About Yadegar (magazine)

Yadegar (magazine)

Overview

Yadegar was a Persian-language monthly magazine published in Tehran, Iran, from 1944 to 1949. Its name meant "Monument" or "Souvenir," and it appeared in a total of 50 issues arranged in five volumes. Founded and edited by the historian Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani, the magazine specialised in Iranian literary and historical research. Encyclopaedia Iranica, in its entry on Eqbal, records that Yadgar continued publication for five years and is still considered one of the most informative periodicals ever published in Persia. A later account of Iranian cultural publishing described Yadegar — Majaleh-e-Yadegaar — as the first Iranian journal of culture, filling a gap in the market for an academic periodical of scholarly articles on literature, history and geography.

Founder: Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani

Yadegar's founder and editor was Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani (1896–1956), an Iranian literary scholar, historian, translator and man of letters. Eqbal was born in Ashtian and educated at Dar ul-Funun (Dar al-Fonun), the House of Sciences, in Tehran, and at the University of Paris. After graduating from Dar al-Fonun he taught Persian language there, as well as literature, geography and political science, and he wrote literary and historical articles for magazines including Daneshkadeh, Foruq and Tarbiyat. In 1925 he went to Paris on a government scholarship and obtained a BA in literature from the Sorbonne. On his return he became a professor in Tehran, and in 1938 he was appointed professor of history at the newly founded University of Tehran and a permanent member of the Persian Academy (Farhangestan-e Iran), positions he held for many years. When he founded Yadegar in 1944, he was therefore one of the most established historians in the country, and the magazine bore the stamp of his scholarly authority throughout its life.

Founding and Run, 1944 to 1949

Eqbal founded the monthly periodical Yadgar in 1323 Š./1944, according to Encyclopaedia Iranica. The magazine was published in Tehran and continued for five years, ending in 1949, with 50 issues in five volumes. Its appearance came just after the abdication of Reza Shah in 1941 had loosened the controls of the previous decade, opening space for independent scholarly publishing. Eqbal himself recorded, in the pages of Yadgar, his strong criticisms of the Persian Academy's word-formation policies after Reza Shah's fall, a sign that the magazine was willing to host consequential intellectual debate. In 1328 Š./1949, at the end of the magazine's run, Eqbal was appointed the Persian cultural attaché in Turkey and later in Italy, a position he held until his death in Rome in February 1956. He remained unmarried, and he was buried in the shrine of Shah Abd-al-Azim south of Tehran. Yadegar thus belonged wholly to the last, most productive decade of its editor's scholarly life in Iran.

From General Topics to Scholarship

Encyclopaedia Iranica notes a clear evolution in Yadegar's contents: the early issues mostly dealt with social and educational topics, but the later issues were devoted to scholarly articles and notices on literature and history. The magazine's specialisation, as summarised in modern reference entries, was Iranian literary and historical research. A detailed later description of the journal's internal structure records that each issue was usually composed of editorial, communication, cultural, historical and geographical sections. The editorial, always written by Eqbal himself, presented and discussed important cultural subjects and was also known as the Questions of the Day (Massael-e-Rooz). In one such editorial he reflected on the nature of culture and its relationship to the individual, observing that a person lives not only in a physical environment but in a cultural environment of man-made objects, social institutions, ideas and beliefs, and that the culture of any people is the product of history, built up over time. The communication section, literally titled We and the Readers (Ma va Khanandeh-gan), answered the cultural, historical and geographical questions and inquiries sent in by readers.

Contents and Subject Range

The remaining sections of Yadegar covered cultural and historical events, the history of ancient Iran, the Greek, Arab and Mongol invasions, the rebirths of imperial dynasties, the Persian language and literature, geographical sites, old scripts, historical personalities, and photographs and maps, among many other subjects. That range matched the description of the magazine in the Ferdowsi School of Persian Literature's survey of Persian journals, which records that Yadegar covered Persian literature, history, politics and geography. Its contributor list reinforced the same breadth: the survey names among its contributors Mohammad Qazvini, Qasem Ghani and Said Nafisi, three of the most respected Persian scholars of the period. The magazine can be situated within what the historian Kaveh Bayat called the Pahlavi school of historiography on the Pahlavi era, and the Cambridge History of Iran's survey of printing, the press and literature in modern Iran cited Yadegar in its account of the period's literary culture.

