The history of communism in Muslim societies has often been linked with the Soviet hegemonic project, which at various times permitted differing levels of local agency to harness indigenous anti-imperialist movements.Footnote 1 Although recent studies have highlighted the independence of Iranian communists from Moscow, the idea of Soviet co-optation remains common in discussions about the origins of Iranian communism.Footnote 2 This article seeks to nuance debates on the agency and Russian dependency of Iranian communists by approaching the question through cultural and conceptual history. It focuses on two Persian translations of The Communist Manifesto, produced in 1923 and 1951, both sponsored by Soviet Russia and published in the aftermath of the Soviet occupation of Iranian territory. By examining the changing Soviet strategies of propaganda dissemination alongside the evolving translation ethos of Iranian translators, the article shows how Soviet infrastructures, although designed to serve expansionist aims, also created, in James Pickett’s words, “ample space for its Iranian constituency to continue a modernizing project initiated decades before the Soviet occupation,” in James Pickett’s words.Footnote 3 The analysis highlights the interplay between shifting Soviet policies on Iran and the dynamics of Iranian modernism during the first half of the 20th century, a process made tangible in the metamorphoses of Persian language reform and intellectual discourse. Taken together, these forces call for a revalorization of regional entanglements in the history of Iranian communism, beyond simplistic center-periphery models that place the Moscow Politburo at the top of a rigid hierarchy. Finally, the article argues that the identities of Iran’s first communists, shaped initially by late Qajar modernism and the Soviet project of revolutionary transfer, were later profoundly reconfigured by two developments: the Pahlavi regime’s top-down modernization drive and the Soviet retreat that sought to preserve the international balance of power throughout the Cold War.
Recent reconsideration of the Marxist translators’ agency offers a valuable opportunity to reassess the identities and contributions of early Iranian communists in shaping the Iranian communist movement. Translation, viewed as a praxis that “expands the boundaries of the universal” by “creating commensurabilities,” can be seen as a generative power, capable of dismantling or constructing hierarchical structures.Footnote 4 A pivotal dimension of translators’ identity lies in their involvement with and contributions to literary culture, whose political ramifications cannot be overstated. The adaptation of Marxism to local vernaculars, grounded in indigenous rhetorical traditions, was perceived by numerous non-Western intellectuals as a tool for liberation from both international dominance and local disparities through the invention of a novel linguistic.Footnote 5 In Iran, these perceptions have their roots in a long-standing tradition of translation as a process that unites Iranian encounters with European culture and the evolution of Iranian social and political practices. According to Milad Odabaei, this process transforms “epistemic confusion” into a force that “refracts changes” within the local order.Footnote 6 Translation served as a legitimizing tool and a public space for negotiation and debate, largely due to the translator’s evolving role as a cultural mediator. This role underscores a dual commitment to both foreign and local discourses, a phenomenon vividly described by Hussein Ahmed Hussein Omar in his work on Egyptian translator and writer Rifaʿa Rafiʿ al-Tahtawi.Footnote 7
This paper situates the 1923 Persian translation of the Communist Manifesto by Sayyid Muhammad Dihgan within the history of Iranian political concepts by exploring the varying degrees of commensurability between the Iranian Self and the Western Other. The study posits that Dihgan’s specific use of chronospatial concepts and Perso-Islamic literary tropes in the 1923 translation facilitated a reversal of power relations between the East and the West, embodied in the concepts of “denial of temporal co-evalness” and “temporalization of cultural difference,” coined by Johannes Fabian.Footnote 8 Building on this, the article argues that Dihgan’s translation strategy and intellectual ethos enabled the de-Orientalization of Marxist thought, reframing the ideas of canonical texts, most notably the Communist Manifesto, within a Perso-Islamic moral and conceptual framework.Footnote 9 This approach aligns with Milad Odabaei’s argument that emphasizes a “transferential relation with the difference” as the central ethos of Qajar translators.Footnote 10 Dihgan’s pursuit of legitimizing the Persian path to communism through language partially informs the recent republication of his translation by Sayyid Qasim Yahusayni in 1398/2019–20, which serves as a primary source for this study.Footnote 11 Yahusayni, a prolific historian of the Persian Gulf and an editor of numerous memoirs related to the Iran–Iraq war, has edited several volumes on important figures of 20th-century Iranian left-leaning Islamism, which he identifie as a distinctly Iranian leftist ideology (contrary to “borrowed” Marxism) during an interview.Footnote 12 In the same discussion, Yahusayni elucidates that the interest in Dihgan’s translation today is purely historical, categorizing it within a series of early Persian translations of the Manifesto produced by Iranian Marxists who were unable to comprehend either the “tradition” (sunnat) or the “theoretical foundations of modernity” (bunyād-hā-yi naẓarī-yi mudarnitih). Throughout the interview, Yahusayni repeatedly notes that 20th-century Iranian Marxists possessed limited knowledge of Marx’s works, lamenting the historical conditions that fostered this intellectual dependency on Marxism among Iranian revolutionaries. He references the legendary Iranian communist Khalil Maliki, who famously remarked, “We did not choose communism; communism chose us!”Footnote 13 The publication of Dihgan’s translation therefore fulfills several political objectives, notably demonstrating freedom of expression in the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), and discrediting the Iranian Marxist Left as either Westernized or unfamiliar with Marxism’s fundamentals.Footnote 14
Contrary to Yahusayni’s interpretations that view the Perso-Islamic “anachronisms” in the target text as the translator’s “misunderstanding” of Marxism, this study interprets the conceptual continuities between the Persian version of the Manifesto and classical Perso-Islamic political literature as integral to late Qajar reformist thought, which developed upon this foundation. Additionally, it establishes a link between the evolution of Iranian political language and literary modernism, the latter increasingly influenced by the Pahlavi regime’s temporalized language of civilizational development and the print market. It draws upon Levi Thompson’s conceptualization of late Qajar literary modernism as anchored in the local context and reliant on the regional Perso-Islamic tradition, particularly as demonstrated in the early works of Nima Yushij (ʿAli Isfandiyari), who was part of Dihgan’s close circle and published his poetic “manifesto,” “Afsanih” (myth), in 1922, several months prior to Dihgan’s translation of the Communist Manifesto. Nima Yushij’s early poetic modernism, similar to Dihgan’s rhetorical style, was “receptive to the past and attuned to the historical realities preceding it.”Footnote 15 This modernist Iranian movement can be situated within a larger continuum of Iranian literary modernity, which Kevin Schwartz describes as marked by “contingent engagements with the literary past across a fracturing but still active Persianate world.”Footnote 16
Nima Yushij’s role is pivotal to understanding the history of translations of the Communist Manifesto for several reasons. He exemplifies the evolution of Persian literary language in the first half of the 20th century, serving as a representative figure of this transformation. Furthermore, Yushij may have been directly involved in the translation process over the decades. His connection to Dihgan extended beyond friendship; Yushij was linked to the Tudeh Party through his brother, Ladbun Isfandiyari, a member of the Tudeh who authored a book on Islam and Marxism. Their correspondence often included discussions on political and philosophical matters. Additionally, Yushij played a significant role in caring for Azar Biniyaz, who was not only a close friend of Dihgan’s son but also the daughter of the author of an earlier draft translation of the Manifesto, a version that Dihgan later developed. Azar eventually married Ihsan Tabari, who is thought to have produced a second translation of the Communist Manifesto in the early 1950s. As Nima Yushij distanced himself from the Persian poetic canon, the translators of the Manifesto similarly moved away from the late Qajar political vocabulary rooted in Perso-Islamic heritage. This suggests that Yushij’s significance in the history of Manifesto translations is twofold: first, he exerted personal influence on the translators; second, the evolution of his own work and style paralleled the broader development of Iranian literary modernism, as also observed in the translations of the Manifesto.
