A Guerrilla Odyssey: Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and Fadai Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971-1979

Emerging in the early 1970s, the Organization of Iranian People’s Fadai Guerrillas (OIPFG) became one of the most important secular leftist political organizations in Iran. Despite their lasting influence and the way in which their efforts helped shape the history of Iran for decades to come, little is known about the group. A Guerrilla Odyssey presents the first comprehensive examination of the rise and fall of the Fadai urban guerrilla movement in Iran.

Drawing on exhaustive analyses of the published and unpublished works of the Fadai Guerrillas, as well as of archival material and interviews with activists, the author demonstrates historically and sociologically the conditions that surrounded the debut and demise of the urban guerrilla warfare that defined Iranian political life in the 1970s. Vahabzadeh offers a critique of various aspects of the Fadai’s theories of national liberation in an attempt to reconsider the painful relationship among modernization, secularism, and democracy in contemporary Iran. In addition, the author details the transformation of the revolutionary social movements of the 1960s and 1970s into the new, democratic social movements that emerged in the 1980s onward in the form of today’s women’s, student, and youth movements in Iran. A Guerrilla Odyssey is a meticulously researched and engrossing narrative that promises to be a major contribution to the field of Iranian history.