About Habl al-Matin

Habl al-Matin

Habl al-Matin, a Persian title meaning the firm or strong cord, was the name shared by three related newspapers published in Calcutta, Tehran and Rasht. This profile concerns the newspaper in Iran, above all its Tehran edition, while recognising that the Tehran paper cannot be understood apart from its parent. The Calcutta Habl al-Matin, founded in 1893, became one of the most important Persian newspapers of the constitutional period and was distributed widely inside Iran. Its Tehran subsidiary, published daily in the capital from 1907 to 1908 during the Persian Constitutional Revolution, brought that influence home, offering current news about Iran itself until it was suspended after Mohammad Ali Shah's coup and its proprietor in Tehran was sent into exile.

The Calcutta parent newspaper

The original Habl al-Matin began publication in Calcutta in 1893 and continued, for most of its long run, to be published there until 1930. Its editor was Sayyed Jalal al-Din Kashani, known as Moayyed al-Islam, who lived from 1863 to 1930, and his daughter Fakhr al-Soltan was also associated with the paper in the accounts of the period. Published in British India, outside the reach of the Qajar censor, the weekly could criticise the authoritarian government in Tehran and argue for a transition from despotism to the rule of law in a way that a paper printed in Iran could not safely do. It established a firm hold on an Iranian audience as an exile newspaper. Copies were distributed widely inside Iran, and, according to the founding accounts of the Tehran edition, free copies were sent to the seminaries of Karbala and Najaf, the Shi'i scholarly centres in Iraq whose senior scholars would later play a decisive role in legitimising the constitutional cause.

A voice for constitutionalism before the revolution

Long before a constitution existed, the Calcutta paper promoted constitutionalism and progress. Its pages emphasised the adoption of modern sciences as a strategy for Iran's advancement, and its explanation of Europe's progress rested on the spread of those sciences, an approach later scholars characterised as positivist and as paying too little attention to the political, economic, social and cultural changes that had to accompany scientific education. Whatever the limits of that programme, the paper's political thrust was clear: it attacked the status quo of the Qajar order and made the demand for a constitution the central claim of its criticism. When the constitutional decree was finally issued in 1906, Habl al-Matin therefore spoke with the authority of a paper that had advocated the cause for more than a decade, and historians of the revolution placed it among the handful of Persian papers published abroad, alongside titles from Istanbul, London and Cairo, that had prepared the ground for the movement.

Founding of the Tehran edition

The Tehran Habl al-Matin was founded as a subsidiary of the Calcutta magazine, expressly so that it could offer current news about Iran that a weekly printed in India could not supply in time. It was launched in April 1907, at the height of the Constitutional Revolution, and appeared daily in Tehran. Its founders and owners were Moayyed al-Islam, the publisher of the Indian Habl al-Matin, and his younger brother Sayyed Hasan, who directed the paper in the capital and used it to support the constitutional movement. One volume of the Tehran paper was published, containing a total of 274 issues, a substantial daily run for a publication that lived for little more than a year. From its twentieth edition, Shaikh Yahya Kashani, a well-known journalist who owned the magazines Majles, Iran and Iran-e Emruz, was named as its editor, and he was responsible for its editorials. Yahya Kashani had also contributed extensively to the Calcutta edition, linking the two papers' editorial voices in a single career.

The Rasht edition and the family of titles

Encyclopaedia Iranica, in its dedicated entry on the title by Nassereddin Parvin, treated Habl al-Matin as the name of three newspapers, published in Calcutta, Tehran and Rasht. During the constitutional period the paper accordingly appeared not only in the capital but also in Rasht, the chief city of Gilan on the Caspian, a province with its own strong constitutional movement. The existence of three linked editions under one title made Habl al-Matin unusual among the papers of the period: it was at once an exile weekly addressing Iran from India, a daily at the centre of politics in Tehran, and a provincial voice in the north. Later confusion between the editions was common, and careful histories distinguished the long-lived Calcutta weekly, which survived until 1930, from the short-lived Tehran daily of 1907 and 1908 that was the subject of this profile.

