Sazegara earned his master’s degree in history at Shahid Beheshti University in Iran, and went on to complete his doctoral thesis on religious intellectuals and the Islamic revolution at the University of London 1996. After the 1997 election of reformist President Mohammad Khatami, Sazegara published several reformist newspapers including Jamee, Toos, and Golestan-e-Iran, all of which were closed by the hard-line regime.
In the late-1970s, Sazegara was an undergraduate student at both Sharif University of Technology in Iran and the Illinois Institute of Technology, during which time he was a leader of the student movement against the Shah. During the 1979 revolution, he returned to Iran and served as a founder of the Revolutionary Guard Corps and the managing director of the National Radio of Iran (1979–1981).