The First Iranian Journal of Culture?

A 2009 account by M. Saadat Noury argued that Yadegar was in fact the first Iranian journal of culture. The argument rested on a distinction: earlier cultural magazines such as Daneshkadeh (Faculty), founded in 1918 by the Literary Society of Daneshkadeh — whose organisers included the poet Mohammad Taghi Bahar, Saeed Nafissi, Rashid Yasemi and Eqbal himself — and Bahar (Spring), published by Etesam ol-Molk in 1920, contained articles on popular topics written at the reading level of most of the population, and neither survived long. The gap in the market for an academic periodical featuring scholarly articles on literature, history and geography, written in a more sophisticated register, was filled, on this account, when Eqbal published Yadegar. Whether or not the claim of priority is accepted in full, it captures something real about the magazine: Yadegar was deliberately pitched at a scholarly readership at a time when Persian periodicals were overwhelmingly generalist, and its editor's university standing gave it an academic weight that earlier cultural magazines had not attempted.

Yadegar and the Language Debate

Yadegar also served as a platform in one of the sharpest intellectual controversies of the 1940s: the campaign to purify Persian of foreign words. Eqbal had been among the founders and permanent members of the Academy of Persian Language and Literature, but he considered his membership compulsory and opposed the Academy's activities. After 1941 his opposition became more pronounced, and he published his critiques of the Academy's performance in Yadgar magazine after the fall of Reza Shah. A modern study of his position, published in the Journal of Historical Research of Law and Politics, found that Eqbal believed the Academy's activities and the promotion of "pure writing" had led to the impoverishment and inefficiency of the Persian language, and that its newly coined terms, drawn from Old Persian and long fallen out of use, had rendered the language obscure and artificial, so that the public was unfamiliar with them and others could hardly understand them. That the editor of Yadegar used his own journal to argue against the linguistic programme of an institution to which he belonged illustrates the magazine's independence and its role as a forum for scholarly dissent.

Eqbal's Scholarship and the Magazine's Character

The character of Yadegar cannot be separated from the scholarly output of its editor. Excluding his articles, Eqbal's works included studies of Qabus-e Voshmgir-e Ziyari (Berlin, 1923), a life of Abd-Allah b. Moqaffa, the history of the Nowbakhti family (Tehran, 1932), a detailed history of Iran from the Mongol invasion to the proclamation of the constitution (1933), a history of geographical discoveries and of the science of geography (1935), studies on Bahrain and the islands and coasts of the Persian Gulf (1949), and posthumously published works on the vizierate under the great Saljuq sultans and on Mirza Taqi Khan Amir-e Kabir. He also edited and translated numerous classical texts. A monthly journal edited by a scholar of that range, and written by contributors of the calibre of Qazvini, Ghani and Nafisi, naturally became a repository of editions, notices and research that later historians continued to consult — one reason Encyclopaedia Iranica judges it among the most informative periodicals ever published in Persia.

End of Publication and Legacy

Yadegar ceased publication in 1949 after 50 issues, as its editor moved into diplomatic service as cultural attaché first in Turkey and then in Italy. It was not revived. Its legacy rested on the completeness and seriousness of its five volumes: a monthly that had begun with social and educational topics matured into a scholarly journal of literature and history, sustained a readers' correspondence section, published photographs and maps alongside research articles, and hosted its editor's influential critique of official language policy. In the Ferdowsi School of Persian Literature's survey of thirty-five Persian journals, Yadegar stands in the company of Armaghan and Ayandeh as one of the defining literary-historical monthlies of the Pahlavi era. Modern scholarship on Pahlavi historiography continues to cite it, and its full run remains a primary source for the cultural history of 1940s Iran.

Publication Facts

Yadegar was a Persian-language monthly magazine based in Tehran, Iran, categorised under literature and history. It was founded in 1944 and its final issue appeared in 1949; it published 50 issues in five volumes. Its editor was Abbas Eqbal Ashtiani (1896–1956), professor of history at the University of Tehran and a permanent member of the Persian Academy. The magazine had no official website. It is documented in Encyclopaedia Iranica's entry on Eqbal, in the Cambridge History of Iran's survey of the modern Persian press, and in the Ferdowsi School of Persian Literature's survey of Persian journals, from which its contributor list and subject range are drawn.