The “scientific” approach to translation, lauded by the Tudeh Party members involved in the Moscow-sponsored postwar translation wave, is conceptualized in this essay as part of a canon-building effort influenced by both Soviet postwar Iran policies and the Pahlavi print market. In the Cold War context of post–World War II Pahlavi Iran, cultural rivalry between the two blocs was reflected in translators’ efforts to produce the most precise and contemporary renditions of Western modernity through translation and retranslation. The retranslators of the Communist Manifesto aimed to assert Soviet cultural authority and augment their own symbolic capital.Footnote 17 This dual canonization of the 1951 translation impeded further translation endeavors, with the Tudeh Party releasing a new translation of the Manifesto only in 1975. This study posits that the formation of such a canonical translation became possible due to both the Soviet strategy of cultural penetration and the alignment of the 1951 translation with postwar trends in Iranian literary culture.Footnote 18
The article is structured into three sections. The first section examines Sayyid Muhammad Dihgan’s networks and his conceptual universe and modernist internationalism. The second section delves into Dihgan’s approach to spatiotemporal concepts in his translation of the Manifesto, including themes such as stages of historical development and the dichotomy between the East and the West. The final section contrasts Dihgan’s work with the 1951 translation of the Manifesto, highlighting the latter’s secular, bureaucratic, and nationalist logic, as well as its fragmented timeline and emphasis on the incommensurability of the West.
Sayyid Muhammad Dihgan, Late Qajar Reformist and Translator
The personal trajectory of Sayyid Muhammad Dihgan, along with his political and literary endeavors, vividly illustrates how transnational cultural entanglement shaped the identities and discourse of Persian-speaking transnational actors. Born and raised in the Russian Empire, Dihgan maintained a lifelong commitment to Persian literature and education while actively engaging with the Azeri literary movement and continuously enhancing his proficiency in the Russian language and literature. Dihgan’s journey was closely intertwined with the history of Persian merchant networks from the outset. He was born around 1890 in Temir-Khan-Shura (present-day Buynaksk) into a family of merchants: his father, Sayyid Muhammad Taqi, was a merchant of Kurdish descent from Kashan, and his mother hailed from an Azeri Shiʿi merchant family. However, in Dihgan’s brief autobiography, he primarily identifies his father not as a merchant, but as a Persian poet from the era of Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96). Indeed, Sayyid Muhammad Taqi was celebrated in literary circles as the “nightingale of Kashan” (andalīb-i Kāshān), and Dihgan proudly notes that a collection of his father’s poems was published in Istanbul in 1895. Sayyid Muhammad Taqi’s close association with Mirza ʿAbd al-Rahim Talib-i Najjar Tabrizi (Talibuv), a pioneer of Iranian socialism and the author of the renowned Kitab-i Ahmad (Book of Ahmad), exposed Dihgan to Talibuv’s intellectual influence from an early age; Dihgan considered Talibuv as both a mentor and a father.Footnote 19 This physical and spiritual kinship, coupled with a passion for Persian literature, emerge as central identity markers in Dihgan’s autobiographical writings.
Dihgan graduated from the Russian lyceum in Temir-Khan-Shura, where he learned not only Russian but also French. After graduation, he founded a school for Iranian children (Majidiyyih) in Temir-Khan-Shura and taught at two other Iranian schools, Ittihad-i Iran and Nijat-i Iran. During his teaching years, Dihgan also contributed to Turkish-language journals in Baku and participated in the flourishing Azeri theater movement. A cosmopolitan intellectual with a fluid transnational identity, Dihgan was deeply committed to the Persian diaspora and the development of its educational institutions; he also is known for bequeathing his personal library to the Ittihad-i Iran school in Baku. Inspired by late 19th-century Iranian reformism, his educational activities were inseparably linked to his familial identity and the Persianate intellectual tradition.Footnote 20
In his short autobiography, Dihgan recounts that his interest in Marxism and social democracy was ignited by the 1905 Russian Revolution. Like many Iranian social democrats of his generation, he initially joined the Azeri Himmat party (1904) and later became a member of its Iranian section, ʿAdalat, which split from Himmat in 1917. Both Himmat and ʿAdalat were supported by prominent figures of the Caucasian social democratic movement, such as Grigorii Ordzhonikidze and Nariman Narimanov. The involvement of Persian revolutionary youth around these leaders was crucial for their perception of Iran’s revolutionary potential. Dihgan visited Iran for the first time between 1910 and 1911, but little is known about his life between 1911 and 1921. In the early 1920s, he became a member of the Iranian Communist Party (ICP). His political and literary activities included writing for Iranian periodicals such as Raʿd, Sitarih-yi Iran, and Tufan, establishing the first Iranian Workers Union in Tehran, and creating its publication, Haqiqat. He also was interested in Iranian theater. However, his relationships with the ICP and the Workers Union were not always smooth; he soon found himself in conflict with Sayyid Jaʿfar Javadzadah (Parviz), a disagreement that played out in their polemics in Haqiqat. With the establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty and the crackdown by Reza Shah (r. 1925–41) on communists in 1926, Dihgan was arrested but released in 1927. After his release, he abandoned political activities and pursued an administrative career. He was first employed by the Irano-Soviet Bank, serving in various capacities across Iranian cities such as Barforush, Bushehr, Tehran, and Anzali. In 1935, he was hired by the Iranian Department of Cotton Production and was responsible for overseeing cotton cultivation in the North, Hamadan, and Khorramabad. Sayyid Muhammad Dihgan passed away in 1941 at approximately fifty years of age.Footnote 21
