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Advertisement in German for Kaviani press, featuring the name of the company, a description of its services, and the Faravahar logo.

On the Trail of Kaviani

According to legend, ‘Kaviani’ was the name given to their standard by the Sassanian warriors who won their independence from the foreign ruler Zahhāk. Kaviani was meant to show the world their triumph against tyranny and foreign domination. It became a royal banner and the first flag of Persia, remaining so until the seventh century CE, and the story of this heroic uprising developed into the national myth of Iran.1 At the beginning of the twentieth century, during a sweeping political and cultural renaissance movement in Iran, this national narrative once again came to the fore. When Iran was occupied by British and Russian troops in 1907, exiled Iranians spread their national myth far beyond their nation’s borders. As far away as Weimar Berlin, the name of the Sassanian standard was bestowed upon a Persian printworks and publishing house. The company’s logo was the Farāvahār, originally a Zoroastrian symbol for the spirit that also became a secular and cultural icon, especially after the fall of the Sassanian empire. Contrary to what one might assume, however, Kaviani took on a transnational outlook after 1920 and printed multilingual anti-colonial periodicals in various languages and scripts—including Arabic, Farsi, Ottoman Turkish, Urdu, English, and German. From the Berlin suburb of Charlottenburg, its publications reached numerous colonized and semi-colonized territories across West Asia and North Africa.

Little is known about the Kaviani press today, and most scholarship mentions it only in passing. Yet the numerous paths that can be traced from this anti-colonial meeting point lead from Berlin to Paris and London, and thence to countless other cities, revealing a fascinating network of anti-colonial resistance fighters, intellectuals, and students who were part of an internationally oriented Middle Eastern and Asian scene in Berlin. At the heart of this scene was a new form of solidarity among West Asian and North African countries in their anti-imperial struggle against Britain and France. The Kaviani logo thus once again became a symbol of revolt against foreign rule and oppression, but this time oriented beyond Iran’s borders. It can therefore be understood in the context of other international movements of the early twentieth century.

My PhD project follows Kaviani’s trail through numerous archives, memoirs, and periodicals. My aim is to understand the ideas propagated by these anti-colonialists, the vision they had for their country, the shared projects they hoped to initiate, and the political, religious, and spiritual convictions on which their ideas rested. The vision of a shared (Middle) Eastern experiential space, stemming from a common history shaped by Ottoman, Islamic, and colonial forces, appears to have served as a connective element and produced a strong sense of transnational solidarity and fellowship. In recent years, historians have also identified this particular form of international thought in other anti-colonial contexts, including in Egypt, India, and Iran, and have dubbed it ‘Easternism’.2 The Kaviani press thus serves as a case study for a larger phenomenon in the history of ideas—a discipline where central questions include how people express and disseminate their ideas, and how they discuss and defend their views. Many actors in Kaviani’s sphere played changing roles across a variety of journals—here as an editor, there as a publisher. But they all maintained close ties with the owner of the press, the Parsi Abdurrahman Seif, and they were all part of a close-knit network, which I am slowly beginning to piece together from numerous fragments found in archives and libraries. At the same time, the history of Kaviani and its network is full of discontinuities, contradictions, and conflicts—factors that always come into play when people collectively think through their ideas. These deviations from the linear narrative are rarely visible in Kaviani’s official publications. Yet they come into view via the numerous intelligence reports, letters addressed to government ministries, confessions, and denunciations held in London archives.

Three Middle Eastern men in suits on a lawn in front of a large villa.
From left to right: Ghulam Nabi Khan, Afghan Envoy to France; Sardar Mahmud Tarsi Khan, the Afghan Foreign Minister; and Abdurrahman Seif. Photo taken in Montreux, Switzerland. Azadi-i Sharq, 8/1 (1928), 52.

Detective Work in London

The first step in uncovering these archival traces is to get to grips with the language of officialdom. The authorities at the time tended to use very specific terminology, often pejorative and characterized by generalizations. Some reports referred to actors in broad terms as ‘revolutionaries’, ‘agitators’, and ‘extremists’, while others called them ‘nationalists’, ‘pan-Arabists’, ‘pan-Islamists’, or ‘Bolshevists’. They were often described as criminal, sometimes even insane, but occasionally also as intelligent and dangerous. Only rarely are individuals referred to by their given names. The traces I managed to find were thus little more than fragments. Nonetheless, they gave me fresh insight into the meticulous surveillance of anti-colonialists in Weimar Berlin by British spies, government authorities, and private individuals, some of whom are also mentioned in other historical studies.3

The British surveillance system was shockingly sophisticated and rigorous. Yet time and again, there were misjudgements, inaccuracies, and inconsistencies on the part of the authorities. It appears to have been one big game of cat and mouse, which can be beautifully observed from the bird’s-eye perspective of the historian. Names and addresses were constantly changed, magazines were smuggled out of the country inside harmless-sounding letters, and people were taken over the border only to be brought back to Berlin under another identity. All of this can be gleaned from the files held in the UK National Archives and in the British Library’s Oriental and India Office Collections.

Despite all this painstaking monitoring, little is known about some of the actors, whereas others had entire files dedicated to them—including Abdurrahman Seif, Kaviani’s owner–operator, and the press itself. Both of these files have already been consulted by other historians,4 but different scholars bring different interests and research questions to bear. Both files are crucial for studying the history of Kaviani and its network, as they open a small window onto the company’s world, as well as that of one of its main actors.

