What They Don’t Like About the Guardian’s Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners
On August 20th 2026, The Guardian published an open letter addressed to political prisoners in Iran, penned by academic scholars in solidarity. Since then, it has faced various criticisms and sparked wider debates. Joining the debate is former EUME Fellow Mina Khanlarzadeh, who on August 25th published her own response on her Substack, which she has agreed to let us repost on the TRAFO-Blog.
A recent Guardian open letter addressed Iran’s political prisoners directly, linking their struggle to US immigration detention and Israeli prisons holding Palestinians. It made two demands: that the Islamic Republic end executions and free political prisoners, and that the US and Israel end their wars and sanctions against Iran. The letter prompted a wave of criticism for failing some test of proper anti-imperialist politics. I want to examine two responses, by Behrouz Ghamari-Tabrizi and Vijay Prashad, because each raises a broader question. The first response concerns anyone who writes about Iran from a position of expertise: what relationship does the writing create with the people whose struggles it claims to explain or represent? The second concerns sections of the Western left: how do we make sense of a politics committed to anti-imperialism that nonetheless reproduces, toward particular non-Western subjects, the same kind of political invisibility that anti-colonial politics has long opposed?
Telling Iran’s Prisoners Where, When, How, and With Whom
Ghamari-Tabrizi has offered an alternative letter as a model of proper solidarity, meant to replace the one published in the Guardian. He is a scholar of modern Iran and writes from his own experience as a former political prisoner. None of what follows is in denial of either his scholarship or that experience. I am reading the letter on its own terms, and my interpretation rests solely on the textual evidence it provides.
“We know that your struggle is the continuation of a long tradition in Iranian history, particularly during the period that culminated in the 1979 Iranian Revolution that toppled the Shah’s regime… The resistance of your country, the state, and the people against imperialist domination and Zionist expansionism is one of the most cherished achievements of the Iranian revolution. You are a part of that resistance, and you are paying the price for demanding the extension of that struggle to the realization of the unfulfilled promises of the revolution: respect for human dignity, social justice, and freedom.”
At first glance, this reads as historical context. But the passage does three more specific things. First, it assigns a lineage: today’s prisoners are cast as continuators of the movement that toppled the Shah. Second, it tells us what that lineage is supposed to mean politically. Their struggle is made to inherit the anti-monarchical and anti-imperialist commitments of 1979, defined against the United States and Zionist expansion. It is hard to imagine a prisoner objecting to being described as seeking “respect for human dignity, social justice, and freedom.” The breadth of those terms is precisely what makes the next move easy to miss: these widely shared aspirations are presented as the “unfulfilled promises” of 1979, so pursuing dignity and freedom now becomes a matter of completing a political project inherited from that revolution, whether or not a prisoner recognizes that project as their own. Third, and most decisively, it assigns them a side. The letter names “your country, the state, and the people” as the joint subject of a single “resistance,” then immediately tells the prisoners, “You are a part of that resistance.” The grammatical move does the political work: state, country, people, and prisoners are placed inside one collective subject. Thus, the state’s geopolitical position is treated as the position of the nation as a whole, and the prisoners are placed inside it.
None of these claims is self-evident, historically or politically. Continuity between today’s struggles and those preceding 1979 cannot be assumed: the two struggles take place under different political systems, separated by nearly half a century and by a revolution that transformed Iran’s institutions and foreign relations, as well as the political critiques, aspirations, and imagined futures that have emerged within society since then. Sharing a historical field does not mean sharing political goals. Among those arrested in the January 2026 protests, for example, were demonstrators invoking the Shah’s son, a political identification that can hardly count as a continuation of 1970s anti-monarchism. Manouchehr Bakhtiari, the father of Pouya Bakhtiari, who was killed during the November 2019 protests, has himself been repeatedly imprisoned and has publicly identified with the monarchist current. After images showed him praising Qassem Soleimani at a memorial ceremony, Bakhtiari said that he had been forced to participate through threats against his family while he and his family were under state control. Here the coercion was almost literal: a dissident was compelled to appear as part of the very “resistance” he rejected. More generally, Iran’s political prisoners come from different political currents, including monarchists, Mojahedin sympathizers, several currents of the secular and religious Left, reformists, and liberal and secular republicans, groups with radically different relationships to 1979 and to the coalition that produced it. A politically diverse prison population is thus given one revolutionary history, common political goals, and a place within the state’s resistance that many of its members would explicitly reject.
