Dissident Spotlight: Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee
Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee has been in and out of Iranian prisons since 2014 for a fictional story she wrote in her private notebook.

In 2014, Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee wrote a story in her notebook about someone who saw a film about a woman being stoned to death in Iran. The protagonist was so enraged by the film that she burned a copy of the Koran. The film the story’s protagonist saw was real — The Stoning of Soraya M (2008) — but the protagonist and the Koran she burned were fictional.
That didn’t stop Iran’s Revolutionary Guards from storming her house in a raid targeting her and her husband, another longtime human rights activist. After the Revolutionary Guard found the unpublished story in her notebook, Iraee was arrested and sentenced to six years in prison for “insulting Islamic sanctities” and “spreading propaganda against the system.”
Iraee was briefly allowed out of prison while her case faced judicial review, but the Revolutionary Guard interfered to delay her appeal and keep her in prison longer. Iraee was eventually sent back to prison. She was tortured and beaten during her sentence but survived until her release in May 2022.
The Revolutionary Guard arrested her again in September 2022. During the protests demanding justice for Mahshi Amini, who died in police custody after she was arrested for improperly wearing her hijab, Iran targeted former political prisoners and human rights activists to stifle dissent.
In November 2022, Iraee was charged with "assembly and collusion against the regime" and "propaganda against the regime." She’s currently serving a five-year sentence.
Old Freethinking Traditions
There are some obvious lessons about the horrors of totalitarian governments like Iran’s. Americans freely express outrage at their leaders for real and perceived wrongs. Religious criticism certainly isn’t off the table, either.
But Iraee’s story is reminiscent of a much older intellectual tradition.
An Islamic freethinker from the ninth century, Ibn al-Rawandi, wrote a Scoratic dialogue between himself and his friend and mentor, Isa al-Warraq. In the surviving scraps of The Book of the Emerald, Ibn al-Rawandi defends prophecy while Isa al-Warraq criticizes it. If there’s no such thing as prophecy, then Mohammad’s role as God’s final prophet collapses. Ibn al-Rawandi’s dialogue is an attack on a central part of the Islamic worldview.
Ibn al-Rawandi is widely recognized as a critic of prophecy as a source of authority. So, it’s notable that he gave his own point of view to someone else. Historian Sarah Stroumsa argues in her book Freethinkers of Medieval Islam that Ibn al-Rawandi likely ended this dialogue by having his “character” become convinced by the anti-prophecy arguments and reverse the beliefs he held throughout the work.
We don’t know what Iraee’s plans were for her unpublished story. It could’ve been published in protest or remained a private expression of horror at Iran’s continued use of stoning as an execution method. Either way, Iraee is part of a rich history of intellectuals expressing their views through the mouths of fictional others.