The Newspaper and the Pulpit: Media, Religious Anxieties, and the Revolutionary Crowd Prior to Iran's Constitutional Revolution of 1905-1911

• Main Author: Hasheminiasari, Hossein
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2018
• Subjects: Mass communications; Political science; Religion
• ISBN: 0438464745; 9780438464742

This thesis analyses the ways that modernist elites mediated critical political attitudes to Iranian publics, and animated both the ulama and the revolutionary crowds that brought on the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911. I focus on the different media platforms used by prominent activists Malkum Khan and Malik al-Motakallemīn, as well as the cultural and political contexts that informed their activities, in order to assess the deliberate and targeted religious references found within their revolutionary communications. Through my observations of Malkum Khan’s newspaper Qanūn , and mosque sermons from Malik al-Motakallemīn, this essay argues that these activists aimed to further modernity projects by articulating European social-political categories through Islamic narratives and values. I illustrate the cultural necessity for their Islamic interpretations of modernity and show how concepts like liberty, equality, justice, and representative government were re-imagined as a consequence of such interpretations. The research shows that the Constitutional Revolution became possible once ideas about modernity had been sufficiently transformed through religious narratives, thereby garnering support from the ulama as well as revolutionary crowds.