I entered a room in the Illini Union, a major building at the heart of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where student cultural and political organisations had their meeting spaces. It was the second semester after my arrival on campus in 1976. With some trepidation, I entered the office of the Confederation of Iranian Students, National Union (CISNU-Revival Chapter). Before leaving Iran for graduate studies, I had been warned about the ‘political danger’ of becoming involved with this international student organisation. Founded in the early 1960s by Iranian students in Europe and the United States, CISNU became a major force in opposition to the Shah’s regime in Iran. On campus, I had noticed its activities but avoided its members. Yet I remained curious.
That curiosity intensified after I took a course on Comparative World Education with the late Professor Alan Peshkin (1931–2000). He asked me challenging questions about Iran’s social and political circumstances, questions I was neither politically nor historically equipped to answer. I felt embarrassed by how little I knew about social and political relations in Iran, its educational system, and the place of education in the world. It was in this state of intellectual unease – part curiosity, part embarrassment, and part awakening – that I finally entered CISNU’s office.
A large table stood in the middle of the room, and a more mature male student sat at the far end discussing a text on the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. I sat in the only empty chair, closest to the entrance, and looked toward the wall across from me. It was covered with images and slogans that were, in Iran at the time, strictly forbidden: portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, and Mao; slogans such as ‘Down with the Shah’ and ‘Down with U.S. Imperialism’; and colourful posters representing Palestine, the Dhofar Revolution in Oman, and other anti-colonial and revolutionary struggles. I was astonished. I sat almost motionless, taking in a political world entirely unfamiliar to me. I soon heard instructions about further reading, including a text on the ‘class analysis of the Constitutional Revolution’. My presence as a newcomer was quickly noticed. I was warmly welcomed and sent away with pamphlets, a reading list, a schedule of upcoming meetings, and an invitation to the Saturday reading and discussion group.
I trace this encounter as the beginning of a transformative journey. As a scholar of education who has worked on the revolutionary potential of learning, and a lifelong activist engaged in struggles for social and political justice, I turn here to the roots of my own political education: not in the classroom, but through CISNU. Within this student organisation political practice was inseparable from a pedagogical project in which the transformation of the self and of collective relations was understood as integral to broader social transformation. Our political engagement involved learning to see and inhabit the world differently: questioning what we knew, understanding our circumstances within wider structures of power, and participating in their transformation.
At the second Saturday meeting, I volunteered to prepare a presentation for the following session on revolutionary struggles in the Horn of Africa, a region about which I knew virtually nothing. I still remember the apprehension and intimidation I felt as I worked through the pamphlets and newspaper clippings I had been given. The texts were filled with acronyms of revolutionary and Marxist organisations and movements in Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Sudan, which I could barely distinguish. Each had its own history, political orientation, internal divisions, and shifting alliances. At that point, my primary objective was simply to get through the presentation. The discussion that followed moved beyond the Horn of Africa to other contemporary revolutionary and anti-imperialist struggles around the world. My mind was in a haze. As I was leaving, the same student who had led the discussion on the class analysis of the Constitutional Revolution approached me. He invited me for coffee and offered feedback on my presentation. That conversation marked the beginning of a new intellectual, political, and personal life. We eventually married.
Through our conversations, I began to learn a method of inquiry: how to analyse historical processes, situate political events within their material and social conditions, distinguish description from analysis, and synthesise seemingly disparate developments into a coherent historical argument. I would later understand this method as historical materialism and dialectical analysis, rooted in class analysis and revolutionary internationalism. What began as an intimidating encounter with unfamiliar names, acronyms, and revolutionary movements gradually became intellectual and political knowledge and praxis. The world of Marxist political analysis was no longer simply a collection of forbidden images, slogans, or pamphlets, it became a way of asking questions about history, power, social relations, and political transformation – and ultimately a way of understanding the world in which I was living.
Like thousands of Iranian students in the 1970s, I was sent to the United States on a government scholarship. I was expected to become a technocrat equipped to help design and administer Iran’s university system according to the American model of higher education. At the University of Illinois, however, what transformed my life was not the administrative and educational knowledge I had been sent to acquire, but the charged political atmosphere of the student movement within CISNU. This student organisation carried forward the struggles of the 1960s: opposition to the Vietnam War; Black and women’s liberation; struggles against racism and racial segregation; the fight against apartheid in South Africa; and the anti-colonial, anti-imperialist, and Third Worldist national liberation movements unfolding across the world, particularly in Iran and throughout the Arab world, from Palestine to Oman. Immersed in these struggles, I began to discover myself, my homeland, and the world in profoundly new ways. I discovered a passion for life, freedom, and the possibility of a different future. I began to question, and ultimately revolt against, the self I had been expected to become and the social relationships that had confined me: capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism, class division, and religion.
