The Iranian Dissident Asking Simple Questions

Sadegh Zibakalam is in trouble again. The retired 76-year-old professor of political science was already serving an 18-month sentence for criticizing the Iranian regime. He came out on medical furlough—only for Tehran’s prosecutor to start investigating him again. Now Zibakalam, one of Iran’s best-known public intellectuals, whose combined followers on Instagram, Facebook, and X total almost 2 million, is worried he may be sent back to prison.

The new charges stem from a speech he made at the Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies in Qatar in January. Expressing one’s opinion can make a person a criminal in Iran. But Zibakalam had voiced not even his own view so much as a sociological observation: that Iranians no longer support the Palestinian cause, and many even cheer for Benjamin Netanyahu and Donald Trump.

“You’ll be surprised, since October 7 last year, [to see] the number of Iranians who hate the Palestinian” groups, Zibakalam said. “But I saw it with my own eyes during the past 15 months … For [so many] of the younger generation of Iranians … their hero was Netanyahu … Everyone was talking about the U.S. elections … hoping and praying that Donald Trump would win.”

Zibakalam is himself a harsh critic of Trump and in the same speech decried the American president as “anti-women, anti-Arab, anti-immigration, and anti-Black.” He has also accused Netanyahu’s government of war crimes and called attention to the “millions of Israelis” who oppose it. Zibakalam thus was not condoning the views he described, but rather lamenting the turn of a population that once backed Palestinian leaders, such as Yasser Arafat. Iranians, he explained, have come to hate anybody associated with their own regime, whose policies oppress them. “I can tell you why they hate Hassan Nasrallah,” he said of the Hezbollah leader slain by Israel last year, and “why they hate Hamas.” The reason, he said, is “simply because the Islamic Republic supports them.”

Zibakalam is what Iranians call a liberal reformist, meaning that even while he recognizes the fundamental unfairness of the political system, he advocates for participation in the hope of staving off the worst or producing incremental change for the better. Last year, many Iranians boycotted the country’s presidential elections, but Zibakalam dutifully voted for Masud Pezeshkian, a reformist who wields little power in a government dominated by the hard-line Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And yet, even among critics of the leadership, Zibakalam is notably outspoken. He has brushed aside regime taboos to argue repeatedly that Iran’s anti-American and anti-Israeli obsessions do not advance its national interest.

[Read: Iranian dissidents don’t want war with Israel—but they can’t stop it]

Like many Iranian reformists, Zibakalam was a revolutionary in the 1970s. He was born into a religious family in Tehran in 1948 and fell in with Iranian activist circles while studying abroad, first in Austria and then in the United Kingdom, where he was pursuing a doctorate in chemical engineering at the University of Bradford. Having initially flirted with Marxism, he ended up advocating for a left-leaning Islamism, and he headed the Islamic Student Association at Bradford from from 1972 to 1974. The Iranian student organizations he worked with were tightly allied with Palestinian militants. On a return visit to Iran in 1974, he was arrested and sentenced to three years in prison. He was released early, in 1976, and barred from going back to his Ph.D. program in Britain but allowed to teach at the University of Tehran.

Iran’s political space opened slightly in 1978, and Zibakalam helped found the Islamic Association of Academics at that time. A year later, Iranian revolutionaries overthrew the Shah, and he enthusiastically tried to serve the new regime. He was appointed to the prime minister’s office and sent to Iranian Kurdistan as part of a delegation tasked with negotiating with Kurdish rebels. The talks didn’t go anywhere, and Iranian forces went on to brutally suppress the Kurds.

Back in the University of Tehran, Zibakalam advocated for the rupture that became known as the Cultural Revolution. Named after Mao Zedong’s disastrous campaign in the 1960s and ’70s, the Iranian version led to the closure of all universities, the Islamization of their curricula, and the purging of much of their faculty—including female faculty and staff who refused to wear the hijab as well as anyone deemed disloyal to the new regime. Zibakalam has denied playing any role specifically in purging faculty, but in 1998, he publicly apologized for participating in the Cultural Revolution and asked for forgiveness from those affected.

Having served the regime for a few years in academic-management roles, he went back to Bradford in 1984, this time for a Ph.D. in peace studies. He sought to better understand the political upheaval he had helped bring about, and so he wrote his thesis on the Iranian Revolution. He returned to teach at the University of Tehran in 1990 and five years later shot to fame with his first book, How Did We Become What We Are? Seeking the Roots of Backwardness in Iran.

