Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906 Narratives of the Enlightenment Edited by Ali M Ansari First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Gingko Library 70 Cadogan Place London SW1X 9AH Copyright © 2016 individual chapters, the contributors Introduction Copyright © Ali M Ansari 2016 The rights of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patent Act 1988. ISBN 978 1 909942 91 2 eISBN 978 1 1 909942 94 3 Typeset in Times by MacGuru Ltd All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Printed and bound in Spain by Liberdúplex. www.gingkolibrary.com Contents Introduction 1 Ali M Ansari 1. Iran’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Notes on Constitutional Experience and Conflicting Narratives of Modernity 15 Ali Gheissari 2. From Narrating History to Constructing Memory: The Role of Photography in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution 48 Elahe Helbig 3. The Enlightenment and Historical Difference: The Case of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution 76 Kamran Matin 4. Shrinking Borders and Expanding Vocabularies: Translation and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906 98 Milad Odabaei 5. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the influence of Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani’s Political Thought 116 Pejman Abdolmohammadi 6. Realism, Nationalism and Criticism: Iranian Enlightenment and the Philosophy of Literature in Mirza Fatali Akhundzade’s Works 129 Salour Evaz Malayeri 7. “To mean or not to mean?” as the underlying question of Western- inspired counter-Enlightenment discourse in Iran 149 Urs Goesken 8. In Search of the Secret Center in Constitutional Tabriz 170 Evan Siegel 9. Early Translations of Modern European Philosophy. On the Significance of an Under-Researched Phenomenon for the Study of Modern Iranian Intellectual History 200 Roman Seidel 10. Looking Back at Mashrutih: Late Pahlavi Narratives on the Constitutional Revolution 223 Siavush Randjbar-Daemi Contributors 239 Index 243 Any views expressed are those of the authors of the chapters and do not necessarily represent those of the Gingko Library. Introduction: Developing Iranian Intellectual History Ali M Ansari Perhaps the most influential writer on the Constitutional Revolution of Iran was the British Orientalist Edward G. Browne. His ‘Persian Revolution’, published in 1909 effectively established the narratives that would dominate the historiography of the constitutional movement and the revolution it generated, for decades to come.1 Browne effectively narrated it as an Iranian awakening – drawing explicit comparisons with the Italian Risorgimento2 – that had its roots in the Tobacco Boycott of 1891/2, and which, perhaps more interestingly, was emphatically influ- enced by the intellectual leadership of Jamal al Din Al Afghani, the political icon- oclast whom Browne cast as a ‘pan-Islamist’. This was another characterisation that would help shape our understanding of both the constitutional movement to say nothing of Afghani himself.3 Browne’s deep affection for the country ensured that when the time came he would seek to not only explain, but in many ways promote, the constitutional movement that had emerged. His engagement with Iranian activists assured him a steady supply of information and some critics, especially in the Foreign Office, wondered aloud whether Browne was associating with undesirable revolutions and, rather than objectively assessing the situation, was allowing his judgment of the events to be unduly swayed. His enthusiasm 1 See: Amanat, A., ‘Memory and Amnesia in the Historiography of the Constitutional Revolution’, in Atabaki, T. (ed.), Iran in the Twentieth Century, London, 2009, p. 24. 2 Browne, E. G., The Persian Revolution 1905–1909, Washington DC, 1995, (first published by Cambridge University Press in 1910), p. 2. 3 Browne, The Persian Revolution, pp. 1–30. 2 IRAN’S CONSTITUTIONAL REvOLUTION OF 1906 nonetheless won him many Iranian admirers (an admiration that has barely sub- sided to this day) and has probably encouraged a less critical reading of a narrative that is, at once, history and political advocacy.4 Moreover, as a ‘liberal’ supporter of the constitutional movement, Browne’s account has tended to confound the dominant narratives on imperialism and ‘Ori- entalism’ (as redefined by Edward Said in 1978), such that some interpretations have gone further and read into Browne’s text a reading that owes more to current social scientific models, and political leanings, rather than the context of Browne’s own intellectual milieu. Some of these draw on Browne’s text explicitly, others implicitly, to make points about the popularity, nationalist, democratic, and occa- sionally Islamic nature of the movement. To take the latter example, Browne’s emphasis on Al Afghani as a pan-Islamist, suggests to some an acute awareness of the constitutional movement as fundamentally determined by a popular Islamic impulse. But Browne himself