Iran: Empire of the Mind
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Lotf Ali Khan was betrayed in Bam, and taken in chains to Agha Mohammad, who ordered his Turkmen slaves to do to him ‘what had been done by the people of Lot’. After the gang-rape, Lotf Ali Khan was blinded and sent to Tehran, where he was tortured to death.24
Fig. 9. Agha Mohammad Shah ended the civil wars of the eighteenth century and established the Qajar dynasty on a firm footing, but left behind a reputation for extreme cruelty.
Agha Mohammad Khan was now the undisputed master of the Iranian plateau. He turned to the north-west, where he marched into Georgia, re-asserting Persian sovereignty there and (in September 1795) conquering Tbilisi after a furious battle in which the Georgians seemed to be winning at several points, despite their inferior numbers. In Tbilisi thousands were massacred, and 15,000 women and children were taken away as slaves. But the King of Georgia had put himself under Russian protection in 1783. The destruction of Tbilisi caused anger in St Petersburg, and was later to bring humiliation for Persia in the Caucasus.
In the spring of 1796 (1210 AH) Agha Mohammad had himself crowned on the Moghan plain, where Nader Shah had assumed the same dignity exactly sixty years earlier. At the coronation he wore armbands on which were mounted the Darya-ye Nur and the Taj-e Mah, jewels taken from Lotf Ali Khan (they had previously belonged to Nader Shah). Agha Mohammad Khan liked jewels. After the coronation he marched east to Khorasan, where he accepted the submission of Shahrokh, Nader Shah’s grandson. He had Shahrokh tortured until he gave up more jewels, also from the treasure Nader had brought away from Delhi. Shahrokh died of the treatment shortly afterwards, in Damghan.
Agha Mohammad Shah had now resumed control of the main territories of Safavid Persia, with the exception of the Afghan provinces. But he did not enjoy them, or his jewels, for long. In June 1797, while campaigning in what is now Nagorno-Karabakh, he was stabbed to death by two of his servants, whom he had sentenced to be executed but unwisely left alive and at liberty overnight.
Religious Change: Seeds of Revolution
Eighteenth-century Persia was not just a place of massacre and misery. Many, if not most places away from the major towns and cities probably continued in relative tranquillity for most of the period. And other developments were at work; changes in Shi‘a theology and in the religious–social structure of Shi‘ism that were to have crucial importance in the longer term. The old argument between tradition and reason, which had rolled back and forth in a Sunni context between the Mu’tazilis and their opponents in the time of the Abbasids, resurfaced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in a different form, in a dispute between what came to be called the Akhbari and Usuli schools that was not to be resolved finally until the nineteenth century. The Akhbaris asserted that ordinary Muslims should read and interpret the holy texts for themselves, without the need for intermediaries. The traditions (hadith)—especially the traditions of the Shi‘a Emams—were the best guide. The Usulis rejected this doctrine, saying that authoritative interpretation (ijtihad) on the basis of reason was necessary; and required extended scholarly training, which could only be achieved by specially talented scholars among the ulema, called mojtaheds. Almost all areas of human conduct were open to ijtihad (the Akhbaris had taken the view that disputes that could not be resolved by the precedents in the holy texts would have to be referred to the secular powers).
The Usulis eventually won the argument, thanks largely to the leadership of the great mojtahed Aqa Mohammad Baqer Behbehani (1706-1790), though the Akhbaris, whose views were closer to the orthodoxy of Sunnism, had a moment of near-triumph during the reign of Nader Shah, supported by Nader’s ambiguous but broadly pro-Sunni policy.25 The dispute was not fully resolved until the early Qajar period. In time a theory of interpretation and a hierarchy developed on this basis. Each Shi‘a Muslim had to have a marja-e taqlid, an ‘object of emulation’ or religious role model. This had to be a living person, a mojtahed. In practice this meant one or two of just a few mojtaheds in each generation, and helped to create a hierarchy of mojtaheds, the senior, more authoritative among whom were later given more exalted titles: hojjatoleslam (proof of Islam), ayatollah (sign of God) and later still, grand ayatollah (as in other contexts, competition for the titles produced a kind of inflation;26 more people acquired the original titles, so new, more elevated ones had to be invented).
