Mostafa Mehrayin, a sociologist and former faculty member of the Institute for Humanities and Cultural Studies, has been arrested and taken to prison to serve his sentence. News of the arrest of the critical sociologist, who had called on Ali Khamenei in open letters to step down from power, was published on his Instagram page on Saturday, 10 October 2026.
According to IranWire and the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA), the exact date of the arrest and the name of the prison to which Mr. Mehrayin has been transferred have not yet been announced. In January–February 2026, the sentence enforcement office of Tehran's District 33 Prosecutor's Office (the Evin prosecutor's office) had notified him that he must report within three days to serve his sentence.
Mostafa Mehrayin's sentence and the charges
According to HRANA, Branch 15 of Tehran's Revolutionary Court, presided over by Abolqasem Salavati, sentenced Mr. Mehrayin in November–December 2025 to a total of eight years in prison: five years for "assembly and collusion to commit a crime against national security", one year for "propaganda against the system" and two years for "insulting the leader". The Tehran Provincial Court of Appeal upheld the sentence in December 2025–January 2026. Under the rule on enforcing the most severe punishment, five years of the sentence can be carried out.
The court also sentenced him to a two-year ban on activity in cyberspace, the media and the press, a two-year ban on membership in political and social parties and groups, and a two-year travel ban.
Open letters to Ali Khamenei
According to Iran International, in recent years Mr. Mehrayin wrote three critical letters addressed to Ali Khamenei, challenging the domestic and foreign policies of the Islamic Republic. In the third letter, addressing Khamenei, he had written: "I am not your slave, and you are not the master of the Iranian nation."
Security forces had earlier arrested him in Tehran on 15 June 2025. According to HRANA, he was first held in Greater Tehran Penitentiary and then in Qom prison, and was released on bail on 22 July 2025. After the first-instance verdict was issued, Mr. Mehrayin wrote a letter to Abolqasem Salavati, the judge in his case, calling the verdict full of lies and bias.
Mostafa Mehrayin holds a doctorate in cultural sociology from Tarbiat Modares University and has written and translated works on the sociology of culture, art and literature. His arrest is part of the continuing wave of repression of intellectuals, journalists and labor activists, including Majid Saeedi, a news photographer who is still without word a month after his arrest and Mahmoud Beheshti Langarudi, a teachers' union activist summoned to the Revolutionary Prosecutor's Office.
The sociologist who had asked Khamenei to step down from power must now spend five years in prison.
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