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“Is Our Name Remembered?”: Writing the History of Iranian Constitutionalism As If Women and Gender Mattered

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Afsaneh Najmabadi
Afsaneh Najmabadi*
Affiliation:
Department of Women's Studies, Barnard College (Columbia University)
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Extract

Current histories of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1905-1909) frequently begin the story of the revolutionary years with 11 December 1905. On that day the bastinado was inflicted on three Tehrani merchants, Sayyid Hashim Qandfurush, Hajj Ahmad Qaysariyah, and Sayyid Isma'il Charmfurush, on orders from ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah, governor of Tehran. This incident, we are told, led the two leading Tehran clerics, Sayyid Muhammad Tabataba'i and Sayyid ‘Abdallah Bihbihani, to stage a protest sit-in with their supporters in the Shah ‘Abd al-'Azim shrine and demand the dismissal of ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah and premier ‘Ayn al-Dawlah, as well as the institution of a house of justice. A month later, the sit-in ended successfully: though ‘Ayn al-Dawlah remained premier, ‘Ala’ al-Dawlah was dismissed and a royal decree to establish a house of justice was issued. Some months later another incident set off the next round of the contest.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 29 , Issue 1-2 , Spring Winter 1996 , pp. 85 - 109
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1996

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Footnotes

*

This essay is extracted from a book-length manuscript, The Daughters of Qūchān: Remembering the Forgotten Gender of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. The book has been published in Persian under the title Ḥikāyat-i dukhtarān-i Qūchān: az yād raftahhāyi inqilāb-i mashrūṭah (Spånga, Sweden: Baran, 1995; and Tehran: Rawshangaran, 1996). As with the larger work, I owe an immense debt to many friends, colleagues, and institutions too numerous to mention.

References

1. Rubin, Gayle, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the Political Economy of Sex,” in Reiter, Rayna R., ed., Towards an Anthropology of Women (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 157–210Google Scholar.

2. See, for instance, “Maktūb az Khurāsān,” Ḥabl al-matīn, 22 May 1905, 5 and 10 July 1905, 19–21.

3. “Maktūb az Khurāsān,” Ḥabl al-matīn, 17 July 1905, 12–13. See also “Maktūb-i yakī az ṭullāb-i Khurāsān,” Ḥabl al-matīn, 25 September 1905, 9–10.

4. On the secret societies in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution see A. K. S. Lambton, “Secret Societies and the Persian Revolution of 1905–1906,” St. Antony's Papers, vol. 4 (1957). For a more recent evaluation see Bayat, Mangol, Iran's First Revolution: Shi'ism and the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1909 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991)Google Scholar; Encyclopaedia Iranica, s.v. “Anjoman” (M. Bayat).

5. For the full text of this essay, see Kirmani, Nazim al-Islam, Tārīkh-i bīdārī-yi Īrānīān, ed. Sirjani, ‘Ali Akbar Sa'idi (Tehran: Agah-Nuvin, 1983)Google Scholar, part I, 1:299.

6. For other examples and their significance see Najmabadi, Ḥikāyat-i dukhtarān-i Qūchān, chapter 1.

7. The full text of the sermon is reproduced in many texts of the period. See, for instance, Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tārīkh-i bīdārī, part I, 1:444–53. On the notion of “circle of justice” see Lambton, A. K. S., “Justice in the Medieval Persian Theory of Kingship,” Studia hlamica 17 (1962): 91–119CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Muhammad, b. Muhammad b. Muhammad, Naṣīḥat al-mulūk, ed. Huma'i, Jalal al-Din (Tehran: Anjuman-i asar-i milli, 1972), 81–175Google Scholar, esp. 100–101; and Hamadani, Rashid al-Din, Savāniḥ al-afkār-i Rashīdī, ed. Danishpazhuh, Taqi (Tehran: Kitabkhanah-yi markazi va markaz-i asnad, 1980), 113Google Scholar.

8. See Afsaneh Najmabadi, “Beloved and Mother, the Erotic Vaṭan: To Love, To Possess and To Protect,” Comparative Studies in Society and History (forthcoming).

9. See, for instance, Nasir al-Din Tusi's 13th-century tract, Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī ed. Mujtaba Minuvi and ‘AH Riza Haydari (Tehran: Khwarazmi, 1978); trans. Wickens, G. M. as Tire Nasirean Ethics (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1964)Google Scholar. For further discussion of this literature see El, s.v. “Akhlāķ” (R. Walzer and H. A. R. Gibb).

