The literacy campaign in contemporary Iran is one of the most important institutions that mobilized millions of Iranians either as teachers or learners from 1964 until the present and has parallels worldwide. Yet, it is marginalized in studies of the causes and consequences of the 1979 revolution. A few scholarly works that examined adult education did so by exclusively focusing on the efficiency of pedagogical systems, textbooks’ content, and teaching methods in increasing functional and sustained literacy among adults. This leaves a significant lacuna in understanding the state’s efforts in citizen-making through this public platform. Focusing on adult education’s mobilization and political socialization aspects, this paper addresses the campaign’s crucial role in creating new citizens in the Iranian rural and urban areas. This paper takes us back to the transformative years before and after the fall of the Pahlavi shah in 1979 to trace the history and evolution of the literacy campaigns as grassroots and institutions mobilizing adults in the countryside and poor neighborhoods on the margins of the cities. Unlike the Islamic Republic of Iran that touted the literacy campaign as a unique initiative invented by Ayatollah Khomeini, I recognize the postrevolutionary adult education as a continuation of the Pahlavi literacy campaign. Locating this campaign in the early 1960s instead of the early 1980s allows us to identify the evolution of this campaign beyond state change and track the continuity of the several decades of the states’ efforts in citizen-making through adult education in Iran. I argue that both the Pahlavi Literacy Corps (Sepah-e Danesh) and the IRI’s Literacy Movement (Nehzat-e Savadamuzi) functioned as a vehicle for creating new citizens, though the former influenced by “modernization theory” stressed on making “modern and civilized citizen,” and the latter influenced by the discourse of “pedagogy of oppressed” aspired to create “revolutionary and independent citizen.” Interestingly, even the rhetoric used by the Pahlavi and IRI’s leaders was the same in promoting what they called “Literacy Jihad” for “eradicating ignorance” and “fighting the darkness.” Relying on a combination of textual analysis, archival research, oral history, and testimonies of campaign participants and learners, this paper shows how the literacy campaign in both regimes was instrumentalized to produce what the states considered as the “ideal” citizen.