During the decade prior to the 1978‒79 revolution, radical opposition in Iran was spearheaded not by clerics or the Islamic establishment but by hundreds of young men and women engaged in a violent campaign of armed struggle against the shah’s dictatorship. Consciously following similar movements in Asia, Africa and Latin America, these young Iranian militants were active in two main underground organizations—the Iranian People’s Fadāʾi Guerrillas and the Iranian People’s Mojahedin. The first proclaimed strict adherence to Marxism-Leninism, while the second espoused an innovative ideology that openly mixed Marxism with Islam. While playing a significant role in revolutionary mobilization, these guerrilla groups could not assume its leadership, which was soon monopolized by Ayatollah Khomeini and his followers. The guerrillas’ considerable political presence in fact materialized only after the monarchy’s fall, when they demanded a share in post-revolutionary power struggles. Within a few years, however, the guerrilla organizations, along with all other political contenders, were crushed in a reign of terror imposed by the Islamic Republic.

The guerrilla movement’s story then became yet another murky chapter in pre-revolutionary Iran’s highly contested historiography. Scholarly studies of 1970s guerrillas began with Ervand Abrahamian’s seminal Iran between Two Revolutions (1981), followed by his monograph Radical Islam: The Iranian Mojahedin (1989). Maziar Behrooz’s Rebels with a Cause: The Failure of the Left in Iran (1999) briefly narrated the history of Fadāʾi guerrillas, while Peyman Vahabzadeh’s A Guerrilla Odyssey (2010) offered a fuller account of their 1960s origin and 1970s activities. In post-revolutionary Iran, official attention to the guerrilla movement came under the watchful eye of the Islamic Republic’s intelligence ministry, which selectively published primary source compilations, such as Chap dar Iran be ravayat-e asnad-e SAVAK: Sazman-e cherikha-ye fadāʾi-e khalq (The Left in Iran according to SAVAK documents: the organization of Fadāʾi guerillas; 2001). In addition to the above sources, those who read Persian can get closer glimpses of the guerrilla movement’s history by putting together fragments revealed in about two dozen memoirs published by its members and sympathizers. Two new Persian-language studies, however, provide the Fadāʾi story with both additional facts and a more complex narrative structure. Anush Sālehi’s Esm-e shab: Siāhkal (Codename: Siāhkal; Sweden, 2016) reconstructs the intellectual genesis and political unfolding of the Fadāʾi movement with details gleaned from available primary sources. More diverse and comprehensive is the book reviewed here, Rāhi digar. (According to its preface, the book’s title is a Persian rendering of “The Road not Taken,” a phrase borrowed from the American poet Robert Frost. A more accurate translation would have been “rāh-e narafteh.”) This two-volume compilation of primary and secondary sources is edited by social historian Touraj Atabaki and independent researcher Nāser Mohājer. The book’s contents are of three kinds. First, chapters written by the editors and other researchers that narrate overall Fadāʾi history or its selective aspects. Second, chapters by Fadāʾi members or sympathizers remembering daily life in “safe-houses” and prisons or on university campuses, the main sites of guerrilla activity. Third, chapters by writers, poets and artists affiliated with or sympathetic to the Fadāʾi movement, remembering its impact on intellectual production and popular culture in 1970s Iran.

