How Iran’s Theocrats Allied With — and Then Crushed — the Left
- Bani Khoshnoudi
Sociologist Chahla Chafiq was a 25-year-old Marxist activist during the 1979 Iranian revolution. Now in exile in France, she looks back on the tensions between socialism, feminism, and anti-imperialism that have roiled Iran’s opposition politics for decades.
Iranian protesters set fire to property while marching down a street on October 1, 2022 in Tehran, Iran. (Getty Images)
Since the September murder of twenty-two-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested by Iran’s so-called “morality police” for violating that country’s mandatory hijab law, Iranians have been demonstrating in the streets and going on strike. Chahla Chafiq is a writer and sociologist who was active in the 1979 revolution, which overthrew the US-backed regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and was the beginning of Ayatollah Khomeini’s long theocratic regime. Chafiq went into exile in 1982 and has lived in France since then. Jacobin spoke with her over Zoom on Thursday, in English and French, with translation from award-winning Iranian American filmmaker Bani Khoshnoudi.
Liza Featherstone
Can you talk about how you got involved in left politics as a student, in the years leading up to the revolution?
Chahla Chafiq
Like the teenagers we’re seeing in Iran now, I first joined the student movements in high school, in the years before the revolution. I was an avid reader and interested in the sociopolitical aspects of what was happening. When I was a university student, about three years before the revolution, I was studying sociology and again joined the student movements. At the time, there were civil liberties in terms of what you could wear and what music you could listen to. But there was no political freedom, to organize or be part of a political movement.
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