By the second half of the nineteenth century Istanbul had become an important social and political environment for many Iranian activists and politicians who had been exiled from Iran. This community formed a highly active opposition base involved in Iranian politics from abroad. Although a certain amount of background material can be found in the literature concerning this community, no significant work has yet been carried out on its impact on political, social and literary reform in Iran. The publication of Akhtar from Istanbul is but one of the many agents of change that was a product of the Iranian colony in Istanbul. The present work is a preliminary investigation of the Iranian community of Istanbul in the late nineteenth century as studied through the lens of the offices of Persian-language newspaper Akhtar.
