The Discovery of Iran: Taghi Arani, a Radical Cosmopolitan

By Ali Mirsepassi

The Discovery of Iran examines the history of Iranian nationalism afresh through the life and work of Taghi Arani, the founder of Iran's first Marxist journal, Donya. In his quest to imagine a future for Iran open to the scientific riches of the modern world and the historical diversity of its own people, Arani combined Marxist materialism and a cosmopolitan ethics of progress. He sought to reconcile Iran to its post-Islamic past, rejected by Persian purists and romanticized by their traditionalist counterparts, while orienting its present toward the modern West in all its complex and conflicting facets.

As Ali Mirsepassi shows, Arani's cosmopolitanism complicates the conventional wisdom that racial exclusivism was an insoluble feature of twentieth-century Iranian nationalism. In cultural spaces like Donya, Arani and his contemporaries engaged vibrant debates about national identity, history, and Iran's place in the modern world. In exploring Arani's short but remarkable life and writings, Ali Mirsepassi challenges the image of Interwar Iran as dominated by the Pahlavi state to uncover fertile intellectual spaces in which civic nationalism flourished.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Release date: Nov 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781503629806

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The Discovery of Iran

Taghi Arani, a Radical Cosmopolitan

Ali Mirsepassi

Stanford University Press

Stanford, California

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Stanford, California

©2021 by Ali Mirsepassi. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free, archival-quality paper

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mirsepassi, Ali, author.

Title: The discovery of Iran : Taghi Arani, a radical cosmopolitanism / Ali Mirsepassi.

Description: Stanford, California : Stanford University Press, 2021. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2021010706 (print) | LCCN 2021010707 (ebook) | ISBN 9781503629141 (cloth) | ISBN 9781503629806 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Arrānī, Taqī—Political and social views. | Nationalism—Iran—History—20th century. | Cosmopolitanism—Iran—History—20th century. | Philosophy, Marxist—Iran—History—20th century. | Iran—Intellectual life—20th century.

Classification: LCC HX385.2.A8 M67 2021 (print) | LCC HX385.2.A8 (ebook) | DDC 335.4092—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010706

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021010707

Cover photograph: Sepah Square, the main square in Tehran, Iran, April 20, 1946. (AP Photo/Tom Fitzsimmons)

Cover design: Rob Ehle

Typeset by Kevin Barrett Kane

For Arshid

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Transliteration

Timeline: Taghi Arani’s Life and Work

INTRODUCTION: Iranian Nationalism, Revisited

1. Transnational Cosmopolitanism: Arani’s Life and Times

2. Among the Nationalists in Berlin, 1922–1929

3. Arani’s Early Writings: A Racialized National Narrative

4. For a Radical Cosmopolitan Iran

5. The Persian Language, Past and Present

6. ʿErfan, Reason, and the Nation

CONCLUSION: An Unfinished Iranian Enlightenment

Notes

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

Over the course of writing and producing this book, I benefited from the invaluable help of colleagues, friends, and students. I offer to them my genuine gratitude for making this study a more compelling piece of scholarship than would have been possible without the benefit of their insight and advice.

Before I committed to carrying out this study, I discussed with Arash Azizi the possibility of completing a joint study on Taghi Arani. While we soon realized that our two discrete visions might uneasily cohabit a single volume, Arash encouraged me to see the project through, and kindly permitted me to use in this book some of his translations of Arani’s essays. As I completed the study, I revisited and edited these translations, and added to them some of my own.

Bita Mousavi worked with me during the isolating months of the Covid-19 pandemic to edit and produce the final manuscript. Her careful editing and thoughtful comments have enhanced the book’s clarity and argumentation. My sincere gratitude to Bita for her contributions to this book, and for the substantial time she has devoted to it. Tadd Fernee edited an earlier version of the manuscript, and I remain appreciative of his contribution. Mehdi Faraji, Zoya Honarmand, Mehmet Darakçıoğlu, Younes Jalali, Tehreem Nahar, and Hossein Kamali assisted me with translations, identification of source materials, and editing, and to them all I am grateful.

Ervand Abrahamian, Eskandar Sadeghi-Boroujerdi, and Siavush Randjbar-Daemi reviewed an earlier version of this study, which benefited greatly from their incisive comments. I am indebted to them for constructive critiques and collegial advice. The two anonymous reviewers at Stanford University Press provided thoughtful feedback, which I have endeavored to incorporate in the following pages.

