Document Type : Research Paper

Authors

• Mohammad Amir Ahmadzadeh ¹
• Farhad Baradar shad ²

¹ Associate Professor, Department of History, Institute of Humanities & Cultural Studies, Tehran, Iran

² PhD Student, Department of Revolutionary History, Research Institute of Imam Khomeini and the Islamic Revolution, Tehran, Iran

Abstract

During the constitutional period changes, a new force emerged that and played an important role in the awakening of the people, familiarization with the West, and the publishing of the press, and also thought for a way out of the upcoming deadlocks. Iranian intellectuals came to understand Iran's backwardness through familiarity with the ideas of the new world, and by proposing and publishing new issues in Iranian society, they established different poles of thought that led to the mixing and even opposition of tradition and modernity. The epistemology of the reforms and the explanation of this new reading from thought to the fulfillment of an important precondition is stopped, and that is the knowledge of intellectuals and the fundamental components of their thought. This research, with a thought-oriented approach and documentary content analysis method, deals with the purposeful rereading of the works of Afrasiab Azad, the founder of Hezb Khuda and a traditionalist intellectual of the constitutional and Pahlavi periods, and by evaluating it through the logic of Skinner's contextual approach, In search of an answer to this central question, how is the position of nationalism in the works of Afrasiab Azad and its metamorphosis compared to his contemporaries and contemporaries, and how does this flow contribute to the establishment of the Pahlavi government? Free thoughts are evaluated in the context of the modernist thought of contemporary thinkers.
The documents of Afrasiab Azad are available in the sources of purchase documents and in the form of about a thousand files in the repository of documents and national archives. A small number of documents attributed to Afrasiab Azad are available in the Library of the Islamic Council and the Astan Quds Razavi Document Center and have been indexed. An autopsy of a political gathering related to the bread riot in December 1942/Azar 1321 in Tehran has quoted an article about Afrasiab Azad's speech in this context. He has also mentioned the effect of modernization and de-religion in the chapter of westernized plays in relation to the conditions of this art in the first Pahlavi period and the important role of Afrasiab Azad as one of the initiators of the play. The purpose of this study is to put Azad's key concepts in the cultural and discourse contexts from which they were formed with Skinner's method, so that the advantage and validity of his thought can be put to the test. The aim of Skinner's methodology is to enable us to recover the historical identity and genealogy of each such intellectual history text. The guide to the content analysis of the data in this research based on this approach is, on the one hand, the internal logic of the intellectuals' thought system as a whole and a text, and on the other hand, measuring it with the external logic and comparing it with contemporary publications and press - including the magazine Iranshahr, Kaveh and Aindeh- will take place and the focal point is to pay attention to the recognition of opinions and goals, ideas and the thought system of Afrasiab Azad.
The findings of the research aim to prove the hypothesis that the association of intellectuals from the intellectual spectrum of Afrasiab Azad led to the expansion of the acceptance of the discourse of authoritarian nationalism and the theorization of the legitimacy of the first Pahlavi government. With the reduction of modern components in the eyes of Azad in the atmosphere of political and intellectual obstruction of the Reza Shahi era, his influential social and political positions declined. In his works and publications, Afrasiab Azad was introduced as an orator, a freedom-seeker and a modernist of the post-constitutional era, who was later introduced as a writer, lawyer and playwright of the political and social genre. He used the ideas of modernism in his opinions to seek transformation along with the tradition and he believed in a form of moderate or reductionist modernism, which at the same time accepted the new concepts of antiquity and nationalism, and religion as well. He saw the base of social mobility and ethnic solidarity in the special political and social conditions of the post-constitutional period. This approach was interpreted and propagated in the service of authoritarian nationalism at the level of the government superstructure and the national unity of ethnicities and religions at the level of the people and the subalterns in order to gain legitimacy. Gradually, the modern ideas were transformed in his opinions and works and with the establishment of Pahlavi I, he only focused on describing and theorizing the existing conditions and the failure of the primary elements. The reduction and transformation of these ideas and accompanying the first Pahlavi government by Afrasiab Azad during the political and intellectual blockage of the Reza Shahi era, turned him into a messenger of the government's official discourse and led to the loss of his influential social and political base and the decline of his role. In the society of writers, a new idea was created.

Keywords

• Afrasiab Azad
• Modernism
• Authoritarian Nationalism
• National League

Main Subjects

• Political Thought