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Iran in Revolt: Revolutionary Aspirations in a Post-Democratic World
In his retelling of the boldness and tragedy of the Zhina uprising in Iran, Hamid Dabashi What constitutes the success of revolutions and how do we measure their failures?
In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Zhina Mahsa Amini, was killed in police custody for failing to observe the strict dress code imposed on Iranian women. Her death sparked a massive social uprising within and outside of Iran. The slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” spread like wildfire from Amini’s hometown to solidarity protests held in London, New York, Melbourne, Paris, Seoul and beyond. The pain felt by millions of Iranians, caused by the Islamic Republic, was on the global stage again.
Yet, misreadings of the Zhina uprising—both accidental and insidious—began to proliferate, with different parties vying for power. Iran in Revolt by author and scholar Hamid Dabashi cuts through the white noise of imperialist war mongers and social media bots to provide a careful and principled account of the revolution, and how it has forever altered the nature of politics in Iran and the wider region.
Iran in Revolt argues that “democracy” and the “nation-state” are tired concepts, exploring what it means to fight for a just society instead. Through detailed political, philosophical, and historical analysis, Dabashi shows that the vulnerable lives and fragile liberties of nations have never been so intimately connected, just as the pernicious cruelties of ruling regimes have never been so identical as they are today.
In September 2022, a young Kurdish woman, Zhina Mahsa Amini, was killed in police custody for failing to observe the strict dress code imposed on Iranian women. Her death sparked a massive social uprising within and outside of Iran. The slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” spread like wildfire from Amini’s hometown to solidarity protests held in London, New York, Melbourne, Paris, Seoul and beyond. The pain felt by millions of Iranians, caused by the Islamic Republic, was on the global stage again.
Yet, misreadings of the Zhina uprising—both accidental and insidious—began to proliferate, with different parties vying for power. Iran in Revolt by author and scholar Hamid Dabashi cuts through the white noise of imperialist war mongers and social media bots to provide a careful and principled account of the revolution, and how it has forever altered the nature of politics in Iran and the wider region.
Iran in Revolt argues that “democracy” and the “nation-state” are tired concepts, exploring what it means to fight for a just society instead. Through detailed political, philosophical, and historical analysis, Dabashi shows that the vulnerable lives and fragile liberties of nations have never been so intimately connected, just as the pernicious cruelties of ruling regimes have never been so identical as they are today.
256 pages, Paperback
Published February 4, 2025
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88 people want to read
About the author
Hamid Dabashi
81 books210 followersBorn on 15 June 1951 into a working class family in the south-western city of Ahvaz in the Khuzestan province of Iran, Hamid Dabashi received his early education in his hometown and his college education in Tehran, before he moved to the United States, where he received a dual Ph.D. in Sociology of Culture and Islamic Studies from the University of Pennsylvania in 1984, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard University.
He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field. He has taught and delivered lectures in many North and Latin American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. He is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University.
He has written 20 books, edited 4, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in major scholarly and peer reviewed journals on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010).
Hamid Dabashi is the Series Editor of Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World for Palgrave Macmillan. This series is putting forward a critical body of first rate scholarship on the literary and cultural production of the Islamic world from the vantage point of contemporary theoretical and hermeneutic perspectives, effectively bringing the study of Islamic literatures and cultures to the wider attention of scholars and students of world literatures and cultures without the prejudices and drawbacks of outmoded perspectives.
An internationally renowned cultural critic and award-winning author, his books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Danish, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan.
In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, Hamid Dabashi is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema. He is also chiefly responsible for opening up the study of Persian literature and Iranian culture at Columbia University to students of comparative literature and society, breaking away from the confinements of European Orientalism and American Area Studies.
A committed teacher in the past three decades, Hamid Dabashi is also a public speaker around the globe, a current affairs essayist, and a staunch anti-war activist. He has two grown-up children, Kaveh and Pardis, who are both Columbia University graduates, and he lives in New York with his wife and colleague, the Iranian-Swedish feminist, Golbarg Bashi, their daughter Chelgis and their son Golchin.
He wrote his doctoral dissertation on Max Weber’s theory of charismatic authority with Philip Rieff (1922-2006), the most distinguished Freudian cultural critic of his time.
