Debating Iranians: the Discursive Practice of Munāzirah and the Making of Modern Iran

Debating Iranians: The discursive practice of Munāzirah and the making of Modern Iran by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations University of Toronto © Copyright by Hamid Rezaei Yazdi (2015) Debating Iranians: The discursive practice of Munāzirah and the making of Modern Iran Hamid Rezaei Yazdi Doctor of Philosophy Department of Near and Middle Eastern Civilizations University of Toronto 2015 ii Abstract Iranian modernity has chiefly been examined in the context of a dialectical antagonism between “traditionalists” and “modernists.” Following this binaristic approach, early demands for reform within the country have often been (de)historicized as a theatre of national “awakening” resulting from the toils of secular intellectuals in overcoming the resistance of traditional reactionaries, a confrontation between two purportedly well-defined and mutually-exclusive camps. Such reductionist dialectics has generally overwritten the dialogic narrative of Iranian modernity, a conflicted dialogue misrepresented as a conflicting dialectic. Historical evidence suggests that in fact the heated debate over the definition of being modern and the limits of modernization was often conducted on the universally acknowledged premise of the simultaneity and commensurability of Islam with modern civilization. This defining feature of Iranian modernity has been silenced in scholarship that views modernity as the dialectic, and diametric, opposition of the old and the new. The genre that recorded the dialogue of rival discourses, the munāzirah (debate or disputation), draws on a long-standing tradition in classical and religious literature. However, in the modern era the munāzirah gradually transformed from a polemic between the mentor and the disciple, the wise and the haughty, to a debate between competing discourses which engaged in opposing, informing, appropriating, and complementing each other. Beyond its narrative manifestation in the form of treatises, the discursive practice of the munāzirah was also present in social practices, official policies, intellectual endeavours, and cultural expressions. In each of these articulations, rival discourses had to vie for legitimacy, often with the shared but ambiguous sentiment that there is no fundamental difference between east-Islam and west- civilization. The binaries so central to the contemporary studies of modern Iranian history disintegrate into overlapping hybrids when put in historical perspective. The munāzirah is the account of modern Iranian histories. iii Table of Contents Introduction: Munāzirah: The narrative of Iranian Modernity…................................................. 1 Chapter 1: The Pre-Constitutional Munāzirah 1………………………………………………. 37 The Friend and the Vizier………………………….…………………………………………… 39 The Bureaucrat and the Commoner……………….……………………………………………. 45 The Clergy and the Vizier………………………….…………………………………………… 51 One Word………………………………………….……………………………………………. 54 Court Intrigues…………………………………….……………………………………………. 63 Establishment of a Bank…………………………….…………………………………………... 68 Chapter 2: The Pre-Constitutional Munāzirah 2………………………………………………. 71 The Iranian and the Indian……………………...……………………………………………… 71 Islam and the Clergy……………………………………………………………………………. 83 Proclamation of Justice…………………………...……………………………………………. 87 The Munāzirah in the Pre-Constitutional Periodicals………………………………………….. 91 Chapter 3: The Constitutional Munāzirah………………………………...………………….. 104 The Clergy and the Saucy…………………………………………………..……………….… 105 The Treasury of Helpers………………………………………………………………..……... 113 The Bukharan Teacher and the European Person………...…………………………………... 120 Conversation with My Friend’s Skull…………………………………………………………. 124 The Resident and the Traveller………………………………………………………………... 128 The Munāzirah in the Constitutional Periodicals....…………………...……………………… 135 Chapter 4: The Post-Constitutional Munāzirah……………………………..……………….. 146 Ramadan Soiree……………………………………………………………………………….. 146 The Remedy for the Ailments of Iran…….……………………………………………………. 158 Mirror of Constitutionalism…………………………………………………………………… 164 Persian Is Sugar………………...…….……………………………………………………….. 172 The Munāzirah in the Post-Constitutional Periodicals………………………………………... 177 iv Chapter 5: The Munāzirah in Historical (Con)text………..…………………………………. 187 Characterization in the Munāzirah…………………………………………………………….. 187 Setting in the Munāzirah………………………………………………………………………. 192 The Temporal Logic of the Munāzirah………………………………………………………... 195 What Is at Issue in the Munāzirah?……………………………………………………………. 199 Competing Discourses………………………………………………………………………… 201 The Topoi of the Munāzirah…………………………………………………………………... 205 The Munāzirah in Historical (Con)text………………………………………………………... 208 Postscript..