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| First wave of executions of revolutionaries and citizens of Tabriz by Russian forces during their occupation of the city (30 April 1909 – 28 February 1918). |
On the anniversary of the Constitutional Revolution, perhaps it is better to listen not to the official narratives but to the traces buried in everyday life; from the time when the idea of constitutionalism and the notions of law, justice, freedom, and rights first found their way into people’s speech, to today—when women, minorities, environmental defenders, and others have entered the arena with new languages—something has been in the making: emerging subjects who, in the midst of closures, have given birth to new meanings of politics in tune with their own times.
These subjects are not merely the products of suffering; they carry a kind of creativity and embody signs of resistance. They have shown that even through the narrowest cracks, one can imagine a future. Subjects who, time and again, have tried to create a disruption in the existing order—even through the smallest fissures of the official system—and each disruption, however fleeting or minor, has been an opening to reread the past and to imagine a future whose continuation, for many of us, could not even stretch into tomorrow.
These ruptures do not chart a clear path for the future, but they do reveal that the present condition is not our inevitable destiny. If the language of the Constitutional Revolution was the language of law, the new subjects over the past hundred years have spoken in other languages: sometimes through silence, sometimes through refusal, sometimes with the body, and sometimes by dismantling the official language itself. These languages, though marginalized and denied, have always managed to fracture reality.
A brief reflection on the anniversary of the Constitutional Revolution is neither a yearning to return to the past, nor a confident sketch of a leap into the future. It is about a fold, as if the past has wrinkled within the present in order to split open the moment of now. Even today, a woman in a village speaks out against domestic violence, a student in a small town writes about the right to equal education, a miner cries out through his exhausted body, and a minority on the margins endures every hardship for its denied identity. These are not simple events. They are all extensions of a foundational idea—but embodied in a different form, not in the frame of constitutionalism, but in the frame of redefined meaning.
Keywords: Iranian Constitutional Revolution, Resistance, Subjects, Language, Justice, Power, Struggles, Future