qualified what he understands by the term ‘pan- Islamic’, and makes quite clear at the outset that in seeking to rehabilitate the term and help situate Iran’s constitutional revolution within broader developments his domestic audience might better appreciate. At the same time he sought to reas- sure a readership that that tended to view any such transnational movements with fear and disdain. For Browne, pan-Islamic movements, should not necessarily be seen as any more, or less, fanatical to other movements, and can be a means by which ‘national’ movements can be energised (a view that probably owed much to Afghani). But even this was influenced by his own appreciation of Islam, which drawn from his own particular intellectual heritage, was arguably more romanti- cised and indebted to the Enlightenment than many might acknowledge.5 It is this ‘liberal’ Enlightenment context that has at times been both ignored and misunderstood. Browne, and those intellectuals – Iranian and European – with which he engaged, operated within an intellectual environment framed and informed by the ideas of Enlightenment. It is thus important to understand and 4 For an excellent account of Browne’s influence see: Bonakdarian, M. ‘Edward G Browne and the Iranian Constitutional Struggle: From Academic Orientalism to Political Activism’ in Iranian Studies, vol. 26, no. 1/2, 1993, pp. 7–31. 5 Ridgeon, L., ‘Ahmad Kasravi’s Criticisms of Edward Granville Browne’, in Iran vol, 42, 2004, p 224. Browne’s ‘mystical’ (arguably romantic) reading of Islam, as Deist and Pantheist, implicitly drew a favourable comparison with orthodox Christianity and owed more to Enlightenment ideas about religion. It might also be pointed out that while Browne was a keen advocate for the Babi movement, his interest did not extend to him acknowledging their role in the Constitutional Movement, a role which may might have considered impolitic to highlight. See Amanat’s introduction to The Persian Revolution, p. XIv & XIX. INTRODUCTION: DEvELOPING IRANIAN INTELLECTUAL History 3 contextualise their views within this frame of reference. This has of course subse- quently led to problems of its own as critiques of the Enlightenment gathered pace after 1945, which tended to argue that all the ills of radical nationalism – most obviously in its promotion of race theory – and imperialism, could be traced to and laid at the door of the Enlightenment.6 In this re-reading of the narrative, the Enlightenment gave birth to notions of race, nationalism, and imperialism in Europe, which was soon transported and transplanted, often through the agency of a willing local elite to the non- European world, where these alien ideas obviously failed to take root, and led ultimately to further dislocation and the emergence of nativist movements, which were instinctively ‘anti-nationalist’ and increasingly beholden to ‘authentic’ cul- tural and ideological values often identified around religion. Edward Said was to epitomise this narrative in his eponymous critique of ‘Orientalism’, but it is also not difficult to see how Browne with his apparent sympathy for pan-Islamism, could be recruited to this narrative. It does not necessarily sit well with Browne’s support for the constitutional movement – no narrative, especially those driven by an explicitly ideological template is clean and tidy in its analytical categories – but Browne’s apparent support for the ‘subaltern’ in the Iranian political awakening helps exonerate him from any responsibility in not seeing the flaws of a movement drawn from an inauthentic nationalist ideology, and which, despite its idealism, ultimately resulted in the restoration of autocracy, under the Pahlavis. At the same time, it is worth acknowledging that the Enlightenment was not a homogenous movement and that Browne engaged with particular narratives of the Enlightenment and, like other intellectuals, absorbed, adapted and reproduced these ideas according to his own needs, rationalisation and prejudices. Intellectual history, in short, is neither clean nor tidy, nor does it follow a disciplined tem- plate in which one idea clearly leads to another.7 It is our retrospective analytical conceit – as well of course our need to provide didactic explanation – that seeks to simplify complex processes into neat categories. Browne, for example, is clear in his Persian Revolution that ties of faith are a good deal more rational than ties of race.8 yet in an earlier exposition, his unfavourable comparison of the Turks 6 A key text in this regard being Horkheimer, M. and Adorno, T., Dialectic of the Enlightenment, Stanford, 2002 (first published 1947). 7 For a useful introduction see: Whatmore, R., What is Intellectual History?, Cambridge, 2016, pp. 137. 8 Browne, The Persian Revolution, p. 1. 4 IRAN’S CONSTITUTIONAL REvOLUTION OF 1906 against the Iranians could certainly be read as racist9 while his continued passion and enthusiasm for the Iranians could be viewed as holding them up as a people of innate superior intellect.