Mojahedin meaning

Anyone who remembers Iran in the 1950s and 1960s can attest that it was an era marked by severe repression against the dissidents and political activists. After conducting the 1953 coup against Dr. Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s popular Prime Minister who nationalized the country’s oil industry, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s monarch, had forced all opposition groups and movements into silence and submission.

Through his brutal secret police, the Savak, Pahlavi had established an iron-fisted rule.

It was under these circumstances that on September 6, 1965, three Iranian intellectuals, Mohammad Hanifnejad, Saeid Mohsen and Ali Asghar Badizadegan, founded a new opposition movement that later became the People’s Mojahedin Organization of Iran (PMOI/MEK), the principal and longest-standing Iranian opposition movement.

The trio were inspired by the authentic interpretation of Islam that rejects all forms of fundamentalism, which had previously been the dominant interpretation of the r