Iran’s Fearless Intellectuals, by Naghmeh Sohrabi – 7 March 2026

From Equator

Before the bombs fell, I had started an archive of debates taking place inside Iran in the aftermath of the January protests and the massacre that followed. It seemed to me that a cacophony of voices from outside the country was drowning out a surprising development from within. In intellectual circles – which include journalists, activists, scholars, artists, essayists, novelists, poets, and students – people were coming together not only to mourn but also to imagine what might be built from their grief and despair. The fact that these voices have gone silent since 28 February, when the US and Israel began “Operation Epic Fury,” makes remembering them even more urgent.

While the US has given several (often contradictory) rationales for its preemptive attack, its goal, stated or not, is clearly to pulverize Iran’s infrastructure, to turn it into what some suggest will be a failed state. Unable to stand.

But this war also stands to destroy ideas. In the weeks following the winter protests, the Western press presented Iranians as one of three things: protestors, mourners or dead bodies. But inside the country, Iranians demanded to be seen in another light: as writers and thinkers imagining a different future, one that might break from the tired binary of the Islamic Republic on one hand and the Pahlavi monarchy on the other.

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Naghmeh Sohrabi teaches history at Brandeis University (Massachusetts, United States) and is the author of ‘Taken for Wonder: Nineteenth Century Travel Accounts from Iran to Europe’.

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