Volume one begins appropriately with a long, comprehensive history of the Fadāʾi movement from its mid-1960s inception to its participation in the 1978‒79 Revolution. This period is divided into four phases. First is the 1960s stage of ideological and political preparation, culminating in the 1971 launch of armed struggle in the forests of northern Iran (Siāhkal). Second is the stage when the Fadāʾi organization considered armed struggle as “both strategy and tactics” for starting a revolution whose “objective conditions” were supposedly present. Third is a mid-1970s phase when devastating setbacks forced the Fadāʾis to admit the insufficiency of armed struggle without popular political mobilization. The fourth stage was one of ideological disorientation, lasting from the mid-1970s to the outbreak of the revolution. This chapter recapitulates existing accounts of Fadāʾi history with clarity and cohesion without adding new analytical insights. It provides the book’s overarching narrative, which is expanded upon by the more detailed accounts of other chapters. The fact that the testimonies of individual Fadāʾi members corroborate this narrative means it could stand as the movement’s basic history during the 1970s. The book’s real contribution, however, consists of six chapters in volume one and two chapters in volume two that cover personal testimonies by Fadāʾi members and sympathizers, half of whom are women. Beyond their significance to Fadāʾi historiography, these chapters are vivid firsthand accounts crucial to understanding the cultural and intellectual, as well as political, history of 1960s‒1970s Iran. Admittedly reflecting the “subjective” perspective of direct participants, they remind us how armed actions, by no more than a few hundred guerrillas, had captured the imagination of 1970s Iran’s young political activists, consisting mostly of university students. This underlines the specificity of Iran’s guerrilla movement, noted in studies like The Iranian Mojahedin and A Guerrilla Odyssey, as a response to the shah’s dictatorship, as well as its generic fit within the global pattern of 1960s‒1970s national liberation movements.

Fadāʾi testimonies are unanimous that recruitment to the organization required an “existential” commitment, i.e. accepting the average six-month life span of a guerrilla fighter, rather than intellectual competence or ideological rigor. The movement’s handful of theorists were more or less familiar with the literature of Cuban, Vietnamese or Chinese guerrilla warfare, but ordinary members often read no more than a few tracts that simplistically adapted this literature to Iranian conditions. The fascinating accounts of daily life in guerrilla “safe houses” show an invariable routine, including some study of Fadāʾi literature, while everything was subordinate to the stringent requirements of military operations. As with all armies at war, technical efficiency dictated horrendous moral choices, including the elimination of untrustworthy or deviant members. For example, in the chapter entitled “My Beloved Organization,” Nahid Qajar recounts her own story of being a Fadāʾi woman coming from a lower middle class family politicized by mid-century nationalist and communist movements. Like many other militants, her radicalization came in the wake of close contacts with the country’s poorest people and during her service in the Literacy Corps. In order to join the Fadāʾis, she explains, she had to “abandon all ties to life and devote her entire time and energy to serve the organization’s objectives.” The harsh and strict discipline of guerrilla life applied equally to all members regardless of gender. Once they joined “safe-houses,” all recruits received rigorous guerrilla training consisting of routine physical exercise and practice with firearms and explosives. As a rule, guerrillas always carried cyanide capsules in order to commit suicide rather than be captured alive. They also studied classics of Marxism and guerrilla warfare alongside the Fadāʾi organization’s literature (pp. 156‒61). Military discipline was harsh, and the slightest infraction resulted in severe punishment, such as lashing. The guerrillas’ onerous physical and psychological regimens involved food rationing and enduring deprivation in matters of personal comfort, health and hygiene. Disciplinary practices that might appear absurdly harsh in fact functioned to reinforce the individual guerrilla’s extreme psychological and emotional subordination to the cause. A young Fadāʾi woman, for instance, was forced to kill her pet cat in order to purge the weakness of having “feeling for animals” (pp. 185‒7). Given this kind of discipline, the occasional execution of “deviant” comrades also occurred, although it was not mandated by the Fadāʾi organization’s official bylaws (asās-nāmeh) (pp. 193‒206). In another chapter, Fadāʾi leader Majid ᶜAbdolrahimpur notes the social background of most members and supporters as teachers and university students. He provides a list of the legally published and underground literature that Fadāʾi members and sympathizers would read, and remembers that the organization’s bylaws did not describe it as “democratic.” In fact, superiors explicitly told him that an underground military organization could not be democratic. ᶜAbdolrahimpur, who helped rebuild a virtually decimated Fadāʾi organization after 1976, admits that during the immediate pre-revolutionary years the ideologically disoriented Fadāʾis gradually deemphasized guerrilla tactics. The last chapter in this volume is a firsthand account of the daily life of women political prisoners during the 1970s. Numbering around 450, these were mostly young leftist students, of whom many were tortured and a few, including two Fadāʾis, were executed. Like their male counterparts, women political prisoners often lived highly regimented lives in “communes” that regulated their members’ diet, exercise, study and leisure. The prisoners tried to keep the spirit of struggle alive, engaging in hunger strikes and even managing the successful escape of Fadāʾi leader Ashraf Dehqāni.