In the scholarship concerning the history of the Iranian Left, Dihgan is predominantly remembered as a pioneer of Iranian unionism who played a key role in steering it toward a pro-Soviet revolutionary Marxist path.Footnote 22 However, an examination of Dihgan’s biography reveals that he was not a staunch revolutionary but rather lived as a state functionary who eventually severed ties with the Soviets, abstained from political activities, and remained committed to cultural and educational projects. Dihgan’s primary audience was likely comprised of young, educated, reform-minded Iranians with a focus on social inequalities and progressive politics.Footnote 23 Dihgan’s emphasis on Iran’s spatial and cultural parity with the West resonated with debates in the Iranian parliament regarding the unionist movement, which conservatives dismissed as incompatible with the country’s economic underdevelopment.Footnote 24 The quick dismissal or neglect of Dihgan’s translation by both the ICP and Iranian leftists in the 1930s suggests that his principal audience was not ICP members but rather non-Marxist reform-minded Iranian activists, for whom conversion to Marxism was secondary to their engagement with Iranian politics.Footnote 25 Therefore Dihgan can be considered both an activist translator and a Gramscian organic intellectual, committed to political struggle without aiming to radically challenge the hegemonic cultural discourse.Footnote 26
A closer examination of Dihgan’s writings reveals his unique use of Persian concepts, which aligns neither with the classical Perso-Islamic discourse on justice and governance nor the Eurocentric Marxist narrative on civilizational development. Instead, his work aligns more closely with interwar cosmopolitan Persian nationalism, which integrated ideas of international solidarity with the primacy of Persian civilizational heritage.Footnote 27 In this context, Dihgan’s interpretation of the concept of tamaddun (civilization) warrants particular attention. In his article “In the Midst of Abundant Poverty, We All Remain Untouched by Need” (published in Tufan on 13 February 1922), Dihgan argues that the achievements of the West have their roots in ancient Persian civilization, with today’s Iran as its legitimate heir:
The nation of Iran today is the heir of the new civilization that was left by our ancestors who migrated from this country several thousand years ago and rushed to the western region. If our compatriots are not in a hurry to benefit from it [Iran’s resources] and do not want to enjoy their legitimate rights, it is laziness on their part.Footnote 28
Despite his Marxist views, Dihgan sees no structural obstacles to Iran “catching up” with the rest of the world and achieving prosperity:
If we make an effort and strive to claim our share of the new civilization with the means and tools that have been preserved for us, we can generate enough power and prosperity to be recorded in the annals of history.Footnote 29
Although Dihgan’s claims echo Iranian ontological nationalism, his universalism becomes evident in his statement on human interconnectedness (khānivādih-yi basharī-yi muttaṣil va marbūṭ) and “fabricated differences” (ikhtilāfāt-i sākhtigī):
We are interconnected and related to the rest of the human family by unbreakable bonds, and in no way can we separate our lives from theirs through artificial beliefs and fabricated differences.Footnote 30
Dihgan’s discourse on civilization appears to be a result of the entanglement between the classical Perso-Islamic perspective on civilization, achieved through spiritual improvement (tarbiyat), and Marxist views on primitive classless societies. It also aligns with late Qajar nationalist conceptions of tarbiyat, most notably in the Tarbiyat periodical (1896–1907), which linked modern progress to Iran’s educational and moral traditions.Footnote 31 In his article “History of Socialism,” Dihgan asserts that “the practice of sharing … gradually became the basis of education and civilization” (āʾin-i ishtirāk … raftih asās-i tarbiyat va tamaddun gardīd).”Footnote 32 At the same time, Dihgan uses the metaphor of the Sufi (as darvīsh, or dervish) to describe medieval Christian communities based on collective ownership, stating, “in other words, as the old saying goes, one must be content with little and accept whatever comes with a positive attitude” (bih ʿibārat-i ākharī mīguftand bāyad darvīsh būd va har chih pīsh āyad khush āyad).Footnote 33 Dihgan acknowledges the prominence of the Persian Sufi poetic tradition in Iranian political discourse and stresses the importance of spiritual improvement.
The vernacular aspect of Dihgan’s narrative goes beyond merely adapting Marxism to suit his audience’s tastes; it is part of the late Qajar reform agenda, both protonationalist and cosmopolitan. In the early 19th century, concepts of tamaddun and tarbiyat were associated with a ruler’s ability to use reason (ʿaql) and educate subjects. By the late 19th century, Iranian “mirrors for princes” began linking tamaddun and tarbiyat to the delegation of sovereign power and representative politics.Footnote 34 The mystical and anticlerical connotations inherent in the political concepts adopted by late Qajar reformist thinkers are also present in Dihgan’s comments on humanity’s natural inclination toward socialism. Dihgan envisions progress as characterized by intellectuals’ concern for the poor and efforts to eliminate poverty, making his use of darvīsh and tarbiyat explicitly political rather than solely focused on personal spiritual growth.Footnote 35 Yet, Dihgan’s darvīsh maintains symbolic authority over the intellectual, rooted in the virtue of poverty. Dihgan also employs the literary language of Sufism when asserting that socialism “made everyone fall in love with it with his weary heart.”Footnote 36
Like many other tricontinental Marxists, Dihgan places special emphasis on Marx’s insistence on revolutionary practice, stating, “Rational argumentation gradually lost its former importance and gave way to empirical reasoning” (istidlāl-i ʿaqlī raftih az ahamiyat-i sābiq-i khud kāstih va jā-yi khud rā bih istidlāl-i tajrubī dād).Footnote 37 Beyond Marx’s and Lenin’s advocacy for revolutionary action, Dihgan’s critique of “rational argumentation” (istidlāl-i ʿaqlī) also reflects secular trends in Iranian political writing of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Footnote 38 During the late Qajar era, there was a growing concern about democratizing knowledge, which led to a shift in the meaning of the concept of ʿaql from pious reason acquired through religious education to modern rationality stemming from scientific knowledge. This shift was mirrored in the evolving meaning of the term ʿuqalāʾ (learned men). Whereas in the mid-19th century the term designated the clerical establishment, by the early 20th century, the meaning of ʿāqil expanded to include all intellectuals in the political field, akin to the “intelligentsia.”Footnote 39 Moreover, the 19th-century Qajar discourse on consultation, traditionally limited to the genre of “mirrors for princes,” became a site for negotiating political agency between religious and nonclerical elites, the latter often referred to as “experienced men.” Dihgan’s focus on the contrast between “rational argumentation” and “empirical reasoning” not only contributed to the conceptual transformation of ʿaql but also was interconnected with the broader secularization process, driven by power struggles within Qajar society.
