Taqi Arani
Born(1903-09-05)5 September 1903
Tabriz, Sublime State of Persia
Died4 February 1940(1940-02-04) (aged 36)
Tehran, Imperial State of Iran
NationalityIranian
Alma materBerlin Institute of Technology
Criminal chargeMarxist sedition

Taqi Arani (Persian: تقی ارانی; 5 September 1903 – 4 February 1940), was a professor of chemistry, left-wing Iranian political activist, and the founder and editor of the Marxist magazine Donya (The World).[1]

Biography

Arani was born in Tabriz and moved to Tehran with his family when he was four years old. In 1920, he graduated from Dar ul-Funun School in Tehran and pursued his studies in Germany studying chemistry at Berlin Institute of Technology. While studying in Germany, he began to study politics as well. Upon finishing his studies, he returned to Iran in 1928 and started Donya magazine. Many people consider Donya as his most important contribution to modern intellectual life in Iran. In 1938, he and 52 of his colleagues, The Fifty-Three, were arrested and charged with being involved in communist activities.[2] He died (or as some claim, was killed)[3] in jail on 4 February 1940.[4]

Illustration of Taqi Arani during his trial

Members of the Fifty-Three would go on to found the Tudeh Party in 1941,[5] often considered the beginning of the modern Communist party in Iran.[6]

Views

Although an important figure in the history of Iran's Marxist Left, Arani held strong Iranian nationalist and chauvinistic leanings[7] and wrote on the Iranian character of Iran's Azerbaijan region in response to pan-Turkist groups in Turkey of the 1920s.[8] He also argued that the state should be reestablished based on the principles of the Sassanian state and that Zoroastrianism should be the religion of this state.[7]

References

  1. ↑ Daryaee, Touraj (2012). The Oxford Handbook of Iranian History. Oxford University Press. p. 352. ISBN 9780199732159.
  2. ↑ Afshari, Reza (2002). "Tortured Confessions: Prisons and Public Recantations in Modern Iran (review)". Human Rights Quarterly. 24 (1): 290–297. doi:10.1353/hrq.2002.0001. ISSN 1085-794X. S2CID 145509961.
  3. ↑ "Sarmayeh.net - سرمایه Resources and Information". Archived from the original on 24 July 2011. Retrieved 15 September 2009.
  4. ↑ Michael Pye (2015). In the belly of the bear?: Soviet-Iranian relations during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (PhD thesis). University of St Andrews. p. 65.
  5. ↑ "History of Iran: History of the Tudeh Party of Iran". www.iranchamber.com. Retrieved 1 May 2016.
  6. ↑ Ghods, M. Reza (1990). "The Iranian Communist Movement under Reza Shah". Middle Eastern Studies. 26 (4): 506–513. doi:10.1080/00263209008700833. ISSN 0026-3206. JSTOR 4283395.
  7. 1 2 Ali Massoud Ansari (1998). Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and the myth of imperial authority (PhD thesis). SOAS, University of London. p. 63. ISBN 978-0-355-37592-3. ProQuest 1951728471.
  8. ↑ Ahmadi, Hamid (2017). "The Clash of Nationalisms: Iranian response to Baku's irredentism". In Kamrava, Mehran (ed.). The Great Game in West Asia: Iran, Turkey and the South Caucasus. Oxford University Press. pp. 297-298 (note 102). ISBN 978-0190869663.

Further reading

  • Abrahamian, E.; Alavi, B. (1986). "ARĀNĪ, TAQĪ". In Yarshater, Ehsan (ed.). Encyclopædia Iranica, Volume II/3: ʿArab Moḥammad–Architecture IV. London and New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. pp. 263–265. ISBN 978-0-71009-103-1.
  • Jalali, Younes (2018), Taghi Erani, a Polymath in Interwar Berlin: Fundamental Science, Psychology, Orientalism, and Political Philosophy, Springer, doi:10.1007/978-3-319-97837-6, ISBN 978-3-319-97837-6, S2CID 189356398
  • Mirsepassi, Ali (2021). The Discovery of Iran: Taghi Arani, a Radical Cosmopolitan. Stanford University Press. ISBN 978-1503629141.
  • Saffari, Siavash (2021). "Taqi Erāni, Bizhan Jazani, and a Marxian Framework for the Critique of Religion in Twentieth Century Iranian Political Thought". Iranian Studies. 54 (5–6): 859–877. doi:10.1080/00210862.2020.1855970. S2CID 234069935.
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