Mostafa Sho‘aiyan: The Forgotten Revolutionary and the Possibility of Unified Action

PART OF THE BILINGUAL LECTURE SERIES ON IRAN

*Lecture in Persian

Mostafa Sho‘aiyan (1936-1976) was one of Iran’s unique political theorists and activists.  His political career spans over a number of important crossroads in contemporary Iranian history, especially in the 1960s and 1970s.  His friction with the dominant face of Marxism at the time, the People’s Fadai Guerrillas, enabled him to launch a theoretical diagnosis of the plagues of ideological thinking.  Until his death, Sho‘aiyan wrote a number of important treatises that, aside from a few cases, have not been seriously studied.  This paper will offer an interpretive overview of Sho‘aiyan’s theory of dissident action and activism in an irreducibly pluralistic society.  He offers a possibility of retaining differences and yet creating a united front.

Peyman Vahabzadeh is an Associate Professor of Sociology at University of Victoria, Canada. He is the author of Articulated Experiences: Toward a Radical Phenomenology of Contemporary Social Movements (2003), A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and the Fadai Discourse of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979 (2010), Exilic Meditations: Essays on A Displaced Life (2013), as well as six books of fiction, poetry, memoir, and literary criticism in Persian.

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Duration: 45:20