Dihgan further highlights the authenticity and self-consciousness of the Iranian communist movement by affirming its revolutionary potential and genuine engagement with communist ideas, despite their perceived “late” arrival following the 1917 October Revolution. To underscore the grassroots agency of Iranian Marxists in relation to the Soviets, Dihgan recounts in his article “The Importance of Socialism” a story about a visitor who reminded the Bolshevik delegation that “socialism exists in Iran, too.”Footnote 40 Just as Dihgan was eager to incorporate the concerns of the subaltern into his work on historical and theoretical matters, he remained steadfast in asserting Iran’s agency within the global revolutionary movement.
Given the prominent role that modern rationality rooted in experience plays in Dihgan’s work, his use of outwardly religious vocabulary—such as the “sacred word of socialism” (kalāmih-yi muqaddas-i sūsyālīzm) and the “salvation of the workers” (rastākhīz-i ranjbarān)—raises questions about the role of religious categories in early Iranian Marxism.Footnote 41 Although Marxist millenarianism has been extensively discussed in both Middle Eastern and European contexts, the religious concepts used in early communist propaganda and literature have often been separated from their traditional scriptural meanings and functioned as “floating tropes” that could be translated across languages and contexts.Footnote 42 Similarly, Lenin’s references to the Russian “miracle” should not be understood as an acknowledgment of supernatural influences driving the October Revolution.Footnote 43 The study of early Soviet Persian press reveals another function of religious terminology in communist propaganda, namely, the endorsement of subaltern subjectivity. The Soviet Tajik periodical Shuʿlah-yi Inqilāb (1920), run by Iranian communists, made a distinct separation between subaltern, religiously tinged discourse, which appeared in the section “Letters from Our Readers,” and the neutral “scientific” Marxism, conveyed through articles by the editorial team. This approach also mirrored the regional debates during the constitutional movement period regarding the utilization of “low” and “high” language.Footnote 44 The religious language of the subaltern therefore found its way into Soviet propaganda thanks to Persian literati who were committed to the longer project of the creation of a new national Persian language, both modern and anchored in the classical Persian literary heritage.
Dihgan’s trajectory from a Qajar-era reformist milieu to the precarious intellectual life of early Pahlavi Iran illustrates how translation functioned as cultural mediation enabling downplay of the Orientalizing aspects of Marxist literature. His engagement with European socialist thought was filtered through the conceptual and rhetorical resources of the Perso-Islamic tradition, allowing him to negotiate between inherited vocabularies of justice and the emergent lexicon of modern political economy. In this sense, his biography is inseparable from his translation practice: the personal negotiations of exile, repression, and reform mirror the textual negotiations between Persian and Marxist categories. Reading his life alongside his rendering of the Manifesto reveals how translation became a site where broader questions of authority, tradition, and modernity were worked out in early 20th-century Iran.
Spatiotemporal Coevalness in Dihgan’s Translation of the Manifesto
Today the Communist Manifesto remains famous for its Eurocentric and Orientalist affirmation of the subjugation of the “uncivilized” East by the “civilized” West, as well as for its theory of stages of historical development based on Marx’s reading of European history. As the Iranian context did not fit well into the classical Marxist model, it is not surprising that Iranian communists very early became concerned with the prospects of revolutionary movement in such a “backward” non-Western country as Iran.Footnote 45 In July 1908 a group of Iranian revolutionaries from Tabriz wrote a letter to Karl Kautsky to inquire about the relation between the Iranian revolution and European civilization. One part of the Tabriz group argued that the Iranian revolution had nothing “progressive” (mutiraqqī) and was “setting up a barrier on the way of European civilization” (bar sar-i rāh-i tamaddun-i urūpāyī sadd bih pā kunad) by impeding industrial development, whereas the other group esteemed the Iranian revolution as progressive because it aimed at the destruction of a reactionary feudal regime.Footnote 46 The Caucasian revolutionaries from the Russian Empire, actively involved with the Iranian constitutional movement, shared the Iranians’ preoccupation with the economic backwardness of non-Western countries.Footnote 47 It is in this context of general perplexity that the translation of the Communist Manifesto into Persian was initiated by the famous Georgian revolutionary and Soviet statesman Grigorii Ordzhonikidze (d. 1937) between 1909 and 1910.
The first translation of the Manifesto was shaped both by the Russo-Persian linguistic entanglement and Iranian modernist rhetoric. The source text was most probably the 1882 Russian translation of the Manifesto produced by Georgii Plekhanov, a moderate social democrat and Menshevik, who was well respected among Iranian revolutionaries, and with whom they tried to establish correspondence in 1905. Plekhanov’s translation opened with Marx’s introduction on the role of the collectivist culture of Russian peasants in the success of socialist revolution in Russia (a contrast to the younger Marx’s perception of non-Western countries as insufficiently developed for communist revolution), and this framing may have shaped how readers of the Russian version interpreted the Manifesto. Yet, in the later Soviet discussion of different Russian translations of the Manifesto, Plekhanov’s work was criticized for lacking the radically revolutionary tone of the German original and for diminishing the emphasis on class conflict.Footnote 48 Ordzhonikidze might have had access to the first Bolshevik Russian translation of the Manifesto, published by Vorovskii in 1906 and based on Lenin’s terminology, but given its limited circulation it is more probable that Iranian translators chose the famous Plekhanov translation.Footnote 49
As Ordzhonikidze did not know Persian, he entrusted the translation to Abd al-Razzaq Khan Biniyaz, who grew up in Temir-Khan-Shura together with Dihgan and was also close to Talibuv. The lifelong friendship between Biniyaz and the pioneer of Persian literary modernism, Nima Yushij, is indicative of the latter’s proximity to Dihgan, who might have been influenced by Yushij’s ideas on Persian literary modernism as inseparable from the traditional poetic canon.Footnote 50 Unfortunately, the first translation of the Manifesto by Biniyaz has not been found. The first summary of the Manifesto in Persian was published under the title “Iʿlān-i Ishtirākiyat” (The Declaration of Socialism) in 1910 in the journal Irān-i Naw, which was the mouthpiece of the Democrat Party (radical opposition born out of the Constitutional Revolution) and was run by a group of Tabrizi revolutionaries. Dihgan’s translation of the Manifesto, which was most probably based on the work of Biniyaz, was published in the leftist Iranian journal Tufan in Tehran in 1923 under the title Bayaniyih-yi Karl Marks.Footnote 51
