Negotiating Freedom: Mostašār od-Doule’s Yek kalame and the Iranian Constitutional Experience

Abstract

Innumerable modernization measures were implemented in nineteenth-century Iran, in what might be called a process of translation. In the course of translating new ideas into the Iranian context by means of applying old expressions, Iranian legal language underwent sequences of change. To gain a better understanding of current struggles over the proper interpretation of some basic concepts, the paper seeks to explain how the concept of freedom was modified, by reference to Koselleck’s “space of experience” and the “horizon of expectation”. The analysis is based on Mostašār od-Doule’s treatise Yek kalame (“One word”), one of the most important nineteenth-century Iranian source texts, which greatly influenced the further development of the Iranian freedom movement.