In the summer of 2025, Bozorgmehr Sharafedin and Yeganeh Torbati were finishing their book, “Stolen Revolution: Betrayal and Hope in Modern Iran,” when the United States and Israel bombed Iran for nearly two weeks.
“We ripped up the epilogue and wrote a new one,” Torbati said in a recent joint video interview.
The news out of Iran has only grown more dramatic since then: In January, huge protests in Iran were followed by a vicious response from the government that resulted in mass killings of civilians; the U.S. and Israel launched airstrikes on the country, killing Iran’s supreme leader and other officials even as the conflict has continued longer than President Trump’s initial estimation of a 4-6 week engagement.
Even as the current situation is unclear, one result, as it stands now, is that Iran’s clerics and Revolutionary Guard are perhaps more powerful than ever. While it was too late to update the book by then, the authors say that’s ultimately missing the point.
“There are dozens of websites and news services where people can find the most up-to-date information, but we are explaining how we got here and why Iran is reacting the way it is,” Torbati says.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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Q. What does the book teach us about last year’s bombings, this year’s protests and now the prolonged war?
Torbati: January was a notable moment with a lot hinging on those protests. We show there have been repeated bouts of popular protest, but increasingly they’ve become the spontaneous explosion of pent-up frustrations. From the outside, it’s very inspiring, and the people who are protesting are very brave, but the government has shown it is more than willing to carry out enough violence to suppress those protests.
Sharafedin: The book also shows why a revolution that came to power by creating an independent nation, which was not reliant on Eastern or Western powers, would lead almost 50 years later to where parts of the population welcomed foreign intervention.
Iranians have been trying over and over new things to get to a democratic society. We had the constitutional revolution and then the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which was itself an attempt to create a just society. When that failed, there was a reform phase where people said maybe revolutions are not the solution, maybe we need to do this gradually. But that didn’t work.
In recent years, Iranians felt so desperate and so powerless in front of an armed government that was willing to machine gun them when they came to the streets, that part of society thought they’d welcome foreign intervention. But that didn’t work either. With all these failed attempts, Iranian society goes back, does soul searching and regrouping and comes back with something new.
Q. Much of the history is told through the story of Mehdi Karroubi, a prominent cleric who’d been close to Ayatollah Khomeini but later came to push for reforms. But your five narrative profiles also feature ordinary citizens in Iran, including young women like Hila, Kosar and Rozhin. Why was it important to include them?
Sharafedin: The core idea was to show the economic angles and the history of how the Islamic Republic changed gradually into a mafia state. But we needed to add the cultural and political and social angles, too.
Torbati: With Karroubi, it was important to show how well-intentioned people sometimes carry out bad acts. They’re not just religious radicals or tyrants and did things for what they thought were good reasons. That has lessons also for people who are in power today or people who would like to be in power in the future.
With the others, we could convey history but give readers sugar with their medicine, where you could get invested in Hila’s, Kosar’s or Rozhin’s life and through them see the last 10 years of Iranian history. There were people that we talked to for months who pulled out – one was arrested for activism and went to prison, another we believe received pressure from the security forces not to speak with us.
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Q. You show how leaders like Karroubi and Mir-Hossein Moussavi had chances to push for real change but were always too tentative or tied to the system. Will change ultimately have to come from the streets?
Torbati: Nothing’s inevitable. Those two identified too much with their roles as people who helped build the revolution, so they just weren’t willing to take that step, but they could have.
Sharafedin: The Iranians were unlucky when they chose Khomeini in 1979 because it started from there. Then other leaders couldn’t handle the idea of being confrontational.
They were not ready for what the nation wanted from them, and they couldn’t capture the moment. By the time they were, it was too late. The election system has become much more predictable and engineered, and the oppressive system is much more ready to deal with the presence of millions of people on the streets. Compared to 20 years ago, the government is much more brutal. It’s equipped with surveillance technologies from Russia and China. The soldiers are trained in Syria, and they are used to killing.
Torbati: But yes, change probably has to come from the streets. The benefit of a leaderless protest movement, which is what we’ve seen now in the last 10 years, is that you can’t arrest one person or a group of people and it’s over. But the weakness is there’s no kind of strategizing about tactics. What are safer ways to resist the state or weaken it without getting shot in the street. Should they strike or organize boycotts – there are major conglomerates in Iran controlled by the supreme leader or the Revolutionary Guards, but there hasn’t been creative planning about a boycott of these businesses. So we just see these bursts of energy that peter out once the state uses force.
Q. Are you more hopeful or less after the events of this year?
Torbati: Iranians are a restive and restless population who will always question whoever is in power, and I don’t expect that to go away. But seeing the video of body bags piled up during the protests in January, it was a level of killing beyond what I expected and anything we covered in the book. Here’s a government that will do anything to stay in power and people need an accurate picture in their minds of what they’re up against.
Hope is important, but it’s important to be realistic.
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Sharafedin: Don’t forget the gains over the last 50 years – any rights gained, like women walking on the street without hijab, was not something the government gave them, it was something they fought for. Iranians understand the necessity of forming a secular society, which is unique in the Middle East.
They have risen up again and again and, as we show in the book, they try new things. So this is not the end of the story. They will come up with innovative ways to challenge the system. Think of Iran as a frozen river. It might look like a block of ice from on top but below it is a very strong stream of social and cultural movements that is still flowing. A river cannot be totally blocked – it will find a way to flow around the obstacles.