work carries messages of social importance as written in the language of the people of his native land, Azari. With no indication of split-personality, he combined larger Iranian identity with Azerbaijani—he used the term vatan (fatherland) in reference to both." Reza Zia-Ebrahimi too considers Akhundzade as the founding father of what he calls 'dislocative nationalism' in Iran. According to Zia-Ebrahimi, Akhundzade found inspiration in Orientalist templates to construct a vision of ancient Iran, which offered intellectuals disgruntled with the pace of modernist reform in Iran, a self-serving narrative where all of Iran's shortcomings are blamed on a monolithic and otherized 'other': the Arab. For Zia-Ebrahimi, Akhundzade must be credit with the introduction of ethno-racial ideas, particularly the opposition between the Iranian Aryan and the Arab Semite, into Iran's intellectual debates. Zia-Ebrahimi disputes that Akhundzade had any influence on modernist intellectuals such as Malkum Khan (beyond a common project to reform the Alphabet used to write Persian) or Talibov Tabrizi. His real heir was Kermani, and these two intellectuals' legacy is to be found in the ethnic nationalism of the Pahlavi state, rather than the civic nationalism of the Constitutional movement. While Akundzadeh is said to have been an atheist, he was very sympathetic to the Zoroastrian religion and was in correspondence with Manekji Limji Hataria. At that time the Qajar dynasty was in great crisis as a consequence of their failures against the Russian empire and the British, and their corruption and mismanagement. This gave rise to the Constitutional movement. According to these intellectuals Iran needed political change to a constitutional parliamentarian model of governance. But for some intellectuals like Akhundzadeh this was not enough. He argued that the Arabs and Islam were responsible for the downturn of Iranian civilization and argued that Iranians should look back to their glorious pre-Islamic civilization. In the Maktubàt-e Kamàl od-Dowleh beh Shàhzadeh Jamàl od-Dowleh (Letters from Kamal od-Dowleh to Prince Jalal od-Dowleh, 1860, hereafter Maktubàt) his vision on the glorious pre-islamic past is portrayed. Just like Jalal ed-Din Mirza Qajar, with whom he corresponded, he argued that Arabic loanwords, alphabet and Islam should be removed. If this is accomplished, then according to him Iran can return to its glorious state. He was the first to compile these ideas into a coherent nationalist ideology, which makes him the father of Iranian nationalism. Akhundzadeh was also an atheist, but he made an exception for Zoroastrianism,