Hamid Dabashi is the Hagop Kevorkian Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Literature at Columbia University in New York, the oldest and most prestigious Chair in his field. He has taught and delivered lectures in many North and Latin American, European, Arab, and Iranian universities. He is a founding member of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, as well as a founding member of the Center for Palestine Studies at Columbia University.
He has written 20 books, edited 4, and contributed chapters to many more. He is also the author of over 100 essays, articles and book reviews in major scholarly and peer reviewed journals on subjects ranging from Iranian Studies, medieval and modern Islam, comparative literature, world cinema, and the philosophy of art (trans-aesthetics). A selected sample of his writing is co-edited by Andrew Davison and Himadeep Muppidi, The World is my Home: A Hamid Dabashi Reader (Transaction 2010).
Hamid Dabashi is the Series Editor of Literatures and Cultures of the Islamic World for Palgrave Macmillan. This series is putting forward a critical body of first rate scholarship on the literary and cultural production of the Islamic world from the vantage point of contemporary theoretical and hermeneutic perspectives, effectively bringing the study of Islamic literatures and cultures to the wider attention of scholars and students of world literatures and cultures without the prejudices and drawbacks of outmoded perspectives.
An internationally renowned cultural critic and award-winning author, his books and articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Japanese, German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Hebrew, Danish, Arabic, Korean, Persian, Portuguese, Polish, Turkish, Urdu and Catalan.
In the context of his commitment to advancing trans-national art and independent world cinema, Hamid Dabashi is the founder of Dreams of a Nation, a Palestinian Film Project, dedicated to preserving and safeguarding Palestinian Cinema. He is also chiefly responsible for opening up the study of Persian literature and Iranian culture at Columbia University to students of comparative literature and society, breaking away from the confinements of European Orientalism and American Area Studies.
A committed teacher in the past three decades, Hamid Dabashi is also a public speaker around the globe, a current affairs essayist, and a staunch anti-war activist. He has two grown-up children, Kaveh and Pardis, who are both Columbia University graduates, and he lives in New York with his wife and colleague, the Iranian-Swedish feminist, Golbarg Bashi, their daughter Chelgis and their son Golchin.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
January 10, 2026
I find it imperative to stress that leftist and radical texts are not meant to put you in the “know.” They are meant to make you think. To draw you into important conversations where you develop your own, just as important, critical analysis. Audre lorde, like so many before her, said there are no easy solutions.
This book will definitely be foundational to the creation of my understanding of iranian khizesh, as well as the poems I have read and the stories I have heard from my family members (some themselves still having deeply flawed views). Power to the people power to all oppressed and policed bodies and may we have the courage to learn from history and eachother to build a life where communities can live with dignity and good health, however they may define it.
I hope that one day I can see the place where my grandpa planted jasmine to wake my mom up with the sweet smells of the earth. To see the places that lent her an imagination that gave her the bravery to raise two children in a foreign country by herself. The imagination she has now abandoned as she anxiously checks her phone waiting for news of anything that may signal the freedom of a home that was stripped from her, even if this signal is manufactured and commodified and televised and influenced by western forces.
Alas, there are no easy solutions.
This book will definitely be foundational to the creation of my understanding of iranian khizesh, as well as the poems I have read and the stories I have heard from my family members (some themselves still having deeply flawed views). Power to the people power to all oppressed and policed bodies and may we have the courage to learn from history and eachother to build a life where communities can live with dignity and good health, however they may define it.
I hope that one day I can see the place where my grandpa planted jasmine to wake my mom up with the sweet smells of the earth. To see the places that lent her an imagination that gave her the bravery to raise two children in a foreign country by herself. The imagination she has now abandoned as she anxiously checks her phone waiting for news of anything that may signal the freedom of a home that was stripped from her, even if this signal is manufactured and commodified and televised and influenced by western forces.
Alas, there are no easy solutions.
March 11, 2026
I started this on the 8th of February, before the belligerent attack on Iran by the US and Israel. It has been a very interesting and emotional journey to be reading about the revolutionary spirit of the Iranian people and its rich history shaped by colonisation and imperialism as events unfold.
As a white Spanish woman, I wanted to understand the determination and steadfastness of the Iranian people, especially Iranian women. A country with a very rich history, culture, literature, art, music, etc. I had been meaning to read about its politics and history for a long time from an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist Iranian perspective.
