What You've Been Told vs What Actually Happened

The Press Boom of 1906

by Iran Prism 10 min read

The Majles parliament building after bombardment by the Russian-led Cossack Brigade, Tehran, 1908.
The Majles parliament building after bombardment by the Russian-led Cossack Brigade, Tehran, 1908. From Morgan Shuster's The Strangling of Persia. Public domain.

The Man in the Shah’s Garden

Mirza Jahangir Khan was brought to the Bagh-e Shah — the Shah’s Garden — on a summer day in 1908, and strangled.

He was the editor of Sur-e Esrafil (“The Trumpet of Israfil”), a newspaper so radical in its criticism of the monarchy and the foreign powers that controlled Iran’s resources that it had become the voice of the constitutional revolution’s most democratic impulses. Alongside him, the preacher Malek al-Motakallemin — whose sermons had fused religious rhetoric with constitutional demands, mobilizing the faithful toward democratic action — was killed the same way.

They were not shot. They were not given trials. They were taken to a garden and manually strangled — a method that combined execution with humiliation, sending a message that their deaths were personal, not judicial. Mohammad Ali Shah, who had just bombarded the Majles building with Russian-officered artillery, was eliminating not just the parliament but the information ecosystem that had made the parliament possible.

Mirza Jahangir Khan understood something that authoritarians of every era understand: the most dangerous weapon against arbitrary power is not a gun. It is a newspaper that ordinary people can read — or, in a country where most people could not read, a newspaper written so clearly that it could be read aloud.

The Explosion

Before the constitutional revolution, Iran had a handful of state-controlled publications and a few cautious private newspapers that operated under the Shah’s censorship. The revolution of 1906 detonated that system.

Within months of the Majles convening, dozens of newspapers and periodicals appeared — in Tehran, Tabriz, Rasht, Isfahan.1 The Supplementary Fundamental Laws had guaranteed freedom of the press (with vague exceptions for material “harmful to Islam”), and Iranian journalists treated the guarantee as absolute. Between 1906 and 1908, Iran experienced the most explosive expansion of public political discourse in its history — a two-year window in which ideas that had circulated only in private salons, seminary debates, and clandestine pamphlets suddenly became available to anyone within earshot of a teahouse.

The newspapers ranged from moderate constitutionalist organs advocating gradual reform to fiercely radical sheets calling for the abolition of aristocratic privilege and the redistribution of land. Some were explicitly secular; others fused Islamic reformism with democratic demands. What they shared was a refusal to accept the premise that political power was not the public’s business.

The constitutional framework that protected this press was not without its own contradictions. The Supplementary Fundamental Laws guaranteed press freedom but carved out a vague exception for material “harmful to Islam” — a phrase elastic enough to mean whatever the powerful needed it to mean. And Article 2 gave a committee of senior mujtahids the power to veto legislation deemed un-Islamic — a clerical check that the constitutionalists largely ignored in practice, but that survived on paper long enough to be resurrected, in vastly expanded form, as the Islamic Republic’s Guardian Council. The constitutional press operated in the gap between the law’s promise and its enforcement. That gap was wide in 1906. It would not stay wide.

The Constitutional Press (1906–1908):

  • Sur-e Esrafil — The most radical, edited by Mirza Jahangir Khan. Named after the trumpet that announces the Day of Judgment — an explicit framing of the newspaper as a wake-up call.
  • Musavat (“Equality”) — Published in Tehran, emphasizing democratic principles and social justice.
  • Habl al-Matin (“The Strong Rope”) — Originally published in Calcutta to evade Iranian censorship, then openly in Tehran during the constitutional period. One of the longest-running Persian-language newspapers.
  • Nasim-e Shomal (“Northern Breeze”) — Published in Rasht, using satirical verse to mock the aristocracy and foreign powers. Its editor, Ashraf al-Din Gilani, wrote political poetry accessible to the barely literate.
  • Anjoman — Published in Tabriz, tied to the anjoman (council) movement that organized democratic governance at the local level.
  • Literacy rate: An estimated 10–15% of the population could read, making oral distribution the dominant channel for political ideas.

These were not elite publications for educated readers. Many were deliberately designed to reach the majority of Iranians who could not read.

