Kaveh Askari <askarik1@msu.edu> is an Associate Professor of English and Film Studies at Michigan State University.

This transcript is an edited version of an eighty-minute interview conducted at Northwestern University on January 5, 2018 under the auspices of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. The Fieldnotes project of SCMS aims to trace, through discussions of the career trajectories of pioneers of film and media studies, developments that have shaped–and continue to shape—the expanding field.

Kaveh Askari: Let’s start a little earlier than some professional biographies and talk about childhood experience, because it is something you have written about and something that scholars working in exile sometimes braid into their work.

Hamid Naficy: I was born and raised through high school in the city of Isfahan in Iran. As a kid, my first memory of movie-watching is going to the theatre and the movie-house with my dad. Thief of Baghdad was one of the early ones I remember. I also watched a number of films in the fifties that were based on literature, like King Vidor’s War and Peace and Jean-Paul Le Chanois’ Les Misérables. I had read the novels before. In this case, one medium sort of led me to the other. I think one of the early intersections of two media or intertextuality for me as a kid happened there. I had read the novels, I would go to see the movies. Then a neighbour of ours gave me a 35mm Agfa camera and I took this camera with me to see the movies. I clearly remember trying to take a picture of Audrey Hepburn in War and Peace; I was holding the camera like this, holding my breath, making sure that my hand wouldn’t shake when I took the picture. That’s how from early on I had a fairly multi-media relationship with film. Just to answer your question a little bit more, the role of foreign cultural societies in my childhood was very important. The Soviets had their Iran-Soviet Cultural Relations Society in Isfahan, the British had The British Council, and the Americans had the Iran-America Society, where they not only showed films, but also taught languages and had libraries. Interestingly, when I was in elementary school the United States Information Agency, USIA, began to train Iranians in making documentaries. They brought a whole new phenomenon of film screening in Iran, as well, which involved showing films via mobile film units. These were Jeeps that had a driver who was also the projectionist. He would carry 16mm Bell & Howell projectors with screens. He would come to our school every Thursday afternoon, the day before the weekend, and set up his screen in our library and show a USIA film.

KA: All USIA films or other kinds of films?

HN: USIA films, which included films on development and agriculture, Iran News newsreels shots in Iran, and newsreels about life in the United States. He would travel from that school to villages nearby and show the films. The thing which is remarkable for me is that I have a notebook that contains 16 film reviews which I had written of USIA films at age nine while attending that school. I don’t think that was based on my own initiative. I think that was a requirement by an enlightened teacher. So that’s another aspect of film viewing and reviewing and criticism which was embedded into my experience from early on.

KA: So, there are two different dimensions to the film-going that you are talking about. One is kind of an institutional dimension with USIA educational film; the other is commercial film-going. Were there overlaps between these two worlds in terms of film fans or was that something unique to your particular educational experience?

HN: I think anybody who was going to that elementary school (called Nemuneh Elementary) had similar experiences. By the way, that school was built by funding from USIA in Iran, and served as a model for modern schools. It had an open-stack library, which was very unusual.  All the libraries in Isfahan in those days were closed stacks. You had to go and ask for a book and somebody would fetch it for you. In this library students would just browse and find the books they wanted to read.  There was a film club which had just opened up and they would generally rent commercial cinema and show films Friday mornings, when nobody else would go to see movies. I attended that film club’s film screenings a few times. There were very few, like 10 or 12 people, in the huge cinema watching some arthouse film, mostly foreign stuff. When I was a kid I also tried to build a film projector and failed! That was miserable! I tried to build a radio receiver and I failed, again! I still remember the regret and sense of frustration, but that’s how it goes!

KA: What were you watching at the time you were contemplating studying abroad?

HN: The films that I remember were these literature-based films that I mentioned, as well as Richard Brooks’ The Brothers Karamazov.  I had read the novels and looked for their filmic adaptations.  Reading was a big thing in our family and all the kids had actually pulled together a children’s library which by the time of the revolution housed some 5000 volumes, many of them children’s books, which was an incredible treasure. So, we did a lot of reading and writing.

KA: And then your parents supported your desire to go abroad. You went to England first, is that right?

HN: Yes, I went for a year to the UK in the early 1960s. My dad was actually a well-known physician and for his heart specialisation went to Harvard. He also brought back with him a present for me which was one of those View-Master slide viewers with the disc and you click on it to change the slides. So, actually, for the first time through the agency of my dad I became Americanised; not only by watching American films with him before, but [also] through these slides of national parks and so forth I began to sort of imagining myself there. So, there were multiple strands that turned me towards media, in particular film, and also toward the States as a site for education and college.

KA: How was that experience of arriving and studying into the US?

HN: I came to the US in 1964 to go to school at University of Southern California. My intention was to major in dentistry. The first year I had to take science courses and pre-dental courses, but organic chemistry did me in, basically. I think I got 40. That was terrible. So, I said to myself, “I’m gonna take a course in this Department of Telecommunication, and if I like that course, I’ll change my major.” It just so happened that I took a course from Edward Borgers who was an old massive and voluble guy who had us analyse a classic television drama, like Playhouse Nightie, as well as TV commercials. I remember analysing for the first time a Marlboro cigarette commercial. I’d never seen anybody assign a 60-second commercial for analysis. Remember, those days filtered cigarettes were more regarded as female cigarettes, so for the first time they were trying to reassign filtered cigarettes to men, and the He-Man, the rugged cow-boy type, who was smoking filtered cigarettes was a new phenomenon. Anyway, that kind of textual analysis of the Marlboro man really attracted me tremendously, as it demonstrated how these lowly commercials were producing meaning. So, I switched to telecommunication, which in today’s parlance means Radio-Television. USC had a separate school of cinema. Telecommunication was in another school, so we didn’t have a lot of contact with cinema, but I did take a couple of courses there as well. I remember, George Lucas was a year or two ahead of me as a student in cinema. I was undergrad and he was, I think, either a grad or at the end of his B.A. I participated in a lot of activities in the telecom department. We had the KUSC-FM radio station, where I was a sound-effects man for a whole series of radio dramas. Then, I had my own weekly half-hour show on that radio station, called Non-Western Music. I played Indian, African, Persian, Arab and Asian music of various sorts. The format of my program was completely idiosyncratic, for I interspersed these musical numbers with my readings of the latest discoveries culled from Scientific American. This format satisfied my own interests, but nobody told me not to do it and nobody told me to do it.  USC was an interesting experimental place where I continued my combination of production and studies…

KA: So, film studies was there for you from the start, but your major was in production?

HN: Both. Not film production, but radio and TV production. Courses were generally broadcast- oriented, like management or analysis of history of radio, history of television, with a few production courses thrown in.

KA: And after that point you’d gone into MFA at UCLA.

HN: That’s right.

KA: That was in film?

HN: Yes. That was in the department of theatre arts which had both film and television. It was a heady time, from 1968 to 71, and the counter-culture movement, the anti-Vietnam war and the civil rights movements were all on. Students were actually taking over offices of the faculty at UCLA. I remember a group of students took over Howard Suber’s office. He said to me later that he evacuated his office and gave it to the students for a year to run things from it. Students took over the department’s remote van and went around campus filming various activities and demonstrations. Then, they took the van to different locations on campus and played back the tapes, so people could see. As a group of 11 students in the MFA production program, we petitioned the department to give us a course that we, the students, would design and manage, and the department agreed. It was an unusual thing, part of the counterculture ethos. So, we were eleven students running our own class, in which I made some of my early shows, both documentaries and surreal, experimental films and videos. I was at the time living in a leftist, hippie commune called Ellis Island, so I made a documentary, Ellis Island: A Commune (1969), which captured it during an important period of transition.

KA: Were there any particular interlocutors in the MFA programme that stand out to you? Because it seems like a very collective experience. 

HN: The faculty were very hands-off and that was an advantage for people who knew what they wanted to do, and I was one of those. I became interested in doing for my MFA a film, using computers, in the days when computers were primarily accounting machines. There was this hotshot group in the computer science department at UCLA. A young professor, Leonard Kleinrock was running it. I went to him and said I’d like to make a computer-animated film about the consciousness of the external universe and the internal human consciousness within us. And I said to him, “I would like you to be on my committee.” He said: “Fine, I’ll be willing to be on your committee, provided that you go on and take a Fortran class and do not bother my staff and graduate students, and you have access to the computer room only after 5 o’clock.” I said, “Fine” to all of his restrictions and conditions.  I went and took the courses and did well in them. In two years, by the time I was about to finish my MFA film, Salamander Syncope (1971), I had six system analysts and programmers on his money working on my project, one of whom is now a major figure in Google.  His name is Vint Cerf, the Chief Internet Evangelist at Google, often credited as the co-inventor of the Internet. My project was arduous, because I was moving out of the normal realm of the film production into a highly technological and evolving one involving the new medium of digital and analogue computers. So, it was a very good experience and UCLA was a very good place. My interlocutors at that point were really more computer guys than film guys.

KA: So that was your MFA film and you graduated. Did you go back to Iran immediately or start make films in L.A.?

HN: Again, I have an experimental side and always look for new things, like new media. After I finished my MFA, the first cable company opened up in LA. Theta Cable Television, Channel 3, opened up in Santa Monica, and I was one of the first people they hired as producer/director for their original programming. For two years I directed the daily newscasts, a weekly discussion show, and occasionally children’s programming, Theta Cable Fable Car. It was a fantastic experience at local programming and production. Then I got an invitation to go to Iran to help plan a new multimedia university that was patterned after Open University system in the UK. So, I returned to Iran where for three years I worked with a dynamic group on its planning and soon it became a reality, as Free University of Iran (Daneshgah-e Azad-e Iran). The Shah approved of the plan to start this multimedia university which was really innovative, because we didn’t have a main campus like most other universities. But we imparted our educational material through books that we published, for which the university established the largest publishing house in the country. In conjunction with the National Iranian Radio and Television Organisation we produced radio and television programmes. We produced science kits, which the students would receive and take home and with which they could conduct 150 experiments in their kitchens. There were twenty study centres in different parts of the country with tutors available to help students.  Copies of university’s radio and television programs were also available there. It was a very integrated and media-intensive situation. We had taken in the second year of our students when the tanks came into the streets and the revolution was on. About that time, my request for a sabbatical had come through, fortunately, so I decided to return to the US to see if I wanted to do further education and graduate studies or to continue filmmaking. So that was a major transition for me away from Iran.

KA: I’m curious about the collaboration between NIRT and this Free University. Was the university designed to work with these other institutions within Iran? I’m trying to get a sense of how those infrastructures were forming in the 1970s.

HN: The head of the university was Abdolrahim Ahmadi who was a well-known literary person, whose translation of Grapes of Wrath I loved when I was a high school kid. He had published it under a pseudonym. But he was a learned man, well connected to various institutions and had a mandate from the prime minster, Amir Abbas Hoveyda, to create this university as approved by the Shah. So, he had approval at the highest level. At the same time this university needed to connect with other institutions, as you mentioned. We brought in the entire editorial staff from Franklin Publishing, which was a major publisher of pocket books in Tehran, to come on board and become the editorial department for the book publishing in our university. We contracted with the Educational TV network to help produce and broadcast our radio and television programmes.   The Broadcast and Media Center, the unit that I directed at the university, hired the producers and directors and sent them to the BBC to be trained in production. Upon their return, they used the Educational TV’s studios and staff to produce our programmes. The heart of the university which, I think, was ingenious and was borrowed partly from the UK system, was a course team that designed and produced all the educational materials collectively. For example, the course team for the science course would consist of a physicist, a chemist, a biologist, and a mathematician, but it would also have a textbook editor, a radio and television producer, a kit designer, and an educational technologist. All of these would work together to decide on what material would go to the kit, to radio or TV, or to textbook. Together they produced the various components of the course.  It was kind of unusual in the atmosphere of authoritarianism and distrust endemic in Iran at the time. It’s interesting that after the revolution this university was divided up and dispersed. A lot of it went to form the Allameh Tabatabai University. The whole text production became Nashr-e Daneshgahi, the university publisher, which is the biggest publisher in Iran. But then a new Islamic Free University was created in its place which has none of these features we are talking about.

KA: And that was when you wrote your first book-length project on documentary?

HN: That’s right. It’s a good point, because at the same time that I was working at the Free University of Iran, I also taught in the College of Cinema and Television a course on the history and theory of documentary cinema. There was a lot of material written and published in Persian about documentary films, but there wasn’t a single book yet. So, as I began to teach and prepare my lectures, I saw the beginning of a book forming and it became a two-volume book in Persian, Film-e Mostanad (Documentary Film) which the Free University of Iran Publishing House published. As it was being published the revolution happened. The book sold out immediately and no more copies were produced, because the publishing house also was transformed. I received only three copies of the book after I returned to the US.  There was a great deal of interest in reprinting it, and in one of my return trips, the director of the new University Publishing offered to reprint the book if I amended it, particularly by removing some of the stills of women who showed too much skin, which were considered inappropriate for the new Islamic era.  I refused.  So, for many years the Xerox copies of the book were available in bookstores in Tehran. That is the story of my first major publication.

KA: And some of your other publications in journals like Jump Cut on documentary came out of the same project. 

HN: Yeah, gradually they came out of the same project…Jump Cut and Quarterly Review of Film Studies. In addition, I began to publish a series of interviews I had conducted with direct cinema documentarists the Maysles brothers and Richard Leacock, and with verité filmmaker, Jean Rouch. I had kept all of those interviews that I had done in preparation for my Persian language book and so transcribed and edited them and they were published in American journals.

KA: So, we’re kind of going back now to LA. You took a sabbatical from the Free University?

HN: Which became permanent! I came back to LA and began working in television for a while. The UCLA had an internal production house for producing educational shows and I became a producer-director in that outfit, one among seven producers-directors. While there I produced or directed several major series, like a twenty-part TV series, Mastery Teaching, designed to train teaching assistants, a 14-part TV show, The Tutors’ Guide, for training tutors, or a 14-part radio show called Power in America. Then I made a whole series of television shows for the American Medical Association on various topics like hearing loss, obesity, asthma, COPD, and sexually transmitted diseases. These were two-hour tapes plus study guides that we produced. It was very technical material, but it was fun and I enjoyed the process, having come from a family of doctors. As a result of making the hearing loss show I was also able to make another film that was award-winning.  It was called Beethoven: Triumph over Silence, for which I worked with a famous otolaryngologist, Dr. Victor Goodhill.  We basically tried to recreate what Beethoven would have heard before he lost his hearing and how he lost it and in what frequencies he lost it. Because after he lost his hearing, he communicated with people by writing in a notebook, and other people responded by writing in his notebook, and these notebooks exist today; we had a remarkably intimate record of what Beethoven thought and felt and said. We used these writings as part of the narrative of the film and recreated audio-wise how he would have heard, for example, when he conducted his 9^th symphony and he went out of synch with it. We have his notes as to how terrible he thought of what he had done. But we were also able to recreate his hearing loss in the first, say, 30 seconds of the 9th, which conveys the drama and the tragedy that Beethoven felt to contemporary audiences.

KA: Was it around that time that you started thinking about doing a PhD?

HN: Yes, because I was on the UCLA campus all the time anyway, and also at this point I had gotten to know a lot of Iranian Studies and film studies people at the UCLA.  So, I applied for the PhD programme in film-TV and got in. Our professors were Nick Brown, Janet Bergstrom, Steve Mamber, Teshome Gabriel, Katherine Montgomery, Robert Rosen, and Howard Suber. These were the core faculty, but I worked mostly with Teshome Gabriel, who was my advisor and a friend.

KA: And you edited a book together. Was it while you were a student or after?

HN: I was still a grad student…almost finished. Working with Teshome I put together a special thick issue in 1991 of Quarterly Review Film and Video (combining three issues into one) on postcolonial cinema, which we later republished as a book, Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged. I had begun to study the Iranians in diaspora for my PhD. I remember Teshome advising me not to choose an Iranian topic. He said because you are going to be branded as an Iran specialist and pigeon-holed, which I think was a good advice, but I didn’t take it, because I was personally interested in that topic and I was very knowledgeable about it. I had followed all these Iranian exiles with their television and radio programmes and pop music. Iranians were very active in those days and media-savvy, because many of those who came to LA were media people already. Producers, dancers, singers, actors, directors, musicians, all kinds of people were there. In one decade, Iranians in LA produced nearly 90 periodicals in Persian language alone, and these were all commercially-driven, which means they had to have had fairly strong cultural and economic capital to invest in advertising and to sell products to Iranians. They produced over sixty television shows.  I began videotaping these programs and going to their studios and interviewing them. I had a lot of stuff that nobody else had, why give it up?  Plus, working on the Iranian exile meant I was also working on trying to figure out my own situation in exile.  By the way, all of the videos and research materials I collected for my dissertation project are now on deposit at Northwestern University Library Archives, where they are being processed and catalogued for use by other researchers.

KA: And that was the genesis of Iran Media Index and the dissertation project, right?

HN: They were two different things. That was the genesis of dissertation which in a couple of years became my next book, The Making of Exile Cultures, in which I basically paid attention to the totality of pop culture of Iranians in Los Angeles as an alternative home, the home that they didn’t have or had escaped because of the revolution, and the home that they longed to return to. So all of these feelings and nostalgia and longings were embedded in the shows and they were very political as well as cathected. I think that the book established a model for ethnic television studies which hadn’t been on the horizon very much yet.

