About Ayandegan

Ayandegan

Ayandegan was a Persian-language daily newspaper published in Tehran, Iran, and it was one of the most influential and popular newspapers in the country during the rule of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Its name, Ayandegan, meant "The Future People." The paper held a distinctive place in Iranian journalism because it was the country's first morning daily, entering a market that had long been dominated by evening newspapers. It had an independent and critical stance within the limits of its time, and it was described as a liberal and nationalist publication during the Pahlavi period. Ayandegan was published between 1967 and 1979, a twelve-year life that covered the height of the last Shah's rule, the Iranian Revolution of 1979, and the first months of the Islamic Republic that replaced the monarchy.

Founding in Tehran

Ayandegan first appeared in Tehran on 16 December 1967. The Encyclopaedia Iranica recorded Hosayn Ahari, Masud Behnud, and Daryoush Homayoun as the listed founder, editor, and general manager of the paper respectively, but it noted that Ayandegan was in fact the brainchild of Homayoun and a number of aspiring journalists who had for some time been entertaining the idea of publishing a morning paper. Daryoush Homayoun founded the paper and edited it from its start in 1967 until 1977. The headquarters of the newspaper were in Tehran. From the very outset, the founders intended the new daily to be different from the established press of the capital, both in the hour at which it reached its readers and in the seriousness with which it treated news and commentary.

A Morning Paper in an Evening Market

Before Ayandegan, the Iranian newspaper market was dominated by two long-established evening papers, Ettelaat and Keyhan. By publishing in the morning, Ayandegan challenged that dominating position directly and created a new daily habit for its readers. The Encyclopaedia Iranica observed that the paper pursued a more serious journalistic approach in presenting news and commentary than that employed by other papers. Enjoying a relative freedom of action within a tightly controlled and mostly lethargic press, it introduced a new mode of reporting which subsequently found considerable following among Iranian journalists. News and articles in Ayandegan were less circumscribed than those in its rivals, while its commentary was more bold and thought-provoking, and that combination helped to make it one of the most widely read newspapers in Iran during the Pahlavi era.

Editorial Style and Innovations

Ayandegan set itself apart through stylistic innovations, especially in editorial writing, most of it by Homayoun himself. These innovations involved the introduction and extensive use of newly coined Persian equivalents of journalistic words and phrases prevalent in the Western press, an effort to modernise the language of Iranian journalism. The paper also attempted kinds of coverage that were unusual in the Iranian press of its day. It tried serious visual art, opera, and music criticism, and it featured interesting cultural, economic, and sports sections alongside its political reporting. Its news reporting was described as more spirited and analytical than the norm. Together, these features made Ayandegan an experiment in the modernisation of journalistic standards as well as a political publication, and later studies of the paper have treated it as both a vehicle for political reform and a newsroom that raised professional expectations.

Political Outlook

Within the confines of the political control of the press exercised by the Pahlavi regime, Ayandegan professed a nationalistic and liberal leaning. It aimed at the liberalisation of the Iranian political system and at promoting political dialogue. The Encyclopaedia Iranica also recorded its staunch anti-communist and pro-establishment stance, a combination that reflected its position inside, rather than outside, the political order of the late Pahlavi years. The paper was independent and critical in tone, but its criticism was directed at reforming the system in which its founder moved. That dual character, at once establishment and reformist, defined the newspaper throughout its first decade and shaped both its influence and its limitations under the monarchy.

Daryoush Homayoun

The founder of Ayandegan, Daryoush Homayoun, was born in Tehran on 27 September 1928 and began his involvement in politics at the age of fourteen. In his younger years he was a member of several Iranian parties with nationalist views, and he began as a supporter of Mohammad Mossadegh before being imprisoned during Mossadegh's premiership. He later completed his university studies, obtaining a doctorate in political science from the University of Tehran, and he worked at the Iranian daily Ettelaat before founding Ayandegan. His career then moved from the newsroom into government. He became a high-ranking member of the Rastakhiz Party, served as its Deputy Secretary-General, and was Minister of Information and Tourism in the cabinet of Prime Minister Jamshid Amouzegar from 7 August 1977 until September 1978. He therefore left the editorship of his own newspaper in 1977, the year his ministerial career began.

A Shelter for Dissenting Writers

Although Homayoun was a prominent member of the upper political elite, Ayandegan gave refuge to a sizeable number of dissent writers and journalists, most of whom had been formally banned from producing written output by the state security services. By employing and publishing such writers, the paper enabled dissent to survive inside the restricted public sphere of the 1970s. Scholars of the paper have argued that this sheltering role helped dissent to manifest itself eventually in the lively civil society which emerged by 1977 and laid the ground for the Revolution of 1978 and 1979. Ayandegan was thus a witness to a momentous and turbulent era, and its pages preserved voices that the security apparatus had tried to silence, even while the paper itself remained a product of the establishment world its founder inhabited.

The Revolution of 1979

The collapse of the monarchy transformed the paper's position. Homayoun was arrested in the autumn of 1978, together with many other former officials, and he escaped from prison on 12 February 1979, just after the revolution, before eventually leaving Iran and settling in exile. Ayandegan, by then under the effective ownership of dissidents previously sheltered by Homayoun, became a beacon for the secular and non-clerical forces who were being increasingly pressured by the gradual encroachment of the allies and disciples of Ayatollah Khomeini on public space. In the immediate aftermath of the 1979 revolution the paper enjoyed higher levels of circulation, selling around 400,000 copies. The approximately 170 issues of Ayandegan printed in 1979 have long been considered a seminal source for the study of the "other revolutionaries," the non-clerical currents that were mostly pushed out of the political scene by 1981.

Protest, Ban and Closure

The paper's criticism of the new Islamic government's censorship and limitations on freedom of the press brought it into direct conflict with the revolutionary authorities. Ayandegan was banned on 12 May 1979. On the same day, the paper published three empty pages to protest against statements by Ayatollah Khomeini, who had declared that he would not read Ayandegan. Soon after this incident, Khomeini stated that the paper was both depraved and deviationist. The confrontation ended in the summer: the revolutionary prosecutor closed the newspaper on 8 August 1979, and its staff were also arrested. Ayandegan thereby became the first publication to be banned by the judicial authorities of the new Islamic Republic, and its closure in August 1979 marked the end of the brief "Spring of Freedom" that the press had enjoyed after the revolution.

Legacy

Ayandegan was remembered as one of the most influential daily newspapers of the Pahlavi era and as a paper that changed what Iranian readers and journalists expected from a daily. It was the first morning newspaper in Iran, it modernised editorial language, it broadened newspaper coverage into arts and cultural criticism, and it kept dissenting writers in print during years of tight control. Its founder's later life completed the arc of the paper's story: Homayoun lived in exile, became one of the founders of the Constitutionalist Party of Iran, and remained an influential opposition figure until his death in Geneva, Switzerland, on 28 January 2011. The newspaper itself did not outlive 1979, but its twelve years, and especially its final months as a voice for non-clerical revolutionaries, secured its place in the history of the Iranian press.