Charand Parand

The most revolutionary innovation in the constitutional press was not an argument. It was a style.

Ali-Akbar Dehkhoda — a brilliant linguist who would later compile the most comprehensive Persian dictionary ever written — contributed a regular column to Sur-e Esrafil called Charand Parand.2 The title translates roughly as “Nonsense and Stuff” or “Balderdash” — deliberately casual, deliberately unpretentious. It was the most widely consumed piece of political writing in the constitutional period, and its genius lay in a single decision: Dehkhoda wrote in the language of the street.

Persian literary tradition was governed by a strict hierarchy: formal written Persian — ornate, arabicized, filled with complex grammatical constructions and classical allusions — was the language of power. It was the language of the court, the seminary, and the educated class. The vast majority of Iranians, who were illiterate or semi-literate, could not access it. The gap between written and spoken Persian was not merely stylistic — it was a barrier to political participation. If you could not parse the language of power, you could not evaluate the arguments of those who wielded it.

Dehkhoda shattered that barrier. Charand Parand used colloquial Persian — the language of bazaar negotiations, domestic arguments, and street gossip. He employed humor, satire, fictional dialogues between ordinary Iranians, and imagined conversations with animals and objects to demystify political concepts. Complex ideas about sovereignty, constitutionalism, foreign concessions, and clerical authority were rendered in language that any merchant, laborer, or household servant could understand.

The effect was electric. Charand Parand was not just read — it was performed. In teahouses across Tehran and the provincial cities, literate patrons would read the column aloud while others listened, debated, argued, and laughed. The teahouse — already the center of social life in Iranian cities — became an informal political forum. Dehkhoda’s column was the curriculum.

This was not dumbing down. It was democratizing up. Dehkhoda understood that political literacy in a society with widespread illiteracy required a different technology of communication — one that leveraged oral culture rather than fighting it. The column made the Constitution’s abstract principles concrete: what does sovereignty mean for the price of sugar? Why does a foreign concession hurt the baker in your neighborhood? What happens when the Shah can spend money without the Majles approving it?

The Teahouse Network

Iran’s press boom of 1906 operated through a distribution system that predated and outperformed print technology: the human voice.

The teahouse (qahveh-khaneh) was ubiquitous in Iranian urban life — a space where men gathered to drink tea, smoke water pipes, and exchange news. Teahouses had their own oral traditions: storytellers (naqqal) who recited episodes from the Shahnameh, news brokers who relayed information from travelers and merchants, and informal debate circles where political opinions were tested and refined.

The constitutional press plugged directly into this network. A single copy of Sur-e Esrafil arriving at a teahouse in the bazaar quarter could reach dozens of listeners through a single reading. The newspaper’s impact was multiplied not by print runs but by the number of literate readers willing to perform the text aloud. The effective reach of a popular newspaper far exceeded its circulation — because it was consumed as a group event, not a private act.

This created a feedback loop. Listeners who heard Dehkhoda’s column discussed it with others. Arguments circulated orally, were adapted, simplified, personalized. A column about foreign concessions became a conversation about the British engineer who had surveyed the local road. An article about parliamentary sovereignty became an argument about why the governor should not be allowed to bastinado merchants without due process. The press did not create political awareness from nothing — it channeled and amplified grievances that already existed, giving them vocabulary and structure.

Consider what it would mean if your morning news — the thing that tells you what your government is doing with your money and in your name — could only be accessed by gathering at a specific table in a specific room, hoping someone literate showed up today. That was Iran in 1906. And the response was not resignation. It was an improvised information revolution run on tea and human voices.

The Islamic Republic’s deployment of Friday prayers, state television, and IRGC-controlled social media channels as propaganda infrastructure is a structural descendant of this same insight: whoever controls the oral network controls the political imagination. The difference is that in 1906, the press was fighting to give people access to their own governance. Today, the regime’s media apparatus fights to prevent exactly that.

The Silencing

On June 23, 1908, Colonel Liakhov’s artillery shelled the Majles building. Mohammad Ali Shah’s coup was a military operation — but its first target was not the parliament. It was the press.