In this way a religion that formally still asserted the illegitimacy of all authority on earth, in the absence of the hidden Emam, paradoxically came to give a few religious scholars great potential power. This power eventually came to flex its muscles not just in religion but also in politics. The position of the ulema was further strengthened by the fact that the leading marjas often lived in Najaf or Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, beyond the reach of the Persian authorities. Shi‘ism acquired a hierarchical structure, comparable to those of the Christian churches, but markedly different from the less hierarchical arrangements of Judaism and Sunni Islam. The combination of beliefs, in the illegitimacy of secular authority, in the righteousness of the oppressed, and in the legitimacy of an organised hierarchy of clerics, looks with the benefit of hindsight like a recipe for eventual religious revolution.
There was—is—a further important element in this religious culture: the various manifestations of popular Shi‘ism, including most importantly the Ashura processions and the ta’zieh. Every year, on the anniversary of the martyrdom of the Emam Hosein at Karbala, Shi‘a Muslims in Iran and elsewhere take part in processions through towns and villages to commemorate the bitter events of that day. The best way to think of these is as re-enacted funeral processions, in which devotion to and identification with the martyrs of Karbala is as vivid and strong as the feeling for the dead at a real funeral. Bazaar guilds and strongmen from the zur-khaneh (the house of strength—traditional associations of men who gather to build their fitness through juggling heavy clubs, wrestling and other sweaty pursuits—but often with religious overtones) compete to display their devotion and grief. Some carry large, heavy symbolic coffins representing the coffin of Hosein, and huge multi-pointed symbolic banners representing his war-standard, and others beat themselves with chains. Some also cut their heads with swords, but this is an excess that has been increasingly frowned on by the religious authorities. The Ashura demonstrations build a collective sense of grief, bitterness, injustice and guilt (the last from the failure of the Kufans to save Hosein), reliving emotionally the grim events of Karbala. Western news media find images of these processions irresistible when they need to illustrate accounts of Shi‘a religious fanaticism, but the emotions of grief and guilt, and the symbolic representations of suffering (even the blood in some cases) are strikingly similar to those in traditional Good Friday processions in many Catholic countries in Europe and elsewhere. It would be possible to interleave film sequences of both in such a way that the gloom, tears and intensity of the participants would be almost indistinguishable.
The ta’zieh is a form of religious street theatre, unique in the Islamic world (but similar in spirit and function to the religious mystery plays of Medieval Europe). Again, the usual theme is Karbala, but the performance may focus on different aspects of the drama. The performers recite familiar lines describing the action and the audience may join in. Again, those watching experience and show tears and intense emotion. The ta’zieh normally occurs in the month of Moharram and Ashura, but rowzeh-khans (preachers) used to recite unperformed versions at any time of the year. Through the nineteenth century many eminent Iranians erected buildings, as acts of piety, to house the ta’zieh performances. Previously they had taken place in tents or impromptu at street-corners.27
All these manifestations have served to remind Shi‘a Muslims of the central events of their religion, but also to reinforce a commitment to collective religious feeling, around a sense of injustice that may readily express a transferred sense of social injustice that many more or less oppressed and downtrodden communities of Shi‘as have felt at different times and places. The emotions and the custom
of street processions may serve as a kind of precedent or template for collective action and collective solidarity, as has appeared at several points in Iranian history.
But to characterise the grief of Ashura as a kind of training-ground or launch pad for street demonstrations or even mob violence (notwithstanding that has happened, in exceptional circumstances) would be a gross distortion. The more normal association in Shi‘ism is with passive melancholy, modesty, a belief in the righteousness of humble self-sacrifice, and in the virtue of quietly doing good in adverse circumstances.
