Iran's Constitutional Revolution of 1906 and Narratives of the Enlightenment

Ali M. Ansari

• Publisher: Gingko
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781909942943
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 opened the way for enormous change in Persia, heralding the modern era and creating a model for later political and cultural movements in the region. Broad in its scope, this multidisciplinary volume brings together essays from leading scholars in Iranian Studies to explore the significance of this revolution, its origins, and the people who made it happen.
           
As the authors show, this period was one of unprecedented debate within Iran's burgeoning press. Many different groups fought to shape the course of the Revolution, which opened up seemingly boundless possibilities for the country's future and affected nearly every segment of its society. Exploring themes such as the role of women, the use of photography, and the uniqueness of the Revolution as an Iranian experience, the authors tell a story of immense transition, as the old order of the Shah subsided and was replaced by new institutions, new forms of expression, and a new social and political order.
 

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Iran’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Constitutional Experience, Transregional Connections, and Conflicting Narratives of Modernity¹

Ali Gheissari

Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906 aimed at changing the structure of the monarchy from despotic to constitutional and to adopt representative governance by introducing the country to a parliamentary system. It further resulted in a written constitution in which a separation between different branches of government was recognised. Intellectually, however, it drew on a diverse range of ideas and orientations that in good measure were associated with the Enlightenment – either directly from European sources or, more regularly, through elaborate routes of transregional contacts, notably from India, the Ottoman Empire, and the Caucasus.

By drawing on a select range of primary and secondary source material, this paper examines the intellectual encounter of Iran’s constitutional movement with various types of Enlightenment ideas and the general intellectual debates and textual production of that period in areas such as representative governance and the rule of law. Such diverse trends, for instance, can be seen in terms of combining liberal as well as étatiste approaches in the composition of the constitutional laws and subsequent interpretations of constitutional principles and methods of implementation.

Further complexities of Iran’s constitutional experience can also be noted in terms of the impact of Shiʿism on the one hand and prerogatives of autocratic state on the other – as in, for example, the articulation of Iran’s civil code and the subsequent range of procedural laws that were adopted in the 1920s and 1930s. In both of these domains Iran’s constitutional experience included an underlying religious element in its conceptualization of popular sovereignty, and thus the ideal of a constitutional governance emerged with a strong religious component and emphasis on the rule of law rather than demand for liberty. By juxtaposing such divergent trends the paper also elucidates the broad range of intellectual imports of the Enlightenment and their impact on Iran’s political and intellectual landscape during the constitutional period and beyond.

The main argument in Dialectic of Enlightenment, an influential book that was first published in 1944, co-authored by German critical social theorists, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, was to show how in the course of its historical development under capitalism, a fundamental premise of the European Enlightenment turned into its opposite – that is, to show how the Enlightenment idea of man’s ability and right to dominate nature gave way to the idea and the practice of domination of man over man.² Accordingly, various forms of totalitarian and autocratic regimes that appeared in the twentieth century were, in fact, the manifestations of how the Enlightenment ideas of individualism, universalism, and liberty gave way to their opposites.³

In Iran such divergent approaches were further marked by random and unsystematic familiarity of Iranian writers with European sources as well as by Iran’s own heterogeneous social makeup, intellectual background, and historical experience. Iranians’ reading of the European material was also impacted by two distinct yet interrelated factors, namely, the tradition of reacting to domestic autocracy, a tendency with certain similarities to the teachings of the eighteenth-century French Enlightenment as well as the example of the nineteenth century British parliamentary system, and the ideological consequences of Iran’s semi-colonial situation, which was specific to Iran – although Iran was never directly colonised, it was affected by imperial politics and economic incursions during the Qajar period (1785–1925). Opposition to autocracy and resistance to imperialist advances gradually assumed a nationalist form in some elite and non-elite circles – for instance, it was experienced firsthand by segments of the merchant classes, intellectuals, some members of the clergy, and also by some covertly dissenting members of the political elite. In particular such opposition and resistance were aroused by concessions granted to foreign interests and capitulations to foreign states. Domestically, however, opposition to local or central authorities was often expressed in measures such as seeking individual justice out of grievance (tazallom), and resorting to the normative paradigm of ‘circle of justice.’⁴

Seeking a solution to both domestic autocracy and the semi-colonial situation, was a central concern of Iran’s constitutional movement that was later articulated in the text of the Constitution (1906) and its Supplement (1907).⁵ During the latenineteenth and early-twentieth centuries these concerns also provided a window for the reception of counter-Enlightenment ideas, such as romanticism, socialism, and anarchism, that were, by and large, Western in origin – although it ought to be noted that it was not always an either/or situation, as Iranians often selectively combined Enlightenment and ‘counter’-Enlightenment thoughts in ways that conformed to their perceived and desired sense of personal, social, religious-cultural, and national identities and overall objectives. They also gave way to the development of anti-Enlightenment ideas by Iranians, such as Islamic attempts to provide either a synthesis, and accommodation with, or a dismissal of Western ideas or, as was more often the case, reaching at a limited incorporation of Englightenment ideas and other facets of modernities in general – as can be seen in, for example, some of the writings of Moʾayyed al-Islam Kāshāni and Sayyed Jamāl al-Din (al-Afghāni), among others.⁶ Indeed both of these figures were modernising reformers, defending certain key Enlightenment ideas (such as popular sovereignty) and many features of ‘modernity,’ but at the same time rejecting the notion that one had to uncritically imitate the West as the sole proprietor of modernity. In Iran of the early twentieth century there were a number of debates over the ideas and teachings that were associated with the Enlightenment, but such arguments, although carrying over some basic tenets of the Enlightenment, treaded on a different path that was just as dialectical but differed with its European counterpart in philosophical substance and political scope.