Dihgan’s translation appeared soon after the fall of the Iranian Socialist Republic in Gilan, which was preceded by the establishment of the ICP in 1920.Footnote 52 Given the extent of Soviet interference in the creation and development of the Gilan Republic and the ICP, it is quite natural that Iranian Marxists remained dependent on the Bolsheviks for organization and funding. Published in the Bolshevik-sponsored leftist newspaper Tufan, Dihgan’s translation can be seen as part of Soviet cultural diplomacy, but it is unlikely that the idea of translating the Manifesto into Persian came from the Soviets. In August 1923 Georgii Chicherin, Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, wrote to Stalin that there was no need to translate Marxist theory into Persian because of the historical predominance of the poetic genre in the Persianate world:
It should be noted that in Persian conditions there will be very little demand for political or scientific propagandistic literature: in Persia, the most popular religious and philosophical systems have nearly always been clothed in literary and poetic forms.Footnote 53
Meanwhile, the translatability of communist ideology was important to the Iranian opposition as much as the mobilization of masses against the government. The issue of communist terminology was often secondary to the nuances of late Qajar political language, which was dynamically evolving in parallel with the power struggles within Iranian society. For instance, the leader of the Gilan guerilla movement, Mirza Kuchik Khan, was outwardly hostile to the idea of translating soviet (syndicate) as anjuman (committee) because of the widespread negative assessment of the role played by anjumans in the Iranian constitutional movement.Footnote 54 Although some pro-Bolshevik reformist Central Asian literati, such as Abdurauf Fitrat, did not attempt to nativize the concept of the soviet and systematically transliterated it, Iranian intellectuals were keen to make the ideological basis of the communist movement both translatable and part of the existing Iranian political culture.Footnote 55
In this regard, one must note Dihgan’s effort to provide an Iranian perspective on Marx’s most controversial statement about West–East relations: “Just as it [the bourgeoisie] has made the country dependent on the towns, so it has made barbarian and semi-barbarian countries dependent on the civilized ones, nations of peasants on nations of bourgeois, the East on the West.” Dihgan’s translation of this sentence contains a number of ambiguities which reveal his complex reading of concepts such as “dependency” and “civilization.” Whereas the term “civilized” is completely omitted, the term “dependent” is rendered as “subdued” (maqḥūr), which suggests antagonism but not dependency. Western countries are qualified as the masters of the East (mustakhdimīn), a term that obfuscates the assumption of the East’s “backwardness” in Marxist theory and substitutes it with a more ambiguous relationship between the master and the servant. Dihgan consistently translates istismār (exploitation) as istifādah (use), thereby downplaying the structural asymmetry of power relations between the West and the East. He does not fully reject use of such concepts as “barbarian” or “civilization” but employs them in a peculiar manner. Although the term vaḥshī (savage) appears in the translation, more frequent is use of the Persian expression nizhād-hā-yi barbarī (barbarian peoples) which underlines the borrowed nature of this concept.Footnote 56 The entry on barbarī in ʿAli Akbar Dihkhuda’s dictionary, published in the 1930s and 1940s, contains a comparison of the term of barbarī to that of the ʿajam (non-Arab in the Islamic tradition), highlighting the relatively novel, Western origins of this concept.Footnote 57 Finally, whereas in the source text it is stated that “united action, of the leading civilized countries at least, is one of the first conditions for the emancipation of the proletariat,” in Dihgan’s translation the concept of civilization is simply omitted and replaced by the “creation of the spirit of unity among the nations of the world” (ījād-i rūh-i yigānigī biyn-i millal-i ʿālam).Footnote 58
The translatability of Marxist chronospatial concepts of stages of historical development (such as feudalism and capitalism) was another burning issue for Iranian leftists, who were preoccupied with Iran’s lack of well-developed industry. The nativization of “feudalism” and “capitalism” in Dihgan’s translation, rendered as mulūk al-ṭavāyif (kings of the tribes) and sarmāyahdārī (owning of capital), displays both continuity with Qajar historical writing and Dihgan’s radical affirmation of the translatability of the West.Footnote 59 The Persian concepts used to allude to the stages of historical development were not necessarily mutually exclusive and enabled certain ambiguity with regard to the state of Iranian economy. The same can be said about Dihgan’s vernacularization of the concept of proletariat, which simultaneously connected Marxist theory to Iranian political culture. Although Dihgan’s various renderings of the proletariat bear similarity to Plekhanov’s text, revealing the latter’s background in agrarian socialism, they introduce a new dimension to the Manifesto by associating proletariat with neediness and poverty. The term bīchīzān (destitute), used by Dihgan in several instances, echoes classical Perso-Islamic discourse on the well-being of the vulnerable as a criterion of good governance.Footnote 60 Similarly, Dihgan’s rendering of lumpenproletariat (reactionary underclass) as lāt (members of Iranian urban networks who held a monopoly on illegal violence and were notorious for their ties to the senior clergy) was intended not only to delegitimize existing power relations in Qajar society, which claimed to be classless, but also to demonstrate the translatability of Western concepts.Footnote 61
Dihgan uses literary tools to challenge the discourse on Iran’s unpreparedness for revolution that was emanating both from Moscow and Reza Shah’s supporters in 1920s Iran.Footnote 62 He alludes to communism as a hayūlā (monster), emphasizing the force of the communist movement rather than the uncertainty implied by the trope of “specter.” Dihgan also renders Marx’s “specter of communism” as kābūs-i dahshatangīz (terrible nightmare), just as it appears on the Turkic Bolshevik propaganda posters of the early 1920s (Figure 1) and in the first Azeri translation of the Manifesto by Halil Ibrahim published in Baku in 1923. We find the same expression in Plekhanov’s translation (quite naturally contrasting with the later Soviet translations offering a less daunting picture of communism). Translation practices and linguistic entanglements might have shaped Soviet revolutionary propaganda as much as the October Revolution itself.
A specter is haunting Europe—the specter of communism. B. Telingater. Bakinsky Rabochiy (cooperative publishing house). 1920s. Paper, printing, 9 × 19 in. Mardjani Foundation. Taken from Russian Perspectives on Islam, accessed 19 September 2025, https://islamperspectives.org/rpi/items/show/9872.