KA: Just as follow-up to that, you were working on Third Cinema and post-colonial questions and then you choose to start with this television study. Could you say something about that choice?

HN: It’s because television and radio were the media for the Iranian exiles in LA to communicate not only with the exile community in LA, but also with the diasporic community of Iranians elsewhere and with Iranians in the homeland. Eventually these individual television shows which were broadcast on lease-access televisions at first became 24-hour satellite channels. Right now, there are somewhere around two dozen satellite channels in Persian language being broadcast out of LA and are received in Iran. They have become kind of a force in some of demonstrations that are going on this week, for example. So, this was a significant new development in the media and exile world. A lot of Iranian filmmakers who are in exile turned to television, because that was the medium with which they could communicate with large audience. So, film was put on the back burner for a while. But the thing that I want to mention is that around Teshome Gabriel a number of students gathered; not only students and faculty in film, but also those from literature, political science, anthropology, and other fields. We used to get together on Friday afternoons in one of the cafeterias of the UCLA (Lu Valle Coffee-shop), and just B.S. and talk about post-colonial theory, Third Cinema, Third World Cinema, etc. Eventually these gatherings led to the production of two magazines. Emergences was the one that I was involved with. This sort of led me to get involved in academic journalism. It’s interesting that at around this same time, Beverley Houston and Ron Gottesman, the editors of Quarterly Review of Film Studies which was at USC, asked me if I wanted to become the managing editor of their journal. Delighted, I accepted and, so as a graduate student, I was suddenly basking in the glow of all these academic film studies people in southern California and elsewhere. I was the traffic cop for the magazine.

KA: It was an important time for that journal, too.

HN: Yes. For the journal and for film studies. Because also the turn to theory had occurred, so there was an incredible excitement. Everybody was turning to feminism, psychoanalysis and cultural studies, deconstruction, postmodernism, etc. All of these concepts were coming into film and media studies and it was a very exciting period. That’s how I ended up being on so many editorial boards and advisory boards of culture and media journals, from Diaspora to Framework.

KA: And I want you to talk more about the turn to theory and how it figures in your own work at the time. But before we do that, I was trying to figure a good place in the chronology to talk about your programming work and I thought maybe talking about it early on can be an interesting place to put that question, because of all of the controversies surrounding some of your early programmes.

HN:  Actually, in terms of timeline it also works well, because my first major film programming occurred in 1990, the year that I was finishing my dissertation. I hit upon this idea of organising a film festival for UCLA. I proposed that we do a film series on Iranian cinema, ten years after the revolution, to sort of take stock of all the films that had been made after this destructive event, which targeted cinema and movie houses for elimination. Not many films after the revolution had been brought to LA for Iranians to see. And the atmosphere among Iranian exiles was highly partisan against the Islamic republic, because most people had sort of escaped the revolution for political or religious reasons. There were lots of Baha’is and Christians and Marxists and the royalists, from all kinds of places and [also] minoritarian Iranians [or] ethnic minorities who had escaped the enforced Islamisation. So, the atmosphere was decidedly against the Islamic republic…

KA: And many of them had left their careers at home too…

HN: That’s right. They had lost their careers and they were angry; personally angry. I was able to establish a relationship with the Ministry of Culture and Art. I asked for 44 films that I had selected. From them I selected 22 or 24 films for exhibition in this decade of Iranian Cinema event and I invited Abbas Kiarostami and Dariush Mehrjui to come and show their latest films and interact with the audiences. But as soon as we announced the festival, the Iranian television producers came out against it and said that it was a whitewash of the Islamic regime and we were being paid by Islamic republic and blah, blah, blah. On the night of the opening many well-known filmmakers, television producers, actors and so forth came out against it, holding placards [saying] “Down with the Festival.” I was walking with our guests Kiarostami and Mehrjui into the cinema [in] the Melnitz Hall, which was the site of the screenings when Kiarostami walked to one of them- I think it was Parviz Sayyad- and said: “Why don’t you give me your placard? I’ll stand in the line demonstrating against the festival. You go inside and look at the films and see if you still want to demonstrate.” The fact was that none of them had seen these films. They were just categorically opposed because they were made under the Islamic regime. The most interesting thing for me as a programmer was the response of the audiences coming out of cinema. Many of them were crying. These were adult people, professors, [who were] crying on my shoulder, thanking me for giving them the opportunity to see Iran from the point of view of Iranians inside Iran. Remember at the time Iranians had suffered the hostage crisis and so there was a very hostile atmosphere in the US media against Iran and Iranians, including those in the US. So, the image that was painted of Iran in the American media was very one-sided and stereotypically negative.  Everything was Islamic hard-liners and bearded people and angry fists in the air and women all covered up and so forth. So, for Iranian exiles that festival was sort of the first insider view of the Iran that they knew and loved. That festival became an annual event and still continues.

KA: So, in 1990 you probably showed Where is the Friend’s House but not yet Close Up?

HN: Close-up hadn’t come out yet. We showed it at the festival that I started in Houston. When I moved to Houston in 1992 to teach at Rice University I started another Iranian film festival with Rice Cinema and Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. That also became an annual festival which still continues.

KA: That’s actually a good transition to talk about your move to Houston. You moved there before The Making of Exile Cultures comes out?

HN: Yes, I got a Rockefeller post-doc at Rice to work on turning my dissertation into a book. It took me a year to do that. So, the following year, 1993, my book came out and that’s when Rice also announced a new position in film studies, their first fully-fledged film studies person.  I applied for that job, they did a national search and I got the job, so I stayed.

KA.: What was it like to develop your 1990s book projects in that environment? What interventions were you focusing on as you were writing them?

HN: I did another kind of programming there in addition to the film festival for the Museum of Fine Arts and Rice Cinema. I organised a major international conference on exile and diaspora studies and brought in a lot of people, including Homi Bhabha. The contribution from that conference formed the backbone of my next edited book, Home, Exile, Homeland in which we examined different ideas about home, like Vivian Sobchack did a chapter on the body as home. She had lost one leg due to cancer, so I asked her “What about the body as your home or un-home, when your own body is attacking you?” She wrote a really interesting article about that. Other people wrote about the house, as home.  Pat Seed wrote about the key to the house. She’s a medieval historian and she was studying the Muslims and the Jews who were thrown out of Spain due to Inquisition and they lost their homes, but when they were kicked out of the country they took with them the keys from their houses, and they put these keys above the doors of their new homes in exile as a reminder [that] “as long as I have these keys, I’m in exile.” She wrote a very interesting chapter. We did a variety of interesting intervention on the concepts of home, house, homeland. Then Teshome and I transformed the three special issues of Quarterly Review of Film and Video into a book. Teshome had gotten a post-doc at Rice, as well, so for a year he joined me there and we worked together on that. It was a very productive year. These three books: The Making of an Exile Culture: Iranian Television in Los Angeles; Otherness and the Media: The Ethnography of the Imagined and the Imaged; and House, Home, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place were really pushing me towards theorising my next book, which was the idea of an “accented cinema.”

KA: You were talking about this personal dimension of exile, and this leading to books that are so intently focused on the feeling of exile [such as] claustrophobia, anxiety, dread, longing…those kinds of things. Could you talk a little bit about how affect works in these books?

HN: I think it came into my work not through theory first, but through my own experience of exile and displacement, of having an accent.  Everywhere I went as soon as I began to talk people would say “where are you from?” So, my “foreignness” and “outsider-ness” were already pointed out. On the other hand, I became much more cognisant of the affect, [like] the smell of a place or of a particular food, that would suddenly transport you 10,000 miles to somewhere else, or to 40 years earlier. The senses become a lot more important to you when you are displaced or out of place. I think that’s how affect came into my work through my own synaesthetic experiences of displacement, and then through paying attention to the theory.  My theorization tends to be bottom up.

KA: And what has the audience been for “An Accented Cinema” Have you traced its afterlife?

HN: It’s been taught in a lot of different places, like in Eastern European countries. I think it’s been translated into Turkish and Hebrew, but not into Persian, partly because some of these films are not readily available. They are esoteric films, made by smaller people, not well-known auteur directors. So, without access to the films, it’s very hard to see them and to teach and translate them. I think the internet is opening up access to some of these films. There are all kinds of openings that internet has created for alternative and minoritarian cinema. I think when the book first came out in 2001, we did have the internet, but not the kind of fast and high capacity internet that we have now, with streaming and YouTube and all of those things.

KA: So that book comes out and then shortly, after a few years you moved to Evanston, to this office. 

HN: Yes. I moved here, because I think Northwestern has one of the first radio-television departments in this country, if not the first. It has a long history of engagement with various media and also our Department of Radio-TV-Film has various programmes, among them film production, screen writing, documentary production, and a screen cultures PhD programme, with very good and diverse faculty. And there are many others in other departments who teach film and media.  So, it was very attractive for me to move here from Rice which had very few full-time film studies people who were in different departments and there was no cohesiveness to their efforts. So, I came right here to this office 11 years ago.

KA: Were those links between production and studies that happen here important for your decision as well?   

HN: Yes, because when I teach my PhD graduate courses, graduate students in documentary production oftentimes take it. I not only teach theory and history, but also bring in production issues that film studies professors may not bring in.  As a result, both the production and studies students get exposed to things that they probably would not get exposed to normally. Some of the MFA documentary students who have taken my “Accented Cinema” course have made their films inspired by that course. So, it’s fascinating to see how they interpret the material. I teach a graduate “Documentary and Ethnographic Film” course as well, which they have also taken, and they apply some of the things they learn in their studies courses in their work. It’s really nice to see what the takeaway is for them in their work. Of course, this is where my own production experience is also helpful, because I can talk in their language and point to the filmmaking techniques in terms of budgeting, styles of filming, how the group dynamic works, shooting arrangements and so forth. I think I can talk with certain authority to filmmakers who take my classes that average film studies person who doesn’t have a background in film production may not possess.

KA: This was also an important move in terms of finally finishing up this project that you’ve been working on for essentially your entire professional life.

HN: Yes, the four-volume A Social History of Iranian Cinema. With every article that I wrote and published on Iranian cinema or talk that I gave or every visit to an archive…that’s actually where my first English language book, Iran Media Index, comes in as well. For that book I went to a lot of archives in several countries. The whole project basically was to document from 1900 to 1981, all the documentaries, newsreels, and television news programmes that were made about Iran in the UK and the US. For that I went to many archives like, the National Film Archive in the UK, Iran’s National Film Archive, the US Library of Congress, the US National Film Archive, lots of commercial newsreel archives, etc., to produce this filmography. That sort of made me aware of the enormity of the material. Some of the findings from that book, were plugged into A Social History of Iranian Cinema when I was writing about the history of documentary filmmaking by foreigners about Iran. Likewise, other chapters were helped by the previous books that I had published. The three books that I did on exile and diaspora cinema became the impetus for a major chapter in volume 4 about the Iranian filmmakers in the diaspora. Originally, my project was to do a one-volume book, as specified by my contract with Duke University Press. After a few years of writing I realised that it was not going to be one volume.

KA: And in building an argument that runs through all three thousand pages that takes forty years to create, there were massive transformations in the files along the way. Can you say something about the way you adapted the project to the way the field changed, both in Cinema and Media Studies and Iranian Studies?

HN: As I was writing and doing the research, Iranian Studies came into its own, in the US at any rate. Really until the 90s, Iranian studies circles focused primarily on history, politics, anthropology, sociology and if they dealt with the arts, they were traditional arts [like] paintings, Saqqa-khaneh paintings or poetry and literature. Modern media were not really in the purview. So, one of the changes that was occurring in Iranian Studies was that modern media and pop culture gradually became acceptable topics, as a new generation of scholars were minted. In Film Studies we had, at the beginning, as I was mentioning earlier, to turn to theory that really revitalised academia in various fields, including in cinema. I was at the right time in the right place at UCLA, where a lot of these guys like Derrida, Lyotard, Habermas were coming to give talks or to teach courses. I was there and have sketches of all these people, because in all these lectures that I attended, I also sketched the individual speakers. So, I have thousands of sketches of these intellectuals with a little blurb identifying the gist of their talk. That was my notetaking.  I was kind of an inquisitive child, constantly absorbing both the field of Iranian Studies and Film Studies and Critical Theory, all of which were evolving. I incorporated them promiscuously perhaps, but I hope that I have done it seamlessly and creatively enough to make a coherent argument and not be pedantic or doctrinaire about it.

KA: I’m also thinking of how the field is giving more serious attention to non-theatrical media and to the links between television and film.  

HN: I think that is partly because I am intersectional. I’m interested in the intersections and interstices. I wrote a preface to the book Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice, edited by Alan Grossman and Aine O’Brien, which deals with this topic; it was entitled “On the Global Inter-, Multi-, and Trans- —Foreword.” I’ve always been interested in connections and layers, in how things connect to each other. That’s where it comes from. I think the topic is also part of that autobiographical element. If you listen to and look at your own self and your own interests, you may discover that something new is there. But if you constantly try to follow the trends, you won’t discover anything new. The real newness is when you turn inward and inside and discover something there.

KA: Do you have a sense of how the book was received within the field of Iranian studies, maybe among film scholars writing in Persian in comparison with those working in film studies in North America? 

HN: It seems to have done very well, with many reviews published in Iranian studies and film and media journals. The first volume has already been translated into Persian.  There was a recent documentary that was made about me [called] Mouth Harp in Minor Key: Hamid Naficy In/On Exile. Just a couple of weeks ago this was shown at the Cinema-Vérité film festival [in Farsi: Sinama-Haghighat] in Tehran and did very well. Many fans had to sit on the floors because the cinema was so full and they scheduled new sessions for the film. The filmmaker, Maryam Sepehri, is now exploring international film festival and distribution circuits for that film.  So, through the publication of translation of the first volume of A Social History of Iranian Cinema, as well as through translations of my other works in article form, people had heard enough about me to come and see this documentary about this guy who is abroad. A whole bunch of reviews and interviews with the filmmaker are beginning to come out. So, I think it has had some impact. Given the kind of national hostility between my two countries, the US and Iran, which also affects travel- the Trump administration bans travel of Iranians to the US and the Iranian government labels Iranian bi-nationals who travel to Iran to conduct research as US spies, so any time you go there you fear that your research would be taken as spying- it is a very tough field to work in, but such is both the peril and privilege of interstitial existence!

K.A: What you are working on now, and what’s coming on the horizon?

HN: Actually, one of the projects that I’m working is apropos of what I was just saying. Because of the lack of formal relationship between the two countries of Iran and the US, most contact between Americans and Iranians has occurred via media, in cyberspace or on television or in film. As a result of the four-volume book, I’ve been working on this idea of public diplomacy between the two countries involving not only governments’ use of media, directly or through their allies and subterfuge entities, but also by citizens’ use of media, particularly social media. That may become another book, but that one is also an evolving animal.  Public diplomacy via media is a constantly evolving topic not only because of what the governments and social media do, but also because of the technological revolutions that are taking place right under our noses. So that’s one project I’m working on, on the side-line.

KA: Focusing mainly on things like social media or satellite broadcasting?

HN:  All of them. The totality of media which I’m calling media-work, which includes all of the Iran-related media-work, in Persian and also in English, coming out of the US and Iran, including the social media that Iranians mobilise, like during various periodic uprisings or demonstrations. The other [project] is a memoir that I’ve been working on for a while. I have a huge amount of material, as usual, so the challenge here is how to not turn it into a compendium of three thousand-pages, but into something cohesive and readable for the general public. That’s what I’m supposed to be working on this year while I’m on sabbatical.

KA: Thank you so much for being so generous with your time.

HN: Thank you for coming up here. I hope that this will be edited into a nice bouquet of flowers!

[Ramin Khanjani transcribed and contributed to the editing of this interview.]

David Menashri is a professor emeritus and the founding director of the Alliance Center for Iranian Studies at Tel Aviv University. Prof. Menashri has authored and edited ten books. His book Education and the Making of Modern Iran has been translated into Persian as Nezam-e Amuzeshi va Sakhtan-e Iran-e Modern, published by Hekmat Sina in 2017. He is currently completing a book titled tentatively “Iran: Domestic Challenges and Regional Ambitions.”

Toward a New Education System

The progressive deterioration of Iran’s internal situation and the expanding contacts with the West, including the military defeats and the humiliating treaties of Golestan (1813) and Turkmanchay (1828) with Russia, sustained awareness of the country’s weakness and spurred the desire to adopt new methods to meet the growing challenges facing the country. All these promoted—much as they did in the Ottoman Empire and in semi-independent Egypt—the twin processes of imitation and change. The Middle East could no longer ignore the threatening strength of the West and sought to “discover and apply the elusive secret of its greatness and strength.”[2] The West, thus, provided both the impetus for change and the model for imitation, generating a conspicuous tension between the urge to reject and the desire to emulate.[3] As the challenge was noticed primarily in the battlefield, the response was first sought in imitating Western military technology. Gradually, it was realized that modern military techniques and technologies could not be implanted into an otherwise unchanged society. The fabric of the social, economic, and political order needed to be reshaped. In the view of a growing number of Iranian thinkers, education was one of the main secret sources of Western progress and its adoption the main route to progress.

