Note: The US attacked Iran on 28 February, 2026, at Israel’s behest, murdering the country’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khameini. In the weeks that have ensued, the US and Israel have engaged in indiscriminate bombing and war crimes. However, this time, we find ourselves shrouded by a thick haze of censorship perpetrated by the genocidal media in the US and Israel. While the moment might feel terrifying and unprecedented, it is anything but. Each week, our editorial team will unpack and analyze seminal texts that help us make sense of this moment.

The violence begins before the bombs do. Long before the first strike, the moral anesthesia is already in place. Time and again, Iran has been recast as a threat, an oil field, a target, a strategic necessity, a sanctions case. 

The old trick is back: make violence sound procedural, make devastation sound rational, make people disappear into the language of war. On April 7, 2026, Donald Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight” if Iran did not make a deal. 

In this context, The Neighbors, originally published in 1974, and The Age of Orphans (2009) unearth Iran’s histories, revealing what this rhetoric obscures. While many books about Iran have understandably centered the brutality of the present regime, these novels are striking because they turn instead to the deeper histories beneath the present, revealing the very years of formation of the Shah’s Iran.

They turn our attention to a different Iran, one that refuses both the Western reduction of the nation to a nuclear-armed theocracy and the nationalist fantasy of a coherent, unified civilization marching toward modernity. They show a country shaped by oil imperialism and resource wars, by the violent absorption of ethnic minorities into a centralizing state, by the radical political possibilities that were crushed. 

The Neighbors by Ahmad Mahmoud, Translated by Nastaran Kherad (2003)

Mahmoud began writing The Neighbors in 1963, a decade after the U.S.-backed coup of 1953, and completed it in 1966, but political obstacles delayed its publication until 1974. Even then, the novel appeared only briefly in a limited edition before being banned for its leftist politics. The history of the book’s publication is thus inseparable from the history it narrates: a novel about political awakening, oil, and repression which was itself constrained by the post-coup order.

One of the most important political novels of twentieth-century Iran, The Neighbors begins with a history that the West needs to reckon with: British imperialism. 

Set in Ahvaz in the early 1950s, at the height of the oil nationalization crisis, it begins in the oil heartlands, inside a cramped house shared by several families whose lives are shaped by the oil company under repressive conditions. 

The teenager, Khaled, has dropped out of school, and everyday survival shapes the household. His father thinks of migrating to Kuwait for better prospects. Khaled is arrested for a street incident and comes into contact with political prisoners. He begins carrying messages and eventually acquires a political education. This awakening into politics allows Khaled to understand that the misery surrounding him is not natural or private, but bound up with oil, British power, labor, and state repression. 

As Khaled becomes more involved in political circles, the novel broadens from the neighborhood into a larger portrait of working-class mobilization in Khuzestan. The teahouse, the street, and the shared courtyard become centers of political exchange.

The Neighbors follows the growth of agitation around oil, including the role of leftist networks and the Tudeh Party in oil-company towns, meetings, coded language, and the rising hope that nationalization might transform ordinary life. But what makes the novel so powerful is that Mahmoud never abandons the texture of the local. Even when the frame widens to oil politics and the fate of the nation, the book remains about how history is lived in courtyards, cheap rooms, teahouses, and the bodies of the poor. 

Mahmoud does not romanticize the nationalization movement as a moment of uncomplicated popular clarity. In the coffee house, workers argue over whether the British can be forced out at all: one cautions that “you cannot play with a lion’s tail,” only for another to insist, “The lion’s old now, man. His mane is falling out.” The protagonist, Khaled, fails to understand “what this lion thing is they’re talking about.” The moment is revealing. 

Political consciousness in The Neighbors emerges slowly, unevenly, and partially, and within its realist form, the novel captures a skepticism that runs alongside anti-colonial hope. Many locals doubt that Iranian control of oil would materially transform their lives, believing they would still be “struggling to make a hole in the butt of a needle.” Mahmoud thus distinguishes between symbolic national victory and the deeper question of whether power has changed hands in any meaningful sense for the poor.

The novel’s later arc darkens as the hopes of the nationalization period run into repression and the collapse of that political moment around the 1953 coup. A square protest briefly gathers a wider social solidarity around oil nationalization, as demonstrators denounce the exploitation of Iran’s national wealth before gunshots scatter the crowd, bring down the banners, and turn the sky into a swirl of pamphlets. 

What follows is the crushing of that political moment—arrests, Khaled’s imprisonment, torture, and solitary confinement. Khaled’s coming of age is inseparable from disillusionment. He does not simply “join politics”; he realizes that adulthood in this world means entering history through coercion, surveillance, prison, and betrayal. 

This is the Iran that the 1953 CIA- and MI6-engineered coup against Mossadegh destroyed—a moment of genuine popular mobilization around resource sovereignty and working-class organization. Mahmoud does not let us forget that the Cold War “stability” the West imposed had a price paid entirely by people like Khaled’s neighbors. 

To describe Iran only as a repressive Islamic regime is to begin the story far too late. The present order did not arise from cultural inevitability or religious essence; it emerged from the violent foreclosure of another future. Reading Mahmoud reminds us that. 

The Age of Orphans (2009) by Laleh Khadivi

Where Mahmoud works within the register of social realism and labor history, diasporic author Laleh Khadivi’s The Age of Orphans operates more like a tragic epic. Spanning the early Pahlavi period through the Shah’s rule and the 1979 revolution, the novel becomes less a story of one man than a history of modern Iran told through Kurdish dispossession and militarization. 

The Age of Orphans opens in 1921 in the Zagros mountains, where an unnamed Kurdish boy lives inside a tribal world defined by kinship, ritual, land, and a rich oral culture. That world is shattered when the boy watches his father being killed by the army. He survives the massacre and is absorbed by the very forces that destroyed his people. A bureaucrat gives him a new state-made identity—Reza Pejman Khourdi.

From an orphaned Kurdish child, Reza transforms into a soldier of the Iranian state. Here, the novel shifts, showing how conquest works not only through killing but also through renaming, erasure of language, discipline, and remaking of identity. 

Reza internalizes military ideology and rises through the ranks precisely by turning brutality against other Kurds. Khadivi is unflinching about this process: Reza’s ambition and shame become fused, so that assimilation is never peaceful. It requires him to disown his origins and prove himself through violence. 

By the time he is a young officer, he is both beneficiary and victim of the state’s demand for unity. The Age of Orphans’s tragic force comes from this contradiction: Reza seeks belonging through the machinery that made him an orphan in the first place. 

Reza marries Meena, an educated woman in Tehran, briefly staging the fantasy of modern Iran: the urbane, literate Tehrani woman and the ambitious officer. But Khadivi slowly dismantles that fantasy. Reza’s violence and buried past haunt the marriage, and when the couple is posted in Kermanshah, near Reza’s homeland, everything fractures. 

Meena is appalled by the life she finds there. Their marriage becomes a struggle for mastery over one another, over the Kurdish villagers, and over the land itself. 

Interwoven with several voices—his parents, wife, children, superiors, victims, and even the nonhuman witnesses—The Age of Orphans prevents Reza from fully mastering the narrative of his own assimilation. 

He eventually realizes that, “To his boys, Reza can only give flags and state songs and portraits of a medallioned shah. He can give them streets and citizenship, but never the freedom to travel the borderless land or the stable sensation of home.” The line captures with particular force the violence of border-making: the Iranian nation-state comes into being not simply through political consolidation, but through demarcation, dispossession, and the transformation of homeland into territory.

Khadivi thus shows that the modern state is not built by consensus alone, but by force: by erasing language, conscripting the marginalized, and turning violence into the price of belonging. At a moment when Iran is again being spoken of as a problem to be managed from above, this novel returns us to those who paid for that order from below.