Iran in the Middle East

Transnational Encounters and Social History

Houchang Chehabi, Peyman Jafari, Maral Jefroudi, Houchang Chehabi, Peyman Jafari, Maral Jefroudi

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780857737656
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Iran's interaction with its neighbours is a topic of wide interest. But while many historical studies of the country concentrate purely on political events and high-profile actors, this book takes the opposite approach: writing history from below, it instead focuses on the role of everyday lives. Modern Iranian historiography has been dominated by ideas of nationalism, modernization, religion, autocracy, revolution and war. Iran in the Middle East adds new dimensions to the study of four crucial areas of Iranian history: the events and impact of the Constitutional Revolution, Iran's transnational connections, the social history of Iran and developments in historiography.

PART I

THE CONSTITUTIONAL
REVOLUTION AND
NATIONALISM

CHAPTER 1

MOHAMMAD ALI FOROUGHI
AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF
CIVIC NATIONALISM IN EARLY
TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRAN

Ali M. Ansari

Mohammad Ali Foroughi, Zoka’ al-Molk, was one of the leading intellectuals of the Constitutional era, enjoying a distinguished career in both politics and academia. Born in 1877 to a bureaucratic family, Foroughi reflected a tradition that combined public service with intellectual endeavour. He published an impressive corpus of material, ranging from his introduction to Western political thought through to his commentaries on Persian literature and his beloved Shahnameh, the social value of which he argued for passionately throughout his life. He was elected a member of the second Majles (parliament) in 1909 and became the Speaker of the Parliament for a short period in 1911. He occupied a series of ministerial posts including a succession of key appointments in the cabinet of Reza Khan, providing a now-famous coronation oration at the latter's formal assumption of the crown in 1926. He oversaw the establishment and development of the Farhangestan (the state cultural and language institute) and played a crucial role as prime minister during the abdication of Reza Shah and the subsequent enthronement of his 21-year-old son, Mohammad Reza Shah, in 1941. He died in 1942, with his country in the throes of yet another political crisis: occupied by Allied forces and with the ambitions of the Constitutional era incomplete and its achievements uncertain.

Despite Foroughi's pivotal role in the creation of modern Iran – and perhaps more accurately, the idea of Iran for the modern age – his legacy and achievements have been neglected by scholars and political activists alike.¹ In part this reflects a concentration on a political career overshadowed by far more important events such as the Constitutional Revolution itself – of which Foroughi was but one of a startling constellation of intellectual activists. Many of these were far more political and keener on self-publicity than Foroughi, the archetypal ‘quiet’ bureaucrat, ever desired to be. This quality undoubtedly endeared him to Reza Khan, always mindful of where the credit should be due, and Foroughi never achieved the fame that the triumvirate around Reza Shah – Firuz, Davar and Teymourtash – achieved. Nor, of course, did he share their fates, outlasting his master to faithfully ensure a peaceful transition to the untested and somewhat apprehensive heir.

It also reflects the reality that access to Foroughi's corpus of written material has often been difficult, at least until recent years when his works have been patiently collected, edited, and published through the invaluable efforts of dedicated individuals, most obviously the late Iraj Afshar.² Yet Foroughi was much more widely published than many of his contemporaries, for whom the practical obstructions to research would have been far more obvious. There have been, perhaps, more political reasons why Foroughi's legacy has not been properly assessed. Indeed, the ideological nature of subsequent historiography has tended to affect the way in which Foroughi has been presented and it is ironic that one of the real founders and articulators of modern Iranian identity and nationalism should have found himself relegated to the margins of events he did so much to shape because of the desire of some to exaggerate the impact of the ruler he served (a fate he might not have minded), and the much more damaging attempt of others to dismiss his patriotism as the facile product of foreign emulation. This ‘emulation’ has proved all the more damning to Foroughi's reputation because it has been associated with the British, and even worse (if that were possible) with his membership of the Freemasons.³

Yet Foroughi's association with Freemasonry was neither unique nor, certainly in the context of his time, emblematic of a hidden agenda that was antithetical to the national interests he sought to pursue. Quite the contrary, they represented for him membership within an international intellectual brotherhood – a Republic of Letters – that saw no contradiction between patriotism and internationalism.⁴ Nor did he see any contradiction between the pursuit of civic and political ideals that might draw on European political philosophy and defence of the interests of his country against the policies of the very countries he admired.⁵ Foroughi's position was a much more subtle, nuanced, yet profound engagement with the ideas of nationalism than his detractors would care to admit. Marrying the ideas of the (European) Enlightenment with his own bureaucratic inheritance, Foroughi sought to ‘educate his masters’ in the best traditions of the Persian mirrors for princes, except that in his case, his ‘masters’ were the people themselves.

In a lecture to students at the Faculty of Law in 1937 (which had become part of the new University of Tehran in 1934), Foroughi reflected on what had been achieved and what remained to be done.⁶ His main aim, however, appears to have been to remind his young wards of the distance, in political, social, and intellectual terms, the country had come since the onset of the Constitutional Revolution and from just what a low base Iran's reforming and revolutionary elite had to start. It was a measure, in some ways, of the success of succeeding reforms that few, he suggested, could now perceive the paucity of the political environment that confronted Iran's bureaucratic-intellectual elite and the many paradoxes that faced them. The provision of education and the establishment of the rule of law were central to Foroughi's conception of the modern ‘nation-state’ supported and sustained by an educated and politically-aware citizenry. It was not sufficient to have a codified legal system; it had to be understood by a people who were engaged. This, it might be argued, was an ambitious task for the most modern and progressive of states, but for a country that had in the eyes of many stagnated for the better part of a century and failed to keep in touch with its own social changes, let alone developments in the wider world, this was an enormous problem. To establish a legal and educational platform for development, one needed the tools; and the reality was that Iran possessed neither the tools nor the budget to acquire them. In Foroughi's terms, Iran had none of the prerequisites in place; the government was bankrupt, it had no professional cadre of judges or lawyers with which to begin the construction of a functional judiciary, and most importantly it had no codified system of laws.⁷

