Cambridge investigates claims Iran dissidents were misquoted in doctorate that ‘whitewashes’ the regime

Several of the women who Saeidi claimed to have interviewed have come forward to allege that they had never met her.

They claim the work – which describes how middle-class women “constructed their sense of belonging in the post-revolutionary state” – effectively “whitewashes” the regime.

The university is already facing intense scrutiny over former professor Jason Arday, who resigned following discrepancies on his CV.

Saeidi shared image of Alireza Tangsiri, commander of the IRGC navy who was killed in an Israeli strike (Instagram)[Missing Credit]

Now, according to correspondence seen by the JC, Cambridge has appointed a third-party investigator to examine the allegations regarding Saeidi and her work.

Publicity material on the Cambridge University Press website states the book is “based on extensive interviews and oral histories as well as archival sources”.

Outlining the approach, it adds: “Despite the Islamic Republic’s non-democratic structures, multiple forms of citizenship have developed in post-revolutionary Iran” which “destabilises the binary formulation of democratisation and authoritarianism”.

It adds: “The book demonstrates how women remake their rights.”

As part of her research, Saeidi interviewed former prisoners of the Islamic Republic, who were not named in her dissertation but were in the book.

Letters seen by the JC show that four of the women cited by Saeidi claim they were misquoted.

Saeidi wrote that she had interviewed Nasrin Parvaz, who was imprisoned between 1982 and 1990, stating: “I have both interviewed Parvaz and read her work,” noting Parvaz’s memoir is “over 300 pages and in Farsi”.

But Parvaz says she has never met Saeidi.

In a letter to the university press’s “research integrity adviser” Parvaz said: “She has used words or sentences that don’t belong to me.”

“I never knew Saeidi,” she said, “I never had an interview with her.”

She also claims that Saeidi misrepresented quotes from her memoir, and misattributed a poem she translated as her own.

Saeidi wrote that the poem Dear Fahimeh was written by Parvaz, but Parvaz told Cambridge: “Dear Fahimeh is not my poem! It was written by a prisoner in honour of her friend, Fahimeh Taghadosi, who was executed.

"About 20 years later I translated this poem and it was published in [the journal] Modern Poetry in Translation.”

She accused Saeidi of “whitewashing” the crimes of the Islamic republic in her work.

Saeidi also wrote that she interviewed Maryam Nouri, author of the memoir In Search of Liberation, in Cologne in 2008, and even dedicated her dissertation to her, as well as “everyone who was on a war front or in a prison cell from 1980-88 in Iran”.

Nouri, however, told Cambridge: “I have never met with Ms Shirin Saeidi, nor have I had any interview with her in the city of Cologne or in any other city in Germany.”

An image of Saeidi originally posted on Instagram (AAIRIA)[Missing Credit]

After examining quotations attributed to her, Nouri, who was imprisoned by the Islamic Republic in 1985 while pregnant and later gave birth in jail, accused Saeidi of “extensive distortion, misrepresentation and fabrication of my identity in the dissertation and book”.

She wrote: “These alterations have produced a fabricated version of my identity and have attributed to me claims, beliefs, and positions that are entirely false” and submitted a formal complaint to the university regarding “the unethical and unauthorised use of my personal memoir and the fabrication of interview material”.

Nazli Partov, who spent more than eight years in Iranian prisons and whose brother was executed by the regime in 1988, was also quoted in Saeidi’s work.

Partov said she met Saeidi once in Sweden in 2009 but recalled making clear that any quotes from their conversation could only be used if the interview was recorded and a transcript sent to her for approval. According to Partov, Saeidi did neither.

It was 16 years later that the former political prisoner learnt that the book had been published with quotations attributed to her.

Partov said that some of the quotes are “inaccurate, vague, or incomprehensible – words I never said and that were never reviewed or approved by me”.

She also refuted Saeidi’s claims that she supported the Peykar organisation, an Iranian Marxist-Leninist group, and that Partov’s family had ties to the Tudeh Party, the Iranian communist organisation.

“Both statements are completely false,” Partov said.

The Cambridge investigation comes after Saeidi was dismissed from her tenured position at the University of Arkansas over offensive social media posts.

Appointed in 2018 as an assistant professor of political science and director of the King Fahd Centre for Middle East Studies, Saeidi was fired in December after an investigation found she had violated the university’s anti-discrimination policies.

