Iranian security forces raided and detained several critical scholars, targeting a broad progressive intellectual current to shrink cultural space and silence voices linking everyday hardship to structural inequality.
On Monday, 3 November 2025 (12 Aban 1404), security forces in Iran carried out a coordinated raid against a number of well-known critical scholars and translators. Homes were searched at dawn, electronic devices and books were seized, and at least four figures long associated with research on political economy, social history and feminist theory were arrested or summoned.
What made this raid stand out was not only the timing or the number of houses visited. It was the profile of those targeted: academics and writers who for years have produced rigorous critiques of inequality, privatization, rentier economy and the ideological cover that protects it. In a period of deepening economic misery for most Iranians, the state’s security apparatus chose to move not against corrupt businessmen or violent networks, but against people whose work has tried to give language to the demands of working and marginalized classes.
The exact charges have not been made public. Families were told little. But taken together, the arrests point to a wider campaign to silence an independent, progressive current in Iran’s intellectual and political field.
The first target: Parviz Sedaghat, arrested after a house search
According to reports circulating on Iranian social media, security agents first raided the homes of two well-known critical economists, Parviz Sedaghat and Mohammad Maljoo. In both houses, agents confiscated laptops, phones and books. In Sedaghat’s case, they also took him away.
Sedaghat is an economist, political economy researcher and translator. He has edited and translated key works on urban struggles, class and the state, including David Harvey, as well as Persian works on class and capitalism. He also edits the journal Naqd-e Eqtesad-e Siasi (Critique of Political Economy). Recently, he had spoken publicly about the re-emergence of an anti-critical, “anti-progressive” line in Iran: how it formed, who drives it, and why attacking critical voices has become useful for the state. Two days later, he was in custody.
No official body has yet said why he was arrested, or under what warrant.
The parallel move: summoning Mohammad Maljoo
At almost the same time, security agents went to the house of Mohammad Maljoo and took his devices and books. Maljoo, an economist and researcher on labour and dispossession after the 1979 revolution, had already been summoned, and that day he was meant to go to the office the security agency had told him to.
After the search, his family said he had gone to that location. Since then, there has been no clear public information about his situation.
Maljoo is known for careful, document-based research on how labour’s bargaining power declined in Iran, how inflation became a tool of silent expropriation, and how the post-1979 state has redistributed social wealth upward. He has also translated important works by Albert Hirschman, Karl Polanyi, Michael Burawoy, E.P. Thompson and others into Persian, making global critical traditions available in Iran. It is precisely this kind of bridge-building, between international social thought and local realities, that has made him a target.
Expanding the raid: the arrest of sociologist Mahsa Asadollahnejad
By late morning the same day, it became clear that the raid was broader. Mahsa Asadollahnejad, a sociologist and researcher born in 1990 (1369), was also arrested at her parents’ house after her electronic devices were taken.
Asadollahnejad holds a PhD in political sociology from Tarbiat Modares University. Her dissertation studied how the Islamic Republic as a state was formed in its first decade, from 1979 to 1989 — a subject that directly touches on the origins of Iran’s current security, welfare and ideological institutions. She has run reading circles and study groups in independent centres, and she has written and translated for Naqd-e Eqtesad-e Siasi, including on Marxism and feminism (Marcuse), on Adorno, and on recent wars and their moral dilemmas for Iranian society. She also wrote on “the disempowered” and revolutionary institutions, showing how “support” and “discipline” work together.
Her arrest showed that the security services were not only after economists, but after a wider, younger generation of critical researchers who have been connecting political economy, gender and state formation.
A cultural and feminist voice: the arrest of writer and translator Shirin Karimi
That same morning, at about 7:30, agents also entered the home of Shirin Karimi, writer, translator and researcher. They searched the house, seized her books and devices and took her to an unknown location. Her relatives said they had not been informed which agency had ordered the arrest or why.