The Guardian letter closes with two simultaneous demands: that the Islamic Republic stop executions and free political prisoners, and that the United States and Israel end their war and sanctions. In Ghamari-Tabrizi’s alternative letter, the demand to pressure the Islamic Republic disappears. International solidarity is narrowed to ending the war, in the hope that prisoners will afterward be better positioned to hold their own government accountable. The letter supplies no reason to expect this. By its own account, wartime conditions have meant less transparency and more executions; it does not explain why ending the war would cause the state to loosen its grip. The hope stands in for an argument. Imagine writing to political prisoners anywhere else in the world and asking their international supporters to defer pressure on their government until a war finally ends. Why should solidarity with prisoners be politically sequenced in this way?
The prisoners themselves, meanwhile, have continued to act rather than wait for a more favorable political moment. In July 2026, death-row prisoners at Ghezel Hesar, most held on drug charges rather than political ones, began a sixteen-day hunger strike after six men were moved to solitary confinement ahead of execution. The protest gained national and international attention, won a temporary halt to executions, the return of the six men to the general ward, and a review of death-row cases. The point is not that protest guarantees an end to executions, but that prisoners secured an immediate concession by refusing to wait for a more favorable political moment.
The alternative letter affirms the prisoners’ autonomy: “We trust that you know how to organize and advance your own emancipatory politics.” But earlier they are told: “Do not allow the imperialists and Zionists to instrumentalize your just causes in order to delegitimize the anti-imperialist pulse of this revolution.” What, precisely, is this pulse, and whose revolution is being invoked? More to the point: how is a prisoner supposed to prevent imperial powers from instrumentalizing their suffering? Testimony, once public, can be cited by anyone for any purpose, regardless of intent. Taken seriously, the injunction makes prisoners responsible for uses of their words they cannot control. The only sure way to avoid that responsibility is silence. This is a peculiar form of trust: the prisoners are treated as autonomous only so long as their judgment stays within political boundaries already drawn for them.
The contradiction becomes especially clear in the alternative letter’s account of Israel’s strike on Evin in summer 2025. The text praises the prisoners’ “awe-inspiring dignity and humanity” for staying to rescue others rather than escaping. In the very next paragraph, however, it places those prisoners within the same resistance as “your country, the state, and the people.” But the prisoners’ own voices are not absent from the archive. Abolfazl Ghadyani and Mehdi Mahmoudian, who were among those who stayed to help the wounded, describe the event and its aftermath in very different political terms:
“What dark and difficult days we saw. The one who beat the drums of war instead of peace, who boasted to the world and proclaimed himself the Guardian of the Muslims [the Supreme Leader], had taken refuge deep underground behind secure walls, far from any danger. And we—who for years warned and cried out that these policies are destructive for the country and its people—today find our lives, with our hands and feet bound, tossed between the claws of foreign beasts and domestic torturers. Here, between two dangers, we were captives and victims, victims of policies that had gambled with our lives and our human dignity.”
They do not describe themselves as participants in the state’s anti-imperialist resistance, but as victims of both foreign attack and state policies they had opposed. They do not describe a state resisting alongside them. They describe a state whose leadership sheltered itself while policies they had long opposed exposed them to danger, even as a foreign power attacked them from outside. Their rescue of others at Evin was an act of solidarity, not political identification with the state that pointed guns at them and shackled them hours later.
Across the alternative letter, the text tells prisoners what political inheritance binds them, what struggle they belong to, and what their dissent must preserve. A letter to people imprisoned for their politics should start by listening, by learning how they understand their own struggle, before it tells them what that struggle means. The irony is severe: prisoners already confined by the Islamic Republic are made to struggle against a second confinement, this one built in the language of solidarity.
A Defiant “Iran” That Makes Iranians Invisible
If Ghamari-Tabrizi disciplines political prisoners by assigning them a genealogy, a purpose, and a place inside the state’s resistance, Vijay Prashad makes a more complete substitution: he replaces Iranian political subjects with a geopolitical abstraction called “Iran.” His rejection of the scissors metaphor makes this explicit. The metaphor describes prisoners as caught between two sources of harm: US-Israeli violence and repression by their own government. Prashad writes instead: “One is the blade of imperialist war. The other, whatever its internal contradictions, is the state and society being cut.” State violence against Iranians is reduced to an “internal contradiction,” while “the state and society” are fused into a single victim of empire. The Islamic Republic recedes as a perpetrator in its own right, while the testimony of Iranians subjected to its violence is subordinated to a geopolitical frame that determines when their claims may be politically heard and what political weight they are allowed to carry.