In Muslim lands, the value placed on education was readily received. Western models and Indigenous tradition reinforced, rather than battled, each other in recognition of the value of knowledge. In Iran, both the pre-Islamic and Islamic traditions commend education. Both understand it as a twofold process: acquisition of knowledge and character formation. This is reflected in the two-term expressions used to connote the educational process: ta‘lim va tarbiyyat or amuzesh va parvaresh (a neologism derived from old Persian roots). The Avesta contains numerous references to education and educated people. Of even greater relevance to the realities of modern Iran is the prominence of knowledge in Islam. Islamic tradition makes the search for knowledge (talab al-‘ilm) “a duty of all Muslims . . . from the cradle to the grave” and in any place, “even in [distant] China.”[4] Even greater importance is attached to ‘ilm in the tradition of the Shia—the religion of Iran since the early sixteenth century. The ultimate aim of ‘ilm is the knowledge of God and, thus, traditional schools—maktab or madrese—concentrate on religious subjects. The admiration Iranians have for classical literature and poetry further stresses the importance of knowledge. Sa‘di, for example, devoted a chapter in Golestan to tarbiyyat. Human beings’ ability, he said, is based on knowledge. A phrase from Ferdowsi’s Shahname became the motto of the Ministry of Education in the 1930s: “Capable is the one who possesses knowledge” (tavana bavad an ke dana bavad), or in modern parlance, “education is power.” Following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the motto was changed to ta‘lim va tarbiyyat ‘ebadat ast (“education is worship”). With all the differences in their approach, both terms glorify learning.

Such proud traditions notwithstanding, the school system in the early nineteenth century was incapable of responding to the momentous challenges of modern times. Yet the plea for change was confronted by the forces of tradition, with the ‘ulama’ (prominent clerics) at their head. Customarily, they rejected innovation as un-Islamic—bid‘ah (unlawful innovation)—and regarded it as their “religious obligation” to oppose any idea imported from the infidel West.[5] By and large, political dignitaries and social elites, too, rejected any change likely to jeopardize their status. Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza thus complained in 1812 that his brother and political rival, Mohammad ‘Ali, had rendered him and his reform plans odious by arguing that “in adopting the customs of the infidels,” he was subverting Islam.[6] Still, some channels for the infiltration of new ideas gradually opened during the century, not from any ideological preference but because of exigencies of the situation.

Since weakness was most painfully sensed on the military front, the first steps were to acquire Western military technology. A French training mission was invited to Tehran (1807–9), followed by a British one. In keeping with the growing contacts with the West, the first Iranian diplomatic mission was set up in London in 1809, followed by resident embassies in other European capitals. Living in Europe, the diplomats and their companions became acquainted with Western culture and politics and, no less important, learned foreign languages, which was instrumental in transferring ideas. The first steps to obtain the benefits of Western schooling were the government’s initiatives to finance students to study at European universities. The process was slow and limited in numbers, but in retrospect, the contribution of returning graduates to the process of change was invaluable. It was no less than groundbreaking change for the government to take upon itself responsibility for the education of its people (hitherto the exclusive domain of religion), and to send their children to learn from the infidels.

In 1811, the first two Iranian students left for London, placing them among the first Middle Eastern students to do so, followed by another five in 1815. Five more left to France in 1845 (but were rushed home because of the political change in Paris and the shah’s death in 1848). Three others studied in Russia and another in Italy. The initiative was accelerated under Nasser al-Din Shah (1848–96). In 1856–57, three students left for France; two years later, forty-two students left for France. This group stands out not only because of its unprecedented size, but also because all its members were graduates of Dar al-Fonun (discussed below), and thus were better prepared for studies abroad than were their predecessors. The early choice of England soon made room for a preference for France, which was to last well into the twentieth century. Almost all students came from prominent, wealthy families.

Returning graduates were appointed to prestigious positions upon their return and rose rather quickly to prominent positions; but their positions often had little to do with the fields of their studies. Given their social background, they would have been assured of a fine career in any case; nevertheless, new education—particularly European education—was of growing weight in their elevation. Gradually, upper-class families came to feel that the careers of their children had to be underpinned by educational qualifications. Appreciation of Western science and technology, coupled with the curiosity toward these “explorers” of Europe, turned the graduates into a focus of social attention. People were not interested much in their academic credentials; what mattered more was that they had had a glimpse of the West and its secrets. As Malkom Khan—one of the most influential proponents of change in the late nineteenth century—put it, anyone who had wandered in the cities of Europe for a few days was regarded as a source of knowledge.[7] In “Shaykh va Shukh,” the author conveys that it did not matter how much the graduates had actually learned of Western science; they were lionized just for having been to Europe. Shukh comments: “Whoever walked in the streets of Paris is appointed upon his return to a directorship in a government hospital [. . .] build[s] himself a large house, is granted a title, earns a good salary, [and] obtains decorations?”[8]

The first six graduates were initially appointed to positions related to their fields of study. Many of those who studied in Europe between 1845 and 1848 did not complete their studies, which explains why most of them served in positions where they could make use of their general education and knowledge of foreign languages, rather than specific training. Those sent out by Nasser al-Din Shah did complete their studies yet usually proved reluctant to work in their fields of expertise. Clearly, the returning graduates and their families preferred political, diplomatic, or administrative appointments. Mirza Asadollah Khan was exceptional in expressing annoyance at such a turn of events. Having studied paper manufacturing and then been assigned to a senior position in the post office, he cynically remarked: “Thanks God, I still have business with paper; although I am not a maker of paper (kaghaz saz), I still play with paper (kaghaz baz).”[9] Already in the early 1850s, such practices limited the contributions that the specialists were capable of making to the community. While this turn of events was not intended by the initiators of the program, in the wider process of change, the participation of the specialists with new education in the country’s social, political, and cultural life contributed significantly to the overall process of modernization.

The establishment, in 1851, of the Dar al-Fonun (polytechnic college), was the natural outgrowth of the motives that had led to the dispatch of students to Europe—to acquire Western technology. It was the first educational institution in modern Iran to be set up by the government, and the first to hire European instructors to teach Western sciences. Amir Kabir, the initiator and driving force behind the college, had modeled it after similar schools in Russia (where he had traveled in the 1820s) and the Ottoman Empire (where he had spent a long time in the late 1840s). In Russia, he was particularly impressed by the technical college at St. Petersburg, and in Istanbul, by the Maktab ‘Ulum Harbiye and by the wider educational reform in the 1840s. At Dar al-Fonun, Amir Kabir expected to gain the same benefits as were derived from sending students abroad, without incurring the heavy expenses of travel abroad and without exposing them to the “negative influences” of residence in a foreign country.[10]

Opposition to Dar al-Fonun came mainly from the ‘ulama’, who opposed setting up schools outside their influence and resented the teaching of modern subjects modeled on Western design. The founders tried to smooth tempers by incorporating religious studies into the curriculum and by holding public prayers at school, but to no avail. Having failed to prevent its establishment, the ‘ulama’ pressured the shah to deny support for the school, arguing that it was bound to foster anti-monarchical philosophies. Their pressure increased with the spread of the liberal movement in the Ottoman Empire and the approval of a constitution there in 1876, and later with the growth of the liberal movement in Iran, in which graduates of Dar al-Fonun and of foreign universities played a significant part. Even before its opening, the assassination of Amir Kabir had removed the school’s most vigorous supporter. Later, the shah’s initially enthusiastic support for the school gave way to indifference, before turning more favorable again in the late 1870s. In all, the status of the school alternated according to the shah’s arbitrary and inconsistent approach.[11]

Dar al-Fonun became the cornerstone of modern education, and some scholars view its establishment as signaling the beginning of new education in Iran. It trained relatively large cadres of Iranians and acquainted them with Western technology and general education. Many of its graduates later pursued their higher education in Western countries. Dar al-Fonun itself turned into a cultural center, hosting public lectures and discussions and publishing newspapers, textbooks, and translations of Western literature. Graduates, in the high positions they came to occupy, worked hand in hand with graduates of Western universities to support the overall process of change and reform.

Dar al-Fonun owed its existence to a government initiative and relied on its support. The government appointed its academic and administrative staff, drafted the curriculum, selected the entrants, and managed the employment of its graduates. This benefited the school as long as leading state figures (such as Amir Kabir, Mirza Hosein Khan Sepahsalar, Moshir al-Doula, and, at times, Nasser al-Din Shah) supported it, but harmed it when those in power turned against it. In all, the school contributed significantly to the development of modern education and to the larger process of Westernization. Hekmat’s conclusion that its graduates were of “the most important service for the advancement of Iran,”[12] and Safa’s assertion that they were an “important source for ideological, scientific and literary change,” do not seem to be exaggerated.[13]

Almost half a century later, several ministries founded schools of higher learning to provide them with expert staff in their ministries. An important feature of these schools was that they were the first to go beyond imitating the military or technological feature of Western education. In the stormy years of the early twentieth century, Madrese-ye ‘Ulum-e Siyasi became a center of intellectual activity. In 1907–8, its graduates founded the Sherekat-e Ma‘aref (Association for Education), which organized cultural events and founded new schools. These institutions of higher learning later became the building blocks of Tehran University.

New elementary and secondary schools were opened in Iran beginning in the 1870s (missionary schools started earlier). Their establishment was made possible largely through the collaboration between reformist intellectuals and politicians supportive of their vision. Most prominent among the latter were Sepahsalar (in the 1870s) and Mirza ‘Ali Khan Amin al-Doula (end of the century); the ministers of education Ja‘far Qoli Khan and Mirza Mahmud Khan Ehtesham al-Saltane; and to a degree, Shah Mozaffar al-Din himself. In 1873–74, Sepahsalar established in Tehran the first public secondary school, named Moshiriye in his honor. A similar school was established in Tabriz in the same year, to be followed by military high schools in Isfahan (1882–83) and Tehran (1884–85). Public elementary schools were opened in 1890, first by Mirza Hasan Roshdiye and later mainly by Sherekat-e Ma‘aref. Schools for girls were founded in the late 1890s, in addition to already-existing missionary schools and classes in private houses for the affluent. By 1918–19—over a century after the first contacts with Western education—there were a considerable number of new elementary and secondary schools, with a total of no less than thirty thousand students.[14] The curriculum and pedagogical approach differed from one school to another according to the educational philosophy of the founders. It was, as ‘Isa Sadiq (a student at such a school and later minister of education) noted, a period of “experimentations with a new education.”[15] However, each school differed thoroughly from the traditional system: the curriculum went far from what was taught in the maktabs, including new sciences and foreign languages. The majority of the teachers and headmasters were graduates of foreign schools or of Dar al-Fonun.

Few reasons made the opposition by the ‘ulama’ to the new elementary schools more forceful and passionate than their resentment of Dar al-Fonun or of the dispatch of students to Europe. They viewed the elementary schools as a threat to the students’ faith and resented their own lack of control over education, especially as such schools dealt with young children in a sensitive phase of their life. Also, unlike the earlier, numerically limited initiatives, they feared that the new elementary schools would lead to sweeping change embracing the entire country. Sending students abroad or to Dar al-Fonun did not threaten the madrese, but the opening of new elementary schools often resulted in the closure of maktabs. Eventually, the ‘ulama’ also deplored the loss of an important source of income by the akhunds (junior clerics). To the clergy, the struggle against the new elementary schools was a struggle for their faith and a defense of their traditional privileges and functions.

Consequently, the struggle over new elementary schooling turned into an acute cultural battle. The ‘ulama’ pressured the government to refrain from supporting the new schools, threatened the schools’ headmasters and staff, and brought pressure to bear on the students and their families. Roshdiye, the driving force behind such schools, suffered takfir (accused of apostasy), and his school in Tabriz was destroyed by tullab (theological students). His father had warned him that by founding new schools, he would be branded as an infidel.[16] In 1903–4, a fatva (religious ruling) by four mojtaheds (prominent clerics) from Najaf urged the shah to forbid the foundation of new schools. The supporters of modern education persuaded the shah to reject the request.[17] Opponents then argued that the new education was harmful to Iran and to Islam, and served as a tool for foreigners to advance their imperialist schemes. Nonetheless, the advocates of the new education overcame clerical opposition. Once the crucial early years had passed, and mainly under Reza Shah (1925–41), the expansion of the new school system—and the concomitant closure of the maktabs—became irreversible.

With all its quantitative and qualitative limitations, the new education of the nineteenth century became the cornerstone of twentieth-century education. In a manner neither planned nor foreseen by its initiators, the new education became extremely significant to the overall modernization of Iran. Beyond the academic contribution, it signified two major innovations: there was a deliberate, even methodical, attempt to learn from the West; and the state assumed responsibility for education, dislodging the religious establishment from its monopoly. These remained major features of Iranian education until the 1979 Islamic Revolution.

The Educated Class as a Motor for Change

The new educated class played a crucial role in the nineteenth-century reforms and the liberal movement that led to the Constitutional Revolution. Although too weak to mobilize mass support for their new ideologies, the members of this class were successful in mobilizing some key politicians to endorse reforms, contributing to the growing intellectual enlightenment and promoting new schools. The fact that many recipients of new higher education had moved into politics, government, or various cultural engagements, coupled with the social prestige that went with being Western educated, rendered them all the more capable of promoting the overall modernization of Iran, despite not working in the fields in which they had been trained. In the hectic years of the late nineteenth century, they proved instrumental in promoting Western concepts and offering the ideology to underpin both the Constitutional Revolution and the tobacco movement. Considering their small numbers, graduates of new schools, overseas and at home, had an astounding influence on the spread of liberal thought and the modernization of Iran. In due course, a number of influential reformist politicians emerged. Most prominent among them were the Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza and his chief minister Mirza Abu-Qasem Qa’em-maqam early in the century, Amir Kabir in mid-century, and Sepahsalar in the 1870s. A growing number of intellectuals, most of them graduates of foreign universities, joined their entourage.

One of the most important testimonies to the influence of Europe on the first students is the travel book of Mirza Saleh Shirazi, who studied in London (1815–19).[18] He expanded upon his impressions of the political system; personal liberties; the supremacy of law; the limits of royal authority; the concepts of freedom, religion, and the state; and the education system. The notion of political freedom so captivated Shirazi that he referred to England as the “Realm of Freedom” (velayat-e azadi). With much amazement, he described how the regent (George IV) wished to build a new street (to be named after him) but failed because a shopkeeper refused to sell his property. Even all the army, Shirazi maintained, could not force the shopkeeper to sell his property against his will, nor could the regent cause him any harm. All citizens—from the poorest to richest—were subject to the same law and enjoyed the same liberties. Even more illuminating is his remark that azadi (freedom) did not contradict entezam (public order). He wrote of the separation of powers, and tried to make it comprehensible to his readers that the people elected their representatives freely and, thus, became responsible for their destiny; that members of parliament enjoyed unlimited freedom; and that their decisions had sovereign force. “If necessary,” he exclaimed, “parliament can even change the religion.”[19] He took note that, unlike Islam, Christianity was a religion of conscience rather than practice. This led him to conclude that the ‘ulama’ were an obstacle to the progress of Muslim societies.[20]

If his was not the first Persian book to describe the European political system,[21] Shirazi was the first student—from anywhere in the Middle East—to set out his impressions of the West for the benefit of his countrymen. Study abroad influenced the students’ personal conduct and behavior and, with the prestige that went with studying abroad, they influenced many others. Shirazi’s descriptions of England were illuminating for Iranians, contrasting Western practices with the situation in Iran. Finally, rather than in its details, the importance of Shirazi’s book lies in the positive image of the West that it conveyed.

Though not entirely divorced from their Persian–Muslim heritage, the Iranian thinkers found new inspiration in the West. Their writings showed traces of French eighteenth-century thought on education, and some betrayed the influence of the founding fathers of the United States, who held that freedom and illiteracy were irreconcilable. Yet promoting new ideas was not easy. Given the prevalent religious ambience, some of them sought—often unconvincingly or awkwardly—to accommodate Western ideas with Islam. In 1876, Malkom proposed that reformists should present their desired innovations in Islamic terms to make them more easily acceptable. He labeled his approach “reformation of Islam”[22]—a concept reminiscent of the contemporary Egyptian thinker Mohammad ‘Abduh’s “Islamic modernism.” Yet in the second half of the nineteenth century, a new group of reformist thinkers managed to introduce some new ideas and advance the wheels of change.