Editorial role in the Constitutional Revolution

In Tehran, the daily acted as a mouthpiece of the constitutionalists and their supporting anjomans, the revolutionary councils that pressed the Majles, attacked the rival camp that demanded a constitution subordinate to religious law, and criticised the shah for failing to comply with his constitutional duties. Like the other leading papers of 1907 and 1908, its thrust was political education and advocacy: it presented the constitutional moment as Iran's opportunity to liberate itself from centuries of ignorance and oppression by authoritarian institutions, and it placed Iranian constitutionalism in a broader regional context, amplifying its international significance for readers who followed Muslim politics beyond Iran's borders. One modern historian of the press judged the Tehran Habl al-Matin, in a frequently quoted assessment, to have been the most important daily newspaper of the constitutional period.

The argument over religion and the constitution

The paper was drawn directly into the sharpest intellectual dispute of the revolution, the drafting of the Supplementary Fundamental Law and the claim by clerical constitutionalists that constitutionalism contradicted the sharia. Habl al-Matin had for years promoted constitutionalism through explanations based on customary law. After the challenge that constitutional government was contrary to Islamic law, the paper changed its position and promoted constitutionalism on a different basis: the jurisprudential permission given by the scholars of Najaf for separating matters of sharia from matters of custom during the Occultation of the Imam, presented as a way of linking the idea of the modern state with the sharia itself. That shift, documented in modern studies of the Calcutta paper's strategy in the years from 1895 to 1910, showed a newspaper adjusting its central argument in public, over successive issues, in response to its critics, and it made Habl al-Matin an essential source for historians reconstructing how the constitutional idea was defended in religious terms.

Suspensions

Like its fellow constitutional papers, the Tehran daily lived under constant threat of closure. It was suspended on two occasions, albeit for shorter periods than some of its rivals; Sur-e Esrafil, by comparison, was suspended four times. The first suspension of Habl al-Matin was ostensibly imposed because it had published an advertisement for a lottery house, something considered contrary to the sharia and therefore, it was argued, something the paper should not have promoted. The episode belonged to the wider argument of 1907 and 1908 about press regulation that preceded the passage of a press law in early 1908: whether papers should be censored before publication or punished afterwards, and whether an entire newspaper should be shut for the act of a single writer or advertiser. The paper survived those suspensions and continued to support the movement into June 1908.

The coup of June 1908 and exile

The end came with the royalist coup. In June 1908 Mohammad Ali Shah carried out his coup against the constitution, the Majles was bombarded, and the constitutional press in Tehran was suppressed. Habl al-Matin was suspended after the coup, and Sayyed Hasan, its Tehran proprietor, was exiled. The Tehran daily did not resume: its final issues belonged to 1908, and its single volume of 274 issues stood complete. The Calcutta parent, protected by its location in British India, was not silenced by the Tehran coup and continued its long career, which was why the title as a whole survived until 1930 even though the Iranian newspaper founded in 1907 had been closed after little more than a year.

Language, criticism and reputation

The paper's language attracted criticism as well as praise. The poet and literary scholar Mohammad Taqi Bahar, in his study of Persian stylistics, treated Habl al-Matin of Calcutta as a leading example of the daily press whose pressure to publish quickly left writers no time for eloquence, and whose imitation of European and Turkish models, in his view, weakened their originality and introduced a flood of new compound terms into Persian. Other historians took a more favourable view of the same development, treating the plainer, faster newspaper Persian that titles like Habl al-Matin spread as a necessary modernisation of the written language. Contemporary British scholarship gave the paper sustained attention: Edward G. Browne discussed it in both The Persian Revolution and The Press and Poetry of Modern Persia, the latter supplying several of the basic facts, including its Tehran suspension, on which later reference works relied.

Legacy and sources

Habl al-Matin was remembered as one of the most important political journals of the Constitutional Revolution, and its Tehran edition in particular as the daily that connected the exile press, the seminaries of Najaf and Karbala, the anjomans of the capital and the deputies of the First Majles in a single circuit of news and argument. Its history was documented in unusual depth, in the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry devoted to it, in Browne's contemporary accounts, in the memoirs and documents of the constitutional period, and in library catalogues of Persian serials that recorded its runs. As a closed newspaper, the Tehran Habl al-Matin belonged wholly to the years 1907 and 1908; as a title, carried on from Calcutta, it belonged to the longer story of how Persian journalism, printed as often outside Iran as inside it, created the public debate from which the Iranian constitution emerged.