Five men in dress coats and trilbies standing amid railway tracks in front of a large industrial building.
Abdurrahman Seif with two Iranian senators (Ali Dasthi and one Mr Shirvani) and Mr Wagner, Director of the German–Oriental Trading Company, on a visit to the Gutehoffnungshütte industrial works. Azadi-i Sharq, 8/1 (1928), 43.

Kaviani in British Records

Kaviani appears in the archives for the first time in 1921, when the British legations in India and Persia identified that anti-British literature was being smuggled into those countries from Berlin. The situation appeared delicate, and the British authorities racked their brains over ‘whether any steps can be taken through His Majesty’s Ambassador at Berlin to stop the dispatch of inflammatory anti-British propaganda’.5 It was evident that the Soviets were also involved in distributing the journals. The remaining 145 pages in the folder labelled ‘Kaviani’ go on to detail the sources of the press’s funding and its various sales contracts, as well as the addresses of the actors involved and their roles in the wider sphere around the press. A network of pan-Islamists, nationalists, and communists thus begins to unfold. Its members belonged to the intellectual elites of Egypt, India, Iran, Lebanon, and Turkey; they maintained excellent contacts with the most influential people in their home countries and with transnational networks, allowing them to distribute their journals across the whole of West Asia and North Africa.

Yet the files also offer insights into the British struggle against anti-colonialism more broadly, as well as their efforts to ally with France, Germany, and Italy. They thus also reveal a microhistory of diplomacy and international politics in the interwar period: a history of Britain’s power struggles with France and the Soviet Union, with Italy and Germany seeming to constantly switch allegiances. The anti-colonialists thus became pawns within international politics, though they also managed to adroitly sidestep this role. The British campaign against the Kaviani press alone lasted into the late 1920s, and ultimately proved fruitless. Other archival holdings in London have plenty to tell us about the UK’s often unsuccessful attempts to counter the spectre of anti-colonialism by means of state repression.

For example, in February 1922, a dedicated Interdepartmental Committee on Eastern Unrest was established to collect all available information on anti-British nationalists from Turkey, Egypt, and India, as well as pan-Islamists and revolutionaries in Europe and across West Asia and North Africa. Its first report stated the committee’s goal of recording ‘their organisations, their aims and objects, their inter-connection, [and] the degree of danger which their activities, whether singly or collectively, involve’.6 The rising number of revolts, which led to enhanced surveillance, were explained as a product of ‘intense nationalism . . . as an attempt on the part of the various Eastern peoples to emancipate themselves from any form of control by Europeans’.7 This was an astute assessment of the situation; however, the result was increased repression, which in turn fanned the flames of the anti-colonial struggle still further. Berlin was one of the main centres of anti-colonialism, in part because the German authorities welcomed some of the anti-British activity in their capital, and did little to oppose it. The Kaviani network seems to have been a particular thorn in the side of the British.

My investigations in London have produced many other important findings, even though not all of the promisingly labelled folders in the archives lived up to expectations. Like many archival collections around the world, the catalogue of the National Archives in particular lists numerous files that have now been lost, hinting at the other tantalizing documents that were once held there. And even leaving such losses aside, many archival items remain hidden from view due to amended labelling, incomplete cataloguing, or sheer ignorance of how to search for the unknown. As a result, every new find is a valuable prize, and has doubtless elicited the odd squeal of delight from various readers over the years.


Translated by Jozef van der Voort (GHIL).

Feature image: Advertisement for Kaviani. Liwa-el-Islam [German edn.], 1/1–2 (1921), 9.

  1. Djalal Khaleghi-Motlagh, ‘Derafš-e kāvīān’, Encyclopaedia Iranica, 7 Nov. 2013. []
  2. Erin O’Halloran, East of Empire: Egypt, India and the World between the Wars (Stanford, CA, 2025); Mattias Gori Olesen, 2025. ‘From Ottoman Caliphate to League of Eastern Nations: Egyptian Easternist Worldmaking in the Late and Post-Ottoman Age’, Die Welt des Islams, 66/2 (2025), 1–32; Masha Kirasirova, The Eastern International: Arabs, Central Asians, and Jews in the Soviet Union’s Anticolonial Empire (New York, 2024); Mattias Gori Olesen, ‘The Perennial Solidarity of the East: René Guénon, Sufism and Easternist Anti-Colonialism in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt’, Aries: Journal for the Study of Western Esotericism, 26/1 (2026), 27–57. []
  3. Daniel Brückenhaus, ‘“Every stranger must be suspected”: Trust Relationships and the Surveillance of Anti-Colonialists in Early Twentieth-Century Europe’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 36/4 (2010), 523–66; Daniel Brückenhaus, Policing Transnational Protest: Liberal Imperialism and the Surveillance of Anticolonialists in Europe, 1905–1945 (New York, 2017). []
  4. Afshin Marashi, Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran (Austin, TX, 2020); see also the Gerhard Höpp papers at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient in Berlin. []
  5. British Library, IOR/L/PJ/12/193, British Legation Teheran, 13 May 1922. []
  6. British Library, IOR/L/PJ/12/120, p. 1. []
  7. Ibid. p. 2. []
Hanna Janatka
Hanna Janatka
On the Trail of Kaviani
Hanna Janatka is a Gerda Henkel Foundation Doctoral Fellow at the Berlin Graduate School of Muslim Cultures and Societies. She… Read more

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OpenEdition suggests that you cite this post as follows:
Hanna Janatka (June 1, 2026). On the Trail of Kaviani. German Historical Institute London Blog. Retrieved June 8, 2026 from https://doi.org/10.58079/16ax3


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