10. For a discussion of these points see Najmabadi, Afsaneh, “Zanhād-yi millat: Women or Wives of the Nation,” Iranian Studies 26, nos. 1–2 (Winter/Spring 1993): 51–71CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11. Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, Tārīkh-i bīdārī, part II, 4:91.

12. On women musicians, singers and dancers see Khaliqi, Ruhallah, Sarguẕasht-i mūsīqī-yi Īrān (Tehran: Safi ‘Alishah, 1974), 1:465–86Google Scholar.

13. For similar connotative changes in Arabic and Turkish see Lewis, Bernard, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 40–41CrossRefGoogle Scholar; idem, The Middle East and the West (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 75–78; and Ayalon, Ami, Language and Change in the Arab Middle East: The Evolution of Modern Political Discourse (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 52–53Google Scholar. On the shift in the meaning of millat in nineteenth-century Iran from a religious to a national community see Tavakoli-Targhi, Mohamad, “Refashioning Iran: Language and Culture during the Constitutional Revolution,” Iranian Studies 23, nos. 1–4 (1990): 77–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. On “depiction of the homeland as a female body” and the interrelation between nation and gender in European political discourses see Parker, Andrew, Russo, Mary, Sommer, Doris, and Yaeger, Patricia, Nationalisms and Sexualities (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar, Introduction, esp. 5–12. See also Peter Stallybrass, “Patriarchal Territories: The Body Enclosed,” in Ferguson, M. W., Quilligan, M. and Vickers, N. J., eds., Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar; Jean E. Howard, “An English Lass amid the Moors: Gender, Race, Sexuality, and National Identity in The Fair Maid of the West’ (unpublished paper).

The beloved in classical Persian love literature is quite frequently gender-ambiguous, if not evidently male. It is perhaps not an unrelated shift that in the modernist imagination the homoeroticism of classical literature is recast as heterosexual male-female romantic love, the beloved being reimagined as female.

15. For a fuller discussion of these issues see Najmabadi, “Beloved and Mother.“

16. See, for instance, Tamaddun, 12 March 1908, 2.

17. See Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani Parizi, Hasht al-haft (Tehran: Arghavan, 1991), chapter 14, in which the author offers anecdotal examples from a variety of sources on offering daughters and wives in lieu of tax payments as well as slavery in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries in the eastern provinces of Kirman, Baluchistan, Sistan, and Khurasan.

18. See Guli, Aminallah, Sayrī dar tārīkh-i sīāsī-ijtimā'ī-yi Turkamānhā (Tehran: Nashri ‘ilm, 1987), 269–75Google Scholar; Ramazan, ‘Ali Shakiri, Atraknāmah: tārīkh-ijāmi'-i Qīchān (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1986), 224–25Google Scholar.

19. Mafi, Hashim Muhit, Muqaddamāt-i mashrūṭīyat, ed. Majid Tafrishi, and Janfada, Javad (Tehran: Firdawsi, 1984), 287Google Scholar.

20. The classic formulation of the relationship between the state and the tribal and settled populations in Islamic philosophy and political history is, of course, that of Ibn Khaldun. See The Muqaddimah, trans. Franz Rosenthal, ed. and abr. N. J. Dawood (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967).

21. Nategh, Homa, ‘“Abbās Mīrzā va Turkamānān-i Khurāsān,” Nigīn 10, no. 112 (22 September 1974): 13–17Google Scholar.

22. During the reign of Nasir al-Din Shah (1848–96), military campaigns to control the borders were greatly intensified. By one account, there were sixty-three campaigns against the Turkomans between 1850 and 1890. See Muhammad Hasan Khan I'timad al-Saltanah, al-Ma'āir va al-āār (clar aḥvāl-i rijāl-i dawrah va darbār-i Nāṣirī), ed. Iraj Afshar, 3 vols. (Tehran: Asatir, 1984), 1:64–81. See also Guli, Sayrī dar tārīkh; Kazemzadeh, Firuz, Russia and Britain in Persia, 1864–1914: A Study in Imperialism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968)Google Scholar, chapter 3.

23. See, for instance, Mirza Fath ‘Ali Akhundzadah, Maktūbāt, ed. M. Subhdam (n.p.: Mard-i imruz, 1985), 19–21, 53–54, 162 for a rhetorical usage of captivity in the hands of Turkomans as a sign of Iran's ruin and suffering under a despotic government.

