Fada'iyan-e Islam

Society of Fadayeen Islam
جمعیت فدائیان اسلام
General SecretaryMohammad-Mehdi Abdekhodaei
FounderNavab Safavi
Founded1946
Legalised2 July 1989 (1989-07-02)[1]
HeadquartersQom and Tehran
NewspaperManshoor-e-Baradari
Membership (1949)<100[2]
IdeologyPolitical Islam[3]
Islamic fundamentalism[3]
Islamic revivalism[3] Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist
ReligionShia Islam
SloganPersian: اسلام برتر از همه چیز است و هیچ چیز برتر از اسلام نیست
"Islam is above anything and nothing is above Islam"
Website
www.fadaeian.ir

Fadayan-e Islam (Persian: فدائیان اسلام; English; "Fedayeen of Islam" or "Self-Sacrificers of Islam"[4]) is a Shia fundamentalist group in Iran with a strong activist political and terrorist orientation.[3][5][6][7][8] The group was founded in 1946, and registered as a political party in 1989. It was founded by a theology student, Navvab Safavi. Safavi sought to purify Islam in Iran by ridding it of 'corrupting individuals' by means of carefully planned assassinations of certain leading intellectual and political figures.[9]

The group executed a series of successful assassinations (author Ahmad Kasravi, court minister (and former prime minister) Abdolhossein Hazhir, the Prime Minister Haj Ali Razmara, the former education minister Abdul Hamid Zangeneh) and attempted assassinations (the Shah of Iran, foreign minister Hossein Fatemi) and succeeded in freeing of some of its assassins from punishment with the help of the group's powerful clerical supporters. Eventually the group was suppressed and Safavi was executed by the Iranian government in the mid-1950s. The group survived as supporters of the Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian Revolution.[10][11][12]

  1. ^ "List of Legally Registerred Parties in Iran". Khorasan Newspaper. Pars Times. July 30, 2000. p. 4. Retrieved 21 August 2015.
  2. ^ Abrahamian, Ervand (2013). The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the roots of modern U.S.-Iranian relations. New York: The New Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-1-59558-826-5. Although these and future assassinations gave the Fedayan much publicity, their inner core contained no more than a handful of zealots. Their total membership was less than a hundred. Most were young semiliterate apprentices in the Tehran bazaar.
  3. ^ a b c d FEDĀʾĪĀN-E ESLĀM. (1999). In Encyclopædia Iranica. Retrieved from http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/fedaian-e-esla The Fedāʾīān’s importance in Persian politics was due to several related factors. First, they were exceptionally successful as a rebel organization
  4. ^ "Ali Razmara – Prime Minister of Iran". Encyclopædia Britannica. 25 August 2016. Retrieved 12 December 2016.
  5. ^ Masoud Kazemzadeh (4 January 2005). "Finding Mossadegh. (Reconstructing the story of a coup that changed history)". Web.mit.edu. The "terrorist group" that Kermit Roosevelt and Donald Wilber mobilized was the Fadaian Islam
  6. ^ Iran: between tradition and modernity By Ramin Jahanbegloo
  7. ^ Ostovar, Afshon P. (2009). Guardians of the Islamic Revolution: Ideology, Politics, and the Development of Military Power in Iran (1979–2009) (PDF) (Ph.D.). The University of Michigan. p. 35. The Fada'iyan-e Islam were the first Shiite Islamist organization to employ terrorism as a primary method of political activism
  8. ^ Denoeux, Guilain (1993). "Religious Networks and Urban Unrest". Urban Unrest in the Middle East: A Comparative Study of Informal Networks in Egypt, Iran, and Lebanon. SUNY series in the Social and Economic History of the Middle East. SUNY Press. p. 177. ISBN 9781438400846.
  9. ^ Taheri, The Spirit of Allah, (1985), p. 98
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference Taheri-187 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  11. ^ Cite error: The named reference Moin-224 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  12. ^ Cite error: The named reference Taheri, 1985 p.107-8 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).