What They Don’t Like About the Guardian’s Letter to Iran’s Political Prisoners, by Mina Khanlarzadeh – 25 August 2026

From Mina’s Substack

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?

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Mina Khanlarzadeh (Ph.D., Columbia University; B.Sc., Physics, Sharif University of Technology) is a historian whose interdisciplinary work engages global political thought, literary and translation studies, gender studies, and the history of science.

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