This book was the start of an intellectual journey that has never ceased—an attempt to figure out how Iran could catch up with the developed West. Conspiracy theories and simplistic sloganeering popular at the time tended to blame Iran’s ills solely on colonialism or capitalism. Departing from this austere nativism, Zibakalam offered instead a deep, comparative study of European and Iranian history, dating back to medieval times. The book doesn’t find a clear answer to its titular question but breaks a taboo by searching for one in choices made by Iranians themselves and not just ills done to them by outsiders. It was an immediate best seller and immensely influential inside Iran.

[Read: The fire that fueled the Iran protests]

In the years that followed, Zibakalam became a prominent defender of liberal values and critic of Iran’s foreign policy. The latter is a particular red line for the regime, which does not brook much discussion, let alone criticism, of its posture abroad. As a result of his outspokenness, Zibakalam was hounded out of his teaching position and, starting in 2014, repeatedly prosecuted. In 2011, during the Arab Spring, he’d defended the region’s various movements for democracy and contested the Iranian regime’s narrative that the uprisings were actually an “Islamic Awakening.” In Syria, then-President Bashar al-Assad put down a civil uprising with the help of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Zibakalam spoke out against this; years later, a reporter asked him his opinion of Qassem Soleimani, the Iranian general assassinated by the United States in 2020, and he said that the Syrian people should be the judge of him—an extraordinary expression of solidarity with Syrians from inside Iran.

Predictably, out of all his vocal expressions of dissent, Zibakalam has paid the highest price for his stance on Israel. Back in the early 2000s, during the Second Intifada, he criticized the Iranian position on Israel as “more Palestinian than Palestinians” and called for moderation. In 2014, during a public debate with a conservative, he shocked many by declaring, “I recognize Israel as a country because the United Nations recognizes it.” And in 2016, when he was invited to speak at a university in Mashhad, he refused to join in the tradition of trampling an American and an Israeli flag, theatrically hoisting himself onto a banister to avoid stepping on them as he climbed the stairs. “It is wrong to stomp on the flag of any country, because it is a point of identity and a national symbol,” he said after the video of his gesture went viral.

He was explicitly told that he’d lost his teaching position on account of his recognition of Israel. Even so, in 2016, he published a chronicle of the Jewish people from 2000 B.C.E. to 1948, titled Birth of Israel: A History of 4000 Years of Judaism. The book, part of a determined effort to teach his fellow Iranians more about a people their regime wants them to hate, was banned in Iran but widely disseminated via Zibakalam’s Telegram channel and as an audiobook that he read himself. Since October 7, 2023, he has taken part in public debates on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, including a televised program in which he called for a historical understanding that showed sensitivity to Jewish concerns.

Zibakalam has been charged and sentenced to a total of five years in prison since 2014, but he managed to stay out of jail until last year; his sentences were repeatedly suspended or turned into fines during the appeals process. His latest book pokes fun at this history with the title How Come They Won’t Arrest You?—a question he says he is often asked. But the day he was supposed to launch that book with a speech at Tehran’s book festival last May, he was finally arrested and sent to Tehran’s Evin prison. Four months later, he was diagnosed with cancer and released on medical furlough.

On coming out of Evin, Zibakalam knew that his continued freedom depended on him keeping his mouth shut, particularly on hot-button issues such as Israel. Nevertheless, in the past few weeks, he has shared several controversial positions with his large audiences online. He compared the open debate in the Israeli press over the cease-fire agreement with Hamas with Iran’s censorship and lack of discussion around an agreement it signed with Russia at around the same time. And when a commercial flight collided with a military helicopter over the Potomac River, in Washington, D.C., in January, Zibakalam called on Pezeshkian to send a condolence message to Trump as a means of opening a dialogue with the United States. He has also posted plenty of criticism of the U.S. administration, denouncing its treatment of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office and comparing Elon Musk’s destruction of the administrative state to the work of Iranian zealots in 1979.

[Read: Iran’s return to pragmatism]

Foreign-based media outlets pipe radical views into Iran every day from activists in the diaspora. By comparison, Zibakalam’s positions are relatively moderate. To the irritation of some opponents of the regime, he has refused to endorse its revolutionary overthrow. But the Iranian authorities perceive him as dangerous precisely because he couches his far-reaching demands in sensible, pragmatic language. He dares to ask simple questions plainly—for example, “What business does Iran have in seeking to destroy Israel?”

And sometimes, he just dares to state the facts that everybody can see but that the regime denies. That’s what was once known as speaking truth to power. It’s what he did in Doha, and it’s why he’s once again in trouble with a regime that thrives on silence and fear.