Mirza Malkam Khan

Mirza Malkam Khan (1833–1908), born Hovsep Melkumyan at New Julfa, Isfahan, was an Iranian modernist writer, diplomat and publicist, founder of the Freemason-like Faramushkhaneh and of the newspaper Qanun, and the most influential Persian advocate of government by law in his century. ^{1 2}

His birth year is split: the Persian article and Wikidata give 1833, the English article 1834. His personal religion is contested in the sources — an Armenian Christian family, a documented profession of Islam whose sincerity the scholarship doubts — and the record states both directions in its data note rather than settling it. ^{2 1}

He was born in 1248 AH/1833 CE in the town of Julfa — New Julfa, the Armenian quarter of Isfahan — son of Mirza Ya'qub, a stone-cutter who, in the Persian article's words, was "one of the Armenians of Julfa who turned to Islam" and who served as translator at the Russian embassy in Tehran. The boy was educated at the Samuel Muradian school in Paris from 1843 to 1851, returned to Iran and entered government service, and in 1852 was appointed instructor — the Persian article says of arithmetic and geometry — at the newly founded Dar ol-Fonun polytechnic in Tehran. ^{1 2}

In 1857 he went to Paris on diplomatic service. In 1859 he introduced into Iran societies modelled on the Freemasons — the Faramushkhaneh, the "House of Oblivion", intended to school a reforming elite — and in 1862 Naser al-Din Shah exiled him for it; the Persian article adds an arrest and exile to Iraq before a pardon mediated by Mirza Hosayn Khan Sepahsalar and an embassy to Egypt. Pardoned, he was posted to the embassy in Constantinople, where in 1864 he married the daughter of Arakel, a prominent Armenian, with the ceremony in an Armenian church. ^{1 2}

He returned to Tehran in 1872 as assistant to Grand Vizier Mirza Hosayn Khan Moshir od-Dowleh and became chief of the Persian legation in London, later ambassador, holding the post until 1888 and losing it in 1889 over the scandal of selling a cancelled lottery concession; the Persian article also recounts the Reuter concession affair and a forty-thousand-pound bribe allegation that cost him the Shah's favour for good. From London he attacked the Shah and the government in his newspaper Qanun (Law), first issued in 1890, banned in Iran yet read by the Shah and his ministers; its readers, the Persian article notes, were largely Dar ol-Fonun graduates, and among his collaborators was Sayyid Jamal al-Din Asadabadi. ^{1 2}

He also campaigned for reform of the Persian script, devising a disjointed alphabet easy to typeset and printing several books in it, in concert with his friend Mirza Fatali Akhundzadeh. ²

Pardoned and reinstated by Mozaffar al-Din Shah, he was sent as ambassador to Italy in 1898 with the title Nezam al-Dowleh and remained in Rome until his death in 1908 (1326 AH); from his sickbed, two months before his death, he sent the Foreign Ministry his final reform scheme, writing that "this new plan will be the key to Iran's salvation". ^{1 2}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.