Refashioning Iran

Language and Culture During the Constitutional Revolution

Bibliographic Data

ID9977549
AuthorsMohamad Tavakoli‐Targhi (Illinois State University, corresponding author)
Year1990
Volume23
Issue1-4
Pages77-101
Publication date1990-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueIranian Studies (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0021-0862 • E-ISSN: 1475-4819
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1080/00210869008701750
OpenAlexW1967697130
LanguageEN
Citations received32
References cited8

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

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · Islam · Linguistics · Literature · Persian · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Classics · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Philosophy

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