Refashioning Iran: Language and Culture During the Constitutional Revolution

Abstract

The dialogic interaction among India, Europe, and the Arab-Islamic culture in the 18th and 19th centuries led to a refashioning of Iran and a rescripting of “the people” and “the nation” in Iranian political and historical discourses. The newly imagined Iran, constructed of textual traces and archaeological ruins, fashioned a new syntax for the reconstruction of the past and the formation of a new national time, territory, writ, culture, literature, and politics. Language, the medium of communication and signification, and the locus of tradition and cultural memory, was restyled. Arabic words were purged, “authentic” Persian terms forged, and neologisms and lexicography were constituted as endeavors for “national reawakening.” Iran-centered histories displaced dynastic and Islam-centered chronicles. In order to recover from historical amnesia, people reinvented pre-Islamic Iran as a lost Utopia with Kayumars as a Persian prophet predating Adam, Mazdak as a theoretician and practitioner of freedom and equality, Kavah-yi Ahangar as the originator of “national will”(himmat-i milli),and Anushirvan as a paradigmatic just-constitutional monarch.

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