To Stanford University Press’s stellar editor, Kate Wahl, whose comments helped place the study’s argument on a more sound footing, and whose editorial guidance made its publication possible, I owe special thanks. I am fortunate to have worked with Kate and her team, including Caroline McKusick, and I express my appreciation to them for seeing this study to completion.

Lastly, I am grateful for the unstinting support I continue to receive from the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University. I owe a great deal of thanks to the dean of the Gallatin School, Susanne Wofford, and to the faculty and students at NYU, whom I am proud to call colleagues.

Note on Transliteration

The transliteration of Persian words and names follows the system suggested by the Iranian Studies Journal, with the following exceptions:

• The consonant ghayn is represented by gh and qaf by q, but this difference has not been retained in the transliteration of Taghi. Instead, the most common rendering of Arani’s given name has been used throughout.

• For the names of individuals, their own preferred spelling is used if accessible. Where this information was not available, the most common transliteration is used. In general, ʿayns and hamzas have been omitted wherever a name is commonly transliterated without them.

• Current Persian pronunciation has been followed, except when transliterating Arabic. In such cases the International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies transliteration scheme is followed.

Dates

In some cases, two dates are used to cite Persian materials (e.g., 1395/2016). In such cases, the first date is based on the solar hijri calendar, which is currently used in Iran, and the second one is its equivalent Common Era date.

Timeline

Taghi Arani’s Life and Work

Introduction

Iranian Nationalism, Revisited

Persia, after New Year’s Day, will not be Persia anymore. . . .

New York Times, 1935¹

Unnaming the Nation

On New Year’s Day, 1935, the Associated Press reported that a national reckoning was looming over Iran. By diplomatic decree and in one fell swoop, Persia would be no more, and Iran would come into international existence. What triggered the fall of a nation, if only in name, with so long and illustrious a history? Why would people who prided themselves of their ancient patrimony choose to reject their country’s name? Any researcher scouring contemporary Iranian newspapers for a complete local account of the name change will only meet with disappointment. The absence of any mention, let alone discussion, of the end of Persia in contemporary Iranian discourse is striking. Perhaps this is because for Iranians, Iran had never been Persia. It had been Iran for as long they could remember.²

The Iranian foreign minister had summarily demanded on December 4, 1934, that foreign governments desist in three months’ time from referring to the country as Persia. Come March 1935, they should, the decree stipulated, call it by its real name, Iran.³ The Iranian government sought to compel European countries in particular, as standard-bearers of the international order, to refrain from using the name Persia. What inspired the Iranian state’s commitment to enforcing a name change? How has this event been interpreted by historians and scholars of modern Iran? The issue is critical, considering that the small window of time between the 1935 name change and the dawn of World War II, which coincided with the second period of Reza Shah’s rule (1934–41), directly shaped the future of Iran as a modern nation-state and the development of Iranian nationalism.

The Associated Press speculated that the name change was motivated by the Iranian state’s desire to align the nation with the so-called Aryan race.⁴ This racial supremacy thesis, used to explain everything from the name change to Iran’s supposedly troubled relationship with Arabs and Islam, soon supplanted all other explanations to reach the status of common wisdom as Reza Shah’s putative sympathy for Germany became well known. European governments followed suit and attributed the same motive to the name change, an about-face they regarded with evident dismay. Iran, they suspected, was a racialized epithet. The British government at first found the request silly and considered resisting it.⁵ Then, as now, the racial-supremacist thesis required little more than a glance at contemporary events and alliances emerging across Europe and in Germany to seem all too true. That some Iranian statesmen and intellectuals openly embraced German racialist ideas and willfully implicated Iran in a fictive struggle over the Aryan nation added to the credibility of the thesis. What actual evidence exists, however, for the speculated motives impugning the name change as racialist? The rationale for the name change is more intricate than the assumed desire of projecting Iran’s Aryan identity internationally. A fresh look at this policy’s gestation and a more nuanced perspective on Iran-Germany relations during the 1930s, then, are required to appreciate the complexity and contingency of its motivations.

The un-naming of Iran was externally directed; the change in nomenclature affected foreign and, more specifically, European countries. Iran already circulated domestically as the nation’s name and was the historic term that neighboring Islamicate countries had for centuries used to refer to the country. Why would a government demand that foreign nations identify the country in racialized terms, while disregarding its current usage among its people? How do we explain this? The change occurred during a critical period in the formation of Iranian nationalism, so the historiographic silence surrounding the name change is curious indeed.

