About Sur-e Esrafil

Sur-e Esrafil

Sur-e Esrafil was a Persian-language weekly newspaper published in Tehran during the Persian Constitutional Revolution. Its name, rendered in English as the Trumpet of Esrafil, referred to the trumpet call of the archangel that, in Islamic tradition, was to awaken the dead on the day of resurrection. For its founders the image served as a metaphor for the awakening of Iranians and for a people learning to take control of their own fate. The paper was launched at a moment when Iran had, for the first time, a written constitution and a national assembly, the Majles, and when a rapidly expanding press was testing how far criticism of authority could go in print.

Founding and first issues

Sur-e Esrafil was founded by Mirza Jahangir Khan Shirazi, an Iranian author and journalist who became its publisher and editor. Its first issue appeared on Thursday 30 May 1907, a date also given as 8 Khordad 1286 in the Persian calendar. The paper appeared about ten months after Mozaffar al-Din Shah had issued the royal proclamation declaring the creation of a parliament, and it was created, in the words of later commentators, to protect the demands of the constitutional movement at a time when many of those demands had not yet been fulfilled. Financial backing for the enterprise came from Ghasem Sur-e Esrafil, the son of Mirza Hasan Khan Tabrizi, whose support allowed Jahangir Khan to sustain a weekly that quickly attracted attention far beyond a small circle of Tehran readers.

Place in the constitutional press boom

The paper belonged to a wider explosion of publishing that followed the granting of the constitution in the summer of 1906. The Ministry of Publications had been abolished in March 1907, censorship had eased, and an unprecedented number and variety of newspapers had begun to appear in the capital and the provinces. Sur-e Esrafil was published alongside other new titles of the period, including Nasim-e Shomal and Majalleh-ye Estebdad, and it operated through part of the legislative period of the First Majles, which sat from October 1906 until June 1908. In that crowded and argumentative environment, the weekly distinguished itself by the directness of its politics and by the literary quality of its satire, and it was remembered by historians as one of the publications that set the tone for liberal constitutional debate.

Editorial line and political stance

Sur-e Esrafil had a liberal and revolutionary orientation and contributed significantly to supporting the Persian Constitutional Revolution. Its editor published articles that strongly criticised the high class, attacked despotism, dependency and corruption in the monarchy, and challenged the traditional views of reactionary clergy. It also carried discussion of the controversial questions dividing conservatives and advocates of modern religion at the time. The paper identified itself with the constitutionalists and their supporting anjomans, the revolutionary councils that pressed the Majles to make explicit demands, criticised the court, and called on the shah to comply with his constitutional duties. Its masthead carried an image of an angel holding a banner bearing the French revolutionary slogan of liberty, equality and fraternity, a visual statement of the principles the paper claimed to defend.

Charand-o Parand and Ali Akbar Dehkhoda

The journal became famous above all for its literary satirical elements, and in particular for the column Charand-o Parand, a title variously translated as Nonsense or Balderdash and Piffle. The column was written by Ali Akbar Dehkhoda, who lived from 1879 to 1956 and who became one of the most celebrated literary figures of the period. Dehkhoda signed his pieces with a rotating cast of imaginary figures, including Dakhoo, Dakhoo-Ali, Khar-Magas, meaning gadfly, Ruznameh-chi, meaning journalist, and other invented personae. Through those voices he blended humour with sharp political commentary, portraying incompetent officials as grotesque and laughable figures while exposing the dysfunction of the state beneath the comedy. The column proved both popular and controversial, and it remained the centrepiece for which the paper was best remembered.

Language and a new style of journalism

Dehkhoda deliberately wrote in a simple, colloquial Persian, in contrast to the ornate literary style that addressed only educated readers. Sur-e Esrafil was among the first papers to use the ordinary language of the common people in place of the traditional didactic and flowery approach favoured in literary circles. In this way it sought to reach the majority of the population and to address the daily problems of ordinary people, making constitutional ideals accessible to readers who had never been addressed directly by a newspaper before. Historians of the press have treated this as a literary as well as a political innovation, establishing a new modern style of writing and journalism in Iran. The paper was also among the first of its kind to be sold on busy street corners by children and small city vendors and peddlers, rather than reaching readers only by subscription.

Readership and circulation

Contemporary and later accounts differed on how widely the paper circulated, and the figures had to be read in that light. The batch of scholarship summarised in studies of the period gave an initial circulation of around 5,000 to 5,500 copies, a figure that was already large for Tehran at the time. Other accounts said the circulation rose considerably, with the number of printed copies reported as high as 20,000 to 24,000 at its peak. What was not in dispute was the paper's reach beyond its buyers. Copies were read aloud in coffeehouses for listeners who could not read, and a single copy commonly passed through many hands, so the audience for its editorials and for Charand-o Parand was substantially larger than any print figure suggested. Its popularity made it, by equal measures, loved by supporters of the constitution and hated by those it attacked.

Suspensions and pressure

Success brought repeated repression. The paper was suspended on four occasions during its short Tehran life, at times on grounds that contemporaries considered spurious and at other times for direct attacks on the rule of Mohammad Ali Shah. Its editors, including Jahangir Khan, were repeatedly accused of being apostates and were constantly threatened on that basis. The suspensions formed part of a wider argument, conducted in the Majles itself, about how the new press should be regulated: whether by censorship before publication, as in the past, or only by penalties after an offending piece had appeared, and whether a whole newspaper should be closed for the writing of a single author. Jahangir Khan had stated his own position in the paper's second issue, on 6 June 1907, arguing that because the country and government were now constitutional, the press had to be free as it was in other constitutional states, and that the word censorship should be eradicated so completely that later generations would find it only in history books.

The coup of June 1908 and the execution of Jahangir Khan

The paper's Tehran life ended with the royalist coup of June 1908. On the orders of Mohammad Ali Shah, the Majles was bombarded and the constitutional government was overthrown, beginning the period Iranians called the Minor Tyranny. Sur-e Esrafil was finally suspended in June 1908, and Jahangir Khan was arrested. Accounts of his death differed slightly in the date they emphasised, placing his arrest and execution at the beginning of June 1908, about a year and six days after the first issue had appeared, but they agreed on the essential facts: the founder of Sur-e Esrafil was executed for the part his paper had played in attacking the shah and defending the constitution. Dehkhoda, like other surviving constitutionalist journalists, was forced to flee the country.

Revival in Switzerland and final issues

The paper did not end entirely in Tehran. Dehkhoda revived Sur-e Esrafil in exile and published three further issues from Switzerland between 23 January 1909 and 8 March 1909. That Swiss revival was backed by Moazid al-Saltaneh. With those three issues the run closed. In total, the first 32 issues had been published by Jahangir Khan in Tehran, and the three exile issues brought the paper's history to its final issue on 8 March 1909. No further revival followed, and the title passed into history as a closed publication of the constitutional period rather than a continuing newspaper.

Legacy and historical assessment

Sur-e Esrafil was remembered as a child of the constitutional movement and as one of the most important Iranian publications of its era. Scholars credited it with a significant contribution to the Iranian enlightenment, with a central role in supporting the constitutional cause, and with a lasting literary influence through Dehkhoda's satire and through the simpler Persian prose the paper helped to establish. Its history illustrated, in a single short run, both the promise of the free press that journalists had celebrated in 1907 and the violence with which that promise could be withdrawn in 1908. For historians of Iran, of satire and of the press, the weekly remained a primary source for the language, arguments and hopes of the First Majles period, and its founder's execution ensured that it was also remembered as a symbol of the personal cost paid by the first generation of Iran's constitutional journalists.