24. Parizi, Muhammad Ibrahim Bastani, Payghambar-i duzdān (Tehran: Nigah, 1992 [1944]), 263Google Scholar.

25. A more polite version reads: “I might as well give up on my coquetry (qir)/I am a prisoner of Turkomans.” For a discussion of these two versions see Muhammad Hasan Khan I'timad al-Saltanah, Khalsah mashhur bih khwābnāmah, ed. Mahmud Katira'i (Tehran: Tuka, 1969), 265–66 (editor's note entitled “Sukhanī dar bārah-yi Rūznāmah-yi khāṭirāt-i I'timād al-Salṭanah“).

26. I take the concept of geo-body from Winichahul, Thongchai, Siam Mapped: A History of the Geo-Body of A Nation (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1994)Google Scholar.

27. In this connection, but in a different historical context, see Alonso, Ana Mariá, Thread of Blood: Colonialism, Revolution, and Gender on Mexico's Northern Frontier (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, chapter 3.

28. The eventual consolidation of the borders was marked by a formal treaty signed between Iran and Russia on 21 December 1881. See Kazemzadeh, Russia and Britain in Persia, 80. From the 1860 Marv expedition, we also have the report of a scribe who traveled with the campaign. See al-Husayni, Muhammad ‘Ali, “Safarnāmah-yi Marv, nivishtah-yi Sayyid Muḥammad Lashkarnivīs,” in Rawshani, Qudratallah, ed., Sih safarnāmah: Hirāt, Marv, Mashhad (Tehran: Tehran University Press, 1968), 73–144Google Scholar.

29. For a detailed analysis of these issues see Najmabadi, Ḥikāyat-i dukhtarān-i Qūchān, chapters 4–6.

30. Taqizadah, Sayyid Hasan, Tārīkh-i inqilāb-i Īrān (Tehran: Yaghma, 1961), 6Google Scholar, 20, 34, 42–43.

31. Kasravi, Ahmad, Tārīkh-i mashrūṭah-yi Īrān (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1968), 226–27Google Scholar, 278, 347, 406–407, 479–80.

32. Idem, Tārīkh-i hijdah-sālah-yi Āẕarbāyjān (Tehran: Amir Kabir, 1968), 15.

33. Malikzadah, Mahdi, Tārīkh-i inqilāb-i mashrūṭīyat-i Īrān, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Tehran: ‘Ilmi, 1984Google Scholar; 1st ed. 1949–54 in 7 vols.); Adamiyat, Firaydun, Īdi’ uluzhī-yi nahżat-i mashrūṭīyat-i Īrān, vol. 1 (Tehran: Payam, 1976)Google Scholar, vol. 2 subtitled Majlis-i avval va buḥrān-i āzādī (Tehran: Rawshangaran, n.d. [1992?]). Here we are concerned only with histories of the Constitutional Revolution written in Persian and published in Iran, since the criterion is how the historians’ narratives have shaped collective Iranian memory of that revolution. Histories of the Constitutional Revolution written in English, then or subsequently, have not directly shaped that memory. A critical assessment of these histories deserves a separate study, though some of the issues raised here may have relevance for these works as well.

34. Malikzadah, Tārīkh-i inqilāb 1:332–34, 456–57, 506–508.

35. Adamiyat, Īdi'uluzhī 1:405–407.

36. Ibid. 2:68–69.

37. Ana Mariá Alonso, “The Effects of Truth: Re-Presentations of the Past and the Imagining of Community,” Journal of Historical Sociology 1, no. 1 (March 1988): 34. See also Hutton, Patrick H., History as An Art of Memory (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993)Google Scholar, esp. chapter 1: “Placing Memory in Contemporary Historiography.“

38. Kasravi, Tārīkh-i mashrūṭah, 3.

39. Idem, ‘Tārīkh-i hijdah-sālah rā chirā nivishtam?” in Yahya Zuka', Kārvand-i Kasravī: majmū'ah-yi 78 risālahva guftār az Aḥmad Kasravī (Tehran, Jibi, 1973), 195. See also ibid., 166–73 for his essay, “Dar pīrāmūn-i Tārīkh-i mashrūṭah.“