There are two accounts as to who first broached the idea of introducing a formal change in nomenclature. Most scholars have identified the culprit using the directive Iran’s foreign minister issued to Iranian embassies abroad. The directive states that the Iranian ambassador to Germany, Abdolqasem Najm,⁶ an alleged Nazi sympathizer, had perhaps persuaded Reza Shah of the need for a name change.⁷ In Iran, however, another understanding prevailed. It was believed that Saeed Nafisi, a renowned scholar on friendly terms with Reza Shah’s advisors, had led a group of Iranian luminaries, including former Prime Minister Mohammad Ali Foroughi and former Foreign Minister Seyed Hasan Taqizadeh, in convincing the Shah that the name change was necessary to improve the nation’s standing in the world. And there is indeed evidence of Reza Shah’s respect for Nafisi as a scholar: On the occasion of the 1934 jubilee celebrating the establishment of the Pahlavi monarchy, he commissioned Nafisi to write the history of his rule.⁸ Nafisi’s two-volume survey, The Social History of Iran, continues to be considered a pioneering work of scholarship.⁹

Perhaps the sole document explaining the government’s rationale for the name change is a retrospective article by Nafisi, which was published in a leading Iranian daily, Ettelaʿat, on December 10, 1934, three days after Iranian officials had apprised foreign governments of the name change. Nafisi’s argument for foreign government’s use of Iran in place of Persia rested on the conviction that the former name better captured the multiethnic makeup of a nation in which Persia (Pars) was only one region. According to Nafisi, the name Persia could never encompass the diversity of cultures constitutive of the historical reality of Iran, and instead gave the impression of a multiethnic nation ruled by one ethnic group. Nafisi’s argument, however, was convoluted. Alongside his insistence on Iran’s ethnic plurality, he argued that these differences were in fact overridden and subsumed by a unifying identity: Iranians, he reasoned, collectively constituted a branch of the nezhad-e sefid (white race) and were therefore Aryan. The name Iran promised the possibility not only of capturing Iran’s ethnic mixture without compromising it, but of evoking the grandeur of its ancient past.¹⁰ Nafisi expressed gratitude to European Orientalists for their wisdom in electing to use the term Iran to describe the region encompassing contemporary Iran, Afghanistan, and beyond.¹¹

Rather than determine whether the attempt to annul Persia as the name for Iran does or does not confirm the existence of Iranian Aryanism, this book views the name change as, above all, institutionalizing a new autocratic mode of imagining modern Iran. The years 1934 and 1935 inaugurated a novel form of top-down Iranian nationalism which aimed to mold the nation in the image of the king. Despite these discontinuities, Nafisi’s text still forwards the civic aspirations of the constitutionalist tradition, mechanisms for realizing which were outlined in the Iranian Constitution of 1906. Even the new autocratic nationalism of Reza Shah’s rule retained residual elements of civic nationalism. In this light, Nafisi’s clouded argument captures a new bipolar reality of civic activism moderated by autocratic force. His is not an argument motived purely by racial animus. Nafisi himself, perhaps, failed to realize the improbability of imagining Iran in a way similar to the new Republic of Turkey. Instead, he desired an ethnically inclusive Iran at the same time that he attempted to situate it within the pantheon of Aryanism.

Taghi Arani’s Civic Nationalism

The present study critically reexamines the intellectual history of Iranian nationalism as it developed during the often overlooked interwar period (1919–35). It does so by situating at its center the life and thought of Taghi Arani, who married the analytical insights of Marxist materialism to a cosmopolitan ethics of progress through international scientific exchange. Arani’s radical secularism combined the principles of civic nationalism with a humanist imaginary for the future of the Iranian nation. He relentlessly preached the values of modern science and of class and gender equality; but in anticolonial fashion he was skeptical of cultural capitulation to the West, unlike many of his modernist counterparts. He sought to reconcile Iran to its own history before and after the Islamic conquests, a history of syncretic exchange rejected by Persian purists as the Arabization of Iran and romanticized by their traditionalist counterparts as the apex of Iranian civilization, while reconciling its present to the modern West. Arani’s vision for Iran transcended the cultural nationalism of the secularists of his time and the Westoxification discourse dominating Iran during the second half of the twentieth century.

In the process of exploring Arani’s life and writings, we uncover the fertile intellectual spaces that flourished during the interwar years, which were far from being a period of decentralization and decay. In those years, Iranian intellectuals debated distinctive ways of imagining modern Iran and produced innovative political and intellectual tracts, literary and artistic productions, and cultural spaces as they labored to discover a new Iran. Political and civic organizations formed in these spaces to discuss recent scientific achievements, educational reform, and the meaning of the human condition, all in an attempt to amalgamate these insights into a new national imaginary.