The interrelation between education, freedom, and progress became the mainstay of intellectual argument then. In numerous treatises, Malkom drove home his view of education as the prerequisite for progress in general and constitutional order in particular. In his Shaykh va Vazir, a fictional dialogue between the shaykh (conservative) and the vazir (reformist), the latter argued that the secret of the strength, welfare, and the survival of nations depend on knowledge, and opined that unless it adopts Western education, Iran will fail to equal the achievements of the West.[23] In Neda’-ye ‘Edalat, he stated that only the spread of education had enabled the West to establish a political order based on justice. Iran is poor because it lacks legal justice (‘edalat-e qanuni) and because of its leaders’ failure to perceive the importance of education.[24] Sepahsalar was concerned primarily with the establishment of a constitutional order as a guarantor of freedom and social justice. To achieve these, he held that a European-style education was essential. ‘Ilm va Jahl, attributed to him, stressed: “The key to spiritual and material progress is knowledge,” adding that “one can achieve perfection only by knowledge.”[25] Mirza Yusef Khan Mostshar al-Doula attached similar importance to the spread of education, but considered a constitutional regime its prerequisite. In Yek Kalame, he claimed that “a single word” contained the key to progress: “Law.” However, without education the reign of law would not survive.[26] In a report to the Crown Prince Mozaffar al-Din, he opined—apparently for the first time in Iran—that education was also vital for fostering national unity.[27]

At the turn of the century, intellectuals’ appeals to expand new education turned more insistent, as was their critique of traditional schooling. Inaugurating a new school in Tehran (1898), Malek al-Motakallemin gave vent to his boundless expectations: “Only through knowledge can mankind achieve the highest peaks of progress; only under its aegis is it possible to establish justice and bring redemption to the world.” Turning to the young students, he said: “Having come to study at these factories for producing human beings (karkhane-ye adam-sazi), you ought to know that the destiny of the world, the fate of your nation, your own future and that of your children—[all] depend on knowledge alone.”[28] In Malkom’s Shaykh va Vazir, the shaykh queried, “How is it at all possible to adopt the principles of infidels?” just for the vazir to respond: “I do not deny that they are infidels. My only claim is that the strength of Europe derives from their unique mechanisms [. . .] The ‘ulama’ should either permit us to imitate the principles of Europeans’ strength, or bring some squadrons of angels down from heaven to rescue us from European rule.”[29] Abul-Qasem Khan Nasser al-Molk, a statesman educated in Britain, regarded constitution as “the origin of happiness, nobleness, and honor.” However, in Iran it may become the “origin of chaos, destruction, suffering, insecurity, and [. . .] sore evils,” because Iran lacked “the knowledge and potential” to turn it to good use. Constitutional order could not survive in an illiterate society as progress did not depend on the formal approval of a constitution but on the spread of education. He added passionately: “In the name of Allah, we need educated people. In the name of the Ka‘ba, the prophet and faith [. . .] we need educated people. The one and only way toward progress, equality, justice, happiness, sovereignty and pride is through spread of knowledge and existence of people who are educated according to the requirements of the times.”[30] For ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov (Talebzade), the “lack of knowledge and spiritual poverty” were not only the “enemies of freedom,”[31] but education also had a significant economic value. In line with Adam Smith, he regarded “human potential” (este‘dad) as “economic wealth” and education as the main means for its cultivation. In his words, “If we will have a constitution, we will have education, and will possess wealth, order (nazm) and independence. But if we ignore these truths, we will be nothing but fools who betray their nation, homeland and religion.”[32]

At the end of the period under review, the intellectuals’ optimism was further fueled by the modernization of Japan. Its victory over Russia (1904–5) fired the imagination of Muslim intellectuals and breathed confidence in the East’s ability to equal and, eventually, outpace the West. They were impressed by the way the Meiji restoration benefited from educational reform. The fact that Japan, an Eastern country with a constitution, defeated a Western power with no constitution was especially illuminating for them. Ignoring what was unique in the Japanese experience, Iranians used it as a paradigm, a proof of the linkage between education, constitution, and advancement. They often seemed to view education—and in a way also parliamentarism and constitutionalism—as an entity isolated from social, economic, and political structures, one that could be easily transplanted from one country to another. Malek al-Motakallemin and Malkom Khan attested to their underlying sentiment by referring to schools as “factories for producing human beings.” Just as industrial factories “take in raw materials and turn out final products,” Malkom opined, the schools “take in ignorant children and turn out engineers and accomplished thinkers.” Setting up several such “factories” would enable Iran “to advance by 3000 years in the space of three months.”[33] Similar sentiments were expressed by Talebov in his fictional book Ketab-e Ahmad (inspired by Rousseau’s Emile) in a dialogue between the author and his sons, Ahmad and Mahmud. Soon after Ahmad entered a new school, the father told him that in only four months, “you have gained more knowledge than Mahmud, who is attending the maktab for over three years.” Before the age of nine, students at the new schools learned the history of their nation, religion, geometry and arithmetic, geography, physics, chemistry, literature, and several foreign languages. “While the tullab, even at the age of seventy, are still stuck in the laws of taharat (purification), wondering how to spell that word.”[34]

Graduates of universities abroad and Dar al-Fonun were also the driving force behind the first newspapers. The first newspaper, Kaghadh-e Akhbar, published in 1837, eventually led to the publication of Vaqaye‘-e Ettefaqiye in 1851 at Dar al-Fonun, which lasted until the Constitutional Revolution. Later, official or semi-official papers—such as Iran, Sharaf, and Ettela’, still habitually praising the shah and his conduct—also included some educational and literary articles. Much more important were the newspapers published in the diaspora by expatriates mainly from the 1870s onward. Free from supervision or censorship, they argued for reform and for a constitution. The most significant of them were Malkom’s Qanun (London, first published in 1890); Akhtar (Istanbul, 1876); Habl ul-Matin (Calcutta, 1893); and Thoraya and Parvaresh (Cairo, 1890s). Many more were published closer to the Constitutional Revolution. Altogether, Browne lists 371 newspapers published until the revolution, some of which were of “a very high order, and afford examples of a prose style, forcible, nervous, and concise, hitherto almost unknown.”[35]

Another important avenue for intellectual discourse was translation and critical writing. Most prominent among the early translators was Mirza Reza Mohandes (studied in Paris), who translated (in 1829–30) Voltaire’s essays on Peter the Great and Charles XII of Sweden and later Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Many more books appeared with the establishment of Dar al-Fonun. In addition to textbooks, they included translations of European classics, such as Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Moliere’s plays, Dumas’s The Three Musketeers, Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, and, of particular significance for Persian readers, Morier’s Hajji Baba of Isfahan. Additionally, biographies of Napoleon Bonaparte, Nicholas I (Russia), Frederick the Great, William I (England), and Louis XV, and short histories of Rome, Athens, France, Russia, and Germany also became available in Persian. The shah likely commissioned some of these translations to glorify the monarchy, but they inadvertently allowed for unflattering comparison, contrasting the shahs and the prevalent poverty in Iran with famous world leaders and an advanced Europe.

In the last quarter of the century, numerous original books were also published, usually conveying critical messages. Most influential were the books by Talebov (such as Ketab-e Ahmad and Azadi va-Siyasat), Zayn al-‘Abedin Maraghe’i (Siyahat Name-ye Ebrahim Beg), Mostshar al-Doula (Yek Kalame), the treatises of Malkom, and the publications of Mirza Mohammad-Hasan Khan E‘temad al-Saltane (who studied at Dar al-Fonun and later in France). It is not certain whether the last actually wrote and translated the countless books appearing under his name, or if some of them were written by the team that he headed in the Ministry of the Press, but they are believed to reflect his views. Among such books are the Salnames, Mir’at al-Boldan, Matla‘at al-Shams, and Al-Ma‘ather va al-Athar. His sharp criticism of the mismanagement of Iranian affairs came out most clearly in Khalsa (Ecstasy), also known as Ketab-e Khab (Dream Book). Like Maraghe’i’s Ebrahim Beg and Talebov’s Ketab-e Ahmad, Khalsa adopted a loose fictional framework—a poetical dream—to castigate Qajar dignitaries for the decline of Iran. In Khalsa, the nineteenth-century chancellors were called upon to confess their sins in a tribunal “in the presence” of the great rulers of Persian history, standing accused of Iran’s decadence. Reviewing the Qajar period through their actions, eight years later, Seyyed Jamal-al-Din Wa‘ez, Malek al-Motakallemin, and Sheykh Ahmad Kermani wrote Ro’ya-ye Sadeqe (True Dreams), making the dignitaries, clerics, and governors account for their sins at the Last Judgment. Among the charges against the ‘ulama’ was their opposition to new education.

Gradually, many more intellectuals felt an urge to make their newfound views public. Though merely “inexperienced youngsters,” Hedayat wrote about the returning graduates, “each holds under his arms a thesis (resale) about the French Revolution and wishes to play the role of Robespierre or Danton.”[36] Writing about the leading intellectuals of that time, Mangol Bayat stated that they perceived themselves “as the new apostles,” spreading reason, science, liberty, and progress.[37] They did not necessarily share the same perception of Western civilization, nor did they want to imitate it in every respect, but they were impressed by what they witnessed and viewed borrowing elements of it as indispensable. However, a major barrier was the perception that change and innovation are un-Islamic (tantamount to bid‘ah). Yet throughout the century, intellectuals managed to mitigate such concerns, at least to some degree and in certain limited groups.

The urge to publish was supplemented by a desire to read. The reading public fed on political treatises, periodicals, and newspapers. Banned publications were smuggled into the country and read avidly, even at the shah’s court. Iranians, with their traditional admiration for verbal skill, marveled at the new idiomatic style and popular language of such books. “The intricate tales and excitements of this new literature were so fascinating [. . .] that families used to gather to hear them read aloud.”[38] The urge to write, however, seemed stronger than the aptitude to read. There is some truth in what Hedayat grieved: “Of books we have enough; what we lack are readers [. . .] The customers are illiterate.”[39]

Thus, when it came to mobilizing mass support for the tobacco revolt (1891) or the Constitutional Revolution (1906), the intellectuals needed elite groups as a driving force. The main contribution of the intellectuals was in influencing the influential segments of the elites, including some ‘ulama’ and officials, not the populace. When political change was finally in the offing and revolutionary forces were searching for an ideology to unite the divergent components of their camp, the intellectuals offered their ideology as the cohesive element. Freedom, parliamentarism, and constitutionalism were their contribution, and the wording of the constitution of 1906 carried their imprint. In the 1970s, their fellow intellectuals could not claim as much.

In all, the nineteenth century was a significant phase in transition from traditional schooling to new education inspired by the West. It was a slow process—in fact, too slow—involving severe ideological and political clashes between contradictory convictions. The following overly picturesque description by Mojtaba Minovi, a prominent twentieth-century historian, seems to properly illustrate the situation. He compared the role of the recipients of new education to spreading seeds in an uncultivated soil, where the land had not been fertilized or irrigated, and weeds and stones had not been removed. Some of the seeds, therefore, fell on spots where they could not germinate, but a few fell on fruitful soil and yielded the crop of progress.[40]

Conclusion

In the search for a path to confront the challenge of modernism, Iranian political thought over the last two centuries has fluctuated between extremes. From the Islamic doctrine that characterized the country’s general outlook until the late eighteenth century, Iran gradually underwent a phase of change, inspired by the West, that was exacerbated in the generation preceding the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

Integral to the general fabric of society, education has been a catalyst for change and an element itself subject to transformation. In the contest between traditional-religious and new, Western-style schooling, which took on the nature of a Kulturkampf in the late nineteenth century, the latter emerged triumphant and the religious establishment lost its age-old monopoly over education. Once the government had control, it changed the structure and content of the schooling system. New subjects, not previously included in the traditional curriculum, became the stock-in-trade of the new education. The new education of the nineteenth century was only the prelude, still limited at the end of the century. This initial change was underpinned by the Pahlavi monarchy (1925–79).

Perhaps the most significant testimonial to the value of the new education and to the degree to which it has become rooted in Iranian culture has come from the Islamic regime. With all the opposition of the ‘ulama’ to Western-style education, the elementary school system, despite significant changes in the content, follows the new patterns. Even as they became firmly in control in the first four decades of Islamic rule, the ‘ulama’ did not reverse the process. Education, with the exception of the madrese, has remained much closer to Westernized education than to traditional schooling. New sciences are included in the curriculum, and English language is taught at schools. Universities, closed for Islamization immediately after the revolution, were reopened after two years with their overall structure intact. The clerics in power have used the fruits of modern education in the service of their revolutionary goals in spite of their initial opposition. In a way, they seem to aspire to turn the wheel back to where it had been at the outset of the period discussed, when a distinction was made between (desirable) Western science and technology and (undesirable) Western culture. There is no reason to think that it is more feasible to make such a distinction now than it was then.

Finally, Iran’s historical identity has long been based on two main pillars—which did not necessarily live in harmony throughout the centuries—ancient/imperial/Persian and Islamic/Shi‘i. Since the nineteenth century, a third layer of Iranian identity seems to have emerged—modern/Western. Together, they shape Iran’s new distinctiveness. New education has had a significant role in introducing Western-style education and, through it, has influenced other aspects of Iranian life. Constitutionalism, parliamentarism, and nationalism, as well as modern education—deeply entrenched in modern Iranian history and endorsed also by the Islamic regime—are borrowed from Western culture. The question, it seems, is not if Western civilization and local traditions can live together, but rather if it is at all possible to totally separate them.

[1]This article has been reproduced from my book Education and the Making of Modern Iran (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992). This book was translated into Persian in Tehran in 2017: Nezam-e Amuzeshi va Sakhtan-e Iran-e Modern, by Hekmat Sina.

[2]Bernard Lewis, The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper and Row, 1964), 45.

[3]Gustav von Grunebaum, “Acculturation and Self-Realization,” in The Contemporary Middle East, ed. B. Rivlin and J.S. Szyliowicz (New York: Random House, 1965), 141–42.

[4]Franz Rosenthal, Knowledge Triumphant: The Concept of Knowledge in Medieval Islam (Leiden, NL: Brill, 2007), 89–91, 295.

[5]A lecture by Malkom Khan in London cited in Fereshte Nura’i, Tahqiq dar bare-ye Afkar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, Nazem al-Doula (Tehran: Ketabha-ye Jibi, 1973–74), 48–52.

[6]James Morier, A Second Journey through Persia, Armenia and Asia Minor (London: Longman, 1818), 213.

[7]See Malkom Khan, “Dastgah-e Divan,” in Majmu‘e Athar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, ed. Mohit Tabataba’i (Tehran: Danesh, AH 1327/AD 1948–49), 73–95. Quote on p. 78. All translations are mine unless otherwise stated.

[8]“Shaykh va Shukh,” in Afkar-e Ejtema‘i va Siyasi va Eqtesadi dar Athar-e Montasher Nashode-ye Dowran-e Qajar, ed. Fereydun Adamiyyat and Homa Nateq (Tehran: Agah, 1977), 144–49. Quote on p. 149.

[9]As cited by Mohit Tabataba’i, Shafaq-e Sorkh, “Tarikhche e‘zam muhasel beh Orupa,” (6 Murdad 1312/28 July 1933).

[10]‘Abdollah Mostowfi, Tarikh-e Ejtema‘i va  Edari Dowre-ye Qajariye, vol. 1 (Tehran: Tehran Mosavvar, n.d.), 70; Hajj Mirza Yahya Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo‘aser ya Hayat-e Yahya, vol. 1 (Tehran: Ibn Sina, 1957–58), 324–28; Hosein Makki, Zendegani-ye Mirza Taqi Khan, Amir Kabir (Tehran: ‘Ilmi, 1958), 183.

[11]Mostowfi, Tarikh-e Ejtema‘i, 86; Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo‘aser, 327–29; Mehdi Qoli Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat (Tehran: Rangin, 1950–51), 75.

[12]‘Ali Asghar Hekmat, “Ta‘limat-e ‘Aliye: Notq-e Jenab-i Aqa-ye Hekmat . . .,” Ta‘lim va Tarbiyyat, sal 6, shumareh 4 (Tir 1315/June–July 1936), 249–60. Quote on p. 251–52.

[13] Dhabihollah Safa, “’Madrase,” Iranshahr, vol. 1 (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1963), 736. See similarly Mostowfi, Tarikh-e Ejtema‘i, 86; Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat, 94.

[14]Sazeman-e Barname va Budjeh, Markaz-e Amar, Bayan-e Amari-ye Tahavvolat-e Ejtema‘i va Eqtesadi-ye Iran dar Dowran-e [. . .] Pahlavi (Tehran: 1976–77), 35–36; ‘Isa Sadiq, Tarikh Farhang-e Iran (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1976), 354–59.

[15]Sadiq, Farhang, 359.

[16]Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo ‘aser, 180–84; “Roshdiye Pir-e Ma‘aref,” Amuzesh va Parvaresh, Dawreh 14, Shumarah 10 (December 1944), 543–46; Mehdi Malekzade, Tarikh-e Enqelab-e Mashrutiyyat-e Iran, vol. 1 (Tehran: 1948–49), 150.

[17]Doulatabadi, Tarikh Mo‘aser, 238–43.

[18]Mirza Saleh Shirazi, Safarname (Tehran: Razun, 1968).

[19]Shirazi, Safarname, 325.

[20]Shirazi, Safarname, 427.

[21]Two others had preceded him: Mir ‘Abd al-Latif Shushtari, Tuhfat al-‘Alam va Zayl al-Tuhfah, ed. Samad Muvahhid ([Bombay: s.n., 1847]; Tehran: Tahuri, AH 1363/AD 1984), 363–67; Mirza Abu-Taleb Khan ibn Mohammad Esfahani, Masir Talebi fi Bilad al-Faranji (Tehran: Ketabha-ye Jibi, 1973).

[22]Wilfrid S. Blunt, Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (London: 1907), 83–84.

[23]Malkom Khan, Nazem al-Doula, Kolliyyat-e Malkom (Tehran: n.p., 1907), 88–95.