The transliteration of “communism,” rendered as kumūnīzm in the Persian text of the Manifesto, seems at first glance a claim of the West’s untranslatability. However, this rendition also enables the translator to avoid the term ishtirākiyat, which beginning in the first half of the 19th century was widely used in the Islamic world to translate “socialism” in Islamicate languages.Footnote 63 The term ishtirākiyat also was used by conservative Iranian religious intellectuals who sought to discredit communism by equating it with Mazdakism, the pre-Islamic sectarian movement that not only belonged to the era of “ignorance” (jāhiliyyih) but also was associated with opposition to the Iranian state.Footnote 64 In this context, Dihgan’s use of transliteration can be seen as tactical secularism that differed significantly from later attempts to completely eliminate religion from Persian translations of Marx. Dihgan’s rendition of the Manifesto’s title as Bayaniyih-yi Karl Marks (the declaration of Karl Marx) points to his reluctance to introduce communist ideas to the Iranian public as inherently Western and nontranslatable.
Albeit coopted by the Soviet authorities, the agency of tricontinental anti-imperialist revolutionaries becomes tangible in Dihgan’s translation, which breaches the alleged gap between Western and Eastern intellectual histories. In light of global, regional, and specifically Persian patterns intermingling in Dihgan’s translation, it can in no way be reduced to a mere tool of Soviet propaganda or simple application of the newly established Soviet translation paradigm. Through the employment of Persian literary tropes and concepts Dihgan managed not just to adapt the Manifesto to the taste of his readers but also to make its message more universal by suggesting spatiotemporal contemporaneity between the East and the West.
Dihgan’s Manifesto in Light of Irano-Soviet Canon-Building
Except for Dihgan’s incomplete translation of the Communist Manifesto published in Tufan, no Persian translation of Marx produced before 1951 has survived. Between 1923 and 1951, several endeavors were undertaken to produce and disseminate new translations. Notable attempts came from figures such as Avitis Sultanzadih (Mikailyan), the first head of the ICP; Taqi Irani, the legendary leader of the Marxist revolutionary group of the Fifty-Three; and ʿAbd al-Husayn Nushin, a renowned translator and playwright who became a member of the Tudeh Party following its establishment in 1941 during the joint Anglo-Soviet occupation of Iran.Footnote 65 These early translation attempts lacked significant institutional support from Moscow and ultimately were lost, although it is possible that the authors of the 1951 translation were acquainted with these earlier texts. The 1951 translation was published by the Publishing House of Foreign Language Literature as a result of the Tudeh Party’s initiative, coinciding with the centenary celebration of the Manifesto covered in the Tudeh Party’s official publication, Mardum, in April 1948.Footnote 66 This translation emerged during a transformative period for the Iranian Left, marked by profound structural shifts in the position of Iranian communists both domestically and internationally. Despite Soviet backing and its Marxist orientation, the Tudeh Party did not represent a direct continuation of the ICP; it was conceived as a more inclusive, popular national movement, with its nucleus formed by Iranian leftists who were not necessarily veterans of the ICP.Footnote 67 It was only a decade after the establishment of the Tudeh that the new translation was smuggled into Iran, subsequently reprinted in tens of thousands of copies, and used by party members for propaganda and recruitment purposes.Footnote 68 Following the collapse of the Soviet-backed Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan in 1946, retranslating the Manifesto was a strategy for regaining the prestige of the Tudeh Party, crucial during the years of Prime Minister Musaddiq’s leadership, especially given the tense relations between Musaddiq and the Tudeh.Footnote 69
The Soviet translation policy likely influenced the translation choices applied in the 1951 Persian version of the Communist Manifesto. In the 1930s, Moscow imposed a thorough revision of translations, driven by fears of national movements on the Soviet periphery. Translations into the Islamicate languages of the Soviet Union were particularly targeted, with significant attention given to Perso-Islamic concepts related to religion and kingship in Tajik literature on Marxism.Footnote 70 However, during the Soviet occupation of Iranian Azerbaijan, religion was utilized by Soviet propaganda, and literature in Persian was likely not subjected to the same level of censorship as politically sensitive Tajik literature. Yet, the production of the 1951 translation highlights the Soviet emphasis on soft power and cultural politics following the breakdown of the Democratic Republic of Azerbaijan.Footnote 71 The Pahlavi regime’s increasing hostility toward the Iranian Left and heightened Soviet-US tensions over Iran prompted Moscow to retreat in its propaganda and mobilization activities, endorsing a regional status quo. Although aligned with Chicherin’s emphasis on “cultural” propaganda in Shiʿi cultures, Moscow’s new cultural policy was shaped by increased participation from Iranian intellectuals and Soviet support for “national” Persian narratives.Footnote 72 The Publishing House of Foreign Language Literature in Moscow, a Stalinist successor to the earlier Comintern-run printing organ, maintained a Persian section managed by Iranian literati such as ʿAbd al-Samad Kambakhsh, Mohammad Purhurmuzan, and Ihsan Tabari. This section primarily focused on publishing poetry and fiction, unlike the English section, which published numerous Soviet legal documents and works on Marxist theory during the same period. In his memoirs, Tabari refers to the new translations published in Moscow as “more precise and scientific” (tarjumih-yi daqīq va ʿilmī-yi āsār-i siyāsī), reflecting the Tudeh literati’s views on contemporary language standards and translation techniques.Footnote 73 Despite these “scientific” standards, the 1951 translation was not intended as part of a broader campaign to spread Marxist theoretical literacy in Iran, as evidenced by the activities of the Publishing House of Foreign Language Literature (Izdatel’stvo Literatury na Inostrannykh Iazykakh, or ILnIIa). Discussions centered around the Manifesto were integral to Tudeh propaganda activities, yet often occurred in prisons without access to the Persian translation.Footnote 74 Therefore the publication in Moscow was more of a symbolic gesture, part of a broader Soviet cultural strategy to assert cultural authority. The executors of this policy were Iranian Marxists, direct successors of Qajar literati, intimately connected to the literary and cultural milieu of Pahlavi Iran, especially given the collaboration with Soviets by renowned Iranian writers such as Sadiq Hidayat and Saʿid Nafisi.Footnote 75 The anonymity of the 1951 translation reveals the Soviet quest for cultural dominance and internal Tudeh rivalries concerning translations. For instance, Ihsan Tabari was notably critical of ʿAbd al-Husayn Nushin’s translation efforts, deeming him insufficiently versed in Marxist theory.Footnote 76
Iranian translation logic also was influenced by Pahlavi state policy, although various sociopolitical factors on a broader regional scale also played a vital role in shaping the Pahlavi translation ethos. Calls to modernize the Persian language through the adoption of Western scientific terms were made by intellectuals in the 1930s not only in Iran but also in Afghanistan, following the broader modernization trend in the Middle East. At the same time, a transnational Persianate discourse on literary history, marked by an obsession with monolingualism and pure origins, led to what Aria Fani describes as a “heightened awareness toward translation.”Footnote 77 In this context, Iranian translators assumed the role of mediators between Iranian society and global modernity. They were more interested in “serious literary works” and sought to distance themselves from Qajar translation patterns, often retranslating works initially translated by Qajar translators. In the 1940s, Iran saw an “explosion” of translations, with the decades of the Cold War marked by a significant increase in translations from Russian and English.Footnote 78
Caught between the capitalist and socialist blocs in the intense cultural competition of the Cold War, Iranian translators during the Pahlavi period leveraged retranslation to carve out a unique Iranian path to modernity and enhance their own symbolic capital. Beyond ideological differences, the print market competition was particularly fierce, as poets and writers, each commanding a significant audience, played a leading role in a Pahlavi translation “fever.”Footnote 79 Post–World War II global modernity was to a great degree linked to imitation of Western consumer societies, leading Iranian literary modernism to advocate for a break from traditional Perso-Islamic culture and to emulate modern Western literature. Although various attitudes to Persian classical heritage were present within the new poetry (shiʿr-i naw) movement, one of its distinct trends was a movement away from the Persian past. The secularization of Persian literary language accompanied the hegemony of linear temporalities implied by the emphasis on progress (often equated with Westernization) and the perceived decline of the “old” Perso-Islamic world.
