INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 277
certainly a necessary precondition to democracy. It asserts that a society
operates within a stable framework of stated laws binding ruler as well as
ruled. Absolute monarchies, the system long in place throughout the Mus-
lim world, gave rulers de facto power to decide the rules as they pleased at
any given moment. It's important to realize that in absolute monarchies
this pattern doesn't apply just to the top ruler; it is reified throughout so-
ciety, each man having arbitary power over those below him and subject to
the arbitrary whims of those above. (Similarly, democracy doesn't just
mean top leaders gaining office through election; it means that some sort
of interactive participatory process goes on at every level: elections are not
equivalent to democracy; they are only a sign that democracy exists.)
Constitutionalism made headway in Iran in part because, out of the ris-
ing class of educated secular modernists, a new intelligentsia emerged.
They announced their modernity not just in their ideas but in the very
language they used to express their ideas. New writers began to eschew the
diction of classical Persian literature, which was so full of ornate rhetorical
flourishes and devices, and developed instead a simple, muscular prose,
which they used to write, not epic poems and mystical lyrics, but satirical
novels, political plays, and the like.
Literary scholar Hamid Dabashi notes the curious case of the English
language novel The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan, written by a trav-
eler named James Marier, who pretended he had merely translated a Per-
sian original. Marier used a ridiculous diction in his novel to lampoon
Persian speech and depicted Iranians as dishonest scoundrels and buffoons.
Then, in the 1880s, an astounding thing happened. Iranian grammarian
Mirza Habib translated Hajji Baba into Persian. Remarkably, what in Eng-
lish was offensive racist trash became, in translation, a literary masterpiece
that laid the groundwork for a modernist Persian literary voice and "a sem-
inal text in the course of the constitutional movement." The ridicule that
Marier directed against Iranians in an Orientalist manner, the translator
redirected against clerical and courtly corruption in Iranian society, thereby
transforming Hajji Baba into an incendiary political critique.^2
With the emergence of a secular modernist intelligentsia, the classics of
Persian literature, poetry by the likes of Rumi and Sa'di and Hafez, began
to gather dust while readers instead devoured, not just the new Iranian
writing, but also books by European thinkers such as Charles Montesquieu