At the turn of the twentieth century in Iran, ulema’s status as knowledge producers was called into question. I posit that in addition to modern education—new primary schooling (dabest?n) and the university (d?neshg?h)—a new discourse on the ulema made their epistemic demotion possible. Proceeding historically, I argue that the literary and intellectual imagination vis-à-vis the ulema changed in quality as Iran entered the twentieth century. In the classical period, sources primarily berated the bad among the ulema for character vices such as hypocrisy, but without a corresponding attempt to critique or undermine the underlying structure of ulema social and epistemic authority. A change occurred with the constitutional movement (1906-1911). Constitutionalist sources treated character vices as secondary and shifted their primary attention to the critique of anti-constitutionalist ulema for their alleged social sins against the community and for their obstructing of new education. With rise of the Reza Shah state, a further change occurred. The intellectuals of the new educational order called into question the social authority of the entire ulema collective from whom they differentiated themselves, and further attempted to marginalize the ulema from what constituted true, legitimate, and mainstream knowledge. By the 1930’s, the state and new intellectuals converged on the following: true knowledge belonged to state-trained intellectuals; the ulema, now referred to as “spiritualists” (ru??n?y?n), had to limit themselves to “spiritual” and ritual matters. The sources I use to trace this history are diverse, some are widely known, printed, and examined, while others are studied for the first time in this paper. They include classical Persian poetry, Hadith texts, constitutionalist and modernist literature, and an unpublished university thesis. This paper is part of a larger project that examines educational and intellectual change in Iran from 1889 to 1934.