The 1951 Persian translation of the Communist Manifesto aligns with the broader trend of using positivist, secular, and Eurocentric language. This translation includes Engels’ comments on Samuel Moore’s 1888 English translation of the Manifesto from German, ignoring the nuances of translation approaches in non-Western languages. As a retranslation, it aimed to discard earlier translation methods and establish a new canon, both literary and ideological. A comparative reading of the 1923 and 1951 translations provides insight into the paths not taken by the ICP but implicitly present in the collective identities of the Iranian Left. The difference in temporal regimes between these translations is particularly revealing in their respective visions of the past.
In the 1951 translation, terms like zavāl (decline) frequently describe degeneration or gradual decline, as seen in expressions like “the old world was in the grip of decline” (dunyā-yi qadīm dar dast-i zavāl būd), “decline of the old thought” (zavāl-i afkār-i kuhan), or “decline of the old living conditions” (zavāl-i sharāyiṭ-i kuhan).Footnote 80 These expressions suggest a deterministic perspective on societal change, indicating a move away from traditional structures and ideologies. In contrast, the German original uses the term decline (Untergehen) only once, suggesting a more nuanced view that does not necessarily frame societal changes as mere degeneration. Dihgan’s translation, however, omits the term zavāl entirely, opting instead for terms like destruction and annihilation caused by external forces (inhidām, az miyān bardāshtih shudan).Footnote 81 This choice may convey a belief in active forces of destruction rather than passive decline, suggesting an external impetus for change instead of an inherent flaw in existing systems. By favoring stronger connotations of destruction and external agency, Dihgan’s translation aligns with a broader narrative of resistance against oppressive structures, highlighting a transformative agenda rather than a mere acknowledgment of decline.
Conversely, the concept of taraqqī (progress) appears rarely in the 1951 translation but is prevalent in Dihgan’s text. Whereas Marx uses “progress” (Fortschritt) to discuss political advancements brought on by the formation of the bourgeoisie and industrial progress, Dihgan employs taraqqī to indicate simultaneous quantitative and qualitative improvement. This also aligns with the Koselleckian definition of progress as a collective singular that integrates various types of progress into a “singular historical movement with a collective, universal subject.”Footnote 82 The 1951 translation replaces progress (taraqqī) with terms like growth (rushd) or completion (takāmul), along with its singular mention of taraqqī as unattainable for the worker. This offers a more elitist interpretation of progress, perhaps applicable only to the context of the USSR and Tudeh’s party program, rather than the recent past.Footnote 83
The 1951 translation of the Communist Manifesto emphasizes a temporal rupture, highlighting the difference between the old and the new. Although Marx extensively used the concept of modern, various translations of “modern” into Persian reveal the translator’s conceptualization of historical time and modernity. Dihgan translated modern as kunūnī (current), implying an inclusive present, whereas the 1951 Manifesto uses the term nuvīn (new) in opposition to kuhan (ragged, obsolete), underscoring the idea of a break between past and present and suggesting chronospatial exclusion of Iran.Footnote 84 Unlike Dihgan’s view of time as a feature of a specific social reality, described with terms like “its own time” (zamān-i khūd) and “forthcoming world” (ʿalam-i ātiyih), the 1951 Manifesto highlights the tension within the abstract binary of past/future (guzashtih/āyandih).Footnote 85 Dihgan’s translation appears closer to the modernist cyclical vision of time and the multiple temporalities found in the Perso-Islamic literary tradition than to the modern Western model of linear time.Footnote 86
In the 1951 translation, the translator’s avoidance of the possibility of Muslim unity and emphasis on the spatial distinctness and confinement of the modern state support a nationalist tone. The passage concerning political and economic centralization brought by capitalism reads “one united nation (yik millat-i vāḥid), one united government, one united judiciary, and one united customs regime” in the post–World War II Persian target text, with the term vāḥid (united) underlined.Footnote 87 Absent from Dihgan’s translation, the emphasis on spatial confinement aligns with the Tudeh Party’s reluctance to support minority independence projects following the collapse of the Republic of Azerbaijan in 1946, as well as a broader exclusionary pattern. This is similarly reflected in the use of Western terminology concerning stages of economic development (feudal, capitalist) and social structures (proletariat, bourgeoisie), thereby marginalizing the non-Western, nonindustrialized Other.
In contrast to the Tudeh version of the Communist Manifesto, Dihgan’s translation accommodates the traditional Iranian political and social model implicit in classical Persian literary language. The centrality of the divinely sanctioned ruler, typical of the Perso-Islamic political tradition, is reflected in Dihgan’s translation choices. In the 1951 version, Dihgan’s term salṭanat-i mashrūḥih (conditional rule) is replaced with dawlat-i intikhābī (electoral state), and darbāryān (courtiers) is replaced with ashrāfiyat (nobility).Footnote 88 However, there is no indication in Dihgan’s body of work that he favored monarchy; rather, his engagement with traditional sociopolitical concepts reflects their dynamic evolution and change in meaning by the 1920s. The expressions employed by Dihgan prominently feature in the list of “new” terms from the constitutional period, which was compiled by Qajar prince ʿAyn al-Saltanah shortly after the Revolution of 1906.Footnote 89 In this regard, Dihgan’s treatment of concepts like class and equality is connected to broader Qajar intellectual history, which was shaped by both existing rhetorical patterns and encounters with Western modernity. The expression taẓād-i tabaqātī (class conflict) appears in both translations, yet Dihgan also renders “class conflict” as ʿadam-i tasāvī bayn-i tabaqāt (absence of equality between social classes), echoing the classical Perso-Islamic discourse on the necessity of equal and just treatment of different social classes by the ruler.Footnote 90 This discourse laid the foundation for Qajar reformists’ claims for social and political equality (musāvāt). The 1951 translation opts for more general, homogenizing terms to describe society, such as ijtimā‘ī (social), hamigānī (public), and ittiḥād (unity). In contrast, Dihgan prioritizes the concept of ʿumūmī, which reflects the khāṣṣ/‘ām (privileged/common) binary in traditional governance discourse. The term ʿumūmī, linked to the idea of universalism on a larger scale in the Middle East since the mid-19th century, conveyed multiple meanings, including democratization and emancipation. However, these meanings were lost to late 20th-century readers due to language transformations driven by state policy.
