Sadegh Zibakalam is a writer, journalist and professor of political sciences. He holds a doctorate in Political Science from Bradford University in the United Kingdom and is currently Professor at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences at the University of Tehran. However, after years of teaching at the Azad University of Tehran, he was dismissed from his position as a professor at the university in 2017 for comments that he made publicly. Zibakalam also has several ongoing lawsuits filed against him.

Prior to the 1979 Islamic Revolution in Iran, Zibakalam studied chemical engineering in the United Kingdom, continuing his studies until he achieved his doctorate in the field. In the summer of 1974, while he was traveling back to Iran, Zibakalam was arrested by the National Organization for Security and Intelligence, or SAVAK, the Pahlavi Shah’s intelligence service and secret police, and was sentenced to three years imprisonment on charges of “sabotage against the government” and “carrying propaganda for the Mojahedin-i-Khalq Organization,” also known as the MKO, or the People's Mujahideen.

Zibakalam was released from prison in September 1976 after having served two years of his three-year prison sentence.

After his release, Iranian security agencies prevented him from returning to the United Kingdom, and he began working in Iran at the University of Tehran's Faculty of Engineering. 

Following the Islamic Revolution of Iran in 1979, Sadegh Zibakalam returned to the UK in 1984 to continue his education. Instead of continuing his studies in chemical engineering, he turned to the humanities, earning a master's degree and then a doctorate from the Faculty of Peace Studies and International Development at the University of Bradford,

In 1990, Zibakalam returned to Iran and after two years he was accepted into the Political Science Group at the Faculty of Law and Political Sciences at the University of Tehran.

In June 2014, Sadegh Zibakalam was sentenced to 18 months imprisonment on three charges. The charges were “propaganda activities against the state,” “spreading lies with the intention of disturbing the public mind” and “insulting judges and judicial officials.” 

Zibakalam announced this news in a post on his Facebook page on June 18, 2014, in which he wrote that the evidence in support of the three charges was a question that he asked about “the nuclear policy of the Islamic Republic of Iran” and his criticism of “the judicial procedure in the case of those accused of embezzling 3,000 billion tomans.”

According to his Facebook post, Zibakalam wrote a letter to Hossein Shariatmadari, the editor-in-chief of the conservative Kayhan newspaper, and Hamid Rasaei, a member of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, asking the question: “How does Iran’s nuclear programme benefit the country?” He was subsequently sentenced to one year imprisonment by the Attorney General of Tehran.

Zibakalam also published a statement in February 2013 in which he critiqued the court’s verdicts of a legal case involving the embezzlement of 3,000 billion tomans. He called Mahafarid Amir Khosravi, the primary defendant in the case, who was sentenced to death, a “genius.” According to him, Khosravi's execution had no legal basis and he was the only victim of the embezzlement case.

According to Zibakalam, one of the pieces of evidence that was cited in support of his accusations was his statement about the legal case. 

In response to Zibakalam’s aforementioned letter, Shariatmadari spoke about the importance of the nuclear issue to Iran, saying: “If he [Zibakalam] is really worried about the unemployment [in Iran] and the current economic problems, why did he previously defend an individual [Khosravi] who has been accused of the misuse and economic fraud of 3,000 billion tomans with the false claim that he is an entrepreneur?” 

Zibakalam appealed against the court’s sentence. Eventually, in November 2014, the Court of Appeals commuted his sentence of 18 months imprisonment to a monetary fine of five million tomans. 

However, in a separate legal case in March 2018, Zibakalam was once again sentenced to 18 months imprisonment and a two-year ban on political and social activity by Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Courts of Tehran on charges of “propaganda against the state” and “spreading lies.” The evidence cited in support of these two accusations was Zibakalam's interview with the Persian language section of Deutsche Welle radio in Germany, in which he spoke about the nationwide protests in January 2018.

In the interview, he stated that: “the accumulation of the demands and desires [of the people] over the previous years” was the main cause of nationwide protests in Iran, and said that if a referendum were held in Iran, more than 70% of the people would say “no” to the Islamic Republic.

The court’s initial verdict has been issued in this case and it is now awaiting the appeal hearings.

In August 2019, Sadegh Zibakalam was also sentenced to one year imprisonment by the Special Clerical Courts on the charge of “spreading lies with the intention of disturbing the public mind.” This sentence was issued on the basis of one of Zibakalam's posts on Instagram. In the post, Zibakalam compared the budget allocated for the employment of 300,000 clerics with the budget for the province of Kurdistan, the province of Sistan and Baluchestan and Iran's budget for environmental affairs.

In an interview with Borna News Agency, Zibakalam said at the time that: “I published a post on my Instagram page and calculated that if we consider a salary of at least 2.5 million tomans per month for each one of the 300,000 clerics to hold the position in Iran, it is somewhere in the region of 9,000 billion tomans a year. I compared this figure with the budgets of the provinces of Kurdistan, Sistan and Baluchestan, the country's budget for environmental affairs, or the University of Tehran, each of which are between 400 to 800 billion tomans a year."

Zibakalam also spoke about his sentence in an interview with the Etemad newspaper in which he said: “the issued sentence has no legal validity” and that the court sentenced him to one year imprisonment for “spreading lies with the intention of disturbing public opinion.” Zibakalam appealed the court’s verdict and the legal case is currently awaiting the appeal hearings. No final verdict has yet been issued in the case.

As such Zibakalam is awaiting the final verdict in both his second and third legal cases.

In the past few years, two of Sadegh Zibakalam’s books have faced problems being granted a publishing licence from Iran's Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance. In January 2021, Zibakalam announced that the Ministry of Islamic Guidance and Culture opposed the publication of his book, The Shah Did Not Kill, and that the book would not be granted a publication license. Zibakalam stated that one possible reason for opposing the publication of this book was that “the contents of the book contradicted the government’s official narrative.”

Zibakalam’s previous book, Reza Shah, has also not yet been granted a publishing license by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance.

Zibakalam, who had been teaching at the University of Tehran and the Islamic Azad University of Tehran at the same time, was expelled from his position as a professor at Azad University in 2017. Zibakalam stated that his dismissal was related to Farhad Rahbar’s appointment to managerial positions at the Islamic Azad University, as Rahbar had a hardline conservative political orientation.

Sadegh Zibakalam's most prominent literary works include: How Did We Become What We Are, How Did the West Become the West, Hashemi Unvarnished, Tradition and Modernity, From Huntington and Khatami to Bin Laden, The Illusion of Conspiracy and Reza Shah. The latter book, Reza Shah, was illicitly published in Iran and online after it was denied a publishing license.