About Negin (magazine)

Negin (magazine)

Overview

Negin (Persian: نگین, "Jewel") was a Persian-language monthly magazine published in Tehran, Iran, from 1965 to 1979. The British Library's Endangered Archives Programme, which digitised its run, describes it as a critical monthly review of art and literature, published 1965–79 in Iran, comprising 177 journals, and records in Persian that the monthly appeared from 1344 to 1359 and dealt with literature, art and the humanities. Encyclopaedia Iranica, in its entry on the magazine's founder, calls Negin a leading and well-regarded intellectual monthly journal, founded and first published by Mahmud Enayat in May–June 1965. In the years when censorship was at its height, Negin was able to publish articles that reflected the social and political concerns of the time in a cautious and critical way, while keeping away from overt political commentary, bringing together an elite of Iranian essayists and intellectuals. It ceased with the Iranian Revolution, and its complete run survives in archival collections.

Founder: Mahmud Enayat

Negin was founded by Mahmud Enayat, a journalist and editor whose career, as recorded by Encyclopaedia Iranica, made him one of the defining editors of Pahlavi-era cultural journalism. Enayat sympathised with the left-leaning approach of Khalil Maleki and supported Mohammad Mosaddeq; he joined the editorial board of Niru-ye Sevvom alongside Ali Asghar Haj Sayyed Javadi, Jalal Al-e Ahmad, Mohammad Ali Khonji, Naser Vosoughi and Nader Naderpour, and wrote his column "Rummaging the Newspapers" in that publication until the coup d'état of 1953 shut the newspaper down. He then joined Ferdowsi magazine, an influential weekly cultural journal, first as a writer and contributor and later as its editor in two rounds, between 1958 and 1960 and again between 1961 and 1964. Under his editorship, especially in the second round, Ferdowsi became a serious intellectual weekly with liberal leanings. His differences with Ferdowsi's publisher, Ne'mat-Allah Jahanbanu'i, over the magazine's readership helped lead him to leave: in Enayat's own words, the publisher liked articles that would appeal to everyone, whereas he wanted a magazine that addressed a specific social stratum. In 1960 he was also appointed editor of Iran-e Abad, a cultural monthly affiliated with the Planning and Budget Organization, where he had begun to work after leaving Ferdowsi. Negin, founded five years later, was the magazine in which that editorial philosophy — a serious journal for a defined intellectual readership — found its fullest expression; Iranica judges it perhaps his most important legacy.

Founding and Stated Aim

Negin was first published in May–June 1965. Its aim, as stated in its third issue, was to bring about "a forum for thoughtful intellectuals, without any misplaced partisanship or any undue antagonism toward anyone … so that our people get used to the idea that in this country it is possible both to have an opinion and to express it openly." The statement was programmatic in two directions at once. Against the censored press environment of the mid-1960s, it asserted the legitimacy of expressed opinion itself; against the polemical habits of the Iranian press, it promised thoughtfulness without partisanship or antagonism. The British Library catalogue's classification of Negin as a critical monthly review of art and literature, devoted to literature, art and the humanities, matches that programme: criticism, conducted at a high level, was the form in which opinion could most safely and most usefully be expressed. The title itself — Negin, a jewel or gemstone, the stone set in a ring — suggested the editor's conception of a small, polished, valuable object made for a discerning audience rather than a mass one.

Publishing under Censorship

Encyclopaedia Iranica's assessment of Negin centres on its navigation of censorship. In the years when censorship was at its height, the magazine was able to publish articles that reflected the social and political concerns of Iranian society in a cautious and critical way, while keeping away from overt political commentary. That balance was the condition of its survival for fourteen years, from 1965 until the revolution of 1979, in a press system in which direct political criticism could end a publication. The strategy had a distinguished pedigree in Enayat's own career: he had seen Niru-ye Sevvom shut down at the 1953 coup, and had built Ferdowsi into a serious intellectual weekly within the same constraints. Negin applied the lesson at monthly length. Social criticism, literary argument, and the humanities became the permitted vehicles for concerns that could not be stated politically, and the magazine's stated ideal — accustoming readers to the idea that one could both have an opinion and express it openly — was itself a quiet argument about the public sphere, made in the only register available.

