SHARIAsource

Jafar Shokrolah Zadeh

Jafar Shokrolah Zadeh is a faculty member at Arizona State University. His interests extend from the philosophy of languages and translations including theoretical, historical, and philosophic thought on translated ideas and cultural intersection, to pragmatics of language pedagogy. His dissertation examines the contribution of Mirza Yusif Khan Tabrizi (1823-1895) to the intellectual and legal history of Iran, with respect to sharīʿa and the reception of French Enlightenment ideas, as expressed in the Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen. By preparing a comprehensive historiography of translated ideas at the end of nineteenth and early twentieth century, he is examining how the complex Iranian political and cultural attitudes towards modernity, through the Persian Constitutional Revolution, were translated into the rule of law in the modern sense. With a new and complete annotated English translation of Yik Kalima (“The Book of One Word,” published in 1871), Shokrolah Zadeh argues for the pivotal role of this prime work of Mirza Yusif Khan in the early 20th century pre-constitutional struggle to reform and modernize Iranian legal system and politics. He received a PhD from SUNY Binghamton in Translation Research Instruction with regional specialization in Middle Eastern Studies.