About Pasdar-e Islam

Pasdar-e Islam

Pasdar-e Islam, in Persian Pasdar-e Eslam and in English Guardian of Islam, is a Persian-language religious monthly magazine published in Qom by the Islamic Propagation Office of the Qom Seminary, the Daftar-e Tablighat-e Eslami. It is among the oldest periodicals of that office, the organisation created after the 1979 revolution to promote the ideology of the Islamic Republic. The magazine began in 1981, taking over and renaming a short-lived predecessor published by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps in Qom, and achieved a reach remarkable for a seminary publication: a circulation reported at 100,000 copies in its first two years, with some 20,000 subscribers inside and outside Iran. For more than four decades it has carried the religious, ideological and increasingly political and social commentary of Qom's clerical establishment to a national readership.

Origins: from Pasdar-e Enqelab to Pasdar-e Islam

The magazine's own institutional history, reconstructed in the Journal of Islamic Propagation's study of religious propagation in the Islamic Republic, begins with a predecessor title. In the early months of 1980 a magazine called Pasdar-e Enqelab, Guardian of the Revolution, was published in Qom under the auspices of the city's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. When that publication ceased in Aban 1360, in the autumn of 1981, it was transferred to the newly formed Islamic Propagation Office of the Qom Seminary and relaunched under the name Pasdar-e Islam. The office's history dates the relaunched monthly from 1360, 1981-82, published in Qom with articles by revolutionary scholars.

The transfer is characteristic of the period. In the first years after the revolution, propaganda and publishing functions were consolidated into specialised institutions, and the Islamic Propagation Office, created by order of Ayatollah Khomeini and supervised by the Supreme Leader, became the seminary's official arm for disseminating Islamic ideology. A guardsmen's magazine became a seminary monthly, and Pasdar-e Islam settled into the role it has kept: the religious journal of the Qom propagation establishment, published, as its listings record, from Qom, with the office's post office box 777 in the city long given as its address.

An exceptional early circulation

What distinguishes Pasdar-e Islam from the many institutional journals of the period is the scale of its early success. The propagation office's own historical study, drawing on an interview with the magazine's founder and licence-holder published in its fortieth-anniversary issue and on a history of the title by the press historian Goli Zavareh, records that the welcome given to the magazine was exceptional: its circulation in its first and second years reached 100,000 copies, and it gathered around 20,000 subscribers at home and abroad. For a Persian religious monthly produced by a seminary office in Qom, those figures represent mass circulation, comparable to the country's big general magazines.

The same history notes that the monthly continued relatively independently of the office's cultural section, a measure of the standing it had won. The Islamic Propagation Office went on to publish dozens of periodicals, forty-eight titles and more than 2,200 issues by the office's own count, including the journals Ayineh-ye Pajouhesh, Payam-e Zan and Howzeh. Within that large stable, Pasdar-e Islam is singled out in the office's history as one of its oldest magazines, the flagship of its first generation.

The magazine in the war years

Pasdar-e Islam's first decade coincided with the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-1988, and the magazine formed part of the ideological mobilisation of those years. Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, then speaker of parliament and one of the war's senior political managers, recorded in his memoirs for 10 July 1982 that he gave an evening interview to Pasdar-e Islam magazine, which he identified as a publication of the Qom Seminary, about the war. The entry is a small document of the magazine's standing: within a year of its relaunch, it was interviewing the regime's leading figures on the central national question of the day.

A contemporary eyewitness account fills in the magazine's public face. The writer Sima Nahan, describing Iran in 1986-87, noted Pasdar-e Islam, a publication of the Qom Islamic Propaganda Center, displayed prominently at newsstands and appearing weekly in the eyes of passers-by. Its front covers, she observed, typically combined a montage of the emblem of the Islamic Republic rising from the Kaaba like a full moon, or an action photograph of smiling boys in Ya Sar-Allah headbands on their way to the front; the back cover offered a quotation from the Quran in nastaliq calligraphy within floral ornament. She remarked on the production values inside, the de luxe, glossy paper and generous layout of the articles, superior to the straw paper of literary magazines, though she also relayed a kiosk attendant's scepticism about how many copies actually sold once distributed. The account, admiring and critical at once, captures the magazine's dual identity: a privileged, well-produced organ of the new order, and a title whose prominence owed something to institutional backing.

