Culture, Art, and the Constitutional Revolution: A 120-Year Struggle, and Still Counting

Ahmad Kasravi's History of Eighteen Years in Azerbaijan, and following it his History of the Constitutional Revolution of Iran, may be counted among the finest and most reliable research and the most exact record of events concerning the Constitutional Revolution and those who led it.

He says two groups played a part in that revolution:

Ministers and men of standing. 2. Bazaar merchants and ordinary people without name or glory.

The first group were hesitant, friends who went only halfway. In truth, history should be written in the name of the second group, the nameless people, who gave thousands of precious lives to this movement.

(Let me add that there was a third group whose role in the process cannot be denied: writers, artists, poets and journalists. They are the main subject of this essay.)

Kasravi adds that between the death of Karim Khan Zand in 1779 and the death of Fath-Ali Shah in 1834, a great deal happened in Europe: the French uprising, the rise of Napoleon, the appearance of new instruments and new discoveries. Iran, meanwhile, remained without a share in any of it, and unaware.

The rise of Mirza Taghi Khan Farahani, known as Amir Kabir, to the office of Grand Vizier under Naser al-Din Shah, and the reforms he undertook, opened a new chapter, above all the founding of Dar al-Fonun in Tehran and the invitation of foreign teachers to teach there. But the clergy, together with courtiers who saw their own position threatened, could not endure his reforms, and contrived matters so that Naser al-Din Shah dismissed him and then issued the order for his killing. Yet the season of awakening had begun. Mirza Hasan Tabrizi, known as Rushdiyeh, founded the first modern school in Tabriz with teaching materials and books he had written himself, and then established in Tehran the second school after Dar al-Fonun. This was the beginning of a change of direction for Iranian children, from the traditional maktab to primary schools built on a modern culture.

Amir Kabir was gone, but his mark and his traces remained. Dar al-Fonun remained, and so did those who had been trained through his efforts. Among them was Mirza Hossein Khan Sepahsalar, who became Grand Vizier in 1871. Ahmad Kasravi regards his term and his measures as the start of the Iranians' awakening. But once again the clergy did not relent, calling him irreligious, and the Shah had no choice but to remove him from the office. It is said, on Kasravi's authority, that wretched is the nation that does not know its own history; more wretched still the nation with no wish to know it; and most wretched of all the nation that holds its own history up to ridicule.

The trumpet of awakening has sounded, and awakening is the beginning of the constitutional movement. The newspapers Qanun, Habl al-Matin, Akhtar, Sur-e Esrafil, Rouh al-Qudus, Nasim-e Shomal, one after another and alongside one another, played an essential part in simplifying Persian prose, bringing it closer to the language of ordinary people, and spreading the ideas of freedom.

Mirza Fath-Ali Akhundzadeh was the first to take up modern playwriting. His book Tamsilat, written in the Azerbaijani Turkish of the Caucasus, was rendered into Persian by Mirza Mohammad Jafar Qarachedaghi. It contains one story, Yusof Shah, and six plays: Monsieur Jourdan, The Miser, The Alchemist, Vazir Khan of Lankaran, The Advocates, and The Thief-Catching Bear. They are held to be a mirror of Iranian society of that time. But the first to write a play in Persian was Mirza Agha Tabrizi. On Akhundzadeh's advice he began by translating plays from foreign languages into Persian, then set himself to writing plays of his own, drawing much benefit from Akhundzadeh's guidance along the way. The Fate of Ashraf Khan, The Rule of Zaman Khan, The Tale of Shahqoli Mirza's Journey to Karbala, Agha Hashem Khalkhali Falls in Love, and Haji Morshed the Alchemist are among his works. Let me note here that The Rule of Zaman Khan was staged in 1968, directed by Rokneddin Khosravi at the Sangalaj Theatre. At that time the work was believed to be by Mirza Malkam Khan, but it was later established that its true author was Mirza Agha Tabrizi, and under that author's name Sousan Farrokhnia staged it in London some fifteen years ago.

Beyond theatre and performance, the awakening of Iranians drew strength from wider fields. The poets of the late Qajar period and the constitutional era played a considerable part in it: Iraj Mirza, Seyyed Ashraf al-Din Gilani, Adib al-Mamalek Farahani, Malek al-Shoara Bahar, Mirzadeh Eshghi, and Aref Qazvini. The tasnifs of Aref Qazvini, built on the joining of poetry and music, carried such force that they became the songs people hummed in the streets and bazaars, and they hold a high place in the movement from traditionalism toward modernity.

It is a pity that those efforts, those sacrifices and those honest acts of creation were consigned to forgetting within half a century, which Ahmad Kasravi counts as yet another sorry tale in this field. Perhaps, had it been otherwise, and had a clear historical memory existed in us and in the other peoples of this land, matters would now be turning on a different axis.

Sadegh Hatefi
1 August 2026