Iran’s Curiosity in Davar’s Clairvoyance
Once upon a time, Iran had one of the most sophisticated legal systems in the Middle East and for a time the institution of the Judiciary accommodated modernity and Islam. Today, as Iran ushers in an ultra-conservative judge and cleric as her new leader, I find more and more stories appearing online about a pragmatic systems reformer of some one hundred years ago.
I was named Iran Davar Ardalan in memory of Ali Akbar Davar, my paternal great grandfather. As one of Iran’s earliest legal reformers, Davar dismantled and reorganized the Ministry of Justice in 1927 that was primarily run by clergy and the laws of Islam. He envisioned an Iran based on modern laws and a system of justice based on human rights. He did away with harsh punishments, including stoning and lashing which mostly victimized women.
It’s stunning to see the number of articles, papers, films and books written about Davar showing up on the internet. It’s as though there is a longing to know about this past.
Alan Eyre, the US State Department’s first Persian-language spokesperson, once told me that Davar was one of his heroes.
Davar was first a journalist before he became a politician. He was the editor of a nationalist newspaper called Mard-e-Azad, or “Free Man.” He later traveled to Switzerland to study law. It was this immersion in the legal systems of Europe that convinced him that Iran needed a massive reform of its code of justice if it was to enter the modern age.
Davar was appointed Minister of Justice by Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1927. Between 1927 and 1932, Davar shut down the ministry to rewrite Iran’s legal code from top to bottom. Prior to this, it was the clerics who administered justice in Iran. Davar felt the conservative clergy were holding Iran back from modernization. His penal code included elements of European secular and Islamic law and his modernized justice system was administered, for the most part, by state-appointed judges with training in non-Sharia law.
His pragmatic reforms in law and later in the area of commerce, helped usher Iran into the modern age. In the December 2020 book, Mapping the Role of Intellectuals in Iranian Modern and Contemporary History, by Ramin Jahanbegloo — the scholar Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Director of the School of Public and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, writes that Davar founded Iran’s Business School (Madrasa-ye-Tejarat) in 1926. In 1932, he laid the foundations for Iran’s chamber of commerce. In 1933, he led the Iranian delegation to the League of Nations and defended Iran against the Anglo-Persian Oil Company.
Many of Davar’s legal reforms were dismantled or abandoned after the 1979 Islamic revolution but his name still appears on a street next to the ministries of justice and finance in Iran today.
In October 2003, after I learned that human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi had won the Nobel Peace Prize, I began to research the connection between my family and Iran’s long struggle for a lawful society. At the time, an Iranian scholar noted, “The questions of the rule of law, the relationship between secular and religious law and concerns about due process have been the main preoccupations of many lawyers, judges and law professors in Iran.”
In 2004, I co-produced a three-part NPR series and an American Radioworks documentary called, My Name is Iran where I traced the history of Iran’s struggle for a lawful society from Ebadi to the time of Davar.
Inside Iran’s courtrooms, lawyers like Ebadi fought for change. They demanded a reinterpretation of Islamic law that nurtured freedom of expression and fair and just laws. Through the years, they were successful in raising the age of marriage for girls from nine to 13 and divorced women can have custody of male children up to the age of seven. But they are always confronted by hard-line clerics who are adamant that the legal system remains based on their interpretation of the word of God.
The late, Jahangir Amuzegar, a distinguished economist, former Executive Director of the International Monetary Fund and Iran’s former Minister of Commerce and Finance was one of those who shared his insights with me on Davar’s contributions to modern Iran, “By taking civil and penal trials away from poorly educated and frequently corrupt local clergy, and placing them in the hands of modernly trained lawyers and judges in a properly structured court system, Davar gave Iran a recognized status among civilized nations,” Amuzegar said.
On Davar’s economic reform Amuzegar said, “Davar’s truly outstanding, albeit insufficiently recognized, claim to fame, lies in his unique role as the initiator and guarantor of Iran’s post-1930 economic development. By enabling the parliament to pass the Documents and Properties Registry Act of 1932, he helped establish, for the first time in Iran’s modern history, a clear recognition of private property rights –as the cornerstone of all private investments and economic growth.”
Amuzegar said the formal and official registration, and national recognition, of private property ownership by the central government put an end to the endless disputes among various claimants to the ownership of a given property, each presenting a special private deed signed and endorsed by a local cleric — thus putting the true ownership in limbo for ever. The clarity and certainty of recognized ownership under the new statute thus acted as the sine qua non of all subsequent economic developments in Iran.
“The country’s pre-1979 remarkable economic development owes greatly to Davar’s sagacity and clairvoyance,” Amuzegar added.
Might Iran one day embrace Ali Akbar Davar’s reforms once again?
