pseudo-charisma in the Weberian tradition and a co-authored study on “state-building, 1979–1989, with an emphasis on leadership agency.” Put plainly, her work strikes at official narratives of legitimacy and the “myth of charisma,” offering a historically grounded analysis of how power has been organized in the Islamic Republic. Her arrest (after her devices were seized at her parents’ home) underscores the heightened sensitivity toward research that moves beyond slogans to anatomize the mechanisms of political legitimacy.

Heiman Rahimi is a writer–translator active across critical websites and magazines (from “Radical Democracy” to “Critique of Political Economy”), Rahimi has translated on the Paris Commune, contemporary socialist debates, and written essays on themes like a “new social contract” and “Mossadegh and the question of backwardness.” His home was searched, his devices seized, and he was summoned—an example of pressure on the circle that renders foundational ideas in clear, accessible prose for social media and online outlets.

From “circulating ideas” to the “infrastructure of knowing”

1. Translation as political infrastructure. 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.”
2. Tangible political economy. Sedaghat and Maljoo merge academic research with public writing to challenge “neutral” official storylines about crisis, inflation, privatization, and labor—from “structural blockage” to the “chain of accumulation” and the commodification of education. These aren’t abstract buzzwords; they’re tools for explaining everyday life, which is precisely why they’re seen as threatening.
3. Legitimacy under the microscope. Asadollahnejad’s work on charisma/pseudo-charisma and state-building in the first decade of the Islamic Republic systematically interrogates the symbolic bases of power. When “charisma” becomes a historical, criticizable category, claims of “exception” and “sacrality” crumble. That is where political security collides with social science.
4. Networked, accessible circulation. Karimi and Rahimi, working on independent platforms and online magazines, have built a bridge between academia and public text. During the “Woman, Life, Freedom” uprising, this mattered even more, because making and circulating critical knowledge fed into horizontal organizing and linked campus to street. That’s the very pattern student crackdowns targeted in 2022—and that continues today.

This wave of arrests shows the security apparatus fears “publicly intelligible critical knowledge”—knowledge that has left the academic cage and been translated into everyday language. Today’s repression is the logical continuation of a project, underway since the 1980s, to silence the left; what’s changed is the battlefield. It has shifted from “party organizations” to the “infrastructure of knowing” (translation, websites, channels, archives). The goal is to sever the chain that runs from the production to the circulation to the uptake of ideas—the very chain these five, each in their own way, have helped build.