The eighteenth century in the Islamic world (the concept itself is questionable—in Islamic terms we are talking mainly about the twelfth century, though the centuries do not exactly correspond in the two calendars) has often been depicted as a period of decline and decadence. It is easy to see why that was the case—the Ottoman empire lost territory, the Safavid monarchy collapsed, and so did the Moghul dynasty, ushering in the period of European colonial dominance. These are facts that cannot be gainsaid. But there were important signs of change, development and vigour in the Islamic world too, that have often been overlooked; some of which were significant in their own right, others that contained the seeds of major future developments. We have already looked at the importance of the reign of Nader Shah (its significance emerges more fully in the light of the Persian/Russian wars of 1804-1828). The Akhbari/Usuli dispute and its outcome were important for the future development of the Shi‘a ulema in Iran, and the Iranian revolutions of the twentieth century cannot be properly understood without them.
There were other significant developments in the Islamic world in this period—notably the rise of Wahhabism in Arabia. This was a truly fundamentalist movement within Sunnism, deeply hostile to Sufism, Shi‘ism, any real or apparent kind of departure from monotheism, and any form of what it called ‘innovation’—all of which it considered heretical (according to some accounts28 the movement’s founder, Abd al-Wahhab, studied for a time in Isfahan, though this must be doubtful). It insisted on a return to what its exponents considered to be the earliest principles of Islam, as exemplified by Mohammad himself and his earliest converts. In alliance with the Al-Saud family, Wahhabism made progress in Arabia until the early nineteenth century, destroying shrines and tombs in their fervour, and sacking Karbala itself in 1802; a deep shock and insult to Shi‘a Muslims. By 1818 Ottoman forces had defeated the Al-Saud and reasserted their control of the Arabian peninsula and the holy places. But the Al-Saud and the Wahhabis returned to take control of most of the Arabian peninsula in the twentieth century.
Fig. 10. Fath Ali Shah, whose reign was one of recovery for much of Persia, but was marred by the loss of territory to the Russians in the Caucasus and the general encroachment of European powers on Persian sovereignty.
Fath Ali Shah
After the death of Agha Mohammad Shah, Persia could again have slid into chaos and civil war, as had happened after the death of Karim Khan Zand. That this did not occur was largely due to the foresight of Agha Mohammad Shah in the 1780s and after, resolving feuds within the Qajar tribe, and preparing the succession for his nephew Fath Ali Khan, and for Fath Ali Khan’s son Abbas Mirza.29 There were some disturbances in Azerbaijan, and Fath Ali marched to assert his authority. He defeated his enemies near Qazvin, and went on to punish the old Shah’s murderers and have Agha Mohammad’s body buried in Najaf. He then had himself crowned, on 21 March 1798, the feast of Noruz, the New Year.
Fath Ali Shah has some prominence in the history of Iran, for a variety of contingent and unrelated reasons. One is that it was during his reign that Europeans suddenly began travelling to and reporting back from Persia in larger numbers, and as state representatives operating out of diplomatic missions. This was because his reign coincided with the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, and the European powers were reaching out in competition with each other to find new allies. Another reason is that Fath Ali Shah encouraged a new wave of portrait-painting, the favourite subject of which was himself, resplendent with waist-long black beard and spangled from arms to belt to crown with jewels. So a wealth of arresting images of him have survived to the present day. Unlike his uncle and other predecessors like Karim Khan Zand and Nader Shah, Fath Ali Shah loved magnificence. A further claim to fame was his prodigious fathering of children—it has been calculated that he had by the end of his reign a total of 260 sons by 158 wives. Finally, he reigned for a relatively long time—thirty-seven years—and from that fact alone he later symbolised an era.
Some of these factors have combined to give a broadly negative impression of Fath Ali Shah that may not be wholly justified. Many of the Europeans who reported back about Persia at his time made invidious and sometimes ignorant and prejudiced comparisons between Persia and Europe. Many of them did not fully realise the degree of the trauma and destruction Persia had suffered over the previous century, nor the very different nature of state and government in Persia. The other, inescapable fact was that Persia lost large swathes of valuable territory in the Caucasus to the Russians during the reign of Fath Ali Shah, and the performance of his armies in the wars he fought against the Russians was poor for the most part.
