Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani
Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani (;‎ 1854 – 1896/97) was an Iranian intellectual reformer, a Babi, and son-in-law of Subh-i-Azal. In his writings, he advocates for political, social, and religious reform characteristic of his generation of intellectuals whose reformist ideas and engagement with sociopolitical themes set the stage for the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, and the political and literary changes that were to follow. Kermani was also a literary critic and like many of his contemporaries an advocate of simpler, more accessible prose. He believed that meaning as opposed to the mode of expression exerts real influence on the reader. He thus discouraged the destruction of the natural clarity of language by means of complicated metaphors, difficult words, long sentences, and complex expressions. Life Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani was born in 1854 in Kerman into a family with a proper position on the socio-economic ladder. There, he was schooled in mathematics, natural science, and theology (ḥekmat-i ilāhī) and also learned some French and English. He was influenced by Voltaire. At age 32, because of hardship he faced from the governor of Kerman, he moved to Isfahan and then Tehran where he taught Qur'anic interpretation (tafsīr). Eventually, he ended up in Istanbul