This book did not disappoint. Dabashi conceptualises the uprisings in Iran as Khizesh, based on the model of the Palestinian intifada. He has a very convincing critique of the ‘hyphen holding together the very idea of a ‘nation-state’ and the trap of democracy. Moreover, he writes beautifully on the feminist critique of the white saviour complex and the Western obsession with saving Muslim women.
All in all, this was excellently written and structured, I could engage with Dabashi’s ideas well and you could tell it is written from the heart of an Iranian.
Recommend!
As a white Spanish woman, I wanted to understand the determination and steadfastness of the Iranian people, especially Iranian women. A country with a very rich history, culture, literature, art, music, etc. I had been meaning to read about its politics and history for a long time from an anti-colonial and anti-imperialist Iranian perspective.
This book did not disappoint. Dabashi conceptualises the uprisings in Iran as Khizesh, based on the model of the Palestinian intifada. He has a very convincing critique of the ‘hyphen holding together the very idea of a ‘nation-state’ and the trap of democracy. Moreover, he writes beautifully on the feminist critique of the white saviour complex and the Western obsession with saving Muslim women.
All in all, this was excellently written and structured, I could engage with Dabashi’s ideas well and you could tell it is written from the heart of an Iranian.
Recommend!
January 17, 2026
Moralising but vacuous, post-structuralist claptrap.
I would have ended my review with the above, but I feel compelled to provide some clarification so that nobody else wastes their time reading this nonsense.
In his chapter titled ‘Toward a post-Islamist liberation theology’, the author sincerely writes that ‘the Islam of the Islamic Republic is the most secular, the most colonized, the most Christian of them all’. The logic he expounds to reach this absurdity isn’t profound nor erudite, simply verbose sophistry.
Ironically, for somebody arguing the necessity for women’s rights organisations as modes of understanding women’s lived experiences, he accuses Bahareh Hedayat - a female Iranian activist courageous enough to stay in her homeland to pursue change - of lacking ‘philosophical erudition and political imagination’, being ‘astonishingly limited in her critical awareness’ and of Islamophobia, albeit inadvertently for the latter. Indeed, this reflects a broader criticism I have of Hamid Dabashi, not only does he come across as incredibly arrogant and self-aggrandising, but this book reeks of misogyny.
Again, it is ironic that he is so critical of the current Iranian regime when he lauds the ‘local, regional, and global Intifada’ that is ‘[a]t the heart of Palestinian resistance’ when this is but a direct reflection of the internationalist, revolutionary ideology that underpins the Islamic Republic and is codified in the Iranian constitution!
Above all, for me, it was the tone of this book that made it most difficult to read: not only does he throw around the terms ‘proto-fascist’ and ‘fascism’ when clearly inappropriate but he continually makes patently absurd statements like ‘“[d]emocracy” was always a trap set by white people to keep coloured people down’ and ‘the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) … is not an Islamic product’ - need I say more?
I had approached this book with high hopes of a coherent and well-integrated analysis of the Iranian protests, complete with discourse on the psychological explanations and protest theory that underpin them. However, the only chapter in this book I found to be of any value and real interest was ‘“Crowd is Untruth”’. Sadly, rather than providing any significant evaluation of how social media played a role in Iranian protests and revolt, he spent the overwhelming majority of the chapter using it to berate Western-aligned expats - virtually all of whom were women, I might add - who had fled from authoritarian regimes, including (in his words) ‘career opportunist cyber trolls like Alinejad or Yeonmi Park’. Notwithstanding, if I were to stretch to say one positive thing of this book it would be that he did broach the interesting topics of surveillance capitalism and of social media as an expedience to personal anomie and traditional cultural disintegration.
This is the first book of Hamid Dabashi’s I have read and it will be the last. In my opinion, this is not a serious work, nor should Dabashi be considered a serious academic.
I would have ended my review with the above, but I feel compelled to provide some clarification so that nobody else wastes their time reading this nonsense.
In his chapter titled ‘Toward a post-Islamist liberation theology’, the author sincerely writes that ‘the Islam of the Islamic Republic is the most secular, the most colonized, the most Christian of them all’. The logic he expounds to reach this absurdity isn’t profound nor erudite, simply verbose sophistry.
Ironically, for somebody arguing the necessity for women’s rights organisations as modes of understanding women’s lived experiences, he accuses Bahareh Hedayat - a female Iranian activist courageous enough to stay in her homeland to pursue change - of lacking ‘philosophical erudition and political imagination’, being ‘astonishingly limited in her critical awareness’ and of Islamophobia, albeit inadvertently for the latter. Indeed, this reflects a broader criticism I have of Hamid Dabashi, not only does he come across as incredibly arrogant and self-aggrandising, but this book reeks of misogyny.