Karimi, born in 1983 (1362), has an MA in sociology from the University of Tehran. She has published an important critical book on Suvashun (Fifty Years After Suvashun), and has translated works by Judith Butler and Afsaneh Najmabadi. She has also published translations and essays in Naqd-e Eqtesad-e Siasi. In other words, she is part of that strand of Iranian critical culture which connects questions of gender, nationalism, literature and power. Her arrest, alongside that of two economists and a younger political sociologist, confirms that the raid was not about one topic or one institution. It was about a whole field.
“The state is still at war with thought”: statement from Evin prisoners
The raids were quickly condemned from inside prison. Twelve political prisoners in Evin issued a statement saying the arrests show that “the state is still in confrontation with thought and with thinkers who have another way of thinking.” They underlined that all four of those detained or summoned had, over many years, written in defence of the lower classes and against the current model of corruption. Arresting such people, they wrote, at a time when “economic misery has put people’s lives in a disastrous situation,” shows the security apparatus is targeting those who give voice to the poor, not those who are making them poor. They demanded the unconditional release of all four.
Why this wave, and why now?
To understand this crackdown, we have to place it in a longer process. Over the past few years, a clearly identifiable anti-critical discourse has been rebuilt in Iran, both in official and semi-official spaces. It has three functions.
First, it works as a filter. Critical intellectuals in Iran have been among the few who could produce structural critiques of inequality, corruption and power relations. By tagging them as “ideological,” “out of touch” or “dangerous,” the state does not have to answer their arguments.
Second, in a period of legitimacy crisis, regimes like the Islamic Republic sometimes try to build unity around a cultural enemy. By saying “these people are undermining national security, religion or the family,” they try to turn social anger away from the government’s own failures.
Third, they hope to produce resignation. If you remove the voices that connect people’s daily suffering (inflation, falling wages, student drop-out, shrinking welfare) to the overall economic model, you make it harder for people to imagine alternatives.
This is why the recent arrests cannot be reduced to “another security case.” They are part of an attempt to shrink the cultural field. Iranian power knows very well that, today, resistance often starts in culture, universities, study circles and online publishing, not only in the street. So it tries to take back control of those “meaning-making” institutions.
A managerial, not doctrinal, anti-critique
What is new compared to the 1980s and 1990s is that this anti-critical campaign is less doctrinal and more managerial. It is not primarily about winning an ideological debate. It is about controlling the production of language about class, gender and the state.
Progressive and egalitarian critiques in today’s Iran focus on very concrete issues: class contradictions, inflation as expropriation, corruption in privatizations, the disciplining of women, the securitization of campuses. In conditions of high inflation and mass precarity, such a discourse is automatically “dangerous” from the viewpoint of the security state, because it speaks the language of the possible, not of distant utopias.
The paradox of “anti-imperialism” without social justice
There is another layer. Iran’s ruling bloc often speaks in an anti-Western, anti-imperialist register. But at the same time it pursues policies of privatization, extraction, patronage and surveillance that are fully compatible with the global neoliberal order. Critical Iranian thinkers have been exposing exactly this contradiction: that you cannot claim to fight imperial domination while reproducing inequality, suppressing workers and arresting those who write about it.
By targeting these researchers, the state sends a “stability signal”: whatever our diplomatic slogans, we will not allow egalitarian, feminist and anti-corruption discourses to become organizing principles in society. In this sense, the crackdown actually shows a convergence between local authoritarianism and global capitalist priorities: both want labour, women and students to stay fragmented and voiceless.
What remains
History in Iran shows that intellectual fields never close completely. Even when the state tries to freeze public debate, small circles, online platforms, independent classes, cafés, universities and local associations keep the language of justice alive. The people arrested on 3 November 2025 are precisely those who have been doing that work: connecting everyday pain to structural causes.
This is why the arrests matter. They are not only about four people. They are about whether Iranian society can keep producing its own critical knowledge about inequality and power.