40. Kasravi, Tārīkh-i mashrūṭah, 3–4.

41. Kasravi, Tārīkh-i hijdah-sālah, two unnumbered initial pages entitled “YadavarL“

42. Malikzadah, Tārīkh-i inqilāb 1:7.

43. Adamiyat, Īdi'uluzhī 2:402–403. Despite their common philosophical outlook, I do not mean to equate the works of the two. In terms of original archival work and presentation of a lucid narrative that integrates the wealth of research into an overall narrative, their works remain worlds apart. The most important contribution of Adamiyat, and later his close colleague Homa Nategh, resides in their tireless and productive efforts to initiate historical writing that is firmly rooted in primary sources and deeply informed by archival research. From this point of view, Adamiyat's disdainful dismissal of Malikzadah's claim as a historian is more understandable. Malikzadah's work, in the older tradition of historiography, uses already existing histories and memoirs with no clear system of references, documentation or archival work. In fact, despite his early chapter on history as a higher science than story-telling, his style is in the latter tradition. From this perspective, it is also not an exaggeration to suggest that the works of Adamiyat and Nategh have completely transformed historiography in Iran. The younger generation of historians owes an untold debt to these two.

44. Adamiyat, Īdi'uluzhī 2:13–15.

45. Malikzadah, Tārīkh-i inqilāb 1:4. I have used male pronouns here, since Malikzadah's outlook makes it highly unlikely that he would have had a female historian in mind.

46. For a theoretical analysis of questions of history and narrative which have informed my discussion here see Ricoeur, Paul, Time and Narrative, vol. 1 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1983)Google Scholar; White, Hayden, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987)Google Scholar.

47. Afshar, M. Reza, “The Historians of the Constitutional Movement and the Making of the Iranian Populist Tradition,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 25, no. 3 (August 1993): 480Google Scholar, 483

48. Malikzadah, Tārīkh-i inqilāb 1:5.

49. Afshar, “Historians,” 483.

50. Adamiyat, Īdi'uluzhī 1:205.

51. These include Adamiyat's, Fikr-i āzādī va muqaddamah-yi nahżat-i mashrūṭīyat (Tehran: Sukhan, 1961)Google Scholar; Andīshahhā-yi Ṭālibuf Tabrīzī (Tehran: Damavand, 1966); Andīshahhā-yi Mīrzā ĀqāKhān Kirmānī (Tehran: Payam, 1966); Amīr Kabīr va Īrān (Tehran: Khwarazmi, 1969); Andīshahhā-yi MīrzāFatḥ ‘Alī Ākhūnāzddah (Tehran: Khwarazmi, 1970); Andīshah-yi taraqqī va ḥukūmat-i qānūn (Tehran: Khwarazmi, 1973); and Fikr-i dimukrāsī-yi ijtimā'ī dar nahżat-i mashrūṭūyat-i Īrān (Tehran: Payam, 1975).

52. Adamiyat, Īdi'uluzhī 2:30.

53. Ibid. 1:348, 353–54, 359, respectively.

54. Ibid., 369.

55. Cited in ibid., 389.

56. For fuller discussion see Najmabadi, Ḥikāyat-i dukhtarān-i Quūchān, chapter 6.

57. For fuller discussion, see ibid., chapter 5.

58. Adamiyat, Īdi'uluzhiī 1:393.

59. See Ḥikāyat-i dukhtarān-i Qūchān, chapter 6.

60. Malikzadah, Tārīkh-i inqilāb 1:76.

61. For a more contemporary presentation of this line of argument (that Iranian history is masculine history because women played no significant social role), see Baraheni, Reza, Tārīkh-i muẕakkar (Tehran: ‘Ilmi, 1972), 14–21Google Scholar. For a fuller critique of these arguments see Shahidian, Hammed, “Dushvārīhā-yi nigārish-i tārīkh-i zanān dar Īrān,” Iran Nameh 12, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 81–128Google Scholar.

62. Malikzadah, Tārīkh-i inqilāb 1:403, 2:1039, 3:1459 and 1463–64.

63. Afshar, “Historians,” 484.

64. Alonso, Thread of Blood, 76.

65. Shahidian, “Dushvārīhā,” 83.

66. For a lucid discussion of these issues see Scott, Joan W., Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

67. For an initial attempt see Najmabadi, “Women or Wives of the Nation.“

68. See Najmabadi, “Beloved and Mother.“

69. This verse is from the longer poem that appeared in Ṣūr-i Isrāfīl, 20 June 1907, 7–8. For an English translation of the entire poem see Browne, Edward G., The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914Google Scholar; Los Angeles: Kalimat Press, 1983), 177–79.