Rethinking History: Traditional Forms and Modern Contents

The year 1404 Hijri-Shamsi (HS) (2025) marks the 100th anniversary of the Hijri-Shamsi calendar’s nationalization, legislated by Iran’s Fifth Parliament in 1925. Historians of modern Iran often frame this as a new reform and interpret it as a secularizing measure. I suggest, however, that this moment should be understood as the completion of gradual reforms to the Jalali calendar beginning in the 1860s, particularly the introduction of the solar Hijri-Shamsi calendar in 1301H/1263HS (1884) by Abd al-Ghaffar Najm al-Mulk (d. 1908) in his pocket calendar, or vaqt-nāmah (time-report). While some historians contextualize the 1925 legislation within earlier reform debates in the Second Majlis (1910), they too interpret it as a secularizing process. Yet beyond these two legislative acts, there is little historical explanation for the original adoption of a calendar that combines a Hijri-Islamic epoch with ancient Persian month names. This presentation challenges the secular narrative and argues that the obscurity surrounding the calendar’s nineteenth-century developments is partly due to the continuity of traditional forms of knowledge production, forms often dismissed as incapable of facilitating modern changes, yet which in fact functioned as vehicles of modernity by enabling the incorporation of new contents. Drawing on Iranian archival materials, I revisit the history of the Hijri-Shamsi calendar and examine the calendar itself as vital, yet overlooked, archival material.

Bio: