Literature in the Service of Monolingualism: Turkophobia in Modernist Persian Poetry

with Leila Rahimi Bahmany

The published monograph Azeri Turkish Narratives in 20th-Century Iran: Resisting Monolingualism, exposes how modern Iranian intellectuals, especially the Berlin Circle, adopted a monolingual ideology—one language, one state—in 20th-century Iran. In this presentation, I show how modern Persian poetry became a tool of nationalist monolingualism, casting Persian as Iran’s sole legitimate language while pathologising and deterritorialising Turkish. I reveal how leading literary figures—Abolqāsem ʿĀref Qazvīnī and Moḥammad-Taqī Bahār, among others—used their literary influence to marginalise other languages and construct Persian linguistic exclusivity as essential to Iranian identity. (Image courtesy: Wikimedia – ‘Aref Qazvini (postcard))

About the speaker:

Leila Rahimi Bahmany is currently a guest professor of Iranian Studies at the Institute of Near and Middle East at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU). She specialises in modern Persian literature, Azeri Turkish literature of Iran, literary feminism, and comparative literature. Her debut monograph, Mirrors of Entrapment and Emancipation: Forugh Farrokhzad and Sylvia Plath (Leiden University Press, 2015), was the recipient of the Latifeh Yarshater Award (2016). Her second monograph, Azeri Turkish Narratives in TwentiethCentury Iran: Resisting Monolingualism (Edinburgh University Press, 2025), explores how monolingualism, centralism and linguistic marginalisation operate through memory narratives that challenge and subvert official, centre-generated historical accounts.