Peyman Vahabzadeh’s For Land and Culture appeared in 2024, while Iran was still reeling from the repression of the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, a movement in which Kurdish and other non-Persian communities were prominent from the outset. In the time between my agreeing to review the book, the book getting lost in mail, and finally sitting down to write this review, Iran has been subjected to two rounds of war with Israel and the US, and in between a renewed, ferocious wave of internal repression. History proceeds in jolts, and the book one picks up after each jolt is not quite the book that went to press. Read now, Vahabzadeh’s account of a brief, locally grounded experiment in democratic self-governance in Iran’s Turkmensahra takes on an urgency that no conscientious reader in 2026 can bracket away.
The book recovers the grassroots council (showrā) movement that emerged in the Turkmen region of northeastern Iran in the tumultuous aftermath of the 1979 revolution. Over roughly a year—before the councils were crushed by a combination of scheming by Ayatollah Khomeini, violence by his Islamist supporters and the IRGC, and finally “softer” forms of co-optation through, among other things, the Reconstruction Jihad—Turkmen peasants reoccupied ancestral lands, reorganized production on collective principles, and built a dense network of councils that Vahabzadeh describes as “a system of democratic self-governance.” For Vahabzadeh, the Turkmensahra experience was in crucial ways the epitome of that “spring of freedom” immediately following the revolution: a fleeting enactment of “a truly livable Iran for all,” right when “retrograde Islamists were busy consolidating their power” (1). Conceived as “a work of counter-memory and counter-history” (217), the book announces its stance from the outset: “an advocate scholar’s account whose interpretative foundation is the movement itself and the literature it left behind” (10). That directness and urgent sense of commitment is refreshing, and it makes the book, at a moment when Iran is once again at a fateful crossroads, a distinctive contribution to the field.
Challenging the Islamic Republic’s own account of the revolution as well as addressing the lack of interest in minoritized people’s experience with the revolution, Vahabzadeh situates his book at several intersections. It adds significantly to a small but growing English-language scholarship that decenters Persian-centric and Tehran-centric narratives of Iran. And it substantially enlarges an even smaller body of work on the Iranian left’s often fraught relations with Iran’s ethno-national minorities. Distinctively, the book draws on activist-compiled archives that rarely surface in Anglophone scholarship, above all that which has been gathered by Arne Amin Gulli and published in exile in Sweden by the Turkmen Research Center. More broadly, the book also enriches the literature on nonformal, noninstitutional, bottom-up politics in Iran pioneered by the likes of Asef Bayat. The Turkmen showrās, Vahabzadeh shows, were neither vanguardist front organizations nor state-adjacent shells but spontaneous, transitory forms through which Turkmens mobilized as a people for the intertwined right to land and right to culture. In this endeavor, they managed to inspire a broad segment of Iranians dreaming of a different future.
The book’s conceptual scaffolding is set out in chapter 1, a survey of council politics. Vahabzadeh identifies three lineages: Lenin and the Soviets, the interwar council-communist tradition (especially Italian and German), and Hannah Arendt. He selects Arendt as his principal interpretive key: “The seeds of the Turkmen council movement were Arendtian, as the movement emerged by deploying the councils as the grassroots mobilization of Turkmens as a people” (20). Later chapters refine the framing through productive pairings, notably with Gramsci’s “organic intellectuals.” The account of the long history of the land question is brilliant. Vahabzadeh traces this question from premodern regimes through Reza Shah’s “multiple property registry laws aimed at destroying traditional landownerships to ensure capitalist relations over land, turning land into a commodity” (89), including the shah’s personal dispossession of Turkmen villages and lands, and Mohammad Reza Shah’s subsequent transfer of some of those holdings to cronies such as the generals of the 1953 coup. The reading of pre-Pahlavi Turkmen social structures, whose “traditional lack of hereditary khans and hierarchies … provided the culturally sanctioned foundation of modern councils in the Turkmen peasant movement” (86), is especially valuable, and Vahabzadeh’s claim that “capitalist land ownership in fact impoverished the Turkmens who had previously lived off these lands in a sustainable way” (92) is persuasively grounded.
