A Global Fight: Persian Shia Narratives of Decolonization in Late Pahlavi Iran In the 1960s, as decolonization descended upon different regions of the world, Iranian thinkers participated in debates about inequality, social mobility, and race. Various writers – whether religious or secular in orientation – pondered Iran’s place in these narratives. This paper focuses on publications with a religious bent that dealt with decolonization in different contexts, including in Islamic communities of Africa. In particular, it tries to isolate a Shia narrative on decolonization that transcended national boundaries and in some ways foreshadowed the religious ideologies of the 1979 Islamic Revolution. The essay will focus not only on the relevant writings of well-known figures such as Ali Shariati, but also on the publications of lesser known individuals that later assumed positions of relative prominence in the Islamic Republic. Some of these figures include: Seyyed Hadi Khosroshahi and Parviz Khorsand. I will explore the journals, Maktab-e Tashayyo‘ and Nashriyeh-e Ma‘aref- e Ja‘fari, to highlight the prominent themes covered. In addition, I will juxtapose these narratives against the public gestures of religiosity on the part of the Pahlavi elite, including the shah and his queen, who also performed pilgrimages to holy Islamic sites, including Shia shrines, during those years. Finally, the paper will discuss the disempowerment of the Shia in the Arab Middle East in the two decades preceding the 1979 revolution in order to map Shia efforts to “decolonize” their histories from nationalist and dominant Sunni narratives of the time. The paper considers the impact of Shia migration across different national spaces and domains on decolonizing discourses principally through a close reading of the era’s Persian publications.