On November 22, 2025, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents detained Vahid Abedini, an Iranian national and assistant professor of Iranian Studies at the University of Oklahoma; he was released three days later.
Abedini’s commentary is pro-regime. Within the context of the Islamic Republic, Abedini positions himself as a reformist who criticizes the hardliners and praises his own camp. He spoke of former President Hassan Rouhani’s “expanding internet freedom” and criticized then-President Ebrahim Raisi’s reversal of that “accomplishment.” In reality, Freedom House assessed Iran’s internet freedom as “not free” throughout Rouhani’s term. Abedini’s Persian writings similarly defend the reform movement. In 2024, he endorsed Masoud Pezeshkian for president.
Within the context of the Islamic Republic, Abedini positions himself as a reformist who criticizes the hardliners and praises his own camp.
Hardliners and reformists set aside their disputes when it comes to Israel, and Abedini fits the mold. In a 2024 interview with an Iranian newspaper, Ensaf News, he accused Israel of genocide. In a separate Persian interview on May 9, 2025, he emphasized Iran’s right to conduct uranium enrichment. His English academic activism promotes the idea that the Islamic Republic is liberalizing, but U.S. pressure on the regime impedes progress, and Iranians prefer participating in elections to affect slow change rather than regime change. Polls contradict this claim. He has been silent on the 2022 protests.
Most telling is a 2019 essay he published for the regime’s official Islamic Republic News Agency, in which he condemned the anticipated Middle East Peace and Security Conference in Warsaw for attempting to contain Iran’s regional influence. He attacked Saudi Arabia for participating in a conference together with Israel, calling the Jewish state “the first-degree enemy in the Islamic world and the Arab world.” Ironically, he mocked President Donald Trump’s base for being “backwards” and “religious,” while excusing Iran’s literal clerical regime. Most importantly, he called the Islamic Revolution of 1979 “a popular revolution and undoubtedly a progress … toward modern republicanism.”
Abedini’s family connections raise further questions about his presence in the United States to begin with. His father-in-law is Mohsen Armin, a reformist figure who co-founded the Islamist-Marxist Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization. After a schism within the organization, he joined its pro-Islamic Republic wing. According to Fars News, a website affiliated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, Armin was a manager at the Evin prison during the 1988 massacres, an allegation he denies. Hossein Fadayi, currently an adviser to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei, recounts, “Managing the main part of the prison’s Ward 209, which was the [Mojahedin’s] ward, belonged to the attorney general and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps … and I and Mr. Armin and Mr. [Mohammad-Baqer] Zolghadr, and other guys [managed it] together,” adding that Armin advocated for reintegration of the prisoners who repented but was unpersuasive. One of the prisoners was his brother, Mahmoud Armin; the regime executed him, but his body remains missing. Some allege that Mohsen Armin personally tortured his brother.
Armin was a member of the Sixth Parliament, dominated by the reformists. He was sidelined during the presidency of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and detained in the aftermath of the 2009 fraudulent election. He was sentenced to six months’ imprisonment and a five-year ban from politics. After signing a letter objecting to violence against protesters in 2019, he was sentenced to one year in prison. Despite these, in a recent speech to the Reform Front, he proposed reforms within the system to preserve the regime and again condemned advocates of regime change.
If Abedini failed to disclose his family ties in his visa application, the United States should deport him.
Abedini’s views and family raise two questions—one on the state of the U.S. academy and the other on his visa admission. First, his appointment is at Oklahoma’s Farzaneh Family Center for Iranian and Persian Gulf Studies, supported by two Iranian American brothers. Iranian studies are under-resourced, and too often the diaspora, whose interests are advocacy and not necessarily honest scholarship, supports them. The center is run by Joshua Landis, a fellow at the isolationist Quincy Institute, and an apologist for Bashar al-Assad. Someone so partisan and without a scholarly approach should not teach American students about Iran.
Second, if Abedini failed to disclose his family ties in his visa application, the United States should deport him. If he did, it is a scandal worthy of congressional investigation that someone with close and continuing family ties to an enemy regime was allowed entry to the United States.
During the Cold War, it would have been unacceptable that a supporter of Nikita Khrushchev or even Mikhail Gorbachev, whose father-in-law was an adviser to the Soviet leader, would teach Russian studies at an American university. Abedini is exactly such a person, and that the University of Oklahoma is not embarrassed by his employment is scandalous. Then again, perhaps the money behind the Farzaneh Family Center trumps the democratic and liberal values that the University of Oklahoma publicly expresses.