Contents: religion broadening into politics and society

An analytical study of the Iranian press between 1979 and 2004 places Pasdar-e Islam in the first generation of post-revolutionary religious publishing: at the beginning of the 1980s, it records, three religious publications defined the field, Pasdar-e Islam and Howzeh, both affiliated with the Office for Islamic Propagation Organization, and the monthly Noor-e Elm of the Society of Seminary Scholars, alongside the philosophically oriented Kayhan-e Andisheh of the Kayhan group, published in Qom. The same study's survey of religious publications' contents in 1987 found subjects such as politics, sociology, book criticism and philosophy increasingly reflected in Pasdar-e Islam and its stablemates: the seminary monthly was widening from doctrine into the social and political argument of the republic.

The magazine's surviving tables of contents confirm the mixture. Bibliographic listings of issue 192, dated Azar 1376, December 1997, show articles on the prayers of the penitents, avoidance of sin, the criterion of fay, the straight path, self-centredness versus God-centredness, and Imam Ali's negative stance, devotional and theological material in the seminary manner. Issue 193, the following month, mixed the virtues of learning and acceptance of advice and the Quran in the words of martyrs with a critical appraisal of civilisation, a report on events in the Republic of Azerbaijan, and an appreciation of the philosopher Allameh Tabatabai. Doctrine, ethics, history and current affairs shared the same pages, addressed to readers formed by the seminary's worldview.

A voice within the system

The magazine also engaged in public controversy. In its issue 98, of Bahman 1368, February 1990, a roundup of events carried an article questioning a Tehran conference on human rights in Islam, provoking a formal published reply addressed to the magazine's editorial board in the propagation office's journal literature, which defended the conference and described Pasdar-e Islam, with respect, as a weighty journal known for reasoned articles and explicit defence of the principles of the Islamic Revolution and pure Muhammadan Islam. The exchange documents a magazine confident enough to criticise within the system, and recognised by its peers as a serious voice.

Longevity and the scholarly record

Issue numbering traces the magazine's long run. The bibliographic record shows combined issues 107-108 in the autumn of 1990, issues 192 and 193 at the end of 1997, and scholarly citations to issue 305, in an article on the scope of consultation in Islamic sources published in 2007: a monthly rhythm sustained across decades. The magazine marked its fortieth year of publication with commemorative material including the founder's interview and the historical account on which the office's institutional history draws. It is listed among the publications of the Islamic Propagation Office in reference sources to the present generation of the office's output, alongside journals of research, women's and children's magazines and the Howzeh journal with which it began.

The name Pasdar-e Islam also appeared in book publishing: William Chittick's bibliography of Khomeini's mystical philosophy cites the 1986 Tehran edition of the Imam's commentaries on the Fusus al-Hikam commentary, published under the Pasdar-e Islam imprint, an indication that the magazine's office functioned as a publishing house for the seminary's texts as well as for its monthly.

The Qom seminary press

Pasdar-e Islam belongs to a distinctive stratum of Iranian media: the press of the Qom seminary, the hawza that is the centre of Shia learning in Iran. Qom's journals are produced by clerical institutions, written substantially by scholars, and addressed to a readership of seminarians, preachers, teachers and religiously committed lay readers across the country. The Islamic Propagation Office, the magazine's publisher, coordinates propagation nationally and internationally, runs the Boostan-e Ketab publishing house, and maintains research and university arms; its periodicals are the print expression of that mission.

Within that world Pasdar-e Islam held the generalist brief. Where Howzeh addressed the seminary's internal scholarly life and Ayineh-ye Pajouhesh its bibliographic research, Pasdar-e Islam carried the office's message outward, in accessible Persian, on the questions of belief, ethics and public life that the revolution had made the business of the state. Its early mass circulation suggests how large the audience for that message briefly was; its survival suggests how durable the institutional niche remained after the revolutionary decade passed.

Assessment

By the documented record, Pasdar-e Islam is one of the significant religious periodicals of the Islamic Republic: born in 1980 as the Revolutionary Guards' Pasdar-e Enqelab in Qom, transferred to the Islamic Propagation Office and relaunched under its present name in 1981, received in its first years with a reported circulation of 100,000 and some 20,000 subscribers, interviewing the war leadership by 1982, prominent on the newsstands of the war years, broadening through the 1980s and 1990s from doctrine into politics, sociology and criticism, and publishing into its fifth decade as one of the oldest titles of the Qom propagation establishment. Its history condenses the story of the seminary press after 1979: revolutionary in origin, institutional in form, and mass in ambition.