PERSIAN LITERATURE IS perhaps the oldest and most accomplished premodern literature of the Middle East. Yet under the reign of the Qajar dynasty, whose kings (or shahs) had ruled Iran since 1794, Persian literature experienced a steep decline in both quality and influence. Until the early twentieth century, Iran’s literary elites were little more than employees of the court, composing sycophantic odes to Qajar princes.
At the start of the twentieth century, however, as Iran was divided into Russian and British zones of influence and the country’s weak and corrupt shahs became pawns in the global chess game being played out by superpowers, Persian literature underwent a revolution of sorts. A new breed of young, politically active poets and writers began to break with the ornamental style of traditional Persian literature to adopt a simpler, more colloquial form of prose geared toward “the common man.” Books written in Persian became less florid, more secular, and far more concerned with the daily lives of regular Iranians. The Persian language itself was refined and stripped of its Arabic influences as lyric poets such as Nima Yushij and novelists such as Sadegh Hedayat (The Blind Owl) broke with their predecessors and insisted on writing in the vernacular of regular Iranians.
By far the most influential of this new group of writers was Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, whose book Once Upon a Time essentially gave birth to the short story in Iran. Published in 1921, the book is a collection of short stories that paints a scathing picture of a society controlled by foreign powers, enthralled by a buffoonish clerical class, and subjugated by an ineffectual and increasingly paranoid government. Ironically, the country Jamalzadeh described so humorously collapsed the year of the book’s publication. On February 21, 1921, Iran’s minister of war and the country’s most decorated officer, Reza Khan (1878–1944), seized control of the government in a bloodless coup backed by the Russian and British governments, thus putting an end to Qajar rule.
A simple, semiliterate man who rose through the ranks of the military, Reza Khan was a fervent nationalist dedicated to freeing Iran from foreign influence. He renegotiated Iran’s economic relationships with Britain and the Soviet Union, giving the country a greater financial stake in its own natural resources, and fashioned a strong, centralized, and fairly independent government. Yet despite his populist facade and his ostensible commitment to nationalism, Reza Khan could not resist the temptations of absolute power. In 1925, he declared himself Shah of Iran, thus inaugurating the Pahlavi dynasty, which, in the years to come, would become even more brutal and authoritarian than the dynasty it had replaced.
An avid admirer of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Reza Shah Pahlavi instituted a series of reforms meant to modernize Iran, including banning the veil for women and forcing men to wear “Western” clothes, such as top hats and ties. He promoted advances in women’s rights and encouraged Iranian women to earn degrees and hold jobs in the fields of medicine and law. The ensuing Women’s Awakening Movement provided female writers, such as the celebrated poet Parvin E’tesami, with an unprecedented opportunity to write about issues never previously tackled in Iranian literature. (“Formerly a woman in Iran was almost non-Iranian,” E’tesami wrote, in her most famous work, “Iranian Women.” “All she did was struggle through dark and distressing days.”)
At the same time, Reza Shah established an oppressive regime that stifled the press, reduced Parliament to little more than a rubber stamp, and dealt ruthlessly with any opposition, all while enriching himself and the fortunate few in his inner circle. As in Turkey and the Arab states, it fell to Iran’s writers and poets to call society to account for its failings. “O people who are sitting, cheerful and laughing,/on the shore,” cried Nima Yushij, the father of modern Iranian poetry. “Someone is losing his life in the sea;/Someone is struggling in the rough, dark/and formidable sea.”
By the 1940s, Iran had become a police state, one brought frighteningly to life by Sadegh Hedayat in his novel The Blind Owl (widely recognized as one of the most important literary works of the twentieth century), the protagonist of which exists in a nightmare reality devoid of all reason and purpose, where the only person he can trust with his thoughts is his own shadow.
In August 1941, the same powers that encouraged Reza Khan’s coup in 1925 forced him to abdicate the throne in favor of his untried, ill-prepared, and far more easily controlled son, Muhammad Reza Pahlavi, whose own tyrannical rule would bring about an even greater change in Iran near the end of the twentieth century.