The same substitution appears in Prashad’s account of Iran’s regional strategy. He writes: “Soleimani was the architect of Iran’s forward strategy, namely, to build a defensive shield through pro-Iranian armed groups that would attack Israel and US military positions from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Palestine, and other countries.” Calling this network “defensive” already privileges the standpoint of the Iranian state and makes the consequences of that strategy for people elsewhere in the region politically secondary. Prashad then describes how the United States and Israel weakened that shield before feeling “emboldened to attack Iran” directly. That sequence should at least put the strategy itself in question. Instead, the war that followed, whose costs are borne overwhelmingly by Iranians, is folded back into the claim that the strategy protected Iran. But which Iran was protected? The survival of the government is treated as the survival of the country, even as Iran is devastated environmentally, infrastructurally, and economically by the war. Nor should the continuation of conflict become admirable by being renamed resistance. If the political goal is to end imperial violence against Iran, then whether a strategy brings that violence closer to an end or helps prolong the war must itself remain open to judgment. “Resistance” cannot answer that question in advance, since it is easier to celebrate the word than to ask what continued war costs the people who must live through it.
The same substitution structures his account of Palestine. “No other country in the region has been as committed to the Palestinian freedom movement,” Prashad writes, “and none has paid so high a price for that commitment.” But the commitment and the price belong to different subjects: the policy is made by the state, while its costs are borne by society. Calling both “Iran” collapses government policy and national interest into one political subject. Even within the Islamic Republic, that unity does not exist. Heshmatollah Falahatpisheh, former chair of parliament’s National Security and Foreign Policy Commission, has accused Ali Akbar Velayati, a former senior adviser to Iran’s Supreme Leader, of helping turn what had been an Arab-Israeli conflict into an Iran-Israel conflict. “The Iranian people are paying for it,” he argues, asking, “What do these endless international wars have to do with the interests of the Iranian people?” He contrasts this with neighboring states pursuing development while Iran becomes trapped in repeated wars. What Prashad presents as a shared national commitment to resistance is contested even within the state, whose own political establishment contains competing arguments about confrontation, negotiation, and what Iran’s national interests require.
This is why Prashad can respond to the Guardian letter’s demand to stop executions and release political prisoners by asking, “Why challenge Iran just when it has the United States and Israel on the back foot?” and “Is it necessary to ask Iran to become perfect before you defend its right to survive?” The demand not to execute prisoners is recoded as a demand for perfection. Iranian suffering becomes fully legible when it indicts the United States or Israel; when it implicates the Islamic Republic, its political weight is qualified by geopolitical consequence. The hierarchy lies in claiming the authority to decide, on Iranians’ behalf, which violence counts and whose lives may be subordinated to the resistance he wishes to defend. Palestinian liberation is turned from an emancipatory horizon into a measure against which Iranian suffering is discounted. He turns a politics of liberation into moral cover for the repression of another population.
Prashad also turns Fanon’s account of the historical constraints facing postcolonial states into an argument that state violence is inevitable. Here a familiar claim from the right reappears on the left: that thinkers like Fanon can be invoked to excuse the violence of anti-Western authoritarian states and movements. But Fanon argues in the opposite direction. In “The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness,” in Richard Philcox’s translation of The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon condemns the postcolonial single-party state as the “modern form of the bourgeois dictatorship” (111), a coercive apparatus that “imposes itself,” “flaunts its authority,” “harasses,” “making it clear to its citizens they are in constant danger” (111). Historical constraint does not excuse this domination; Fanon critiques the postcolonial leader precisely for abandoning the needs of the people and becoming an accomplice of the national bourgeoisie (112).
Prashad’s logic also recalls another part of Fanon’s argument. In “The Lived Experience of the Black Man,” in Richard Philcox’s translation of Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon describes the racialized subject as “overdetermined from the outside” (95), reduced under the dissecting gaze of the Other to “an object among other objects” (89), made intensely visible through meanings imposed from without and denied authority over what their own existence signifies. Prashad performs a similar operation on “Iran.” He manufactures an abstract version of the country and makes it hyper-visible: the Iran that fits his anti-imperialist framework, while leaving little room for actual Iranians to exist as political subjects beyond a prescribed role, victims of empire conscripted into the state’s resistance to it.