Iran and the Enlightenment

There is a shared, yet seldom clearly substantiated, opinion among various authors and commentators, that ‘sources of the self’ in modern Iran often consist of a mixture of loosely perceived concepts and values that involve nationalism (or more generally, themes and values associated with the so-called ‘idea of Iran’ and the power of Persian language), Shiʿism (in its outward as well as inward dimensions), and a combination of modern European or Western ideas and divergent trends that stemmed from the Enlightenment (in both its individualist and collectivist traditions).⁷ yet these are not internally exclusionary qualities applied to the bare majority of the population, given the variant constructs of the self when it comes to non-Persian or non-Shiʿi Iranians. Also, in regards to the self and its corresponding question of agency, such definitions can be traced in both the ideological discourse of the state or in the ideological counter-discourse of its critics in different periods of Iran’s modern history. In this view each of these sources has maintained a complex and at the same time flexible composition, yet the level and manner of their interaction has been subject to historical and sociological variables – for instance, along typological, sociological (including variables relating to gender, class, ethnicity, and religion), educational, and city/ country demarcations. Also in the course of the past two centuries each of these trends and tendencies, in varying degree, has had certain intellectual, ideological, and political implications, ranging from random reception of post-Enlightenment thought, to the impact of nationalism and later socialism, to various approaches to constitutional government. Further implications can also be noted in the ideological and institutional framework of Iran’s autocratic state-nationalism in the interwar period (1920s and 1930s).

In this context a clear impact of Enlightenment ideas can further be noted in terms of the positive light in which the very term ‘revolution’ came to be viewed and appraised.⁸ In contrast to its former negative connotation as reversal of fortune, ‘revolution’ (enqelāb) was now viewed as a necessary measure for change and a turning point which could deliver the society to the threshold of progress. This semantic shift was also associated with varying degrees of subscription to Jacobin ethics, according to which revolutionary transformation may well involve, if not require, violence. Seen in this light violence would be taken as a secondary concern, and the choice of whether to employ or avoid it would be determined by the exigencies of the revolutionary moment.⁹ (This is not to ignore or neglect prior historical patterns of violence in Iranian society, nor to suggest a complete break between older and newer patterns of violence.) Another semantic impact of the Enlightenment on the ideological composition of Iran’s constitutional movement was the almost universal adoption of the metaphor of ‘light’ when referring to the agency that was most associated with the task of propagating the conceptual principles and values of modern reforms (and by extension, modernity in general), namely the intellectuals.¹⁰ As briefly argued elsewhere, in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries the term monavvar al-fekr (common for ‘intellectual’), which had already gained currency in the Ottoman Empire, was also used in reference to a wide range of Iranian educated elite, both inside Iran and abroad, who were in favor of reform, modernisation, and constitutional government. Furthermore, the term intellectual in its initial form of monavvar al-fekr (lit. one who has been enlightened), resembled the French usage, illuminé, and also almost simultaneously implied ‘someone who enlightens others’ (monavver al-fekr) which had a clear Promethean connotation. However, later in the twentieth century these semantic variations seem to have been conclusively merged into a widely used Persian neologism rowshanfekr (lit. ‘enlightened’), which delineates both of these attributes. Early Iranian intellectuals, somewhat similar to their counterparts elsewhere, were preoccupied with diagnosing the broad range of economic, social, cultural, and political ills of their country; writing as physicians of the body politic, they prescribed remedies in accordance with their ideological orientations.¹¹

In this context the Enlightenment emphasis on free trade also appealed to merchants and traders and posed further challenges to the authority of the state to regulate the economy or to interfere with it at will. This would later also generate a tension between the bazaar-based class and the state, as was manifested during the constitutional period and beyond.

Transregional Connections

Iran’s Constitutional Revolution of 1906 aimed at changing the structure of the monarchy from despotic to constitutional, and to adopt representative governance by introducing the country to a parliamentary system. It further resulted in a written constitution in which a separation between different branches of government was recognised.¹² Intellectually, however, Iran’s constitutional movement drew on a diverse range of ideas and orientations that in good measure were associated with the Enlightenment – either directly from European sources or, more regularly, through certain elaborate routes o...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• 1. Iran’s Dialectic of the Enlightenment: Notes on Constitutional Experience and Conflicting Narratives of Modernity
• 2. From Narrating History to Constructing Memory: The Role of Photography in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution
• 3. The Enlightenment and Historical Difference: The Case of Iran’s Constitutional Revolution
• 4. Shrinking Borders and Expanding Vocabularies: Translation and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906
• 5. The Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the influence of Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani’s Political Thought
• 6. Realism, Nationalism and Criticism: Iranian Enlightenment and the Philosophy of Literature in Mirza Fatali Akhundzade’s Works
• 7. "To mean or not to mean?" as the underlying question of Western- inspired counter-Enlightenment discourse in Iran
• 8. In Search of the Secret Center in Constitutional Tabriz
• 9. Early Translations of Modern European Philosophy. On the Significance of an Under-Researched Phenomenon for the Study of Modern Iranian Intellectual History
• 10. Looking Back at Mashrutih: Late Pahlavi Narratives on the Constitutional Revolution
• Contributors