The book’s second volume begins with another personal testimony of daily life, this time of male political prisoners, adding nuance to our knowledge of political incarceration under the monarchy. Detailed descriptions of life in prison “communes” shows how guerrilla militants continued their struggle in captivity. The legendary Bizhan Jazani, for instance, ironically survived in prison beyond the average guerrilla’s short lifespan to write and even lead the Fadāʾi movement from behind bars, before being murdered, along with eight of his comrades, by the regime. The next chapter focuses on 1970s militant activism in Tabriz University, a necessary corrective to typically Tehran-centric narratives of political opposition. The chapter traces the presence of young women and students from rural areas into academe and their political radicalization outside the capital. A Fadāʾi student himself, the author gives a vivid account of the university’s political sub-culture and the guerrilla movement’s great appeal as well as its fanaticism. He is clear that the Fadāʾi scorned scholarly knowledge, particularly in the humanities, recruiting students based on their “militancy, boldness, and love for the (Fadāʾi) organization” (p. 454). Even more vivid and personal is the second chapter on the Fadāʾi at Tabriz University, written by one of the organization’s student sympathizers. Starting out as an outsider, i.e. a non-Azeri woman, the narrator describes her political acculturation via learning Turkish and joining the university’s library and hiking club, which, as was typical across the country, were sites dominated by sympathizers of the guerrilla movement. Apart from shedding further light on the countrywide appeal of the guerrilla movement, these chapters remind us how at least a decade of sustained leftist, rather than Islamic, activism made Tabriz the second epicenter of the 1978‒79 revolution.

The rest of this volume consists of an important chapter on the guerrilla movement’s relations with the student opposition abroad, a short but meticulous study of the Fadāʾi organization’s participation in the buildup to the revolution during 1976‒78, based on primary sources, and finally seven chapters dealing with the guerrilla movement’s impact on graphic arts, poetry, fiction, theatre, movies, music and songs. These latter chapters provide vantage points for viewing Iran’s cultural landscape during the immediate pre-revolutionary decades when “political commitment” was intimately involved with artistic and intellectual production. Among the country’s outstanding “cultural workers” themselves, the authors reflect on their own life and times to explain exactly what “committed art” might have meant in 1960s‒1970s Iran. They agree that the drama of young militants boldly taking up arms against a repressive status quo made deep impressions on contemporary cultural production. Inevitably, some of the most popular and influential writers, poets, artists, song writers, musicians and filmmakers sympathized with the guerrilla movement or became self-styled “cultural guerrillas,” attacking the regime via artistic and intellectual production (p. 707). Still, in these final chapters, as well as in testimonies by Fadāʾi militants throughout the book, we discern lamentations about the guerrilla generation’s obsession with violent action as proof of political and existential authenticity. This is how exiled writer Nasim Khāksār articulates such sentiments:

According to Khāksār, the guerrilla generation’s self-fashioning as “death-conscious beings” proved an inadequate response during an actual popular revolution: “Instead of creatively reengaging with familiar questions and critiquing the past … they confidently held on to unexamined certitude, believing in borrowed axioms, beliefs that had no future” (p. 639). In the end, before judging the contributions and failures of the pre-revolutionary generation, including the guerrilla movement, we still need to learn much about its complicated and conflicted history. Books such as The Road Not Taken help us move forward along that path.