The 1951 translation of the Communist Manifesto markedly differs from Dihgan’s version in its treatment of religiously influenced concepts. Whereas Dihgan frequently addresses morality using Perso-Islamic concepts such as adab (proper aesthetic and ethical form), tarbiyat (education), and maʿnaviyat (morality) when discussing intellectuals, the newer translation refers exclusively to writing and educating as occupations, stripping away the moral significance.Footnote 91 Dihgan also preserves the connection between spirituality and absence of property by mentioning the beggar (gidā), a figure closely associated with Sufism, whereas the newer translation solely focuses on workers.Footnote 92 Dihgan’s association of the impoverished proletariat with beggars is particularly significant when situated within the context of the evolution of Qajar literature on governance, in which reform and change were often articulated through an ambiguous Sufi idiom.Footnote 93 Within these discourses, the king was depicted as bound by a moral duty to heed the counsel of the Sufi sage, figured as “needy dervish” (darvīsh-i muḥtāj), whose spiritual authority ultimately superseded that of the monarch. The figure of the darvīsh also functioned as a metaphor for the king’s poorest subject, embodying both material deprivation and moral superiority within the political order.Footnote 94 This intertwining of ideas suggests that the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat became entangled with the authority of the Sufi sage, leveraging the ambiguous meaning of poverty in early 20th-century Iran. Notwithstanding Dihgan’s intentions and perceptions of religion, his translation choices reflect a broader semantic field surrounding poverty, justice, and political legitimacy. It is unlikely that Dihgan intentionally positioned workers as Sufis; rather, his embrace of the Perso-Islamic lexical field facilitated the emergence of a secular Muslim Marxism in which popular religiosity did not obstruct learning and development.
Comparing Dihgan’s text with the 1951 literal translation, we see Dihgan employing classical Perso-Islamic terminology like salṭanat (rule), ẓulm (tyranny), and istibdād (despotism) to describe asymmetrical power relations. For example, Dihgan’s translation uses saltanat-i istibdādī (tyrannical rule), which is replaced by salṭanat-i mutlaqih (absolute rule) in 1951, and fishār-i ẓālimānih (tyrannical pressure), which becomes sharāyiṭ-i sirvāzh (conditions of serfdom).Footnote 95 The concepts of ẓulm and istibdād are central to the Islamic discourse on the divinely sanctioned “just ruler,” and Dihgan’s translation choices reflect his emphasis on justice (rather than freedom, as in the original text) in his interpretation of the Manifesto. Footnote 96 Although these concepts still appear in the 1951 translation, their usage is considerably less frequent, and the political vocabulary is largely stripped of religious connotations, contrasting with the terminology employed by staunchly anticommunist Iranian “theist socialists,” such as Muhammad Nakhshab, in the late 1940s. The emergence of this new intellectual current, later championed by figures such as Mahmud Taliqani, ʿAli Shariati, and Mahdi Bazargan, likely contributed to shaping the identity of postwar Iranian Marxists as unconditionally materialist, addressing poverty through the lens of class conflict. Once again, the internal dynamics of Iranian intellectual life overshadowed Soviet ambitions to engage a wider audience.
Conclusion
The early history of the Iranian communist movement is often recounted from non-Iranian perspectives, typically portraying it as a prime example of Bolshevik expansionism. However, examining Iranian Marxism through the lens of language, particularly through Persian translations of Marxist classics, offers an opportunity to reassess the unique characteristics of the Iranian Left. The work of Muhammad Dihgan, who produced the first Persian translation of the Communist Manifesto, exemplifies a late Qajar approach to translation that was based on the principle of translatability of the West and prioritized engagement with local political debates. Inherently linked to the latest developments in Persian literature, Dihgan’s translation showcases late Qajar internationalism. As part of Persian merchant networks and a representative of cosmopolitan Persian literary culture, Dihgan sought to establish a temporal coevalness between the West and the East, effectively rejecting the temporalization of cultural difference. His interpretation of Western discourses on civilization and barbarity enables a broader understanding of civilization, one not confined to Western notions of cultural and racial hierarchies.
In contrast, the 1951 translation’s erasure of Iran’s Islamic past echoed the efforts by late Pahlavi intellectuals to establish a distinctly secular aesthetic, marked by a rupture with Iran’s literary and religious heritage. What emerged was not simply a Persian rendering of Marx and Engels, but a reconfiguration of the intellectual space of the Iranian Left. The 1951 translation’s emphasis on rupture, linearity, and national space mirrored both Soviet cultural politics and the Pahlavi regime’s modernist agenda, producing an unlikely convergence between state-sanctioned literary modernism and communist discourse. Whereas Dihgan’s translation had gestured toward universalist horizons and drawn on the conceptual resources of Islamic political thought, the Tudeh-sponsored version subordinated Marxist vocabulary to a secular-nationalist framework that foreclosed such resonances.
The comparison therefore illuminates the stakes of translation in mid-20th-century Iran: translation was not merely linguistic transfer, but a practice of ideological boundary-making that defined what counted as modern, secular, and revolutionary. By erasing Islamic vocabularies of justice and universalism, the 1951 Manifesto sought to claim Marxism as part of a new secular canon aligned with both Soviet authority and Iranian literary modernism. At the same time, the persistence of alternative voices in poetry, “theist socialism,” and the memory of earlier translations suggests that this secularized trajectory was never uncontested, but rather one of several competing paths through which Iranians sought to articulate their place in global modernity.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my heartfelt gratitude to Einar Wigen, Mary Elston, and Samad Alavi for their insightful comments and constructive feedback on earlier versions of this article. I also extend my thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions.
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