[24]Malkom Khan, “Neda-ye ‘Edalat,” in Majmu‘e Athar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, ed. Mohit Tabataba’i (Tehran: Danesh, AH 1327/AD 1948–49), 193–217. See also Nura’i, Afkar-e Mirza Malkom Khan, 35–57.

[25]Guity Nashat, The Origins of Modern Reform in Iran, 1870–1880 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1982), 144.

[26]Mehdi Bamdad, Sharh-e Hal-e Rejal-e Iran dar Qorun-e 12-14 Hejri, vol. 4 (Tehran: Navar, 1968–69), 490–93; Ferydun Adamiyyat, Fekr-e Azadi va Moqaddame-ye Nehzat-e Mashrutiyyat (Tehran: Sokhan, 1961–62), 182–211.

[27]See the report in Nazem al-Islam Kermani, Tarikh Bidari-ye Iraniyan, vol. 1 (Tehran: Bonyad-e Farhang, 1967–68), 206–11.

[28]Malekzade, Tarikh-e Enqelab-e Mashrutiyyat, 152–54.

[29]Malkom, Kolliyyat, 89–91.

[30]Nazem al-Islam Kermani, Tarikh Bidari-ye Iraniyan, vol. 2 (Tehran: Bonyad-e Farhang, 1967–68), 214–23.

[31]Mirza ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov [Talebzade], Azadi va Siyasat (Tehran: Sahar, 1978–79), 111–13.

[32]Mirza ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov, Ketab-e Ahmad, vol. 2 (Istanbul: 1895–96), 80–84, 89–90.

[33]Tabataba’i, Malkom Khan, 8–13; Hamid Algar, Mirza Malkum Khan: A Study in the History of Iranian Modernization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 28.

[34]Mirza ‘Abd al-Rahim Talebov, Ketab-e Ahmad, vol. 1 (Istanbul: 1895–96), 10–11; Talebov, Ketab-e Ahmad, vol. 2, 5–7.

[35]Edward Browne, The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (Cambridge:  Cambridge University Press, 1914), 27–153; Edward Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905–1909 (London: Frank Cass, 1966), 127–28.

[36]Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat, 150.

[37]Mangol Bayat, Mysticism and Dissent: Socioreligious Thought in Qajar Iran (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1982), 134.

[38]Hassan Kamshad, Modern Persian Prose Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 28.

[39]Hedayat, Khaterat va Khatarat, iii.

[40]Mojtaba Minovi, “Avvalin Karavan-e Ma’refat,” Yaghma 6 (1953–54): 181.

Aria Fani is an assistant professor of Persian and Iranian studies at the University of Washington. He earned a BA in comparative literature from San Diego State University and a PhD in Near Eastern Studies from UC Berkeley. In addition to research and teaching, he engages in social advocacy for asylum seekers in the United States.

     The most salient marker of character, the instrument of national distinction, the basis upon which a nation becomes distinct and distinguishable from other nations is language, and the soul of language is literature^[2]

Depending on context, there could be two radically different readings of the above passage. If one were to find it in Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities, it would read as a critique of a national imaginary rooted in linguistic and cultural difference. If one were to encounter it in a late-twentieth-century literary textbook, it would read as a bold declaration of romantic nationalism and its obsession with cultural singularity. The first reading relies on a critical knowledge of the role that language has played within the discourse of romantic nationalism in order to strip it down to its most basic impulse: the production of distinction. The second reading frames the passage as an effort to raise language and literature as identitarian      fixtures tied to a national imaginary, one that operates through the production of distinction. I will revisit this intriguing ambivalence in my conclusion.

Although this passage may be relevant to both contexts, it did not appear in either one. It was extracted from Mohamad Hosayn Forughi’s Literary History, written with astonishing clarity between the 1890s and 1910s, lithographed posthumously in 1916–17, but never distributed widely or published using later print technologies. This source may be familiar to scholars of late Qajar Iran, but its significance remains largely unexplored outside of that subfield. Precisely because it has not been extensively analyzed or even critically introduced, it can generate a host of unaddressed questions about the social processes by which literary nationalism took shape in the late nineteenth century, particularly for scholars who research different iterations of nationalism in the Middle East.^[3]

My purpose here is to introduce this important literary and historical source and meditate on what its “rediscovery” in the twenty-first century means for the field of Persian and Iranian studies. This article is the result of my ongoing dialogue with Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak about the emergence of literature as a social institution in the Persian-speaking world. The path to becoming a scholar is more than just a matter of earning academic credentials. Along the way, what shapes a young scholar’s intellectual and human development is the presence of a community who fulfills different but complementary roles: teacher, friend, peer, champion, and mentor. In the past five years, Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak has mentored me, championed my work, and treated me as a peer. It is only appropriate in writing an article in his honor that the focus should be on an astounding literary figure who shaped debates and trends in the field of Persian literature and literary history.

This article comprises three methodical vignettes centered on Mohamad Hosayn Forughi’s life, his little-known Literary History, and the broader cultural context to which it belonged. The brief biographical section places the author in the emerging ecosystem of literary institutions and journals in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, illustrating his liminal position in the Qajar court and his role in creating a national pedagogy based on which generations of Iranian students were educated. The second section focuses on introducing his Literary History by outlining its different sections, explaining what they mean and why they were important to the formation of literary history as a modern genre. The last vignette addresses the common historiographical impulse of overestimating works of prominent intellectuals by demonstrating how Forughi’s Literary History belonged to a much broader social context in which similar ideas were in circulation. Ultimately, this article hopes to raise relevant and unaddressed questions that speak to the gestation of Persian literature as an academic discipline in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.^[4]

The Figure: Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi 

This section introduces Forughi’s biography and demonstrates his centrality to the political, cultural, and literary life of nineteenth-century Qajar Iran. The details of his life highlight a period of social change that witnessed an itinerant merchant enter the Qajar court and shape how modern-day Iranians understand and celebrate a certain past as their own. Mohamad Hosayn Forughi (d. 1907) was born in 1839 in Isfahan, the son of Mohamad Mahdi Arbab Isfahani.^[5] Forughi was a prominent Qajar-era litterateur, translator, educator, and advocate for  constitutionalism.^[6] In 1894, he was given the royal epithet Zokaʾ ol-Molk, in praise of his intelligence (Zokaʾ), which he put in the service of the Qajar political domain (molk).^[7] He received a madrassa education in Persian and Arabic in Isfahan. Encouraged by his father, the young Forughi paused his education and became a merchant in the Persian Gulf and India.

After fourteen years, he returned to his life of learning by working as a poet in the court of Kerman’s ruler Esmaʿil Khan Vakil ol-Dowle Nuri. In 1872, Mohamad Hasan Khan Eʿtemad ol-Saltane (d. 1896), who directed the Publication and Translation Bureaus (Dar ol-tebaʿa, Dar ol-tarjome-ye homayuni), hired Forughi as a translator in the court of Naser ol-Din Shah (r. 1848–96).^[8] Forughi entered the court as a merchant and man of learning, not on the basis of aristocratic pedigree or background in bureaucratic or administrative work. As an outsider, he maintained a liminal position vis-à-vis the Qajar dynasty. Farzin Vejdani writes, “This liminal position may explain why, despite being a Qajar bureaucrat, Muhammad Husayn Furughi supported constitutional change and moved in circles critical of the ruling dynasty.”^[9] Thanks to his knowledge of Arabic, French, and English, combined with his mastery of Persian prose and rhetoric, Forughi produced important literary textbooks and translations and edited canonical works of Persian literature. In doing so, he played a major role in the proliferation of print culture and the promotion of a nationalist historiography that valorized the study of the past.^[10]

In the mid-1890s, Mohamad ʿAli Tarbiyat founded Iran’s first independent newspaper, called Tarbiyat or Education (1896–1907), thanks in no small part to newfound political freedoms that followed the assassination of Naser ol-Din Shah in 1896. Tarbiyat was published by an eponymous library in Tehran, which was among the new sites for the reading and the distribution of literary production that had proliferated in late-nineteenth-century Tehran. Forughi served as Tarbiyat’s editor.^[11] In its first issue, released on December 16, 1896, Forughi boldly declared that the difference among people and societies boiled down to only their education.^[12] As Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet has noted, “Most newspapers published in the late Qajar period heralded the virtues of education in shaping a civilized and progressive society—ideals to which a beleaguered Iran aspired.”^[13] Tarbiyat represents only one example of Persian-language newspapers, many of which remain unexamined, that aimed to cultivate a normative national subject in the early twentieth century.

For Forughi, the idea of literature—which he understood as a nationally enshrined corpus of prose and poetry—was a major pillar of education. Since print capitalism was understood as an instrument for the production and dissemination of literature, he wrote a series in Tarbiyat about the history of printing in Europe. Another important series in that newspaper was called adabiyat, a novel concept that needed extensive contextualization for uninitiated readers in the late 1890s, since in its premodern iteration, adabiyat referred to adab-derived sciences such as balagha (rhetoric).^[14] Mid- and late-nineteenth-century thinkers like Forughi invested a great deal of intellectual labor toward bringing adabiyat into close alignment with the nineteenth-century French notion of littérature, a national culture in possession of a singular and distinct literary tradition.^[15]

In Tarbiyat, Forughi featured biographies of poets like Hafez and ʿOmar Khayyam to highlight the literary achievements of New Persian.^[16] The inclusion of Persian poets’ biographies in Tarbiyat was novel not only in its radical rewriting of the tazkere genre or biographical dictionary (more commonly transliterated as tadhkira or tazkira, and also translated as commemorative biographical compendia by Mana Kia), but also for mass producing it for a nationally imagined readership in the format of periodicals.^[17] Kevin Schwartz has conceptualized the tazkeres of Persian poets as a “transregional library” in that the genre forged imagined literary communities with competing poetics and geographical centers of gravity.^[18] Forughi’s literary history and his columns in Tarbiyat can then be understood as an “autobiography” for Qajar Iran at a time when romantic nationalism—the idea of one nation, one language—had become the cultural and cognitive center of gravity for most late-nineteenth-century intellectuals.^[19]

Forughi  taught at premier schools of higher education in Qajar Iran, notably Tehran’s School of Political Science (est. 1899), which he directed until his death in 1907.^[20] I insist on the political qualifier “Qajar” to describe Forughi’s Iran to reduce the risk of collapsing the multitude of political, cultural, and social experiences that existed in different regions of mid-nineteenth-century Iran. Forughi also directed the Education Committee or Anjoman-e maʿaref, wherein he helped to develop a literary curriculum based on different components of Perso-Arabic rhetoric (balagha), including textbooks on maʿna, bayan, and badiʿ, as well as manuals on rhyme and prosody.^[21] His lithograph on Persian literary history includes materials that he used for teaching at the School of Political Science. ʿAbbas Eqbal Ashtiyani (d. 1956), a literary historian at the University of Tehran, claimed that “Zokaʾ ol-Molk was the first in Iran to systemize the history of Persian poets in the style of European writers and [also] add literary criticism to [this European-inspired system].”^[22]

This important assertion lends itself to the observation that balagha was an integral component of a rising literary culture centered on literature and its ties to a national imaginary. Eqbal Ashtiyani’s note about arranging the biography of poets in the style of Europeans is what is identified today as a new mode of historiographical production, in other words a new discourse of literature. His mention of tanqid-e adabi or literary criticism denotes new approaches to writing about Persian literary works, therefore a new discourse on literature. Maintaining such distinction opens new avenues of inquiry for a deeper understanding of these two literary discourses: one creates literature (adabiyat) as a conceptual category, while the other provides a system of approaching its object of critique (naqd).

Like many in his generation, Forughi also composed poetry, and his takhallos or pen name was adib. His divan or collected poems was lithographed in 1900, when Forughi was in his early sixties; it has received passing mentions and very little scholarly attention. His divan opens with a note about the importance of adabiyat for the nation and the education of its body politic, once again demonstrating how the topic remained at the forefront of Forughi’s mind:

I have said this a number of times, but I will repeat it once more: literature (adabiyat) is a page or a text that must bear the imprint of all sciences (tamam-e ʿolum). We must understand that a container will die away without its content. Let me be more clear: the education of a nation lies in literature (tarbiyat-e mellat dar adabiyat ast). That is the reason why I have undertaken this task for fifty years. I will not yield to the enemies’ disapproving taunts, I will not deviate from the straight path (sirat al-mustaqim), and I will not abandon my way.^[23]   

This passage indicates that the notion of literature, even as early as the nineteenth century, was not limited to works of literary history. Followed by Forughi’s preface to his divan, there appears a biographical note written by Shams ol-ʿOlama in the flowery style of Qajar-era courtly writings, which reads like a manaqeb-style hagiography, short on factual information and full of laudatory epithets and rhyming phrases.^[24] A part of Forughi’s translation of E. Abkarius’s Rayhanat ol-Afkar is appended to his divan. This is a curious addition given that the work is framed as the “divan of Zokaʾ ol-Molk” and not an anthology of his writings. Forughi’s poetry mainly consists of qasides that eulogize the prophet of Islam, his daughter, the imams (which he composed during his time in Najaf and Karbala), and his patron Naser ol-Din Shah. Also included are robaʿis with spiritual themes and a versified narrative on love interspersed with prose. His divan is a little over six hundred pages and contains more than five thousand lines of poetry.    

In the course of his extraordinarily productive career, Forughi helped to set in motion a new discourse of (and on) literature and nationalist historiography. His legacy has shaped the careers of many intellectuals who came after him. The memoirs of scholars who were taught and mentored by Forughi are a testament to this claim.^[25] Mojtaba Minovi (d. 1977), the distinguished scholar of Persian literature, recalls that when he was receiving his secondary education in Tehran, he studied textbooks that had been produced primarily by Mohamad Hosayn Forughi and his son Mohamad ʿAli.^[26] During his lifetime, Forughi’s work was known in elite circles familiar with or invested in Persian literature.^[27] For instance, in 1926, Ömer Halis Bıyıktay (d. 1939) translated into Turkish a primary-school textbook on Iran’s history that Forughi had coauthored with his Mohamad ʿAli.^[28] Forughi’s success is not only a recognition of his intellectual force but also a clear indication that the discursive tools with which he was engaged in late Qajar Iran were in global circulation.

The Text: Forughi’s Literary History  

Forughi’s intellectual capital helped to create literature as a social enterprise in late Qajar Iran. He did not operate within ready-made conceptual categories that had been imported wholesale from Europe; instead, he cultivated a set of discursive toolkits with which to rewrite and realign literary concepts in Persian literature. Forughi was part of a network of global intellectuals who were politically, socially, and cognitively preoccupied by the idea of the nation and its cultural properties. In order to fully substantiate some of these assertions, this section examines Forughi’s Literary History in a detailed and focused fashion. 

I first learned about this work in a footnote in the journal Daneshkade (1918–19).^[29] I could not locate Forughi’s Literary History in any university library in the United States or Europe. This is because the work was catalogued under the title ʿElm-e badiʿ, denoting a branch of Perso-Arabic rhetoric that deals with innovations and beautification of literary style. This is because the Forughi sons gathered their father’s disparate writings (or his mosavvades or rough drafts, as they called it), slapped them together under the title ʿElm-e badiʿ, and printed it.^[30] Its posthumous production gives the text an uncertain status and provenance. Was it intended to be a literary history? More importantly, what did it mean for a work to be read as such in the 1910s when literary history was not yet a bounded and institutionally recognized category?

Similar to Forughi’s position in the Qajar court, his Literary History—or one that wasn’t—also occupies a liminal position in the field of Persian studies. It is the work of a scholar who gave the idea of literature arguably its clearest expression in the nineteenth century, yet it is a largely forgotten text. Despite its unique and original ideas—ones that would preempt a generation of scholars—by a twist of fate, it never came into being as a clearly expressed literary product in the author’s lifetime. It has subsequently slipped through the cracks of publishing houses and later generations of scholars and editors. Now, my task is to make sense of the work, its rhetorical novelty, and its discursive logic at a time when Persian literary history has been automatized as a mythologized narrative mapped onto an ethno-geographical entity called Iran. For those reasons, the most sensible approach to understanding it will be through intentional ambivalence.

Because I was searching for Forughi’s work under the title Tarikh-e adabiyat, I did not realize that a copy was held by the library of my own home institution at the University of California, Berkeley until I had graduated and left California.^[31] Curiously, the lithograph copy held at Berkeley is different from the copies my colleagues Alvand Bahari and Shahla Farghadani sent me from the National Library and Archives of Iran and the Library of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature respectively. The Berkeley version has 124 pages of notes on ʿElm-e badiʿ along with samples of Persian and Arabic poetry that elucidate different aspects of Perso-Arabic rhetoric; the copies held in Tehran do not include those pages. The Berkeley version has two systems of pagination: the notes on badiʿ run from pages 1 to 124 followed by the section analyzed in this article, which runs from pages 1 to 353. This is yet another indication that the work was put together with haste and lacks clear organization.  

