The Loneliest RevolutionA Memoir of Solidarity and Struggle in Iran

This very personal book gives a vivid sense of how easy it was to be swept up in the youthful, chaotic intellectual ferment that enabled the left led revolution to succeed and then fail, of how high emotion swept away reality and reason.

The Loneliest Revolution can be defined as an intellectual and political autobiography. Mirsepassi’s first-hand experience of the convulsed years leading to the 1978-79 Iranian Revolution, in combination with his scholarly erudition, make him a unique witness and analyst of a revolution the consequences of which reverberate up to the present day.

As a young man growing up in Iran, Ali Mirsepassi took part in the revolutionary movement that led to the overthrow of the Shah and the creation of the Islamic Republic. He also became one of the Revolution’s early victims. In this searching memoir, Mirsepassi reflects on his country's convulsive history and his own place within it: as a student, as an activist, and finally as an exiled intellectual. It is a credit to Mirsepassi’s intellectual rigor — and his own sense of ghorbat, or strangeness —　that he writes about his youthful self as if he were writing about another person. The truth about himself, and about the Revolution itself — an epochal struggle for freedom that resulted in its negation — is elusive, and in some way unknowable. Where other memoirs of the Revolution have sought to justify (or apologize for) their authors’ choices and to indict their adversaries, The Loneliest Revolution seeks instead to understand, and to ‘think the unthought,’ with a contemplative humility that is full of anguish but remarkably free of bitterness. The result is a daring and powerful work of memoir and intellectual history, and one that is all the more urgent for coinciding with Iran’s ongoing struggle for 'woman, life, freedom.'

In this wonderful book, Mirsepassi leverages touching personal recollections—of parents, a history-telling grandmother, an upbringing across small-town Iran, and student days in revolutionary Tehran—to reflect on questions of public life such as: What does ghorbat mean? Why did world politics matter to Iranians in the 1960s-80s? And how did leftist/Islamic identities interrelate at the time? A fascinating kaleidoscope of a memoir.

The prose of our historiography is changing. Solid scholars with an impeccable academic background are turning to the more publicly accessible genre of memoir, and Ali Mirsepassi’s exceptionally insightful new book is a vintage of such fruitful prose. Deeply erudite, and yet intimate, endearing, and irresistibly readable, The Loneliest Revolution charts a whole new way of writing history. A bravura performance!

As an unprecedented movement for freedom and women’s rights unfolds across Iran, Mirsepassi’s memoir, The Loneliest Revolution, reaches us. Both highly personal and analytical, Mirsepassi offers an intimate window onto the Iranian revolution just when we need to be thinking about it the most. But more importantly, The Loneliest Revolution prompts us, the readers, to question how we define ourselves in relation to the world. The Loneliest Revolution beautifully knits the intimate to the political and the human to the social. It is essential reading not just for students of modern Iran and revolutions but anyone looking to probe these perennial questions.