Our political practice emerged through a process of collective knowledge production: reading Marx’s Capital together; meticulously discussing publications of the Iranian Left, whether we agreed or disagreed with their political positions; studying world history; following the daily news; and, above all, engaging in continuous debate, questioning, listening, and rethinking. Literature, art, cinema, dance, music, and poetry were also integral to our repertoire of revolutionary learning. We read women poets such as Forough Farrokhzad (1934–1967), Parvin E’tesami (1907–1941), and Marzieh Ahmadi Oskoui (1945–1974), whose very different poetic voices opened ways of thinking about gender, desire, sexuality, feminism, social injustice, freedom, and resistance. Revolutionary consciousness, we learned, was cultivated not through political texts alone, but also through aesthetic experience, emotion, and the capacity to perceive the world differently.
This was a distinctive pedagogical practice through which we learned to bring together the multiple threads of historical processes and material conditions, and to see apparently disconnected events and relations as parts of a larger social totality. We were learning, in practice, to understand social relations dialectically: to recognise contradiction, historical change, mediation, and the relationship between the particular and the whole. This method constituted a profound challenge to the positivist and largely uncritical modes of teaching and learning that dominated educational systems globally, including in Iran. Knowledge was no longer something transmitted by an authoritative teacher to passive students, nor a collection of objective facts detached from history and social relations. Rather, knowledge became something produced collectively through inquiry, contradiction, dialogue, and praxis. In this sense, our political education was an education in how to think and, ultimately, in how to relate knowledge to the possibility of transforming the world.
This historical-materialist mode of learning deepened my engagement with my studies and gave me greater confidence in expressing my views, both in the classroom and in public. We were encouraged to take, or audit, courses taught by progressive faculty and introduce them to CISNU. Equally important, we were encouraged to remain actively engaged with the world beyond the university. We distributed bulletins and pamphlets not only across campus but also in nearby factories and working-class neighbourhoods, sharing information about U.S. arms deals with dictatorial regimes such as that of the Shah of Iran. We also sought to expose the political repression, imprisonment, and execution of students and intellectuals in Iran.
CISNU had chapters across European and North American universities. Its activities extended beyond annual congresses, which brought representatives from these universities together. Chapters organised seminars, conferences, celebrations of March 8th, International Women’s Day, and other forms of political education. This mass-based political learning equipped active members with theoretical tools to extend their commitments beyond the university and participate in broader struggles for revolutionary social transformation. Engagement with other student organisations and movements, including Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and Palestinian student organisations, was strongly encouraged. SDS, one of the most influential New Left student organisations in the United States during the 1960s, maintained a large and active presence on our campus. Its emphasis on participatory democracy and organising beyond the university resonated with CISNU’s political practices and created opportunities for political exchange, solidarity, internationalism, and collective engagement with struggles against imperialism, militarism, and authoritarianism.
Respect, solidarity, security, and trust were central principles governing our interactions. I came to understand this as a revolutionary ethic, grounded in principled respect for the individual within the collective. It was also within this context that I learned to confront and overcome my own national chauvinism as a Persian woman living within a multinational Iran. At the same time, I learned to think and speak independently within a predominantly male environment, where masculinist attitudes and patriarchal assumptions were often deeply entrenched. These experiences compelled me to confront the tensions between collective political commitment and individual autonomy, and between solidarity and critical independence. They became an important part of my political and intellectual formation.
Recently, after more than fifty years, I returned to the complete collection of 16 Azar, one of CISNU’s publications, and began rereading it with a renewed sense of reflection. I was struck by the extraordinary range of debates, internal contestations, and international engagements unfolding within its pages. 16 Azar is an intellectual and political archive of the Iranian student movement’s transformation. What stands out is its unrestrained global advocacy for democracy and freedom; its effort to place Iran within a wider world-historical framework; its commitment to anti-imperialist struggle and direct action; and its memorialisation of revolutionaries and movements of resistance across the world. This sustained engagement reveals the remarkable depth of the theoretical and pedagogical work undertaken by this radical student organisation. More than a vehicle for political advocacy, 16 Azar was a site of collective intellectual formation. It documents the political ideas we debated, contested, and reshaped through our engagement with struggles beyond Iran. In retrospect, this process enabled us to confront, and ultimately seek to eradicate, our own bourgeois tendencies.
The revolutionary wave of 1979 brought me back to Iran. Like thousands of Iranian students studying abroad, I returned with enthusiasm and hope, determined to contribute to the making of a new Iran: a post-revolutionary society free from tyranny, class divisions, and gender and national hierarchies; a society in which freedom of thought and expression would know no bounds. The dream, however, was painfully short-lived. The repression that followed the rise to power of Islamist forces left scarcely any time to understand what was unfolding, let alone to pause and reflect upon it. My life was swept into a period of extraordinary and dizzying transformation; from joining the post-revolutionary women’s movement, to becoming involved in the Kurdish autonomous movement, and eventually being forced into exile. Yet, for me, revolution never simply remained a political commitment severed from intellectual and existential transformation. It remained a political and intellectual disposition that I had learned within CISNU, where revolutionary practice was inseparable from critical reflection, collective learning, and the struggle to transform both society and the self.