The task of introducing Forughi’s work begins with clarifying its unusual publication status. It was lithographed, but its number of print runs is unknown. Besides the three copies currently held in Tehran and Berkeley, I do not know of another copy.^[32] Also unknown is whether it was intended to be sold or handed out informally amongst scholars of Persian literature. The only mention of a publisher is on the last page of the copy, bearing the stamp of Mirza ʿAli Asghar’s Press (matbaʿe-ye Mirza ʿAli Asghar), who was a grand vizier to three Qajar monarchs.^[33] The last page also bears information about the scribe, simply identified as Malek ol-Khattatin or “the Chief Scribe,” and one of the book’s patrons, ʿAbdol Vahab Nezam ol-Molk (d. 1917), a Qajar administrator who occupied different positions inside and outside the court. Finding clear answers to these questions would provide a better understanding of the context in which Forughi’s work was disseminated.

The second challenge is how to precisely name this work. His sons, Mohamad ʿAli (d. 1942) and Abol Hasan (d. 1959), classified it as ʿElm-e badiʿ, writing in their introductory note that they had compiled class notes that their father had designed for his literature classes at Tehran’s School of Political  Science.^[34] Those notes primarily consisted of biographies of Persian poets and samples of their verse. Forughi never had the chance to produce a final version for dissemination or publication beyond the classroom, as he may have intended.^[35] Two of his biographies were featured in the newspaper Tarbiyat, demonstrating an overlap in audience. The Forughi sons stated that it was their father’s unfulfilled goal to compose a “Persian literary history in the style of European literary texts” which would “mitigate our shame among educated nations who have studied the history of our literature and knowledge.”^[36]

Could we then call it a literary history? This article refers to Forughi’s work as a literary history with the following caveats: In the 1890s, the first literary histories of Persian had not yet been published, no less translated into Persian. For instance, the first volume of Edward G. Browne’s A Literary History of Persia appeared in 1902, and Shibli’s multivolume Shiʿr ul-ʿAjam was published in Urdu between 1908 and 1918. The University of Tehran’s Faculty of Letters, which became a major site of scholarly production, was not founded until 1935. Therefore, literary history did not yet exist in the late nineteenth century as an institutional fixture. But Forughi exhibited the language, if not the entire structure, that marked the beginning of literary history’s gestation, as this section will show.

Alexander Jabbari has illustrated how the genre of Persian literary history was the result of a long and uneven process of repurposing and refashioning the tazkere genre.^[37] Jabbari has analyzed the rhetorical devices and discursive innovations used by Persian- and Urdu-language scholars like Shibli Nuʿmani (d. 1914) and Mohamad Taqi Bahar (d. 1951) that set in motion a new mode of historiographical production across national and linguistic boundaries. His analysis of how Persian translations of Urdu-language texts helped to define the domain of literary history in Iran and Afghanistan helps disrupt anxieties of originality and influence that surround the study of Persian-Urdu literary dynamics in the twenty-first century. As the earliest instance of literary history (yet) in the Persian language, Forughi’s work bears a formative connection to the tazkere genre in that it is chiefly organized by biographies of Persian poets. Unlike tazkeres, it lucidly articulates adabiyat as the cultural possession of a national historical subject called Iran.^[38] 

Forughi’s literary history, lithographed in the nastaʿliq script,^[39] contains 353 pages and is made up of the following five sections:

1. Note by the Forughi sons, 4 pages
2. Preface, 12 pages
3. Introduction: On the Essence of Literature, Its Influence and Quality, 9 pages
4. The Definition, Subject and Benefit of Literature, 51 pages
5. Biographies of Persian Poets, 282 pages

The dibache or preface is on the nature and importance of literature for the nation. The preface mainly delves into the nature of linguistic interplay, particularly regarding Persian and Arabic. Forughi reminds readers that “no language is pure,” an astonishingly progressive declaration for a nineteenth-century nationalist intellectual.^[40] For Forughi, Arabic elements in Persian do not constitute a linguistic or cultural “flaw or shortcoming” (asbab naqs va ʿeyb).^[41] Forughi’s view shows that not all forms of Iranian linguistic nationalism were accompanied by ideological hostility toward the Arabic language and literature.^[42] Not showing racial or ideological hostility toward Arabic does not prevent Forughi from asserting that in all the works of Arabic poetry, he does not find a single poet who equaled Ferdowsi’s  Shahname.^[43] Writing more than a century before Forughi, Sir William Jones (d. 1794) praised Ferdowsi’s Shahname, but decided that it was ultimately no match for the works of Homer.^[44] Although they belong to different time periods, both assertions are rooted in an evaluative notion of literature with the nation  as its uncontested unit of analysis.^[45]

For Forughi, Arabic elements in Persian stand as historical remnants of a time when Arabic was the dominant language of scientific and literary production in Persian-speaking lands.^[46] Yet Forughi implies that while it may have made sense for “our forefathers” (niyakan-e ma) to borrow their lexicon and aesthetic norms from Arabic, it is no longer appropriate for modern-day Iranians to do so.^[47] He may not flag Arabic elements in Persian as inherently problematic, but Forughi does consider them fundamentally foreign. In fact, his preface reads as a clear declaration of Iranian cultural singularity, with Persian as its most enduring symbol, an idea largely upheld by many in the field of Iranian studies today.^[48]

Language does not only serve as an identitarian symbol for Forughi. He is equally preoccupied with the idea of transforming Persian into a linguistic vehicle capable of producing different types of knowledge, both humanistic and scientific. This transformation primarily requires a simplified, exact, and clear prose style that Forughi thematizes in his own diction. His preface lauds the work of the Académie française (est. 1634) (or Anjoman-e adabiyat-e Faranse, as he called it), for systematically coining new words based on industrial and scientific needs (hajat-e ʿelm va sanʿat) while not giving in to the idea of purging “foreign words” (loghat-e ajnabi) from its lexicon.^[49] According to Forughi, the French language was historically in need of borrowing words from Latin and Greek because the latter were languages of knowledge production, similar to the interplay of Persian and Arabic during the advent of Islam. However, the nineteenth century is the time for Persian to step into the age of knowledge production by strengthening its literature, the “true distinction of being Iranian” (emtiyaz-e haqiqi-ye Irani budan yaʿni adabiyat).^[50] He bemoans the absence of literary associations and individuals who would light up such assemblies (na anjomani na anjoman-araʾi).^[51] Here, Forughi anticipates and calls for the establishment of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature (est. 1935), which now houses a copy of his literary history.^[52]  

The following section of Forughi’s text is titled “On the Essence of Literature, Its Influence and Quality” (Dar haqiqat-e adabiyat va asar va khasiyyat-e an). He writes that speech was assigned to human nature (nahad-e bani Adam) by the “Creator” (afarinande) and its      quality transcends ethnic difference, whether “Iranian, Roman, Indian, or Chinese.”^[53] For Forughi, balagha is the “soul of literature” (ruh-e adabiyat); the key term is often translated as rhetoric, here with the caveat that it defies self-evident and easy translation.^[54] Throughout his literary history, Forughi employs a constellation of terms centered on Perso-Arabic rhetoric whose semantic domain in this period remains underexplored: balagha or belaghat, fesahat, sokhan-vari, sokhan-saraʾi, and terms that pertain to its evaluative or critical domain like sokhan-sanji and sokhan-dani (some of these terms are defined by Forughi below). In fact, Forughi was insistent on classifying literature—and by extension rhetoric—as a science (ʿelm) whose study is indispensable for national education. He writes, “Some have assumed that poetry and prose composition (enshaʾ) are a matter of national amusement (omur-e tafannoni-ye mellal) and pastime while that is decidedly not the case; eloquent poetry and prose (nazm-e fasih va nasr-e baligh) constitute an essential part of rational sciences (ʿolum-e maʿqul), beneficial wisdom (hekmatʾha-ye nafeʿ), honorable ethics (akhlaq-e hamide), and desirable attributes      (owsaf-e pasandide).”^[55]

In the same section, Forughi expresses his idea with precision, writing “Let me be more clear: literature (adabiyat) transmits the true nature of knowledge (ʿelm) through the language of people (be zabaan-e ʿavam).”^[56] This passage should be read in the context of an era whose central ethos was the cultivation of a national readership, designated by Forughi as an undifferentiated entity called ʿavam or the commoners.^[57] The task of literature was to transform the language of commoners and edify their conduct. He writes: “It is important to discern which linguistic register will prevail and prove durable as an instrument of safeguarding language; there are no doubts that the vulgar and reprehensible register of commoners (zaban-e zesht va rakik-e ʿavam) and the grossly weak language of the merchant class (ʿebarat-e sost va sakhif-e mardom-e bazari) lack the stature to prevail and [in turn] deliver durability to the masses.”^[58] If literature embodied the highest character of the nation, then the formation of an Iranian national subject for Forughi necessarily meant being versed in canonical works of Persian literature like Saʿdi’s Golestan, the only work he mentions under its own subheading.^[59]   

Forughi goes one step further and asserts that a nation’s own durability lies chiefly in the rhetorical force of its literature: “What lands have been conquered by a pithy expression (yek ʿebarat-e abdar) and what armies have been broken by an eloquent word (yek kalame-ye baligh).”^[60] He then lauds the works of Nezami and Ferdowsi for capturing the imagination of people living in “climes of knowledge” (aqalim-e maʿrefat).^[61] A survey of the most salient ideas of this section raises two questions. Generally, in order to better understand the processes of adabiyat’s formation as a new discourse of literature, its discursive ties to forms of knowledge related to adab and the role played by balagha therein must be critically examined. More specifically, it is equally important to analyze the way Forughi fashions a crisp and clear prose style to set in motion a new model of literariness.^[62] Consider the following example:

طول نمیدهم و پاک و پوست کنده میگویم انسان بعد از خوب فهمیدن محتاج بخوب گفتن و خوب نوشتن میباشد تا بتواند مدرکات صحیح و سالم خود را مدلّل و ثابت کند و الاّ خوب فهمیدن او غالباً لاطایل و بیحاصل میشود پس سخندانی بیش از هر چیز طرف احتیاج است و این دولت احدیرا چنانکه باید و شاید دست ندهد مگر بمدد ادبیات یعنی احاطه در نظم و نثر استادان سخن و بزرگان اهل فن و بصیرت و وقوف کامل در طرق کلام و خبرت و اطلاع از آغاز تا انجام.

I will cut to the chase: in addition to good comprehension, people need good speaking and writing [skills] so that they can realize and demonstrate their sound and robust intellectual faculties, otherwise their good comprehension will prove futile. Therefore, more than anything, one needs [the ability] to discern eloquence (sokhan-dani). This government can extend a hand to [its] people only through literature—[literature] meaning a command of the prose and poetry of literary masters and [the work of] notables of science and wisdom, and a comprehensive knowledge of and dexterity with the paths of speech [or syntactic constructions], from its inception to conclusion.^[63]

Forughi’s prose style varies throughout the work. In certain passages, it reads as flowery and creative, as exemplified in his entry on Saʿdi’s Golestan.^[64] In other instances, it adopts a more informative rather than creative register, as exemplified in the above passage. The pioneers of literature as a social enterprise in the early twentieth century possessed distinctly different prose styles. Understanding their stylistic and rhetorical variation will help us better distinguish their approaches to meditating on and writing about works of literature. This refers to the generation of scholars who overlapped with and succeeded Forughi, scholars like ʿAbdol ʿAzim Qarib Garakani (d. 1965), Mohamad Qazvini (d. 1949), Mohamad Taqi Bahar, Eqbal, and many others. Broadly put, the question of style has not been fully examined in the formation of various modes of literary production in early-twentieth-century Persian literature.

Other points in this passage demand critical attention. Perhaps the most salient one is the way Forughi defines the notion of literature. He does not see it as a corpus of writing consisting of prose and poetry regarded to possess a certain aesthetic and imaginative quality, as rendered by most dictionaries in the latter part of the twentieth century. Instead, Forughi refers to literature as a type of literacy tied to a particular literary canon. He understands adabiyat as an evaluative, skill-based outcome, not merely an expression of national and literary achievement. Writing in the early twentieth century, ʿAli Akbar Dehkhoda similarly defined adabiyat as “knowledge pertaining to adab” and “literary works,” containing both valences present in Forughi’s literary history.^[65] Adabiyat’s discursive ties to adab, as understood in the nineteenth century, are the main reason we cannot accept the term literature as its clear-cut and self-evident English translation and the anxiety of influence with which it comes. Analyzing these ties will clarify the processes of adabiyat’s conceptual realignment from a plural designation for knowledge linked to adab into a singular term primarily denoting the concept of literature in modern European literary cultures.^[66]

The next section of Forughi’s work is titled “The Definition, Subject and Benefit of Literature” (Taʿrif va mozuʿ va fayede-ye adabiyat). In the first paragraph, he lays out his critical vocabulary. It demands critical attention because it illustrates the ways in which Forughi aims to realign these terms linguistically and conceptually:

Adab has been translated in Persian as culture (farhang); the composite term farhang consists of farr meaning honor and glory, and hang meaning understanding and intelligence. Adab and farhang are both essentially related to knowing the limits and extent of any subject. Therefore, one can refer to adab or farhang as knowledge (danesh) which is not that different from science (ʿelm). According to the terminology of the learned of the age of science (odabaʾ-ye ʿasr-e ʿelm) adab denotes the knowledge of poetry (nazm) and prose (nasr) which in Persian is called sokhan-sanji. Whomever is in possession of this knowledge may be called a discerner of literary discourse (sokhan-sanj); its Arabic equivalent is adib. Literature (adabiyāt) refers to expressions that will render students and any human prosperous through a profitable acquaintance with knowing (shenasaʾi) and a shining light of awareness (agahi). Everyone knows that literary discourse (sokhan) is of two types: metered and unmetered (mowzun va ghayr-e mowzun). metered speech is called poetry and unmetered is called prose; poetry has [different] types which are known in Arabic as qasida, ghazal, taghazul, musammat, qitʿa, rubaʿi, and mathnawi; these types [of poetry] in Persian are called chame, chakame, setayesh-name. Arabs call poets shaʿir or nazim while Persians (ʿajam) call them chame-sara and chakame-sara, a prose writer is called munshi in Arabic and dabir in Persian . . . ^[67]   

To many twenty-first-century readers, this passage may read like a vocabulary lesson given the extent to which the notion of literature has become automatized in Persian literary culture, treated as a given. In the late nineteenth century, however, this passage played a vital role, rhetorically and discursively, in bolstering Forughi’s twofold agenda: turning Persian literature into an object of scholastic inquiry and mythologizing it as a fixture of Iran’s national patrimony. For instance, outlining the discourses of farhang and danesh in parallel to the Arabic adab and ʿelm indicates the interplay of Persian with Arabic, but it also shows Forughi’s insistence on the idea of Iranian cultural singularity expressed through a facile bifurcation of Arabic and Persian concepts and terminologies.

According to Forughi, the subject of literature is prose and poetry, and the science of literature (ʿelm-e adabiyat) is tasked with forming a knowledge of and doing an evaluative assessment of literary discourse (az hays-e dorosti va na-dorosti va khubi va badi).^[68] Adab has two types: adab-e nafs and adab-e dars.^[69] The former includes forms of knowledge like philosophy that bring about moral conduct and self-refinement, while the latter includes academic subjects like geometry, medicine, and geography “whose knowledge has little bearing on perfecting the self (kamalat-e nafsani).”^[70] Both forms of knowledge, rational and authoritative (ʿaqli va naqli), fall under those two types of adab.^[71] Changing his tone, Forughi then laments the poor state of education in Qajar Iran, writing that “in our age, visions are so impaired that the sun’s appearance would not be sufficient proof of its existence.”^[72] In other words, the importance of literature is far from self-evident and needs enforcement in the form of national education.

The remainder of this section draws extensively on the works of Persian poets to establish various points. Lesser-known figures include Maktabi Shirazi, ʿAmʿaq Bokhari, Mokhtari Qazvini, Azraqi Heravi, Seyyed Hasan Ghaznavi, Adib Saber Termezi, Saba-ye Kashani, and Fadaʾi Ardestani. Forughi’s poetic selection speaks to different themes, but he frames them to articulate a single message: One cannot cultivate a national subject through geometry and medicine alone; literature is what instills in people a sense of cultural singularity and moral conduct, while language secures their political autonomy from other nations. The poems do not merely illustrate the points that Forughi made in prose. They embody the rhetorical force with which he wishes to reconfigure the Persian language for its newly imagined role: mass education. Following that point, Forughi writes, “The heart of the speech lies in rhetoric (sokhan-dani) and if what I am saying is not right, then burn it after reading, or wash it off, and say whatever you wish.”^[73] There remains a substantial amount of analysis left to be done on the discursive entanglements of literature, rhetoric, and philosophy in nineteenth-century Iran, which also holds the key to a deeper understanding of Forughi’s conceptual vocabulary and the ways in which he maps them onto newly emerged semantic domains.