………………………...………………………………………………………….. 233 v 1 Introduction Munāzirah: The Narrative of Iranian Modernity The history of modern Iran has too often been described as the dialectical confrontation between “modernists” and “traditionalists” engaged in a ceaseless battle where the former camp worked tirelessly for reform and progress while the latter concentrated all its efforts to thwart those attempts. And indeed such is often the case in scholarship on the subject, which is primarily conducted on the a priori assumption that the narrative of Iranian modernity (with the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 at its crux) is the account of political confrontation between the forces of “tradition” and the armies of “modernity,” viewed as distinct political entities.1 The binaries regressive-progressive, traditional-modern, secular-religious and the like are the inevitable result of such conceptions and abound in studies premised on these binaries. This is, of course, not to deny that there indeed was a fierce conflict between advocates of modern notions and adherents to traditional norms in the history of modern Iran. However, viewing a highly heterogeneous socio-cultural phenomenon as a binaristic “political” showdown between the homogeneous categories “traditional” and “modern” is reducing it to an artificial and linear temporal politics which is a recent innovation of Western thought but not a transcendental category.2 It is also limiting other aspects of societal change (such as social, cultural, economical, artistic, and discursive, among others) to a reductive system of reading premised on temporal binarism. It has been as a result of such views that much scholarship on the topic has been a reiteration of an essentialist grand narrative that views modernity and tradition as well-defined and closed entities, as mutually exclusive binaries, and as temporally distanced poles engaged in a bitter confrontation. Such readings suppress the contestatory and contested history of modernity. In the 1 I am aware that any form of conflict may be termed political in the sense that it is a struggle for power and ascendancy. However, latent in this latter sense is a distinction between political and politics. As such, paying analytical attention to the politics of a conflict might liberate tendencies which cannot always be designated as essentially political. This is a distinction which, I believe, has not been made in much of the scholarship on modern Iran. 2 There is, of course, an enormous body of scholarship on time and modern temporal categories. For a discussion of time as a cultural, rather than a philosophical, construct, see, among others, F. R. Ankersmit’s History and Tropology, 34-44, and Peter Osborne’s “Modernity is a Qualitative, Not a Chronological, Category.” For an investigation of cultural or temporal differences as distance, see Fabian, Time and the Other. 2 words of Hanna Arendt, history so conceived suppresses “the overwhelming mass of the most divergent values, the most contradictory thoughts and conflicting authorities … [and] reduce[s] [them] to a unilinear, dialectically consistent development.”3 While there indeed was intense rivalry between the proponents and opponents of a wholesale adoption of European civilization, this opposition must not be understood in the ideologically evaluative terms dictated by the posthumously invented categories “traditional” and “modern.” For contemporary sensibility did not conceive of the traditional and the modern as essential opposites. Quite the contrary, the consensus among “traditionalists” and “modernists” alike was the essential commensurability and simultaneity of the two. The debate, then, revolved around the difficult question of how to adapt one set of values to another. A general survey of selected scholarship on the subject reveals the extent to which such assumptions underlie the accounts of the history of Iranian modernity. In her study of educational reform in early modern Iran, for example, Monica Ringer notes that the “use of ‘the West’ as a yardstick ignores the complexity of causal variables. Non-Western countries experience the process of modernization later than Western countries. They are therefore affected by retrospective analyses of Western modernization, even while they confront their distinctive chronological, cultural, and institutional environments.” This apt observation is shortly after overturned when Ringer declares that “Modernization in nineteenth-century Iran was a process of translation.”4 The typical conclusion of such observations is that modernizing projects inevitably lead to “the emergence of bipolar categories: modernization, Westernization and secularization [being] intimately connected

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