On February 12, 1951, Amir Mokhtar Karimpour published the first issue of the Shuresh (Uprising) newspaper by inviting the Iranian people to a ‘bloody riot and revolution’. Historians have generally paid scant attention to Karimpour or Shuresh. Little verifiable information exists about Karimpour himself and, as the main, known writer for the newspaper, his diction and publication of unconfirmed reports generally disqualifies the newspaper from consideration as a reliable or professional news source among the few with access to it. In turn, both the publisher and the newspaper remain, at best, footnoted by historians and dismissed in other disciplines.

Continuing to ignore Shuresh, however, denies the newspaper's role in the transformative discourse on Iran as sacred across the religious and political spectra. Without acknowledging this nearly century-long discursive process and its concomitant mechanisms that produced Iran as sacred – as that for which an individual, community, or society sacrifices – it becomes more difficult to understand how and why Iranians (re)acted at particular moments in history. The sacrificial discourse in Shuresh and the affective resonance it produced explain why the newspaper became popular to some and infamous to others.

Karimpour, to be clear, argued in political theological terms for a nationalism that would rise up against the Pahlavi monarchy, Iranian feudalists, and their British partners. The sacred Iran, he asserted repeatedly, necessitated sacrifice to save and resurrect it. Karimpour was not merely a ‘zealot supporter of Mosaddeq’ or just one of the varieties of political forces that vied for public support in the press. After all, the prime minister's name did not make the front cover or even get mentioned in Shuresh until the sixth issue. Yet, the government banned Shuresh after just three issues. Each subsequent issue nevertheless continued to sell out. Shuresh's readership of allegedly 34,000 paid black-market prices for the newspaper (March 12, 1951) while Karimpour went on the lam, hid from the government, and evaded officials and informants seeking his arrest.

Shuresh became and remained popular from its first issue because of the numerous literary devices deployed within its pages.