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This article discusses the historical context of the famed dissident intellectual Jalal Al-e Ahmad’s (1923–69) travelogue documenting his visit to Israel in early 1963, posthumously titled Safar beh velayat-e ʿezraʾil (Journey to the Province of the Angel of Death), focusing on (1) the political and intellectual context and reception of his controversial essay, in particular the brief infatuation of Iranian anti-Soviet socialists in the League of Iranian Socialists with socialist Zionism; (2) Al-e Ahmad’s discussion of political sovereignty and theo-politics in modern Israel and the important insights and observations provided therein; and (3), finally, the shifting sands of Al-e Ahmad’s engagement with Israel and Zionism and their relation to how he understood the politics of anticolonialism in the context of modern Iran following the 1953 coup d’état, which overthrew the nationalist government of Mohammad Mosaddeq, the Shah’s “White Revolution” and the Arab–Israeli War of 1967. The development of his views from ones of curiosity, fascination and ambivalence to condemnation echo less a simplistic and psychologized “return to religion” or “quest for authenticity” than an integration of the category of coloniality in relation to a wider field of struggles then unfolding across the global South during the 1960s, and provided the basis for a critique of not only Iranian social democrats, but several leading lights of the French left.

This article explores the manifold lineages of crisis and revolt currently afflicting the Islamic Republic of Iran, most recently bursting forth in the 2022/2023 national uprisings where women-led mass protests and forceful rejection of mandatory veiling laws captured global attention. This interdisciplinary piece of research, bringing together several different theoretical approaches and historical literatures, interrogates and reflects upon what I call following Stuart Hall a ‘conjunctural crisis’ along the four major axes of (1) gender oppression and social reproduction; (2) the ethnocentric, dominative, and centralising nation-state and the still unresolved ‘ethno-national question’; (3) ‘religious democracy’ and the impasse of the Reform movement; and (4) authoritarian neoliberalism and the Islamic Republic’s political economy of predation. The article aims to show not only how these distinct crises have longer and more complicated lineages than might initially appear to be the case but also demonstrate how they have mutually constituted and shaped one another over the course of several decades, constituting part of a larger political and social system. Moreover, it aspires to provide a systematic and historically contextualised account of ongoing emancipatory struggles for democratic rights and liberation in today’s Iran.

This article examines the importance of the political thought and praxis of politico, 'reformist' strategist and intellectual, Saʿid Hajjarian, and his rethinking of the postrevolutionary Iranian state's sources and bases of legitimacy in the 1990s and 2000s. It also provides an exposition and assessment of a number of his recommendations for the realisation of 'political development' (towseʿeh-ye siyāsi) in the post-revolutionary order and their contribution to the discourse of eslāhāt during the presidency of Hojjat al-Islam Mohammad Khatami (1997Khatami ( -2005. Moreover, it attempts to situate Hajjarian within a broader spectrum of reformist political opinion and its proponents within the Islamic Republic of Iran's political class.

This article argues that the political thought of one of twentiethcentury Iran's foremost intellectuals, Jalal Ale Ahmad (1923-1969) and his seminal work Gharbzadegi (1962), often translated as 'Weststruck-ness' or 'Westoxication', can and should be understood through the critical study of race and racialisation. In contrast to the paradigms of 'nativism', 'Islamic atavism' and the demand for a return to 'cultural authenticity' that have traditionally framed the significance and reception of his thought, this article contends that Ale Ahmad's notion of gharbzadegi provides crucial insights into how predatory forms of colonial capitalism stratify the economic world order in accordance with what W.E.B. Du Bois famously called the 'colour line'. The article submits that Ale Ahmad's political thought sheds light upon the conditions of Eurocentric and racialised forms of knowledge production and immanent material practices, and how they structure the lived experiences of colonial and semi-colonial subjects, as well as providing a remarkable perspective on how 'race thinking' and the 'racial state' were conceived and institutionalised in twentieth-century Iran.