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In the early twentieth century, the Iranian Reza Shah state (1925–1941), in conjunction with the emerging group of state-trained scholars, called the status of ulama as knowledge producers into question. Existing scholarship has primarily examined the impact of state modernization on the Muslim clergy and their responses to modernization but has paid lesser attention to the passive role of the ulama or their representation in modernist intellectual and literary discourses. I examine two major Persian sources of the period to argue that intellectual representation of the ulama, in both polemics and academic critique, aided the state in its attempt to push the ulama from the center of intellectual and social life to the margins of ritual purity. Among my primary sources is a previously unexamined academic thesis authored by Qasim Tuysirkani in 1938.

Ahmad Kasravi (1890-1946), one of the most influential Iranian thinkers of the twentieth century, delivers a stinging criticism of Shi′ism and Islam in two works which have been almost completely ignored by secular scholars, despite their immense influence on the thought and writings of Ayatollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution as well as Ali Shariati and Jalal Ale Ahmad, its ideological forebears. The article considers the paradoxical reception of Kasravi's Shi′ism (Shi′igari) and On Islam (Dar Piramun-i Islam): both their extraordinary impact on Islamic revivalists and their neglect by specialists in Iranian affairs and Islamic studies. The occlusion of Kasravi's impulse to reform, the reduction of his ambiguous position in the Iranian intellectual tradition, has functioned to all but foreclose discussions of Islamic reform among secular scholars, deforming the contemporary intellectual history of Iran and Shi′ism more broadly.

Ahmad Kasravi, 1890-1946, had a great impact on the intellectual transformation of Iran. His writings continue to influence the modern generation of Iranians. He was not an economist, but there are two important reasons for discussing Kasravi's economic ideas: they may reveal the limits of his method of inquiry and his thinking in other areas; and his writings reflect, to some extent, popular sentiment about the economy. (Quotes from original text)

The implementation of a constitutional system in Iran has long been a goal of Iranian exiles. The writings of Seyyed Jamal Waez during the constitutional movement of 1905-08 are compared with the ideas articulated by Ahmad Kasravi some 25 years later.

In 1946, Ahmad Kasravi, a historian who campaigned against what he saw as superstition in Shiite Islam, and his secretary were shot dead in Tehran by a young fundamentalist Moslem after [Khomeini] and other Shiite clerics said he should be killed. \"It is incumbent on Moslems to obliterate these unclean elements from the face of the Earth,\" Khomeini wrote in the early 1940s in \"Kashf al-Asrar\" (Revelation of Secrets), a book against Kasravi and another person of similar thinking.

In this long book, which runs to 905 pages in the best Persian edition, [Ahmad Kasravi] recounts how the spontaneous alliance of clergy, bazar, craftsmen and intellectuals forged in 1905-6 disintegrated when the Shia clergy became aware of some of the wider consequences of Enlightenment ideas. They were shocked to learn that liberty included liberty not to pray or wash, and equality might even be extended to Jews, Christians and Zoroastrians. In short, the new parliament, instead of merely interpreting and enforcing the divine law known as sharia, would actually give law to the Muslims. As Kasravi writes: \"The interests of the mass of people diverged from those of the mullahs and village owners, particularly in Tabriz, where liberal ferment was more effective.\" Meanwhile, the liberals had the bit between their teeth: \"Those who had visited Europe recalled things about the European way of life which they brought home like souvenirs.\" Many of the clergy turned against the revolution, including the most learned and courageous of the Tehran divines, Sheikh Fazlollah Nuri, who was to be a firm influence on [Ruhollah Khomeini]. Sheikh Fazlollah was executed by the constitutionalists on 31 July 1909. Though sympathetic in the History to the courageous divines of 1905-6, Kasravi became more and more bitterly anti-clerical. In the course of the 1930s, he came to argue that the Shia itself was a perversion of the prophet's Islam. That brought him to the attention not only of Khomeini but of a young seminarian, Muhammad Navvab Safavi, who had been influenced by Khomeini's early writings on Islamic government and founded a terrorist group called the Fedayan-e Islam (\"Devotees of Islam\"). Brought to trial for his anti-clerical stance in Tehran, Kasravi was butchered in open court along with his secretary, Muhammad Taqi Hadadpur, on 11 March 1946. According to a recently published interview with a Fedayan-e Islam veteran, one of the assassins, Hosein Emami, appeared at the central police station waving a blood-stained knife and crying: \"I have killed Kasravi! The man who is burning the Qur'an!\" He was turned away as a madman and later pardoned. The Fedayan went on to assassinate the prime minister and may have been behind the attempt on the life of [Muhammad Reza] in the garden of Tehran University in 1949. Navvab Safavi was executed by the Pahlavis in 1955, and his followers dispersed into Khomeini's movement, where they performed some of the rough work. Navvab Safavi is commemorated by a metro station and parkway in Tehran. Khomeini, himself a brilliant stylist, conceded on television in 1979 that Kasravi knew his history and was a good writer, but was a vile man who sought prophethood. When, in 1989, Khomeini declared Salman Rushdie's life forfeit, older Iranians remembered Kasravi.

Iran is a test case of the process of Modernization and the influence of Islam in rebuilding Nationalism

United States Embassy. Iran recommends outreach programs aimed for Iran [Students; Intellectual community] to create opinions favorable to United States policy; Dowres system is described; Iran Students Opinion polls Statistics; Iran Students resent Authoritarian governments; Iran Intellectual community is described