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Ahmed TabriziIranian historian, linguist, lawyer
Date of Birth: 29.09.1890
Country:  Iran |
Content:
Biography of Ahmad Kasravi
Ahmad Kasravi was an Iranian historian, linguist, lawyer, intellectual, social, and religious reformer. He was born on September 29, 1890, in the suburbs of Tabriz, in the poor neighborhood of Hokmavar, to a modest merchant and carpet weaver named Hajji Mir Kasem. He was of Azerbaijani ethnicity. At the age of 11, he lost his father and, being responsible for the future of his family, he took over his father's carpet business at the age of 13. Parallel to this, he studied at the Tabriz Shiite seminary according to his father's last will. He became disillusioned with Shiism at a young age. In 1906, he joined the Iranian constitutional movement. In 1920, Kasravi went to Tehran, where he joined the Ministry of Justice. In the winter of 1921, he arrived in Tabriz, where he was appointed a member of the appellate court of Iranian Azerbaijan. Three weeks later, there was a coup in the country, which brought pro-British politician Seyyed Ziaeddin to power. The latter ordered the dissolution of the judicial bodies in the provinces, leaving Kasravi without a job. Kasravi's writings on religious themes angered religious fanatics. On April 28, 1945, he survived his first assassination attempt. In March 1946, he appeared before a Tehran court on charges of blasphemy, insulting Islam and the clergy, and attempting to claim the role of a prophet. Kasravi was killed on March 11 during a court session in the Justice Palace when a group of members of the Shiite terrorist organization Fedayeen-e Islam, led by the Imamite brothers (Sayed Hossein and Sayed Ali), stormed the court and, using knives and guns, killed him and his assistant, Sayed Mohammad Taghi Haddadpour.
The Sufi custodians of the Zahireddawla cemetery near Tehran refused to grant permission to bury Kasravi due to his anti-Sufi ideas, after which the bodies of the killed were buried in the foothills of Imamzadeh Saleh, called Abak.
Scientific Activity
When Kasravi began his scientific activity as a historian, most historical studies were conducted within the framework of political historiography with nationalist goals. To arouse patriotism among his compatriots and revive their national feelings, Kasravi took a different path. His greatest desire was to preserve and strengthen national unity, which he believed was under threat due to sectarian differences and the plurality of languages and dialects. Kasravi was one of the first scholars in Iran to engage in truly scientific research on the medieval history of Iran and the Caucasus. Unlike other Iranian scholars, who focused primarily on historical personalities in their works, Kasravi was interested in political history, the ideology of medieval society. In his works on the "Azeri" language (1926), based on the works of medieval authors, Kasravi showed that in ancient times, the population of Azerbaijan spoke the Azeri language, an ancient dialect of the Iranian language group.
In 1927-28, Kasravi published three articles in which he defended the genuinely Iranian origin of Sheikh Safi-ad-din, the founder of the Safavid dynasty and the Safavid religious-sectarian order. Nowadays, Safavid historiography insists on his Kurdish origin. Overall, Kasravi was quite prolific. He wrote numerous articles as well as around 70 books and brochures on a wide range of topics from history and linguistics to social issues and religious reform. The outstanding Orientalist V. F. Minorsky praised the accuracy of Ahmad Kasravi's works, stating that "Kasravi possessed the spirit of a true historian. He was precise in detail and clear in presentation."
Besides his native Azerbaijani and Persian languages, he also knew Arabic, English, ancient Armenian, and Pahlavi, and was familiar with French and Esperanto languages.
Worldview
Kasravi's works reflected his pan-Iranist and chauvinistic views towards Azerbaijanis and Arabs. Being an Azerbaijani himself, in one of his works, he condemned the provinces' aspirations for autonomy and feared that it could lead to the disintegration of Iran: "In terms of history, language, and racial type, Azerbaijan has never been different from the rest of Iran. The Turkic language was imposed by invading Turkic tribes; it has always been foreign to Azerbaijan." He believed in the inherently Iranian nature of Azerbaijanis and that the first national language of Azerbaijan was Azeri. These convictions formed the basis of the strategy known today as Kesravism, which seeks the complete assimilation of the population of Iranian Azerbaijan into Iranian culture.
Kasravi believed that Iran's weakness lay in the lack of internal cohesion, and he saw linguistic differences and tribal connections as the main causes of this. He argued that if demands for linguistic freedom were met, other linguistic minorities, especially Armenians, Assyrians, Arabs, Gilaks, and Mazanderanis, would also make similar claims, and "there would be nothing left of Iran." Fearing the disintegration of the state, he even defended the centralizing policy of Reza Shah. Ahmad Kasravi attributed the success of Reza Shah's activities to the fact that "the existence of numerous autonomous centers of power in Iran, which led to a complete lack of security and the de facto disintegration of the state, was the main reason why the people of Iran supported the establishment of a dictatorship." In narrating the history of Khuzestan (a region with a compact settlement of Iranian Arabs), Kasravi argued that Khuzestan had always been part of Iran. Another work by Kasravi, "Eighteen Years of Azerbaijan's History," aimed to prove that the fate of Azerbaijan was inseparably linked to the destiny of Iran.
He sharply criticized Persian poetry, especially Omar Khayyam, Saadi, Rumi, and especially Hafez. Kasravi claimed that this poetry was filled with ideas such as fatalism, Sufism, and Khwarazmianism, with excessive praise of wine and shameless homosexual conversations.
Kasravi strongly opposed Shiism, Sufism, Baha'ism, and other religious teachings. He criticized the clerics for their archaic views on the modern world: "The clerics have the understanding of a ten-year-old about the world. Since their minds are filled with hadiths and ahbar, there is no place for science and philosophy in them. All the world's discoveries and achievements in science pass them by: they either do not know them or do not understand them, perceiving the present through the eyes of a 1300-year-old past."