The book insists that this history is not antiquarian. The three waves of repression from August 1979 through 1980 and 1981 crushed the Turkmen experiment but did not dissolve the political question that experiment had opened. Against Bayat, Vahabzadeh argues that the Iranian councils emerged as political forces with decidedly leftist inflections, organically linked to but distinct and independent from the Fadaiyan-e Khalq (OIPFG) and with clear overlaps with the socialist and Maoist formations in Kurdistan. To broaden perspectives, Vahabzadeh also draws a direct line from the moment of leftist defeat following the revolution to the rebirth of an independent workers’ movement in Iran after three decades of privatization, exemplified by the struggle at the Haft Tappeh sugarcane complex (46). The lines the book draws outward to the Zapatistas in Mexico and to Rojava in Syria, whose autonomies the Turkmen councils in some sense “anticipated,” (219) register these movements as part of a shared global archive of autonomous alternatives “to the present destructive, capitalist order” (221).
The critical observations I would offer are in the spirit of the book’s own ambition. Despite the impressive transnational reach of chapter 1, the three canonical lineages remain firmly European; the Arendtian framing then organizes the Iranian material, and one sometimes wishes for a more sustained dialogue with indigenous and Global South theorizations of self-governance that the book elsewhere invokes. Relatedly, the treatment of Persian-centric cultural hegemony under the Pahlavis is thinner than the surrounding chapters and insufficiently integrated with a now-substantial secondary literature on Pahlavi-era nationalisms, including work on Aryanism, the racialized dimensions of Iranian national identity, and the systematic discrimination against ethno-national minorities.
This matters, because the book’s own central puzzle: why neither the Pahlavi state nor the Islamic Republic could tolerate demands for autonomy (khodmokhtāri), and why the Islamic Republic refused to recognize or license “the Turkmen bodies as political or cultural organizations” (214), which cannot, I think, be fully explained either by the councils’ elective affinity with the OIPFG or by the two regimes’ shared “patriarchal and statist prejudices (160).” A more direct reckoning with Persian-centrism as a structural inheritance that the Islamic Republic took over, seemingly automatically, from the Pahlavi order would strengthen an already compelling argument.
Vahabzadeh rightly calls for care with the Persian melli, “national.” His distinction between melli and sarāsari (nationwide) is useful, and his use of “nations” and “national minorities” to refer to the Turkmen is refreshing as it echoes voices in Iran that have long sought recognition precisely as nations or “nationalities” within a “multinational” conception of the country. Vahabzadeh’s work reminds us that vocabulary and terminology matters. However, the author is admirably candid about his own linguistic limitations: his lack of Turkmen language skills “imposes a limit” on the study, affecting, as he puts it, its cultural dimension. I would put it a little more sharply: it also constrains the political analysis. One can only know what one can read, and further work on sources in the Turkmen language, just as sources in Kurdish, Arabic, Baluchi, and so on, should remain a field-wide priority.
Finally, one could wish Vahabzadeh in future works (perhaps in dialogue with archives in the minoritized languages?) could provide a more searching engagement with the councils’ own frictions: the binary that counterposes an egalitarian postrevolutionary possibility embodied by Turkmensahra against an authoritarian one embodied by the Islamic Republic (“a metastatic cancer,” 169) is rhetorically powerful but risks flattening the actually existing contestations within and around the showrās, not least over leadership, gender, and the possibilities and limits in a movement such as Turkmensahra engaging with a nationwide organization such as OIPFG. The discussion of Turkmen women, in particular, reads more as an appendix than as an integral dimension of council politics. That future work also perhaps could say more about what has happened to Turkmen activism since.
None of this diminishes what Vahabzadeh has accomplished. For Land and Culture is a dense, theoretically serious, politically committed book that helps close a glaring gap in English-language scholarship on the 1979 revolution and opens onto a comparative, global history of council politics. Granular local histories of this kind are the building blocks of any new general history of power, capitalism, class, and culture in Iran. I recommend it warmly to scholars of modern Iran, of the Iranian left, of social movements, and of indigenous, minority, and peasant politics more broadly—and to teachers looking for a book that makes the stakes of 1979 legible to a generation whose Iran is once again being shaped by war.