The bulk of Forughi’s literary history delves into the biography of Persian poets, opening with a brief note on the rise of New Persian literature—or zaban-e Farsi-ye haliye, as Forughi called it—in the western edges of the ʿAbbasid political realm.^[74] He writes: “Persian literature, particularly poetry, began in the ninth century during Iran’s Islamic era, which is also the period that we are in.”^[75] He notes that Umayyad rulers in Iran did not pay attention to Persian, leading to the lack of literary production in that language. Here, Forughi invokes Persian as an undifferentiated language, not specifying to which variation of Middle or New Persian he is referring. Perhaps this context does not necessitate any linguistic or historical differentiation as Forughi mainly aims to locate the origins of a literary tradition that best captured the essence of Iranians—another undifferentiated entity—as a people. As New Persian emerged as a medium for literary production, Forughi writes, “our lands (mamalek-e ma) became a fertile field for the sprouting of knowledge and excellence.”^[76]

The main section of the book is the biographies of Persian poets, which includes a brief overview of lesser-known Samanid poets such as Abu Salik Bokhari, Abu Shaʿib Heravi, and Esteghnaʾi Nayshaburi and samples of their poetry. Following this section, he provides an extensive biography for several Persian poets, starting with Rudaki of Samarqand (d. 941) and ending with Hafez of Shiraz (d. 1390).^[77] Forughi’s work is uniquely different from most literary histories of Persian writing that were developed later in the twentieth century in that it does not place the biography of Persian poets within a political and dynastic history.^[78] Instead, the biographies are organized chronologically. Forughi alludes to his sources mostly in the body of the text and does not cite, with the exception of Jules Mohl’s introduction to the Shahname, his European sources. This is in stark contrast to some of his counterparts writing in other languages—for instance, Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (d. 1966), whose essay “Methods in Turkish Literary History,” published in 1913, is replete with references to European scholars and literary historians.^[79]

Persian literary history is a highly composite genre, and Forughi’s Tarikh-e adabiyat is no exception. By composite, I am referring to the ways in which literary history draws on and radically rewrites different types of historical and literary production composed across linguistic and geographical boundaries.^[80] In Forughi’s case, these modes include tarikh (history), tazkere (biographical dictionary), hagiography, various kinds of anthologies, periodicals, rhetorical treatises, dictionaries, literary studies, and the received literary taste and judgment of his period.^[81] Forughi synthesizes these elements into a work that poses as singular, functioning as greater than the sum of its parts.

Let us return to the notion of adabiyat, which lies at the center of Forughi’s cultural undertaking. I argued that adabiyat prior to the nineteenth-century served as a designation for a body of knowledge related to adab. In the mid-nineteenth century, Persian-language intellectuals such as Fathʿali Akhundzade (d. 1878), Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (d. 1897), and Forughi set in motion an epistemological break from an adab-oriented definition of literature by bringing adabiyat into close alignment with a nineteenth-century colonial concept of literature as a canon of literary works that encapsulates the essence of a racialized people.^[82] In light of this conceptual realignment, there was a shift in emphasis from balaghat to history as the social status and meaning of literature changed from a subject to be learned through cultivating adab—using tools like balaghat—to a historical artifact to be studied and enshrined. Adabiyat, a plural concept, was made singular during a time when romantic nationalism set out to collapse concepts such as origin, ethnicity, homeland, and language with multitudes of meaning and relationships into a singular entity that poses as homogeneous.

Forughi’s Literary History is an important source that needs to be extensively analyzed alongside other late-nineteenth-century works. If literature, then a new and unfamiliar concept, had found such a cogent expression in the 1890s, then it means that decades prior to the compilation of Forughi’s Literary History, these ideas must have been discussed and debated in elite circles in Qajar Iran. But the field of Persian studies is largely left to imagine how such ideas entered literary circles and poetry salons in early-nineteenth-century Iran, a period before the proliferation of print culture and the establishment of literary journals. In that light, there is a need for more analysis or even brief critical introductions of Qajar-era literary sources, both well-known works such as Name-ye daneshvaran and Majmaʿ ol-fosaha and lesser-known anthologies and treatises that have yet to receive careful study. Forughi’s lithograph helps place the gestation of a new discourse of literature earlier than previously thought,^[83] but its rise cannot be attributed to a single work of literary history. Therefore, it is important to place Literary History within a macroscopic framework.

Framing Forughi’s Literary History as the only earliest instance of an emerging mode of new literary knowledge can be problematic if not also teleological.^[84] It is important to understand and appreciate Literary History through its own discursive logic. I am referring to its biographical structure (as opposed to periodization based on national political history); its varied conceptualizations of literature, which include adabiyat as a science encompassing all forms of knowledge expressed through human speech; and its definition of adabiyat as a form of literacy. These features constituted alternative scenarios of literary modernism that did not become a normative part of the genre of literary history. In fact, today these features of Forughi’s work would be labeled by many in Iran as “traditional,” an assessment informed by a presentist vision of literary history. More inquiries into the distinct ways in which Forughi and nineteenth-century European scholars like Browne viewed the concept of literature will deepen our understanding of local forms of knowledge that existed prior to the proliferation and co-options of orientalist interventions that were linked to the “colonial matrix of power.”^[85] In short, there are more questions than answers, and there is more ambiguity than certainty in our understanding of Persian literary historiography.

The Context: Literature as a Social Enterprise

In his lifetime, Forughi put a great deal of intellectual labor into creating an Iranian national imaginary closely tied to the rise of New Persian literature. He spent his career writing, translating, teaching, and building institutional sites of national education and literary production. The ideas he produced and promoted were both aligned with and subversive to Qajar state politics. He did not achieve his goal of producing what could have been—and may still be dubbed as—the first literary history of Persian. His lithographed Literary History, compiled by his sons, may remain largely unknown, but the ideas he expressed in it reached a transregional readership through the newspaper Tarbiyat from the 1890s to the 1910s. For instance, his definition of adabiyat and his biographies of Hafez and Khayyam were first printed in the pages of Tarbiyat. In fact, the main vehicle for the creation of a new discourse of literature in Persian was periodicals that sprang up in the early twentieth century.^[86] In other words, the format through which the novel idea of adabiyat—and by extension literary history—took form was decidedly the small magazine.^[87]  

Early-twentieth-century newspapers and journals created a new literary ecosystem. The ecosystem metaphor refers to a specific literary context wherein certain ideas and behaviors germinate. It operated, in this case, through an interconnected network of ideas with symbolic and binding values: nation, ethnicity, land, origin, race, culture, history, language, literature, and many other notions with which the nation-state rendered itself distinct and complete.^[88] The literary ecosystem nourished a constellation of agents who were in one way or another connected to it: publishers, readers (students, educators, semi-literate readers, listeners), distributors, writers, translators, patrons (the state, merchants, etc.), and many other actors. It gave an institutional form and authority to the multiple sites of power and literary production operative within it: administrative bureaus, national schools, literary associations, language academies, reading rooms or qeraʾat khane, universities, national libraries, and many others. This literary ecosystem was in no way bounded by language or political territory; in fact, it survived through cross-pollination with other literary cultures, regardless of the fact that each national context had its own center of gravity. The most lasting outcome of this literary ecosystem was the constitution of literature as a culturally authoritative and socially prevalent enterprise—in other words, literature as an institution.

Unless Forughi’s Literary History is placed squarely within this expansive literary ecosystem, we run the risk of rendering it a standalone work, thus necessarily overvaluing it. The same conclusion can be applied to other towering figures such as Edward Browne and Mohamad Taqi Bahar, the authors of A Literary History of Persia and Sabk-shenasi respectively. Both scholars have rightly been credited for setting in motion a new model of literary historiography. In Browne’s case, this model was a literary history of a people called Iranians based on a system of political periodization. Bahar’s model forged four different historiographical categories—Khorasani, ʿEraqi, Hendi, and Bazgasht—based on a study of stylistic differences.^[89] Both figures have undoubtedly left their mark on the formation of Persian literature as an academic discipline. However, the literary ecosystem within which their works were produced and read is rarely included in critical assessments of their work.^[90] This omission has led to an overestimation of their work.       

One study that critically contextualizes the rise of national historiography is Farzin Vejdani’s Making History in Iran. Among other topics, Vejdani analyzes the ways in which two generations of Iranian intellectuals became involved in researching and writing Iran’s national history from the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth centuries. In other words, it tells the story of how history writing became a social enterprise, a profession culturally enshrined and socially institutionalized. Vejdani convincingly demonstrates that there is no single pole from which a new historical and literary knowledge is transmitted, disrupting the tired narrative of an undifferentiated entity called the East passively receiving knowledge from a transhistorical entity called the West. Vejdani does that partially by highlighting the idiosyncratic nature of the writings of Iran’s prominent historians. Whether considering history or literature as a discourse, the social processes that led to the formation of new ecosystems—or as Vejdani puts it, a “Republic of Letters”—must be analyzed.^[91] The alternative is to treat literature as a derivative discourse.^[92]

It is worth clarifying my critique of influence as a category of analysis. I do not deny that nineteenth-century Europe was a major source of inspiration for the transmission of a new mode of literary knowledge. In fact, most late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Middle Eastern intellectuals who nationalized their literary curriculum also professionally translated works of European literature and history into Turkish, Arabic, and Persian.^[93] But the rise of literary nationalism was not the inevitable outcome of translation. Instead, it was the result of a non-linear process of network and institution building that allowed certain ideas to take anchor in different Middle Eastern cultural contexts, setting in motion new conceptualizations of language and literature in the age of romantic nationalism. Influence as a rubric is rarely ever defined, woefully overused, and closely linked to colonial forms of knowledge; thus, it is incapable of elucidating the nuances involved in the emergence of literary nationalism in the Middle East.^[94]

By way of conclusion, I will address the ambivalence formulated in this article. Writing in the late nineteenth century, Forughi aimed not only to create a new mode of literary knowledge, but also to cultivate a normative literacy required to understand and respond to it. This literacy was defined by the positivist impulse of modern historiography and was inseparable from the ethos of romantic nationalism, the idea that each nation is in possession of a singular literary tradition that renders it unique and complete.^[95] The intellectual force and clarity of his ideas notwithstanding, Forughi’s work is also marked by its inbetweenness: not a tazkere, but not quite a literary history; printed, but not distributed widely; linked to the courtly discourse of power, but also independent from and vulnerable to it. Therefore, it is important not to erase the text’s ambivalent status in the historical journey that marked the gestation of literary nationalism in Iran. Effortful ambivalence can produce the type of analysis that dispels the false assumption that Iran’s literary becoming was the predestined and inevitable outcome of a pure contact with Europe.

By writing that the most salient marker of a people is their language and literature, Forughi set out to bring Qajar Iran into closer alignment with elite global networks that were constructing and adopting a new set of symbols and myths that resulted into a new imagined community. For Forughi, the production of distinction was an outcome that he was seeking to achieve. For twenty-first-century readers, particularly in the institutional setting of the university, the production of distinction is only a means to better understand how elite Iranians created a national imaginary in the early twentieth century. The growing body of scholarship on different aspects of nationalism has enabled us to read Forughi’s passage with intentional ambivalence, opening a vital space in which the myths that bind us are subject to the process of humanistic inquiry, as opposed to unquestioned devotion. What may emerge as a result of valorizing ambivalence as a conscious part of humanistic inquiry is a new literary map of our worlds, one no longer beholden to the idea of cultural singularity.

^[1]I am grateful to Kevin Schwartz, Alexander Jabbari, and Amir Vafa for their critical comments. My thanks also go to Farzin Vejdani for answering my inquiries about Forughi.

^[2]In Persian: Avval ʿalamat-e tashakhkhos yaʿni asbab-e shakhsiyat-e mellat ke mayeh-ye emtiyaz va joda kardan-e an melal az sayer melal mishavad zaban ast va ruh-e zaban adabiyat mibashad. Mohamad Hosayn Forughi, ʿElm-e badiʿ, compiled and prefaced by Abol Hasan Forughi and Mohamad ʿAli Forughi (n.p: Matbaʿ-e Mirza ʿAli Asghar, 1916–17). Copy available at the National Library and Archives of Iran (Cat. No. 13157). I will later explain why I refer to this work as “literary history.” My analysis here is based on the lithograph available at the National Library and Archives of Iran. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

^[3]For a cogent analysis of Mohamad Hosayn Forughi’s role in the creation of history as a social enterprise, see Farzin Vejdani, Making History in Iran: Education, Nationalism, and Print Culture (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2015), 35–54. Vejdani shows that Forughi had an ambivalent relationship with the Qajar court and was a more independent actor than many other courtiers. Vejdani’s dissertation offers a lengthier biography of Forughi and his father, Mohamad Mahdi Arbab Isfahani. See “Purveyors of the Past: Iranian Historians and Nationalist Historiography, 1900-1941,” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2009). For an examination of the rise of Persian literary history as a genre, including a brief analysis of Forughi’s work, see Manzar Soltani, “Tahlil-e sayr-e tazkere’ha va tarikh-e adabiyat’ha-ye Farsi dar Iran az 1258/1880 (mashrute) ta 1332/1953,” (PhD diss., Tarbiyat Modares University, 1999). Forughi’s Literary History has received passing references in Persian-language periodicals, but it has not been analyzed in a standalone article in English or Persian. I am not able to verify this claim when it comes to scholarship on Persian literature in other European languages.

^[4]See Mahmud Futuhi Rudmaʿnji, Daramadi bar adabiyat-shenasi: Rahnema-ye osul-e amuzesh va parvaresh dar adabiyat-e Farsi (Tehran: Pazhuheshgah-e ʿolum-e ensani va motaleʿat-e farhangi, 2017).

^[5]For a biographical essay on Mohamad Mahdi Arbab Isfahani, see Jalal ol-Din Homaʾi, “Khandan-e Forughi,” Yaghma 66 (AH 1332/AD 1953): 361–65. Most notably, Arbab was the first Iranian to produce a lithographed edition of the Shahname.  

^[6]For biographical information on Forughi, please see Manouchehr Kasheff, “FORUGI, MOHAMMAD-HOSAYN Khan Dokaʾ-al-Molk,” Encyclopedia Iranica, 2012, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/forugi-mohammad-hosayn; Baqer ʿAqeli, Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi va Shahrivar-e 1320 (Tehran: AH 1367/AD 1988); Edward Granville Browne, The Persian Revolution (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1910), 404–5.

^[7]That is in addition to “Forughi,” an epithet that was bestowed on him by Naser ol-Din Shah after he composed a qaside on the occasion of tree plantation. Kasheff, “Forugi” Encyclopedia Iranica. He shared this epithet with the distinguished Qajar-era poet ʿAbbas Forughi Bastami (d. 1857). The two Forughis are unrelated.

^[8]For a description of his exact duties at the court, see Kasheff, “Forugi,” Encyclopedia Iranica.

^[9]Vejdani, Making History in Iran, 41; Kasheff, “Forugi,” Encyclopedia Iranica.

^[10]ʿAbbas Eqbal Ashtiyani, “Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi,” Adabiyat va zaban’ha 163 (AH 1340/AD 1962): 517–22.

^[11]H. Maʿsumi Hamadani, “Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi va ruzname-ye Tarbiyat,” Nashr-e Danesh 4 (AH 1363/AD 1984): 5–19.

^[12]Zokaʾ al-Molk Forughi, “Aqaz-i sukhan,” Tarbiyat, no. 1 (11 Rajab 1314/17 December 1896), 1–3; quote on p. 2; digitized archive of Universität Bonn, Abteilung für Islamwissenschaft und Nahostsprachen (accessed September 29, 2017).

^[13]Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet, Frontier Fictions: Shaping the Iranian Nation, 1804–1946 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), 291.

^[14]Adab is a discourse of humanistic inquiry centered on civility and self-conduct. For more on the term and idea of adabiyat and Tarbiyat’s role in reframing it, see Aria Fani, “Becoming Literature: The Formation of Adabiyat as an Academic Discipline in Iran and Afghanistan (1895–1945)” (PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 2019), chap. 1.

^[15]Another example is Fathʿali Akhundzadeh, who wrote that “literātur consists of any composition whether in prose or poetry,” leaving the French term untranslated in Persian. Maktubat (n.p.: Mard-e Emruz Publications, 1985), 10.

^[16]For instance, the newspaper featured a biographical series of Johannes Gutenberg (d. 1468), the inventor of the movable-type printing press; on Hafez, see Tarbiyat, no. 255 (1902): 14.

^[17]Mana Kia, Persianate Selves: Memories of Place and Origin before Nationalism (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2020).

^[18]Kevin L. Schwartz, “A Transregional Persianate Library: The Production and Circulation of Tadhkiras of Persian Poets in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, no. 1 (2020): 1–27.

^[19]I have borrowed this phrase from Charles Kingsley, one of the pioneers of English literature, who in 1848 declared that “literature of every nation is its autobiography.” Charles Kingsley, “On English Literature: Introductory Lecture Given at Queen’s College,” in The Works of Charles Kingsley, vol. XX, Literary and General Lectures and Essays (London: Macmillan and Co., 1880), 257.

^[20]Majid Tafrishi, “Madares-e ʿali-ye hoquq va ʿolum-e siyasi dar Iran az ebteda ta taʾsis-e daneshgah-e Tehran,” Ganjineh-ye asnad, no. 1 (1991): 53–81.

^[21]Depending on the discipline in which it is encountered, maʿna can mean different things. To highlight the absence of an English equivalent or close approximation, Alexander Key has proposed the deliberately unfamiliar phrase “mental content.” See Key, Language between God and the Poets: Ma‘na in the Eleventh Century (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018). ʿElm-e bayan broadly refers to a branch of Perso-Arabic rhetoric concerned with eloquence. The term bayan denotes manifestation, lucidity, and clearness. ʿElm-e badiʿ as a branch of rhetoric is concerned with figures of speech and innovation in language.