Again, it is ironic that he is so critical of the current Iranian regime when he lauds the ‘local, regional, and global Intifada’ that is ‘[a]t the heart of Palestinian resistance’ when this is but a direct reflection of the internationalist, revolutionary ideology that underpins the Islamic Republic and is codified in the Iranian constitution!
Above all, for me, it was the tone of this book that made it most difficult to read: not only does he throw around the terms ‘proto-fascist’ and ‘fascism’ when clearly inappropriate but he continually makes patently absurd statements like ‘“[d]emocracy” was always a trap set by white people to keep coloured people down’ and ‘the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) … is not an Islamic product’ - need I say more?
I had approached this book with high hopes of a coherent and well-integrated analysis of the Iranian protests, complete with discourse on the psychological explanations and protest theory that underpin them. However, the only chapter in this book I found to be of any value and real interest was ‘“Crowd is Untruth”’. Sadly, rather than providing any significant evaluation of how social media played a role in Iranian protests and revolt, he spent the overwhelming majority of the chapter using it to berate Western-aligned expats - virtually all of whom were women, I might add - who had fled from authoritarian regimes, including (in his words) ‘career opportunist cyber trolls like Alinejad or Yeonmi Park’. Notwithstanding, if I were to stretch to say one positive thing of this book it would be that he did broach the interesting topics of surveillance capitalism and of social media as an expedience to personal anomie and traditional cultural disintegration.
This is the first book of Hamid Dabashi’s I have read and it will be the last. In my opinion, this is not a serious work, nor should Dabashi be considered a serious academic.
March 24, 2026
I will try to speak plainly.
Dabashi opposes the nation state. He says that democracy has been proven impossible. He says that the Islamic theocracy in Iran is evil, but no more or less evil than the Western-back backed monarch that preceded it or whatever new regime the West might want to put in Tehran as a puppet.
He says Iranian women are stuck between Western statism and Islamic statism, both wishing to assert their legitimacy by policing women's bodies through the veil --- the Islamicist forcing her to wear it, the Liberal Westerner forcing her not to --- so that she is left in either case without bodily freedom.
In other words: Everywhere it goes the West fails to see the irony that it brings liberation at the end of a gun.
Dabashi brilliantly explains the idea that "religion" as an idea was a tool colonial Europe used to lock local cultures up into the private sphere of belief and personal practice, while secular language, secular ideology, and secular government could be superimposed upon those traditional communities --- all without recognizing itself as its own kind of religion, its own kind of self-universalized particularity. That is, the naked ideology of an empire with no clothes.
In this way, the veil --- and Islam itself --- are either forced or outlawed, but in either case the people are oppressed and the nation is devoured by the state.
▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎
But as Dabashi --- from his perch at Colombia University in New York City --- leans ever closer to anti-state insurrectionary anarchism in his opposition to the nation state, and replaces libertarian democracy with the abstract idea of "agonistic pluralism", a question is forced into the jarred mind of a thoughtful reader.
Why not the banks?
Despite sharp critiques aimed at virtually every key player (pro-Pahlavi expats, Islamic clerics, Instagram darlings, Kurdish separatists, etc.), Dabashi never speaks ill of the transnational corporation --- or else he conflates it with the state itself.
Why?
Does the invisible neocolonialism of secular liberalism have a corollary in Dabashi's own hyperliberal poststructural radicalism?
Does not his harnessing of Hegel, Marx, and Weber, Gramsci and Foucault already place his thoughts in the highest citadels of radical Westernism. So who is he to critique the 'self-Orientalizing' of radical Islam without turning that critique back on himself?
And further . . .
Gabriel Rockhill --- whose earlier work Dabashi in fact quoted --- asks us, "Who Paid the Piper of Western Marxism?" Meaning who funded the philosophical ideas that have taken over the American academy?
Rockhill's Answer? Capitalist and imperialist interests, including US intelligence agencies like the CIA, private foundations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and elite educational institutions.
And so the final question. Who paid the philosophical piper Dabashi himself chases after? As I write this, thousands are dying over which currency controls Iranian oil.
