5 - A Shirazi Shares His Travelogues

Summary

In Chapter 5, “A Shirazi Shares His Travelogues,” I follow Mirza Saleh Shirazi’s Safar-Nameh (1815). Perhaps the most influential public intellectual of his time, Mirza Saleh Shirazi began his career as a courtier with the reformist Qajar prince Abbas Mirza, by whose royal decree he managed to travel to Europe, write one of the most influential travelogues of his time, and bring back one of the earliest printing machines to his homeland, with which to publish the very first widely circulated newspaper in his country, Kaghaz-e Akhbar. What is peculiar to Mirza Saleh Shirazi and his travel narrative is his pioneering work in helping the formation of a public sphere in his homeland. Simplification of Persian prose, introduction of the printing machine, description of modern social institutions such as parliamentary democracy and the social functions of media, and undertaking the publication of a newspaper in his homeland all come together to mark Mirza Saleh as definitive to the making of an Iranian (Persian-speaking) public sphere, upon which he or anyone else could claim to be a “public intellectual.”