Essay into the Progressive "Experience" of Mirza Yusuf Khan Mostashar al-Dowleh

Yousuf Khan Mostashar al-Dowleh is one of the most important and effective progressivists in the Qajar era. His treatise titled A Word, in spite of concision, has an important role in the constitutional thought during the Nasirid period and the Persian Constitutional Movement. A significant part of modernist view on the law in contemporary Iran is derived from the “status” of Mostashar al-Dowleh as the one of the main constitutionalists who is standing in the crucial place. This Article, by viewing the “Introduction” of A Word as the locus in which the spirit of the work is mentioned, situates the treatise in its modernist context and thereby attempts to show that Mostashar al-Dowleh’s position is completely modern from the law point of view and that is the case in spite of his emphasizing on the traditional “considerations”. We will try to do this by showing that he principally accepts the modernity and then he treats tradition but not vice versa. Therefore, we can consider him as a founder and not as a merely modernist intellectual. Considering this “status”, this article reread A Word and its introduction as a monument struggle to institute “the law” aimed to institutionalization of the government and legalization of the society.