In a repost on X last December, she shared a message translated from Persian that stated: “Thrust the dagger from Doha into the throats of the Zionists, so that all of them howl.” In another post, she called for Israel to be “dismantled”.

Following an appeal of that decision, Arkansas president Jay Silveria upheld the dismissal. He wrote to her on March 26: “Your amplification of the idea that daggers should be thrust into the throats of Zionists could be readily construed as advocacy of violence against Jews or denial of the Jewish people’s right to self-determination – particularly since the term ‘Zionist’ is often used as a proxy for ‘Jew’.”

A post on Saeidi's social media in support of the Islamic Republic (Instagram)[Missing Credit]

Saeidi’s submission of evidence on official University of Arkansas letterhead to Sweden’s Svea Court of Appeal in the case of Hamid Nouri, the former Iranian prison official convicted of war crimes and murder over the 1988 mass executions, has also been cited by her critics.

According to Iranian dissident campaigner Lawdan Bazargan, who runs the organisation Alliance Against Islamic Regime of Iran Apologists (AAIRIA), in that letter, Saeidi cast doubt on the authenticity of Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa ordering the 1988 executions.

Bazargan, whose family member was a victim of the 1988 prison massacres, sent a formal complaint to University of Arkansas that raised concerns over Saeidi’s intervention in the Nouri appeal using official university letterhead.

Bazargan said Saeidi’s submission cast doubt on survivor testimony relating to crimes against humanity.

Speaking to the JC, Bazargan explained her view of the issue with Saeidi’s thesis and book: “It whitewashes the Islamic Republic by reframing the survival and resistance of Iranian women under a deeply discriminatory system as evidence that the regime itself provides women with meaningful agency.

“These women’s ‘agency’ was not bestowed upon them by the Islamic Republic, it was exercised in defiance of it.”

Between 2012 and 2014, Saeidi lived in Iran and taught at Tehran University, where she received support from state-linked institutions, including the Islamic Revolution Art Centre, which is affiliated with the Islamic Propaganda Organisation and operates under the supervision of the Supreme Leader.

In a 2014 interview with the Iranian publication Okhovvat, Saeidi said she had “put pressure” on people and “confronted” them directly over writing that “was harming Iran”.

She said: “Sometimes we even confronted people directly and put pressure on them. Second, we tried to recruit groups whose views were closer to ours or that opposed their own governments’ policies.

"One such group was Code Pink. We worked with them to some extent and tried to bring anti-war activists to Iran. These efforts were carried out quietly and on the margins.”

Saeidi reposted a video in support of former Cambridge academic Jason Arday (Instagram)[Missing Credit]

In the same interview, Saeidi said left-wing groups outside Iran had “cooperated” with her efforts, “even though they knew we were supporters of the Islamic Republic because we shared a common enemy: imperialism”.

She added: “People find it surprising that a girl who grew up in the West likes the Supreme Leader.”

The JC has reviewed dozens of Saeidi’s social media posts expressing support for the hardline regime. She has shared videos of the Islamic Republic’s first supreme leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and his successor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Posting an image of Alireza Tangsiri, who served as commander of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) Navy from 2018 until he was killed in an Israeli strike earlier this year, Saeidi wrote: “The man who transformed global security politics. Iran is a superpower.”

She also shared a video produced by the Good Law Project claiming the media was attempting to “smear” former Cambridge professor Jason Arday with allegations of plagiarism, adding the comment: “Plagiarism accusations are their new tactic.”

She did not respond to the JC’s request for comment and has repeatedly claimed that she is “an intellectual who is in danger because of her research and her political views”.

She said in a recent Instagram post: “Despite the fact that I have presented ample evidence that the University of Arkansas knows I have not violated any policies... they have placed my life in danger, they have placed my entire security, my income, my healthcare, all of that is in danger.

“I fear that I could be falsely arrested because I have been framed as a terrorist… I am in danger. I am a feminist Iranian scholar, and I am your colleague.”

The Scholars at Risk Network has named Saeidi as a cause of “concern”, claiming her dismissal was “an apparent attempt to placate persons outside of the university who objected to the professor’s extramural speech”.

Scholars at Risk said: “Academics should enjoy the full scope of rights as all other persons, including free expression (free speech), freedom of association, and due process.”

A Cambridge University Press spokesperson said: “Cambridge University Press takes all complaints about our publications seriously and we are continuing to investigate the issues raised.”