But from another perspective Fath Ali Shah’s reign looks more successful. Building on his uncle’s achievements, he avoided serious civil war (no small thing in itself), and his reign saw a modest renewal of economic activity and prosperity. Persia lost territory, but preserved her independence and kept the bulk of her lands free from warfare in a dangerous and destructive period of international conflict. It could have been worse. Sir John Malcolm, probably the most knowledgeable and balanced foreign observer of Persia at this time, wrote in 1814:
Fortunately Persia is at present happier and more tranquil than it has been for a long period; and its reigning monarch, who has already occupied the throne seventeen years, by the comparative mildness and justice of his rule has already entitled himself to a high rank among the Kings of Persia.30
Encounter with the West: Diplomacy and War
The story of Persia’s dealings with the western powers in the reign of Fath Ali Shah would be almost comical if the consequences, both short-term and long-term, had not proved so damaging. From the perspectives of the individual European states themselves, their conduct was logical, if short-sighted, given wartime necessity. From a Persian perspective, it looks fickle and crass.
But it began well: the first European mission successfully to agree a treaty was from the English East India Company (EIC) and they knew how to handle things. In 1800 they sent a very able young man, John Malcolm (later to become the historian) with a retinue of over 500, including a military escort of 100 Indian cavalry. The almost royal progress of this caravan made a strong impression, as did the lavish gifts the Company could afford to send with it. The Government of India and its counterpart in London had been shocked by Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt in 1798, and alarmed by a French mission to Tehran in 1796. They were determined to make an alliance with Persia to secure the western approaches to India. The alliance could also be used against the danger of Afghan incursion into northern India. In January 1801 political and commercial treaties were signed, according to which the French were to be excluded from Persia, and Fath Ali Shah agreed to attack the Afghans if the Afghans made any incursion in India. The British agreed to send ‘cannon and warlike stores’ if the Afghans or the French were to attack Persia. The Company’s commercial privileges in Persia were confirmed and enhanced and a solid Anglo-Persian alliance seemed to be taking shape.31
But the big question-mark over the treaties was Russia; a more immediate concern for the Persians than France. After Agha Mohammad’s massacre at Tbilisi in 1795, the Russians established a protectorate in Georgia, stationed troops there in 1799, and later abolished the Georgian monarchy after the death of its king, effectively annexing the territory. Fath Ali Khan continued to protest Persia’s sovereignty over Georgia, but to no avail, and Russian generals speculated about pushing the Russian f
rontier further south, to the Araxes. In 1804, led by a brutal general called Tsitsianov, they set about it in earnest, taking Ganja and massacring as many as 3,000 people there (including 500 Muslims who had taken sanctuary in a mosque). They fought an inconclusive battle against Fath Ali Shah’s son Abbas Mirza outside Yerevan. But as Nader Shah had discovered to his cost, and as many later Russian military men including Tolstoy and Lermontov were to confirm, the Caucasus was an awkward place to go soldiering. The war proved more difficult than Tsitsianov had anticipated, and a little later the Persians succeeded in killing him by a trick. The Russians suggested some negotiations with the Persian governor of Baku, but the Persian governor, suspecting bad faith, made preparations for an assassination. Tsitsianov and the governor both went to the appointed meeting-place with just three attendants each, but when they arrived the governor’s nephew shot Tsitsianov through the chest.32
In the meantime British interest in Persia had faded. After a short peace with the French, hostilities reopened; and whereas before 1801 the British had suspected the Russians of wanting to cooperate with the French against India, they now secured an alliance with Russia against Napoleon. Fath Ali Shah invoked the Treaty of 1801 and asked the British for help against Russia in the Caucasus, but the British valued their northern ally more than their Persian one and ignored the request.
Seeing an opportunity, the French made overtures to the Persians and in May 1807 Fath Ali Shah agreed the Treaty of Finckenstein with them (the treaty was signed in East Prussia, as Napoleon’s army recovered from the bloody battle of Eylau and prepared for a renewed attack on the Russians). This was a mirror image of the previous treaty with the British: the Persians agreed to expel the British and to attack India; Napoleon recognised Persian sovereignty over Georgia and promised military assistance against the Russians, and a mission under the French Count Gardane set out for Tehran to fulfil those terms. But before he could get there Napoleon defeated the Russians decisively at Friedland in June 1807 and signed a treaty of alliance with the Russian Tsar at Tilsit in July. The diplomatic dance swung round, and the partners changed again.