A Socio-Historical Re-reading of Alireza Molaei Tavani’s View on the Invalidity of Treating the 1921 Coup as the Origin of Contemporary Iranian History

Determining the origin of contemporary Iranian history is a contentious issue in contemporary historiography, as every proposed starting point presupposes a specific understanding of modernity, the state, society, and political power. The central problem of this article is whether the 1921 coup and the rise of the Reza Shah state can be considered the beginning of contemporary Iranian history, or if they should be analyzed as a continsuation of previous trends, particularly the Constitutional Revolution. The objective of this study is to re-read Alireza Molaei Tavani’s perspective on the invalidity of establishing 1921 as the historical origin and to expand upon it within the framework of historical sociology concepts. The primary research question is: based on concepts such as state crisis, institutional capacity, state-building, and political legitimacy, which event holds a more fundamental position in periodizing contemporary Iranian history? The research method is historical-interpretive analysis with a historical sociology approach, utilizing data from historiographical works, theoretical studies, sources related to the Qajar and Pahlavi eras, memoirs of political figures, and samples of Pahlavi-era press. The findings demonstrate that while the late Qajar crisis was a historical reality, the official Pahlavi historiography, through discursive representation of this crisis, established the 1921 coup as the origin of “modern Iran.” Conversely, the Constitutional Revolution transformed the logic of politics in Iran by introducing concepts such as law, parliament, the nation, representation, and the limitation of power. The article concludes that although the Reza Shah state was a significant stage in centralizing authority and increasing the state’s institutional capacity, it is not the origin of contemporary Iranian history, as Iranian modernity had already begun earlier with the Constitutional Revolution’s questioning of legitimacy and the limits of power.The analysis presented in this article has shown that the Reza Shah-centered narrative of contemporary Iranian history, focusing on the issue of order, authority, and efficiency of the state, has highlighted the 1969 coup as the starting point of the “new Iran.” However, such a narrative reduces part of the more complex process of state transformation in Iran to a single moment of rupture. An examination of Iran’s political and institutional developments shows that many of the trends that gained greater focus and coherence during Reza Shah’s reign had their roots in the political and institutional crises of the post-constitutional period and cannot be understood without considering that historical context.
In this framework, the present article follows Mollaei’s view that the Constitutional Revolution has a more fundamental place in determining the origins of contemporary Iranian history. The importance of the Constitutional Revolution lay not only in changing the form of government, but also in opening up a new horizon of political concepts, after which the understanding of power and the state in Iran was formulated in relation to them. Concepts such as law, representation, nation, and state responsibility created a new language for politics and created a conceptual framework within which even subsequent authoritarian developments took shape.From the perspective of historical sociology, the importance of this result is that it shows that historical origins are not simply extracted from a political event, but are formed in the interaction between institutional crises, historiographical narratives, and discursive representations. In this sense, determining the origin of contemporary Iranian history is not only related to the assessment of political developments, but also to the way in which Iranian history has been narrated in scholarly and public memory.In recent years, researchers have examined the context and consequences of the 1969 coup from various angles. Karimi Kondroud and Khajeh Nouri.Focusing on the role of Britain,also Sadeghifard has foucosing and analyzed this event within the framework of England's regional policies after World War I.
Finally, a reflection on this issue shows that contemporary Iranian history must be understood in the form of a continuous but crisis-ridden process; a process in which the Constitutional Revolution opened the conceptual horizon of new politics, the crises that followed highlighted the issue of the state and political order, and the developments of the following decades attempted to respond to this crisis in different ways.the importance of discussing the origin of contemporary history lies not in determining a calendar date, but in clarifying the logic of political transformation in Iran.