The Historians of the Constitutional Movement and the making of the Iranian Populist Tradition

Abstract

An Iranian born in 1906, when the constitution was granted, would have had to wait until he was thirty-four to find a history of what was happening at the time of his birth. Kasravi's first volume appeared in 1940 and Malikzada's in 1948. Censorship was not the cause of this strange delay. Could it be that disillusion with the outcome of the movement ran so deep in the minds of intellectuals that no one wished to relive the story by writing it? The newly established Pahlavi state tried to glorify the ancient heritage of Persia and to shift the historical landscape from the immediacy of the constitutional era to the politically irrelevant past of pre-Islamic Iran. It is somehow peculiar—and perhaps a measure of the time—that an author of the Iranian constitution, the Mushir al-Daula (Hasan Pirniya) undertook, when in political retirement, to write not a history of the constitutional movement but a monumental work on ancient Iran. Kasravi speculated about the reasons for the nonexistence of a reliable history. The opportunist elitist reformers (“carpetbaggers”) who shifted sides during the movement “were reluctant to see the history of that movement truthfully written.” The Mushir al-Daula was one of them. Kasravi complained that when he began publishing his history, the sons, relatives, and followers of these men objected to his critical historical evaluation.