In the days surrounding the bombardment, the Shah’s forces systematically shut down every independent newspaper in Tehran.3 Editors were arrested. Printing presses were seized or destroyed. Distribution networks were disrupted. The constitutional period’s most distinguishing achievement — a genuinely free press operating without state censorship — was eliminated in a matter of days.

Mirza Jahangir Khan was strangled. Dehkhoda, who escaped Tehran, fled into exile — first to Europe, then wandering between cities, writing from abroad. He would eventually return to Iran and devote the rest of his life to the monumental Loghatnameh — a comprehensive dictionary of the Persian language that took decades to compile. The man who had democratized political language for the masses spent his later years preserving the language itself, as if the act of documentation could save what the act of publication had lost.

The press boom had lasted roughly two years — from the convening of the First Majles in October 1906 to the bombardment in June 1908. In that window, Iranians experienced what a free information ecosystem looked like: multiple voices, competing perspectives, satirical critique of power, and ordinary citizens participating in political discourse through the technologies available to them. Then the guns returned, and the window closed.

The Digital Echo

The parallels to Iran’s information wars in the 21st century are not subtle.

The Islamic Republic controls all broadcast media, censors the domestic internet, and jails journalists at one of the highest rates in the world. The constitutional press of 1906 was destroyed by a Shah with Cossack artillery. The independent press of the 2020s is destroyed by a regime with internet shutdowns, VPN blocks, and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ cyber warfare division.

And yet: Iranians have rebuilt the teahouse network in digital form. Telegram channels with millions of followers serve as the Sur-e Esrafil of the present — distributing news, analysis, and satire that the regime cannot control without shutting down the internet entirely (which it does, during every major protest wave, at enormous economic cost). Diaspora media outlets like Iran International broadcast Persian-language news back into the country via satellite, reaching audiences the regime cannot block without physically confiscating dishes — which it tries, and fails, to do comprehensively.

The regime’s response mirrors Mohammad Ali Shah’s: target the infrastructure. During the January 2026 protests, Iran experienced a near-total internet blackout. The government understands, as the Shah understood in 1908, that an informed population is a dangerous population — and that the most effective censorship targets not the individual speaker but the distribution system itself.

Dehkhoda’s innovation — translating complex political ideas into the language of ordinary people, using the existing social infrastructure (teahouses then, encrypted messaging now) as the distribution channel — remains the blueprint for democratic communication in authoritarian states. The technology changes. The principle survives: give people the language to describe their own condition, and they will use it to demand change.

The Tradition of Dangerous Journalism

Iran has one of the oldest traditions of press-as-democratic-practice in the Middle East — and one of the highest costs for practicing it.

The press boom of 1906 produced Iran’s first generation of journalist-martyrs. The Islamic Republic has produced several more. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, Iran ranks among the world’s worst jailers of journalists4 — a direct descendant of the Shah who strangled Mirza Jahangir Khan for the crime of publishing in a language the people could understand.

The next time someone describes Iran as a country without a democratic tradition, remember the teahouse — a room full of people listening to a column called “Nonsense and Stuff,” laughing at a satire of the governor, debating whether a parliament was a good idea, and discovering, through the sound of their own language spoken back to them, that they had the right to a say in how they were governed.

That room existed in 1906. The regime has been trying to shut it down ever since. And every time they succeed, someone opens another one.

This article is a companion to The First Try. For the full story of the American who fought for Iran’s democracy, see The Strangling of Persia. For how the 1906 clerical compromise became the 1979 theocratic mandate, see The Ghost of Article 2. For how the regime controls information today, see The Transparency Trap. To test your knowledge of Iran’s hidden history, take The Iran Test.

Footnotes

  1. Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Constitutional Revolution vi: The Press,” 2011 ↩

  2. Encyclopaedia Iranica, “Constitutional Revolution i: Intellectual Background”; Charles Kurzman, “Intellectuals and the Constitutional Revolutions of 1905–12,” University of North Carolina ↩

  3. IranWire, “An American with Iran Against the Russian Empire,” 2024; Cambridge University Press, “A Dynastic History of Iran,” Chapter 3 ↩

  4. Committee to Protect Journalists, annual prison census reports, 2020–2025 ↩