Contributors

Negin brought together the elite of Iranian essayists and intellectuals. Encyclopaedia Iranica names among them Ali Asghar Haj Sayyed Javadi, Daryush Ashuri, Mostafa Rahimi, Mohammad Ali Eslami Nadoushan, Hamid Enayat, Mehdi Parham, Ehsan Naraqi, and Sayyed Abu'l-Qasem Enjavi Shirazi. The list spans the central tendencies of late-Pahlavi intellectual life: Haj Sayyed Javadi, Enayat's colleague from Niru-ye Sevvom and Ferdowsi, was a leading liberal essayist; Ashuri became one of Iran's most influential cultural critics and translators; Eslami Nadoushan was a major literary scholar and editor; Naraqi a sociologist of international standing; Enjavi Shirazi a folklorist and broadcaster devoted to popular culture. That such writers published in a single monthly indicates the convening power of Enayat's editorship and the scarcity, in the censored Tehran of the 1960s and 1970s, of serious forums willing to print them. A magazine that could hold that company, issue after issue, for 177 issues, occupied a position no merely commercial title could have filled.

Contents: Art, Literature and the Humanities

The British Library describes Negin as a critical monthly review of art and literature, and its Persian catalogue note adds the humanities to its fields: the monthly dealt with literature, art and the human sciences. Within the Iranian periodicals of its period, that placed it among the serious cultural monthlies rather than the illustrated popular weeklies such as Sepid o Siah or Tehran Mosavar, with which it is nevertheless archived, because all of them belonged to the print culture that the Endangered Archives Programme set out to preserve. Negin's criticism addressed contemporary Iranian writing and art and the wider questions of the humanities — history, society, thought — through commissioned essays by leading intellectuals. Its format as a monthly allowed the long essay, the genre in which its contributors specialised and in which the cautious, critical reflection of social concerns that Iranica describes could be developed at length rather than in newspaper columns.

Negin and the Intellectual Monthly in Pahlavi Iran

Negin's fourteen-year run coincided with the last, most controlled phase of the Pahlavi monarchy, between the consolidation of the Shah's rule in the mid-1960s and the revolution of 1979. In that period the Iranian press combined commercial illustrated weeklies, official publications, and a small number of independent intellectual journals operating within censorship. Negin belonged firmly to the third category, and its founding statement — a forum for thoughtful intellectuals, without misplaced partisanship — can be read as the category's manifesto. Enayat's earlier disagreement at Ferdowsi, where he had wanted a magazine addressing a specific social stratum against his publisher's preference for universal appeal, was resolved in Negin by design: the specific stratum was the thoughtful intellectual readership, and the magazine addressed it consistently until the revolutionary crisis dissolved the conditions under which such a journal could exist. Its cessation in 1979, shared with virtually the whole pre-revolutionary press, marked the end of that model of Iranian intellectual life.

End of Publication in 1979

Negin was published from 1965 to 1979. The British Library dates its run 1965–79, with the Persian dating 1344 to 1359, and counts 177 journals in the preserved set. The magazine did not survive the Iranian Revolution: the upheaval of 1978–79 closed the era of the Pahlavi-era intellectual monthly, and Negin, whose whole method depended on the cautious navigation of that era's censorship, ended with it. Its final issues, preserved in the archive with dates running through the Persian year 1358 into early 1980 by the calendar, belong to the revolution's first months. Unlike some pre-revolutionary titles that were revived in altered form, Negin remained a closed historical run: fourteen years, 177 issues, complete.

Archival Survival

Negin's afterlife has been archival. The British Library's Endangered Archives Programme project EAP1200, Iranian Performance Arts Journals, created digital copies of the periodicals of pre-1979 Iran, among them Ettela'at-e Banovan, Tehran Mosavar, Tufiq, Negin, Sepid o Siah, Talash, Honar va Cinema, Film va Hunar, Setareh Cinema and Hollywood — a collection of hundreds of thousands of images spanning 1923 to 1979. Within that project, Negin is catalogued under reference EAP1200/1/4, with 177 journals preserved, individual issues catalogued by their Persian dates, and a custodial history connecting the set to the Academy of Persian Language and Literature. The digitisation ensures that a magazine whose print circulation was confined to a specific intellectual stratum of 1960s and 1970s Tehran is now consultable by researchers anywhere — a wider readership, half a century later, than its founder ever addressed.

Publication Facts

Negin was a Persian-language monthly magazine published in Tehran, Iran. It was founded by Mahmud Enayat and first published in May–June 1965; it ceased in 1979, having appeared in 177 issues. It was a critical monthly review of art and literature, also covering the humanities, and a leading intellectual monthly of the late Pahlavi period. The magazine had no official website. It is documented in Encyclopaedia Iranica's entry on Mahmud Enayat and in the British Library Endangered Archives Programme catalogue (EAP1200/1/4), from which its dates, issue count, subject description and archival history are drawn.