Iran’s Battle for Reform Began Long Before 1979

Mirza Malkam Khan believed Iran could embrace reason, law, and liberty before the world was ready to listen

In the long and winding history of Iran, few figures stand out as boldly and tragically as Mirza Malkam Khan. Born in 1833 to an Armenian Christian family in the heart of Isfahan, Malkam Khan would grow up to become one of the most daring reformers in modern Iranian history. He envisioned a nation governed not by whim and dynasty, but by reason, law, and merit—a vision so radical in 19th-century Persia that it would ultimately cost him his homeland and his place at court.

Yet his ideas, first dismissed as foreign and subversive, would come to define the intellectual architecture of modern Iranian political thought. Malkam Khan didn’t just attempt reform; he tried to bring the Enlightenment itself to Iran.

As a young man, Malkam Khan was sent abroad by the Qajar state to study in Europe, a rare privilege for an Iranian at the time. In Paris and elsewhere, he immersed himself in the works of Voltaire, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. What he saw in Europe—a continent undergoing scientific, industrial, and political revolutions—stood in stark contrast to the stagnation and corruption he knew back home.

Returning to Iran with the zeal of a convert, he joined the court of Naser al-Din Shah Qajar, a ruler torn between curiosity about the West and loyalty to the traditions that sustained his power. Malkam Khan became one of the Shah’s most trusted advisers, and with urgency and eloquence, he laid out a bold plan for national renewal: a centralized bureaucracy, a modern legal system, secular education, and, above all, a constitution to restrain royal authority and uphold the rule of law.

At first, the Shah entertained these proposals. But power does not relinquish itself easily. Malkam Khan’s dreams of reform ran up against the entrenched interests of the court, the clergy, and the aristocracy. In 1861, after a dispute over his reformist leanings, he was exiled to Baghdad.

But exile only sharpened his resolve.

Malkam Khan’s most subversive act wasn’t in the palace—it was in print. From exile in London, he began publishing Qanun (The Law), a clandestine newspaper that would become the lifeblood of Iran’s nascent reform movement. Smuggled into Iran and passed hand to hand, Qanun was unlike anything the Persian public had seen prior: fearless, modern, and brimming with Enlightenment ideals.

In its pages, Malkam Khan denounced royal despotism, clerical corruption, and foreign exploitation. He offered Iranians an alternative vision of rights, representative government, and dignity. He was the first Iranian intellectual to give political modernity a distinctly Persian voice, blending the language of Rousseau with the rhythms of classical Persian rhetoric.

For the first time, Iranians were not merely subjects of the Shah. They were citizens-in-waiting.

Malkam Khan understood that to succeed, reform needed more than good ideas—it needed allies. Initially wary of Iran’s powerful clergy, he came to see that enduring change required engagement with religious leaders, not confrontation. His genius lay in reframing Enlightenment concepts, such as the rule of law and the social contract, as compatible with Islamic principles. In doing so, he planted the seeds for a distinctly Iranian modernity, one that could draw from both faith and reason.

This was no easy balancing act. The same clerics he tried to engage often saw him as a heretic. Meanwhile, the royalists viewed him as a traitor. Still, his ideas took root. By the early 20th century, they would bloom into revolution.

Mirza Malkam Khan died in 1908, two years after the Persian Constitutional Revolution brought Iran its first parliament and constitution, reforms he had spent a lifetime championing. But he did not live to see a stable, democratic Iran. The revolution was soon crushed by royalist and foreign forces. The decades that followed would see cycles of hope and repression, constitutionalism and coups, progress and theocracy.

Yet Malkam Khan’s legacy endured. Every Iranian intellectual who has since argued for freedom, reform, and a government of laws rather than of men is walking the path he set out on.

To call Malkam Khan merely a reformer is to underestimate the scale of his ambition. He was a prophet of progress in a land bound by tradition. He introduced not just policies, but a worldview, smuggling Enlightenment values into a society that had no capacity for them yet.

He failed, as prophets often do. But his failure was noble, and it was not in vain. In the face of tyranny, he insisted that dangerous, heretical, and luminous ideas can change history. And for a moment, they did.

Iran today remains a battleground between autocracy and aspiration. But the struggle for a freer future did not begin with the Green Movement or the Islamic Revolution—it began with a man in exile publishing a newspaper and daring to imagine a country ruled by law, not fear.

Malkam Khan tried to bring the Enlightenment to Iran. The question is whether his descendants will finish the work he began.

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