^[22]Ashtiyani, “Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi,” 520. It is important to note that premier schools of higher education in Iran, such as Dar ol-Fonun and the School of Political Science, were not only sites of teaching and learning forʿolum-e jadid, or the new sciences, but also sites for groundbreaking innovation in humanistic inquiry that paved the way for the formation of the humanities decades later.

^[23]Mohamad Hosayn Forughi, Divan (n.p., 1900).  

^[24]According to the divan, the biography had been originally intended for inclusion in Name-ye daneshvaran. Manaqeb is a genre focused on the praiseworthy deeds and memorable sayings of saints.    

^[25]ʿAbbas Eqbal-Ashtiyani, “Mohamad Hosayn Zokaʾ ol-Molk,” Yaghma 14/11 (AH 1340/AD 1962): 517–22; Qasem Ghani, Yaddashtha -ye doktor Qasem Ghani, ed. S. Ghani, 12 vols. (London: n.p., 1980–84); Habib Yaghmaʾi, “Asar va taʾlifat-e marhum Mohamad Hosayn Forughi,” Yaghma 19/3 (AH 1345/AD 1966): appendix.

^[26]Mojtaba Minovi, “Rejal: Jaryan-shenasi-ye rejal dar tarikh-e moʿaser-e Iran (Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi),” Ravesh-shenasi-ye tarikh-e shafahi 41/42 (AH 1375/AD 1996): 81–100.

^[27]Forughi’s Divan includes laudatory prose and poetry—poems mostly in Arabic, prose in Persian—about different Arab leaders of the late Ottoman Empire, including Muhamad ʿAli of Egypt (d. 1848) and Muhamad III as-Sadiq (d. 1882). Forughi noted having met Muhamad III as-Sadiq and given him his biographical dictionary of poets, Tabaqat ol-Shoʿara. See Divan, 121–39. There is a need for a critical biography of Forughi, one that would take into consideration his cultural exchanges and travels.

^[28]Mohamad Hosayn Forughi and Mohammad ʿAli Forughi, Büyük İran Tarihi: Safavi, Afşar, Zend, Kaçar şahları ve kayi-i tarihiyyesi, trans. Ömer Halis Bıyıktay (Istanbul: Matbaʿ-i Askeri, 1926). The Persian original was titled Tarikh-e mokhtasar-e Iran (Tehran: Sherkat-e Matbuʿat, AH 1309/AD 1930–31) or The Abridged History of Iran, originally published in 1905. I am grateful to Farzin Vejdani for bringing this translation to my attention.

^[29]It was in ʿAbbas Eqbal Ashtiyani’s column “Tarikh-e adabi” (“Literary history”), Daneshkade 1 (April 1918): 8. His footnote stated: Tarikh-e adabiyat-e marhum Zokaʾ ol-Molk Forughi. Eqbal Ashtiyani (d. 1956) was among the first in early-twentieth-century Iran to introduce “literature” and “literary history” as conceptual categories to Persian-language readers.

^[30]In a parenthetical note, the Forughi sons wrote, “In full disclosure these biographies, as stated in the preface by the publishers, consisted of disorganized and incomplete rough drafts for teaching at the School of Political Science” (Mohamad Hosayn Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, compiled and prefaced by Abol Hasan Forughi and Mohamad ʿAli Forughi [n.p: Matbaʿ-e Mirza ʿAli Asghar, 1916–17], 242, 310). The contemporary Persian term to describe class notes, used as study guide for exams by students, would be jozve.

^[31]Mohamad Hosayn Forughi, ʿElm-e badiʿ (Tehran: Matba‘ah-i Mirza ‘Ali Asghar, AH 1335/AD 1916).

^[32]The Berkeley copy has been digitized by HathiTrust Digital Library, accessible here: https://hdl.handle.net/2027/uc1.b5069901. Encyclopedia Iranica lists the two works separately as ʿElm-e badiʿ (AH 1333/AD 1915) and Tarikh-e adabiyat (AH 1335/AD 1917). Kasheff, “Forugi,” Encyclopedia Iranica.

^[33]This must be a reference to Mirza ʿAli Asghar Amin ol-Soltan, in whose stable Forughi took refuge to escape from the wrath of the shah, who had been led to believe that Forughi had written for the dissident newspaper Qanun (Vejdani, “Purveyors of the Past: Iranian Historians and Nationalist Historiography, 1900–1941,” 149). On Mirza ʿAli Asghar’s biography, see J. Calmard, “Atabak-e Aʿzam, Amin-al-Soltan,” Encyclopedia Iranica, 2011, http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/atabak-e-azam.

^[34]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 1, 3.

^[35]In his entry on Hafez, Forughi mentioned that he was writing a Persian literary history. Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 349.

^[36]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 1.

^[37]Alexander Jabbari, “The Making of Modernity in Persianate Literary History,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, no. 3 (2016): 418–34; Alexander Jabbari, “Late Persianate Literary Culture: Modernizing Conventions between Persian and Urdu” (PhD diss., University of California, Irvine, 2017); Alexander Jabbari, papers presented at “The World of the Tazkirah: Sources for Study of the Premodern Persianate Lands” conference, University of California, Irvine, 5 February 2016, https://sites.uci.edu/tazkirah.

^[38]Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chap. 1.  

^[39]Alexander Jabbari has analyzed the importance of formal conventions such as script in making Persian literature appear modern in the early twentieth century. He writes: “Lithography, which allowed for the inexpensive reproduction of handwritten nastaʿliq script, helped popularize printed books among Iranians, who preferred nastaʿliq over naskh.” See “Late Persianate Literary Culture,” 72.

^[40]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 3.

^[41]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 5.

^[42]The Qajar Prince Jalal ol-Din Mirza (d. 1872) was an example of an Iranian nationalist who was ideologically hostile toward Arabic. See Afshin Marashi, Nationalizing Iran Culture, Power, and the State, 1870–1940 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011).

^[43]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 9.

^[44]Sir William Jones, “An Essay on the Poetry of the Eastern Nations,” in The Collected Works of Sir William Jones, vol. 4 (London: Printed for John Stockdale, Piccadilly, and John Walker, Paternoster-Row, 1807), 544.

^[45]Jones’ claim can be understood within a civilizational—as opposed to national—discourse in which Greek literature was being framed as “Western,” though the term Western civilization did not yet exist in the time of Sir William Jones.

^[46]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 8.

^[47]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 8–13. He writes, “zur-e tāzi bar Pārsi becharbid va kalamāt-e loghat-e ʿArab na yek yek balke dah dad va sad sad dākhel mohāverāt va resāʾel mā gasht zirā ke tamām-e estelāhāt-e ʿelmi rā bāyad az ʿArabi farā-girim.”

^[48]Aria Fani, “The Allure of Untranslatability: Shafiʿi-Kadkani and (Not) Translating Persian Poetry,” Iranian Studies (forthcoming).

^[49]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 3.

^[50]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 12.

^[51]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 11.

^[52]Forughi’s entry on Hafez includes a note on Hafeziye, the poet’s resting place, and all the changes that different dynasties made to it throughout history. This note is in the context of enshrining Hafez as part of a pantheon of Iran’s seven most distinguished luminaries. In doing so, Forughi also anticipates the foundation of Anjoman-e asar-e melli or the National Heritage Society, which set out to build mausoleums for Persian poets, transforming their resting place into a site of national memory and pilgrimage. Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 349–50.

^[53]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 14.

^[54]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 15. The field of literary studies has begun to pay more critical attention to the importance of balagha in the conceptualization of literariness in non-European and American cultural contexts. The project “Global Literary Theory: Caucasus Literatures Compared” at the University of Birmingham is focused on the role of balagha in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, and Georgian literature. The project, which includes extensive bibliographies in those languages, may be accessed here: www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/lcahm/departments/languages/research/projects/globallit/index.aspx.

^[55]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 15.

^[56]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 15.

^[57]Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak, “Language Reform Movement and Its Language: The Case of Persian,” in The Politics of Language Purism, ed. Björn H. Jernudd and Michael J. Shapiro (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1989), 81–104.

^[58]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 16.

^[59]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 334–35. For the ways in which Golestan was read in the Mughal milieu, see Mana Kia, “Adab as Ethics of Literary Form and Social Conduct: Reading the Gulistan in Late Mughal India,” in No Tapping around Philology: A Festschrift in Celebration and Honor of Wheeler McIntosh Thackston Jr.’s 70th Birthday, ed. Alireza Korangy and Daniel J. Sheffield (Wiesbaden, DE: Harrassowitz, 2014), 281–308.

^[60]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 19.

^[61]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 19.

^[62]For the use of colloquialisms in nineteenth-century Persian prose, see Afshin Marashi, “Print Culture and Its Publics: A Social History of Bookstores in Tehran, 1900–1950,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 47 (2015): 89–108. See pages 94–95.

^[63]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 22.

^[64]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 334–35.

^[65]ʿAli Akbar Dehkhoda, Mohamad Moʿin, and Jaʿfar Shahidi, Loghatnameh (Tehran: Daneshgah-e Tehran, 1949), 6:1545.

^[66]One instance of adabiyat denoting sciences related to adab is Mohamad Amoli’s fourteenth-century Nafaʾes ol-fonun fi ʿAraʾes al-ʿoyun, ed. Abol Hasan Shaʿrani (Tehran: Islamiya, 1957), 16.

^[67]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 23.

^[68]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 24.

^[69]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 24.

^[70]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 25.

^[71]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 26.

^[72]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 26.

^[73]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 69.

^[74]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 301.

^[75]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 70.

^[76]Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 71.

^[77]The full list is Rudaki, Ferdowsi, ʿOnsori, Farrokhi, ʿAsjadi, Manuchehri, Abu Hanife, Eskafi, Masʿud Saʿd Salman, ʿOmar Khayyam, ʿAttar, Saʿdi, and Hafez. The last four poets were not included in Forughi’s class notes, but are included in the lithograph copy compiled by his sons (Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 310). Also, the entry on Rudaki is primarily about Ferdowsi and his Shahname and does not include much information about him (Forughi, Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 83–127).

^[78]For instance, Badiʿozzaman Foruzanfar wrote Sokhan va Sokhanvaran (Tehran: Sherkat-e sahami-ye entesharat-e kharazmi, 1971), which reads more like a tazkere in the way it has a brief preface followed by biographical sketches of poets and selections of their work. The same scholar also wrote Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Iran: Baʿd az Eslam ta payan-e Taymuriyan (Tehran: Sazman-e chap va entesharat, Vezarat-e farhang va ershad-e eslami, 2004), which is organized not by poets’ biographies but by a dynastic and political history of Iran. Yet both are often classified as works of literary history because they were produced in the same time period.

^[79]Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, “Method in Turkish Literary History,” trans. Gary Leiser, Middle Eastern Literature, no. 1 (2008): 53–84. I am thankful to Selim Kuru for introducing me to Köprülü’s work.

^[80]Sunil Sharma was among the first to place Persian literary history within a multilingual and transnational framework of historiographical production. See “Redrawing the Boundaries of ʿAjam in Early Modern Persian Literary History,” in Iran Facing Others: Identity Boundaries in a Historical Perspective, ed. Abbas Amanant and Farvin Vejdani (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 51–64.

^[81]The following offer one example of each mode of writing used in Forughi’s Literary History: Tarikh-e bayhaqi (tarikh), Tazkera tol-shoʿara (tazkere), Chahar maqale (hagiography), Majmaʿ al-fosaha (tazkere/anthology), al-Hilal (periodical), Tarjoma tol-balaghe (rhetorical treatise), Borhan-e qateʿ (dictionary), Jules Mohl’s introduction to his edition of the Shahname (literary studies), and Azad Bilgrami’s Subhat al-marjan (literary judgment).  

^[82]Fani, “Becoming Literature,” chap. 1.

^[83]William L. Hanaway, “Is There a Canon of Persian Poetry?” Edebiyat, no. 1 (1993): 3–12.

^[84]One example is Naser Qoli Sarli’s recent book Dowre-bandi-ye adabi (Tehran: Nashr-e khamush, AH 1397/AD 2018). On page 19, Sarli writes: “the tradition of literary historiography in Iran has still not released itself from the model of tazkere writing which is based on the biography of poets and writers in sections that are self-contained and unrelated to one another. [This model] does not pay much attention to the history of literary change and the trajectory of literature on its terms. In this vein, accounts of literary history by Orientalists are closer to the concept of literary history [than the tradition of literary historiography in Iran].” Sarli’s purity test ignores the fact that the ideas of literary history and literature are both modern inventions. The discursive ties of Persian literary history with the tazkere genre need to be further analyzed, but certainly not in light of anachronistic criteria uncritically set by modern-day understandings of literary history.

^[85]Rita Felski and Susan Stanford Friedman, ed. Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (Baltimore, ML: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013).

^[86]Fani, “Becoming Literature.” For a list of these periodicals, see Edward G. Browne and Mohamad ʿAli Tarbiyat, The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia: Partly Based on the Manuscript Work of Mírzá Muḥammad ʻAlí Khán “Tarbiyat” of Tabríz (Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 1983); Mohamad Mohit Tabatabaʾi, Tarikh-e tahlili-ye matbuʿat-e Iran (n.p.: Moʾassese-ye entesharat-e besʿat, 1987); Mohamad Sadr-Hashemi, Tarikh-e jaraʾed va majallat-e Iran (Isfahan: Entesharat-e kamal, 1948). Sadr-Hashemi’s four-volume dictionary of Persian-language periodicals, printed in Iran and its diaspora, is a work of encyclopedic scope. It even includes periodicals printed in Afghanistan although the title suggests otherwise.

^[87]I speculate that one of the main reasons Forughi’s Literary History remains unpublished is the fact that the ideas he tried to promote in the nineteenth century have become normative and prevalent in the twenty-first century.

^[88]Mana Kia has convincingly attempted to restore our pre-nation-state imagination by analyzing such concepts as origin, place, and land in eighteenth-century Persian-language sources from West and South Asia. See Persianate Selves.

^[89]Forughi mentioned the idea of Sabk-e Hendi or the Indian Style of Persian poetry, curiously in the context of Hafez’s poetry, a poet whose oeuvre is thought to have predated the rise of the Indian Style. Forughi’s mention of Sabk-e Hendi is also one of the earliest instances, to the best of my knowledge, of this idea. This questions the tendency to single-handedly attribute the idea of sabk to Bahar. Tarikh-e adabiyat-e Farsi, 348. For a critical examination of Bazgasht as a historiographical category, see Kevin L. Schwartz, Remapping Persian Literary History, 1700–1900 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020).

^[90]The following studies exemplify this paradigm: Shamsur Rahman Faruqi, “Stranger in the City: The Poetics of Sabk-i Hindi,” Annual of Urdu Studies 19 (2004): 1–94; Rajeev Kinra, “Writing Self, Writing Empire: Chandar Bhan Brahman and the Cultural World of the Indo-Persian State Secretary,” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2008); Mostafa Vaziri, Iran as Imagined Nation: The Construction of National Identity (New York: Paragon House, 1993). His polemical and dismissive assessment of Bahar notwithstanding, Faruqi inaccurately claims that the term “Sabk-e hendi” was coined by Bahar (although he was right in adding the qualifier “perhaps” to his claim). As Forughi’s Literary History proves, the term “Sabk-e hendi” was in use well before Bahar’s career started. Kinra largely attributes the nationalist ideas produced in early twentieth-century Iran to Bahar and a select group of orientalists. More importantly, both Faruqi and Kinra treat Sabk-e hendi as a bounded and stable category of description when in reality that was not the case in early twentieth-century discussions of stylistic variations in Persian literature. Mostafa Vaziri attributes the rise of literary nationalism in Iran entirely to Edward Browne. The ways in which we have understood the role of literary institutions in ushering in a new conceptualization of Persian language and literature also exhibits the same impulse to overestimate. These institutions were the outcome of decades-long social processes— that included debating and networking—that gave rise to their establishment. One article that critically examines the role of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature is Ahmad Karimi-Hakkak’s “Language Reform Movement and Its Language: The Case of Persian.” For Karimi-Hakkak, the establishment of the Academy was only the culmination—and not the originator—of language reform in its cultural and conceptual sense.

^[91]Vejdani, Making History in Iran, 147.

^[92]The edited volume History of Iranian Literature represents this trend. In it, Kubíčková (a collaborator on Rypka’s book) writes, “The knowledge of European languages and literatures, western education, with its opening of new possibilities in technology, natural sciences, and the social sciences, and the reflection of all this in everyday life, is for Iranian literature a discovery in the light of which truths accepted as immutable for thousands of years collapse and the existing social order appears as what it is – a mediaeval survival.” Jan Rypka, History of Iranian Literature, ed. Karl Jahn (Dordrecht, NL: D. Reidel, 1968), 362.

^[93]Vejdani, “Purveyors of the Past: Iranian Historians and Nationalist Historiography, 1900-1941,” 148.

^[94]See the “Introduction” to Hamid Rezaei Yazdi and Arshavez Mozafari, ed., Persian Literature and Modernity: Production and Reception. Iranian Studies (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2019).

^[95]Forughi’s critical attitude toward tazkere writers, seen in many parts of his Literary History, is a function of this positivist impulse.