Despots of the World Unite! Satire in the Iranian Constitutional Press: The Majalleh-ye Estebdad, 1907-1908

. . . attempts to explain why things are funny seem doomed from the outset.

Tim Crane, "Between Temperance and Taste," review of The Morality of Laughter, by F. H. Buckle

Satire and Constitutionalism

The period immediately following the constitutional revolution of 1905–6 in Iran witnessed a flowering of political journalism. In addition to reporting on facts and reflecting both regional and international news, periodicals also played an important role in disseminating and debating diverse ideas that the constitutional movement had brought to the fore. Particular attention can be paid to how these periodicals reflected diverse views and how they created a new space for the expression of opinion. Political journalism further contributed to the diversity of political writing as well as to literary style and format and created new frameworks for relating them to one another. This too is an important dimension of the new genre's contribution to Iranian intellectual and political history that is worthy of attention. Furthermore, the proliferation of journalistic opinion was not always a result of political coherence or maturity, but at times was divorced of it, suggesting that the constitutional revolution had opened a new area in the public sphere that was now serving new experiments with style and satiating the appetite for expression.

However, a good deal of political journalism of the constitutional period remained committed to expressing political and social issues. The task of communicating political ills of the society and offering a vista for change took many forms to manifest and to be expressed, from dramatic denunciation of Iran's relatively backward position in a wider world of the early twentieth century, to criticizing stagnant absolutism and corruption of the Qajar state, to traditionalism and religious fanaticism. In the eyes of many reform-minded critics, now writing as physicians of the body politic, these were among the main causes of much social illness. Rejection of despotism, corruption, and traditionalism was also expressed through an innovative form of political satire.

As with most modern social and political upheavals and revolutions, the literature of the Iranian constitutional movement contains a rich and varied vein of satire in different forms: press articles, novels, tracts, and poems, articulating different stances in an exceptionally Janus-like historical phase.¹ In this context, the production of political satire can be examined in a decade that heralded new beginnings (in terms of rapid expansion of mass media, growth of national and international public opinion, and cross-cultural borrowings and influences in humor, both in tone and format), as it simultaneously conveyed the sense of an ending (of, for example, strong implicit ties and immersion in classical Persian literature and hence the inclusion of subtle literary allusions and in-jokes, feasible in a small self-contained world built on personal connections and shared memories), all summed up under the broad concepts of modernity and tradition.

However, beyond such broad concepts a number of specific themes formed the main thrust as well as the content of political satire in the Iranian constitutional period. Here, a widely used method in the construction of satire was to convey a juxtaposition of different, and at times even opposing, types and allowing the stark dichotomy to speak directly to the reader. It is worth noting that the reception of satire contributed and at the same time reflected new types and modes of reading, offering new vistas whence social and political concerns could be aired and shared. In this sense satire was both educational and communicative at the same time.

The following sharply chiseled busts in the proconstitutional satirists' gallery offered suitable examples for the most frequent recurrent themes of such juxtapositions: members of the Qajar (1797–1925) nobility representing pomposity, sloth and venality; pseudomodernists who encouraged cultural alienation by aping European vogues; individuals...