Ahmad Kasravi’s Writings in al-`Irfan

Ahmad Kasravi (1890–1946), one of the most influential Iranian thinkers of the twentieth century, delivers a stinging criticism of Shi0ism and Islam in two works which have been almost completely ignored by secular scholars, despite their immense influence on the thought and writings of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution as well as Ali Shariati and Jalal Ale Ahmad, its ideological forebears. The article considers the paradoxical reception of Kasravi’s Shi0ism (Shi0igari) and On Islam (Dar Piramun-i Islam): both their extraordinary impact on Islamic revivalists and their neglect by specialists in Iranian affairs and Islamic studies. The occlusion of Kasravi’s impulse to reform, the reduction of his ambiguous position in the Iranian intellectual tradition, has functioned to all but foreclose discussions of Islamic reform among secular scholars, deforming the contemporary intellectual history of Iran and Shi0ism more broadly.

Ahmad Kasravi, scholar, jurist, historian, linguist and controversial religious and social reformist, was born in September 1890 in a poor rural quarter in the suburbs of Tabriz. As a young man he witnessed the constitutional revolution about which he wrote two remarkable books. As a reformer he harshly criticized the poets and Sufis of Iran for their moral laxities and clashed with the Shiaʻ clergy, whom he blamed for distorting the true Islam. Kasravi propagated his own “Din-e Pak” (Pure Religion) and was assassinated in 1946 at the Palace of Justice in Tehran by Fada’iyan-e Islam, a group of Islamic zealots on the ground of blasphemy.

Persian Language, Literature and Culture: New Leaves, Fresh Looks, ed. Kamran Talattof, 2015

Ahmad Kasravi (1890–1946) was a prominent Iranian journalist, linguist, his- torian, lawyer, and religious reformer who was assassinated by the Devotees of Islam on March 11, 1946. As a protean political figure and prolific essayist, he embodied diverse and conflicting intellectual tendencies that fully developed in the decades after his assassination. He promoted religious homogeneity and an Islam-based polity but was critical of Shi’ism and clerical hierocracy in Iran. He was an advocate of language reform but was highly critical of Persian canonical texts. He served as a defense lawyer for the founders of the communist Tudeh Party but was a fervent antagonist of materialism and communism. As a former seminarian, Kasravi was alarmed by the Iranian adoration of Europe, a phenom- enon that he called Europism (Urugayigari). Building upon an earlier critical tra- dition in Persian, he viewed the Iranian mimicry of modern European norms as an “illness,” as a “trap” (dam) that instead of promoting civilization and human- ism would contribute to war and to social devastation. He considered the idea of “European superiority” as a deceptive device for the promotion of colonialism and capitalism. With the exception of scientific innovations, he explained that Iranians could improve their own modes of life and legal and administrative structures without needing to import unsuitable European norms – norms that had promoted individual greed, social inequality, and world war. He meticulously explored the mixed legacy of Orientalism, both as a purveyor of critical scholarship and as a body of knowledge in the service of European colonialism and imperialism. While appreciating the text-editing skills of Iranian literati who were influenced by Orientalists, he was highly critical of their lack of intellectual independence in the forming of the Persian literary canon.

Making History in Iran is a much-needed examination of how various social and institutional changes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shaped how the people of Iran wrote about, taught, and understood the past. Farzin Vejdani traces the gradual formation of modern historiography in Iran through periods of shifting patronage networks, the expansion of reading publics, and the adoption of reformist and inter-nationalist revolutionary ideas. These structural transformations made it possible for history to move out of the court and into the hands of amateur writers, private educators, and activists who introduced the nation as a central historical framework. Previous studies on Iranian historiography have focused on how top-down authoritarian reforms of the late Qajar and Pahlavi periods were responsible for writing nationalism into the history books. Vejdani, however, utilizes a wide variety of source materials, such as historical textbooks, training manuals, periodicals, correspondences, and school curricula to argue that such a view excludes a larger pool of autonomous contributors REVIEWS

Iranian Studies, 2019

Iranian Studies, 1984