And yet nowhere does Dabashi mention the banks.
Dabashi opposes the nation state. He says that democracy has been proven impossible. He says that the Islamic theocracy in Iran is evil, but no more or less evil than the Western-back backed monarch that preceded it or whatever new regime the West might want to put in Tehran as a puppet.
He says Iranian women are stuck between Western statism and Islamic statism, both wishing to assert their legitimacy by policing women's bodies through the veil --- the Islamicist forcing her to wear it, the Liberal Westerner forcing her not to --- so that she is left in either case without bodily freedom.
In other words: Everywhere it goes the West fails to see the irony that it brings liberation at the end of a gun.
Dabashi brilliantly explains the idea that "religion" as an idea was a tool colonial Europe used to lock local cultures up into the private sphere of belief and personal practice, while secular language, secular ideology, and secular government could be superimposed upon those traditional communities --- all without recognizing itself as its own kind of religion, its own kind of self-universalized particularity. That is, the naked ideology of an empire with no clothes.
In this way, the veil --- and Islam itself --- are either forced or outlawed, but in either case the people are oppressed and the nation is devoured by the state.
▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎▪︎
But as Dabashi --- from his perch at Colombia University in New York City --- leans ever closer to anti-state insurrectionary anarchism in his opposition to the nation state, and replaces libertarian democracy with the abstract idea of "agonistic pluralism", a question is forced into the jarred mind of a thoughtful reader.
Why not the banks?
Despite sharp critiques aimed at virtually every key player (pro-Pahlavi expats, Islamic clerics, Instagram darlings, Kurdish separatists, etc.), Dabashi never speaks ill of the transnational corporation --- or else he conflates it with the state itself.
Why?
Does the invisible neocolonialism of secular liberalism have a corollary in Dabashi's own hyperliberal poststructural radicalism?
Does not his harnessing of Hegel, Marx, and Weber, Gramsci and Foucault already place his thoughts in the highest citadels of radical Westernism. So who is he to critique the 'self-Orientalizing' of radical Islam without turning that critique back on himself?
And further . . .
Gabriel Rockhill --- whose earlier work Dabashi in fact quoted --- asks us, "Who Paid the Piper of Western Marxism?" Meaning who funded the philosophical ideas that have taken over the American academy?
Rockhill's Answer? Capitalist and imperialist interests, including US intelligence agencies like the CIA, private foundations like the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and elite educational institutions.
And so the final question. Who paid the philosophical piper Dabashi himself chases after? As I write this, thousands are dying over which currency controls Iranian oil.
And yet nowhere does Dabashi mention the banks.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 27, 2026
Well There are indeed good points Dabashi make in this book (especially for westerners who knows less about Iran) but overall i think his analysis of the situation in Iran and Zhina uprising is a bit too poor on the side of political economy.
in this book, Dabashi introduces the reader to the term "Khizesh" (خیزش in Farsi) and explain it's correspondence with "Intifada" (انتفاضه in Arabic and particularly in the Palestinian context) and then talks about some figures and forces related to these uprising in Iran.
I read the book while we were under internet shutdown during a new uprising (very different in form and style from Zhina uprising) and now we know there were a bloodbath in the streets. I'm sure Dabashi will publish on it sooner or later but this book can help the reader to have a better understanding of Iran and it's people and the situation right now. Though it's a very bleak and sad situation.
in this book, Dabashi introduces the reader to the term "Khizesh" (خیزش in Farsi) and explain it's correspondence with "Intifada" (انتفاضه in Arabic and particularly in the Palestinian context) and then talks about some figures and forces related to these uprising in Iran.
I read the book while we were under internet shutdown during a new uprising (very different in form and style from Zhina uprising) and now we know there were a bloodbath in the streets. I'm sure Dabashi will publish on it sooner or later but this book can help the reader to have a better understanding of Iran and it's people and the situation right now. Though it's a very bleak and sad situation.
August 22, 2025
not particularly convinced by her conclusions tbh
May 24, 2025
"Democracy has never been but an empty and circuitous metaphor at the colonial edges of its European assumptions and rhetoric"
Hamid argues that democratic governments are a delusion and if democracy exits at all, it's at the grassroot organizational level, in voluntary labor groups and in student activism.
Hamid argues that democratic governments are a delusion and if democracy exits at all, it's at the grassroot organizational level, in voluntary labor groups and in student activism.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews