Mapping the Role of Intellectuals in Iranian Modern and Contemporary History Mapping the Role of Intellectuals in Iranian Modern and Contemporary History Edited by Ramin Jahanbegloo LEXINGTON BOOKS Lanham • Boulder • New York • London Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www .rowman .com 6 Tinworth Street, London SE11 5AL, United Kingdom Copyright © 2020 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. Chapter 2 was originally published in Mijatović, Aleksandar. “The Time of Dispossession: The Conflict, Composition and Geophilosophy of Revolution in East Central Europe,” pp. 50–73. In Claiming the Dispossession: The Politics of Hi/storytelling in Post-imperial Europe. Vladimir Biti (Ed.). New York: Brill, 2017. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Control Number: 2020945600 ISBN 978-1-7936-0006-6 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-7936-0007-3 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction ix PART I: IRANIAN INTELLECTUALS, NATIONALISM, AND STATE: FROM QAJAR TO EARLY PAHLAVI 1 1 Amir Kabir: A Reformist and Pioneer of Modernization in the Traditional State 3 Saeed Paivandi 2 Crafting Iranian National Imaginary: The Interwar Period (1918–1935) 27 Ali Mirsepassi 3 British Whiggism and the Iranian Enlightenment in the Nineteenth Century 51 Ali M. Ansari PART II: IRANIAN INTELLECTUALS: BETWEEN TRADITIONAL VALUES AND MODERN STATE 67 4 Third-Worldist Iranian Intellectuals: Shariati and Ale-Ahmad 69 Farhad Khosrokhavar 5 Sadeq Hedayat: Iranian Fiction and the Experience of Modernity 95 Homa Katouzian 6 Rethinking the Legacy of Intellectual-Statesmen in Iran 111 Mehrzad Boroujerdi v vi Contents PART III: WOMEN INTELLECTUALS IN PRE- AND POSTREVOLUTIONARY IRAN 129 7 Women’s Rights in Iran’s Experiment with Modernity 131 Haideh Moghissi 8 “And, Here I Am,” Forugh Farrokhzad and Modernity 147 Farzaneh Milani 9 Simin Daneshvar: The Forging of an Intellectual 163 Nasrin Rahimieh PART IV: IRANIAN LEFT: FROM MARXIST INTELLECTUALISM TO REVOLUTIONARY ROMANTICISM 173 10 The Perplexity of the Iranian Marxist Intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s 175 Touraj Atabaki 11 Intellectual Statesmen and the Making of Iran’s Illiberal Nation-State (1921–1926) 191 Afshin Matin-Asgari 12 A Singular Intellectual: Mostafa Sho‘aiyan, a Revolutionary Scholar 217 Peyman Vahabzadeh PART V: IRANIAN RELIGIOUS THINKERS: INTELLECTUALS OR IDEOLOGUES? 235 13 Iranian Islamic Thinkers and Modernity 237 Farzin Vahdat 14 From Nakhshab to Neo-Shariati: Three Generations of Iran’s Modern Muslim Left 275 Mojtaba Mahdavi 15 The Neo-Mutazilites in Contemporary Iran: Two Generations of Muslim Intellectuals 295 Farhad Khosrokhavar and Mohsen Mottaghi Index 321 About the Editor 325 About the Contributors 327 Acknowledgments I am grateful for the support of my colleagues who participated in the making of this volume. Their participation at the London and Toronto conferences, their proactive comments, and vigorous debates that we had helped refine my own approach and give a better shape to this book. Particular thanks to my colleague Professor Hassan Hakimian, director of the Middle East Institute at SOAS University, for his gracious help in organizing the London conference on “Mapping the Role of Intellectuals in Iranian Modern and Contemporary History.” I am also especially grateful to my friend Mehrdad Ariannejad, chief executive officer of Tirgan Cultural Festival in Toronto, for suggesting a second conference on the same subject. Thanks are also due to all those who made the London and Toronto conferences possible. They all have a place in my mind and in my heart, though their names are not mentioned herewith. Thanks are also due to my assistant, Tharun Vuyyuru, for his help in copyediting and ironing out the inconsistencies that inevitably work their way into an edited volume. I am also extremely grateful to my editor at Lexington Press, Joseph Parry, for his suggestions which have been very helpful in improving the manuscript. Last, but no means last, I would like to thank my wife, Azin Moalej, and my daughter, Afarin Jahanbegloo, for their love and constant support. vii Introduction The book that you hold in hands gathers fifteen essays which were practically all presented at two conferences hosted respectively by the School of Oriental and African Studies in London and the Tirgan Cultural Festival in Toronto.1 The major theme discussed in both conferences was the role of intellectuals in modern and contemporary Iranian history. As a result, most of the essays presented in this volume try to examine how modern Iranian intellectualism was born out of Iran’s encounters with the West, while embracing moder- nity and visualizing their identity and Iran’s destiny in terms of multiple engagements with Iranian traditions, European modernity, religion, and science. The reason is that the way Iranian intellectuals lived, thought, and debated and the culture they animated shaped the destiny of Iranian society. The contributions here present, therefore, concentrate primarily on the Iranian intellectual debates on nation-building, democracy making, women emanci- pation, radical thinking, and religious reformism. This book perhaps allows for a shift in attention from a stereotypical consideration of Iranian intellectu- als as only oppositional figures with forward-looking visions to a discussion of Iranian intellectuals as sociological actors who experienced and promoted transformations in the context of the rise and collapse of the Iranian secular nation-state and the formation of nationalist, socialist, and Islamist ideologi- cal paradigms in Iran. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the intellectual history of Iran, reflecting perhaps the failure of purely political and economic expla- nations for the process of change in the Iranian society. Iranian intellectuals have been questioning the essence of Iranian society for nearly 150 years. However, they have been themselves questions seeking historical responses. Some searched these responses in supporting and preserving political orders. Others found their answers in diverse ideologies, either Marxist or Islamist, ix