Appreciating this context helps us understand the enthusiasm of the response, and while Foroughi was undoubtedly more measured in his public pronouncements on the malaise facing Iran (unlike Taqizadeh for example), his response drew on the same ideas that had informed many of his revolutionary contemporaries, including Taqizadeh. These ideas noted above drew on the European Enlightenment, and were practically expressed and applied through his membership, along with almost every other significant leader of the Constitutional Movement, in Freemasonry; specifically the ‘Iran Awakening’ lodge.⁸ This association and affiliation has been seen as enough in the eyes of some to diminish, and discard onto the scrapheap of history, the ideas and achievements of men like Foroughi, whose adherence to the ideas of the Enlightenment make them deeply flawed, as if they are guilty by association of all the ills of European colonialism, the genesis of which some see in an Enlightenment that apparently launched Europe into a prolonged global exercise in liberal evangelism. Such an assessment, however, that tends to conflate different trends and historical periods – and has been much reinforced by the dominance of Marxist historiography within counter-Enlightenment narratives – both simplifies and generalizes a process of intellectual discovery that was much more cosmopolitan before it became ‘European’. Indeed that which became known as the European Enlightenment saw its own intellectual roots in a humanist tradition that transcended national and local cultures while at the same time not necessarily seeking to denigrate those distinct cultures.⁹

If the Enlightenment movement had a target for criticism, this was contemporary organized religion, which was regarded as overly ritualistic, superstitious, and contrary to the intellectual growth of mankind.¹⁰ Those who sought to challenge the orthodoxies of the day, be they religious or political, and being aware of the sensitivities towards such iconoclasm from those in authority, naturally sought intellectual stimulation and personal safety in a society that was hidden from general view. In the eighteenth century this resulted in the dramatic growth of Masonic lodges.¹¹ This international intellectual brotherhood was firmly Deist, if antithetical to the dominant religious orthodoxies of the day (which in Europe meant Christianity), and as such there was little difficulty in attracting adherents from the Muslim world who likewise had problems with the contemporary religious dogma.¹² No less a figure that Jamal al-Din al Afghani, the father of modern political Islam, was a Freemason, going so far as to found his own lodge when the one he had been affiliated with proved less than enthusiastic about Afghani's determination to engage in politics.¹³ In sum, membership of the Freemasons was not the preserve of an irreligious minority beholden to the West. On the contrary, recent research suggests that it was far more widespread among the progressive elites of the Middle East, providing an avenue for engagement with ideas that was far from an attempt to ‘emulate’ Europe. Indeed, if Afghani's response to the French philosopher Ernest Renan is an accurate reflection of his views, not only had he absorbed many of the ideas of the Enlightenment – especially with respect to philosophy and education – but he categorically rejected emerging European ideas on race that contradicted those tenets.¹⁴

Foroughi's ideas and motivations reflected this dual inheritance, drawing on the cosmopolitanism of the Enlightenment and marrying them to the humanism that was particular to a Persian bureaucratic-intellectual tradition. Both were Universalist in their aspirations. Foroughi was proud of his Iranian inheritance but neither conceited nor complacent, and his irritation at the condescension of Europeans – not least the British – who felt that the Iranians were incapable of governing themselves, was palpable in much of what he wrote. For him Iran represented a civilization, one that may have lost its way but a civilization nonetheless, that with a period of ‘enlightenment’ could once again contribute constructively to the progress of mankind. It would not be too much to argue that Foroughi, borrowing from Hegel, understood Iran as the civilization in which ‘first arises that light which shines itself and illuminates what is around’.¹⁵ It was itself a cosmopolitan force for enlightenment; always generous, almost to a fault.¹⁶ But Iranians had now lost their way. In a memorable passage outlining the problems facing the country, Foroughi wrote,

To summarize, my point is this that today the Iranian people neither worship God, nor love their country, nor seek freedom or honour, they do not pursue dignity, nor to they seek art, or search for knowledge, something needs to be done so that the people despair of charlatanism, racketeering (howchi-gari) and intrigue, and distance themselves [from such things]…¹⁷

To the question of what must be done, Foroughi stated in the best Whig tradition, ‘We must educate the people’.¹⁸

This education had three distinct aspects. The first and perhaps the easiest to achieve, at least on a superficial level, was to restore a level of pride and dignity in Iranian culture and civilization. In this, as in other aspects of the programme he pursued, Foroughi sought to justify his actions by referring to the European experience. So the love of history and culture, language and literature were all encouraged on the basis that such pursuit of knowledge lay at the basis of European development and growth. Indeed the possession of history and the development of a historical consciousness were essential prerequisites for modernization not least, but by no means exclusively, because such knowledge gave peoples the confidence to face the future. Those in possession of a long history were by extension blessed among nations.¹⁹ It should perhaps not be surprising that Foroughi was among the first to author histories of his country, with his history of Sasanian Iran published in 1898 and another more broadly on ancient Iran in 1902. Similarly, in an article on Iranian literature, Foroughi made it clear that the Iranians are in receipt of a blessing ...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: The Constitutional Revolution and Nationalism
• Part II: Transnational Connections
• Part III: Social History
• Part IV: Historiographical Reflections
• Contributors
• Appendix: Life and Work of Touraj Atabaki
• Bibliography of Touraj Atabaki
• Back cover