“If You Can Still Write, Write”
What connects all three texts, despite their real political differences, is that none of them begins from the large body of writing in which Iranian prisoners have already described their own political condition. But the similarity stops there. In the Guardian letter, that absence is partly the price of being heard. To criticize the Islamic Republic without having that criticism recoded as support for war, the letter places Evin alongside forms of detention that the Western left already recognizes as violent, such as US immigration detention and Israeli imprisonment of Palestinians. It does this rather than beginning from what is specific to Iran’s prisons. The letter leaves that absence visible; it does not pretend to know what it has not actually consulted, and leaves it empty.
Ghamari-Tabrizi and Prashad do not leave that absence empty. Each fills it with something the archive was never asked to produce. One hands prisoners a revolutionary lineage and a political loyalty they did not request. The other decides, on their behalf, how much their suffering is allowed to weigh, based on what the state imprisoning them happens to be doing to its enemies abroad. Neither is really solidarity, though the two fail differently. Ghamari-Tabrizi’s letter sets the terms first—a lineage, a purpose, and a political family the prisoners never chose—and only then extends what it calls trust, its boundaries drawn tightly enough that any politics falling outside them reads as betrayal. The letter speaks on behalf of prisoners while confining their politics within limits already set for them. Prashad does something different: the prisoners simply disappear from view. His argument begins from a resistance whose political value is already settled; when prisoners’ suffering complicates that resistance, their claims lose weight rather than forcing the framework itself to change.
The question this raises is whether real knowledge about Iran can still be produced in political spaces where holding the correct position has started to do the work that only sustained attention to Iran itself should do. For the Guardian letter, that failure is a gap, something it leaves undone. For the other two, it becomes a claim: each supplies an answer where sustained attention should have come first.
To ask what solidarity might require instead, one can turn to the archive these arguments have managed to do without. Writing about his imprisonment in Ghezel Hesar during the recent war and severe restrictions on communication, political prisoner Soheil Arabi describes what he witnessed among his fellow prisoners, including their inability to save prisoners facing execution. He does not place their suffering inside a revolutionary script inherited from 1979, make outside solidarity with them contingent on first ending the war, or subordinate their claims to the question of whether criticizing the state might weaken “Iran” in its confrontation with the United States and Israel. He begins from the prison itself. The following is an excerpt from his account:
“We could not save Erfan in the cells of Ghezel Hesar, because the prison walls were not merely physical. There were also the walls of society’s silence, the walls of the world’s indifference, the walls of fear, and the walls that legitimize state violence. We could not, because our voices were not yet loud enough, because our solidarity was not yet broad enough, because many still thought, ‘These things only happen to others.’
But today, we no longer have an excuse.
Every execution that takes place in any corner of the world is the execution of us all. Every noose tied around a young person’s neck is a noose wrapped around the human conscience. Erfan Shakourzadeh, Soltanali, Ehsan, Mohammad, Mehrdad, and thousands of other names are no longer just names. They are mirrors showing us how far we can fall and how high we can still rise.
The uprising against executions is an uprising to keep the possibility of being human alive. This uprising does not need weapons. It needs courage: the courage to speak, the courage to refuse, the courage to join voices with those writing from death row, and with those outside the prison who can still write, shout, and act.
We call on every human being in every corner of the world:
If you can still write, write…”
About the Author:
Mina Khanlarzadeh (PhD, Columbia University) is a cultural and intellectual historian. Before joining the faculty of Deep Springs College, she held postdoctoral positions at Northwestern University and the Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin.
Citation: Mina Khanlarzadeh, What They Don’t Like About the Guardian’s Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners, in TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. 27.08.2026. https://trafo.hypotheses.org/?p=67952
Explore Khanlarzadeh’s Contributions to the TRAFO Blog:
Mina Khanlarzadeh, The Cold That Stays. The 1953 Coup and Its Afterlife in Iranian Political Memory, 23.06.2026. https://trafo.hypotheses.org/66177
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Forum Transregionale Studien (August 27, 2026). What They Don’t Like About the Guardian’s Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners. TRAFO – Blog for Transregional Research. Retrieved September 11, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16ozo
