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Sur-i Israfil in Exile: Modern Definitions of Monarchy

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

Pardis Minucheher
Pardis Minucheher*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Abstract

After the bombardment of the Majlis in June of 1908, several Iranian constitutionalists were forced into exile—if not arrested and persecuted. An influential group of these constitutionalists continued the publication of the Persian paper Sur-i Israfil in exile, in Yverdon, Switzerland, explicitly opposing the monarch, Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar. This article examines the ways and means by which the exiled constitutionalists, in their writings, challenged the monarch and the previously indisputable office of monarchy, and how they proposed to re-define the institution of monarchy. Paradoxically, their marginal setting, writing from European exile, far away from the Iranian borders, did not preclude them from expressing views that were influential in shaping the modern political culture of Iran.

Type
Articles
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , June 2009 , pp. 389 - 408
Copyright
Copyright © The International Society for Iranian Studies 2009

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References

1 Sur-i Israfil (Yverdon), 8 March 1909, 3: 4–5.

2 Ibid.

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31 Sur-i Israfil (Yverdon), 8 March 1909, 3: 4–5.

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38 Mirza Hossein Ali Tajir-i Shirazi, Mikadaw-Namah (Calcutta, 1325/1908). This book of war poetry, “jang-namah” was published by the Government of Hindustan under the direction of Habl al-Matin's editor, Mu'ayyid al-Islam. It includes 58 photographs: reproductions of Japanese and Russian emperors and generals. Its poetry is written in the masnavi form, starting with the story of Kayumars, followed by Houshang, Tahmouras, Jamshid and so forth. The following chapter praises the Russian emperor Peter the Great, and later the Japanese emperor.

39 Ibid.: 2.

40 Ibid.: 1.

41 Sur-i Israfil (Yverdon), 6 February 1909, 2.

42 Ibid.

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46 Ibid.

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51 Sur-i Israfil (Yverdon), 23 January 1909, 1: 8.

52 Ibid.

53 Ali Davani, Nehzat-i Ruhaniyyun-i Iran (Tehran, n.d.) 1: 205. I thank Firoozeh Kashani-Sabet for offering me a copy of this unpublished manuscript.

54 Browne, Press and Poetry: 115–16.

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62 Ibid.: 18.

63 Ibid.: 24.

64 Ibid.: 22–23.

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