Akhtar's Intellectual Discourse on the Decline and Backwardness of Iran and the Muslim World

One of the fundamental issues raised in the Qajar periodicals, including Akhtar newspaper, is the problem of the decline in Iran and the Muslim world and its solution. The question of this article is: what were the discourse methods used by the writers of Akhtar to represent their ideologies about the causes of Iran's backwardness and the ways of escaping from it, specifically in the first two years of its publication? According to the findings of this research, the basic discourse of Akhtar is about the human, the Islamic theology’s redefinition of the concept of humanity, and man’s mission in creation. The man represented in the Akhtar discourse is obligated to prevent human beings from decline by understanding the supreme cause of creation and life as a historical responsibility. Human beings are identified and recognized in a dichotomy between the real and the wild. Despite the theological genealogy for this definition of human in Akhter, the characteristics of the genuine man are the same features of the Western man. Akhtar invites human, as the superior to all the creatures, to defend his dignity through individual and social activism, and achieve progress, which is also a Western pattern. In this discourse, Akhtar introduces a new dimension to servitude, which is the gratitude of the genuine man in the practical dimension. This can be considered as an attempt to escape decline and backwardness with the pattern of the Western human.