Angel of mercy: a Persian reading of Lenin

Abstract

This article examines how the international is imagined from a subaltern viewpoint through Abolqasem Aref Qazvini’s poem ‘O Lenin, O Angel of Mercy’. Written during a period of intense imperial pressure and national despair in early 20th-century Iran, it transfigures the materialist Bolshevik leader into a metaphysical saviour within a sacred Persian cosmology. Using a contrapuntal methodology, the reading treats poetry as an alternative archive to challenge dominant assumptions in international relations. The analysis shows a ‘paradoxical coexistence’ of symbolic orders, where Qazvini grounds revolutionary politics in Islamic tradition by addressing Lenin as a fereshte-ye rahmat (‘angel of mercy’) and identifying Bolshevism with Khidr (‘the hidden guide’). Through this linguistic reconstruction, security emerges as a relational and ethical condition rather than Westphalian territorial sovereignty. The article suggests that Constitutional Era Iran (1905–11), amid struggles against estebdād-e dākhelī (‘domestic despotism’) and estemār-e khārejī (‘foreign colonialism’), developed a pluriversal orientation and creatively transformed Western political thought through its own imaginative resources. By centring the Persian tongue, the article shows how indigenous linguistic and literary registers recover lived experiences of global history and solidarity often overlooked by scholarship focused exclusively on Eurocentric frameworks.