انقلاب

What it means

انقلاب (enqelâb) means revolution. From the Arabic root ق ل ب (q-l-b) “to turn over,” so literally “the turning upside down.” The word covers political revolution, social upheaval, and any sudden total change.

In Iranian speech, انقلاب without further qualifier defaults to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Iranians say قبل از انقلاب (qabl az enqelâb) “before the revolution” or بعد از انقلاب (ba’d az enqelâb) “after the revolution” the way Europeans say “before the war,” and everyone knows which one. Other revolutions have to be specified.

How to use it

• انقلاب اسلامی (enqelâb-e eslâmi) “the Islamic Revolution” (1979)
• انقلاب مشروطه (enqelâb-e mashruteh) “the Constitutional Revolution” (1906, Iran’s first constitutional movement)
• انقلاب سفید (enqelâb-e sefid) “the White Revolution” (the Shah’s 1963 reform program)
• قبل از انقلاب (qabl az enqelâb) “before the revolution” (always means before 1979)
• انقلاب فرهنگی (enqelâb-e farhangi) “the Cultural Revolution” (the 1980-83 closure of universities)
• سال انقلاب (sâl-e enqelâb) “the year of the revolution” (always 1357 in the Iranian calendar, 1979)

In Iranian thought

The word has split families. For some Iranians, انقلاب means liberation from the Shah’s autocracy. For others it means the start of the country’s long catastrophe. Iranian dinner tables can fall silent over the word, and diaspora friendships can be calibrated by which version of “before” and “after” the speaker carries.

The 1906 انقلاب مشروطه is the one historians point to as the foundational moment of modern Iran: the first Middle Eastern country to demand a constitution and a parliament. The 1963 انقلاب سفید was the Shah’s top-down land reform plus women’s suffrage. The 2022 protest movement was deliberately not called انقلاب by its participants, who preferred جنبش (jonbesh) “movement,” because انقلاب in modern Iranian ears is a word that has been used and misused too many times to use lightly.

Diaspora Iranians born after 1979 sometimes find the word’s gravity strange. To grandparents in Los Angeles the word still names the cataclysm. To grandchildren the word names a history class topic. The slow shift in feel as the word passes through generations is one of the quiet stories of Iranian language outside Iran. A diaspora kid who learns انقلاب from a textbook and a grandparent who lived through انقلاب in 1357 are using the same five letters to point at very different things.

Related words

• جنبش (jonbesh) “movement” (a softer word for political mobilization)
• قیام (qiyâm) “uprising”
• اصلاحات (eslâhât) “reforms”
• براندازی (bar-andâzi) “overthrow”
• شورش (shuresh) “riot, revolt” (more chaotic, less organized than enqelâb)

References

• Dehkhoda
• Vajehyab