Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh (1878-1970): Writing the Self in Iran’s Modernity

Twentieth-century Iran saw many outstanding individuals who played crucial roles of varying importance in its state building and the shaping of its national identity. The activities of these Iranian and foreign actors were tightly entangled with each other and quite often in a very productive way. One remarkable example of this was the statesman and scholar Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh (1878-1970). Throughout his life, he would appear in various evolving capacities. He developed from a revolutionary constitutionalist to a quietist influential politician and distinguished diplomat, as well as from a provincial school teacher to not only a famous intellectual journalist but also an internationally-recognised scholar. The multiple sudden peripeteias of Taqizadeh’s life followed the crucial developments in the fate of his fatherland, always both influencing them and being impacted by them. Few historians have been in agreement about Taqizadeh’s persona (e.g. Browne, Adamiyat, Arabajan), as few strong continuities were found in his political views and credos throughout his life. Having always been at the junctures of crucial events in and around Iran, he eventually described his life as tempestuous. Taqizadeh gave the same name to his memoirs which are of great historical importance. Informed by the recently developed conceptual framework of Life Writing (Taylor, McIntyre, Giddens, David-Fox, Sapiro, Oushakine, Dmitriev), this research aims at analysing Taqizadeh’s life-writing texts in Persian as a previously unused historiographical tool for close reading and better understanding of the text of the nation-wide Iranian quest for modernity.