Arani’s radical secularism bore the imprint of the spaces he traversed and the turbulence around him. He lived with his Azeri family in Tabriz until its occupation by Russian forces propelled them to relocate to Tehran. From there, Arani traveled in 1922 to Berlin to study for his doctorate in chemistry. It was in Weimar Berlin, a cultural and intellectual hub, that Arani’s intellectual and political journey started. He was taken in by an illustrious group of Iranian nationalists who had made Berlin their home during the interwar period. Under their tutelage and at the young age of twenty-one, Arani penned for Berlin’s leading Persian journals, Iranshahr and Farangestan, fiery defenses of Iranian nationalism and denunciations of the neo-Ottoman contention that Iran was too ethnically fragmented to constitute a viable nation. Before long he had insinuated himself in a Berlin-based circle of radical Iranians, yet he continued to draw inspiration from the sciences as a doctoral student in the chemistry department of Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin. Soon after arriving in Berlin, however, Arani distanced himself from his earlier nationalist posture and began to embrace the tenets of Marxism and a broad social-scientific outlook. His exposure to those ideas furnished him with the analytical tools needed to understand modernity dialectically. It was at this point that Arani voiced a prescient critique of the antirationalist risks inherent in radical nationalists’ and traditionalists’ embrace of mystical thinking.

It is against the rising tide of authoritarian nationalism that this book presents Taghi Arani’s writings and his vision of a cosmopolitan Iran. Rather than kowtowing to Stalinism or the fashionable quasisocialism of the statist model, Arani reinterpreted the democratic socialist tradition according to the needs and material reality of his country, in a fashion reminiscent of contemporary figures like Jawaharlal Nehru. Arani’s idea of civic nationalism and his cosmopolitan vision for Iran decentered Soviet Marxism as the sole alternative available to Third World reformers. Whether in Iran or during his six years in Berlin, his radicalism was tempered by his holistic care for the nation. Invested as much in questions of progress and development as in culture and language, his leftist tendencies and interest in Marxism were formed within cultural and national dimensions.

Arani’s confrontation with revivalists and antimodernists is also valuable for the window it offers onto Iran’s intellectual scene in the 1930s. The decade was marked by the rise of competing secular and religious antimodernisms, both of which Arani publicly contested in the pages of Donya, the magazine he and a few associates pulled together to publish upon his return to Tehran in the 1930s. Arani’s writings during this period focalized three ideas: one, the necessity of educating Iranians in the sciences and the critical role of national education in general; two, the Persian language as the cornerstone around which a modern and secular Iranian identity ought to coalesce; and three, a critique of antimodern currents emanating from Europe, which secular and religious nativists in Iran adopted to abet their assault on the possibility of progressive social and cultural change in Iran.¹²

Arani’s mature writings also discussed Iran’s interlocking historical and cultural relationship with the Islamic and Arab worlds as well as with modern Europe. The pragmatism of his social-scientific thinking led him to acknowledge as observable fact that Europe had outstripped the world in wealth and technological advancement, a reality that afforded its citizens on balance a higher living standard. Recognizing the correlation between material wealth, scientific progress, and quality of life, however, did not necessitate for Arani the capitulation of Iran, or any other developing country, to the West. While he stressed the necessity of following a European model of progress, his evolutionary (as opposed to teleological) understanding of history rendered absurd the notion that Western capitalist society epitomized the final stage of human civilization—a point that corrects our contemporary tendency to equate secularism or social-scientific thinking with concessions to Western superiority.

With the wheels of modernization already in motion, Arani encouraged Iranians, as the scholar Khosrow Shakeri put it, ‘to participate in developing a transnational modernity’ rather than resist it. ¹³ But what did modernity mean to Arani? Since for him history proceeded through a dialectical sequence of eventuation, negation, and synthesis, modernity and modernization did not demand a violent and permanent rupture with the traditional past. Modernity, instead, would negate some elements of tradition and remold others into a new, modern national culture. Antimodernist intellectuals did not share Arani’s conclusions, however. In the current study, we encounter, vis-à-vis Arani’s responses to their challenges, traditionalist detractors who drew on Islamic and European thought to vindicate their opposition to modernity.

This study further argues that the creation of a modern and centralized Iranian nation-state should not be attributed entirely to Reza Shah. Intellectuals and politicians,