With a French military mission in Tehran training up a Persian army to invade India, the British were impressed once more with the urgency of an alliance with Fath Ali Shah. It seemed so urgent that they sent two competing missions (the government in London and the East India Company government in India could not agree which should take precedence in policy on Persia); one from London under Sir Harford Jones, and another from Bombay, again with John Malcolm at its head. Malcolm got to Persia first but was allowed no further than Bushire, because of Fath Ali Shah’s commitments to the French; he sailed back to Bombay in July 1808 after three fruitless months. But Gardane was in an impossible position, training up Persians whose only real interest was in the war with Russia that was still rumbling on, and the reconquest of Georgia. And Russia was now France’s ally. Harford Jones succeeded where Malcolm had failed, and reached Tehran in March 1809. Gardane, by now discredited, flitted out of the country a month later, abandoning France’s commitments to Persia.
Jones agreed a Treaty of Friendship and Alliance that went further than the treaty of 1801 and gave the Persians more watertight guarantees. The Persians were to receive help against any invading European power, even if Britain had made a separate peace with that power, provided Persia was not the aggressor. The help was to be in the form of British troops, or failing that, subsidies, cannon, muskets and British officers. For his part, the Shah undertook not to do anything to endanger British interests in India, and to give military assistance in case of an attack by the Afghans.
But although the British encouraged Fath Ali Shah to continue the costly war with the Russians, when Napoleon attacked Russia in 1812 Britain and Russia again became allies, and Britain’s enthusiasm for helping Persia against the Russians in the Caucasus evaporated, as it had after 1801. The war in the Caucasus was now, for Britain, an embarrassment that needed tidying away. Although the Persians fought hard with some successes under Fath Ali’s son Abbas Mirza, their failures were more damaging, culminating in a heavy defeat at Aslanduz on the Araxes in October 1812. Britain served as a mediator for a peace signed at Golestan in October 1813. The treaty was a terrible humiliation. Persia kept Yerevan and Nakhichevan, but lost everything else north of the Araxes, including Daghestan, Shirvan and Georgia, and cities that had been part of the Persian empire for centuries like Darband, Baku, Tblisi and Ganja.33 It also included provisions that only the Russians could maintain warships on the Caspian Sea, and that Russia would recognise and support the legitimate heir to the throne of Persia (giving the Russians a locus for meddling in the royal succession, which was to prove seriously damaging). When the terms of the treaty became known they caused anger in Persia and calls for renewed jihad against the Russians, led by bellicose mullahs in the towns. Abbas Mirza regarded the treaty only as a truce, and redoubled his efforts to turn the army he controlled in Azerbaijan into a modernised force that could fight the Russians on equal terms.
It didn’t work. War was renewed with Russia in 1826, after a period in which Abbas Mirza drew further help from the British (who with the final defeat of Napoleon in 1815 grew more anti-Russian again), and another aggressive Russian general, Yermolov, did his best to alienate the new subject populations, to over-interpret the terms of the Golestan treaty and further irritate the Persians. Yermolov proved more belligerent in peace than in war, and the Persians made some initial gains, marching toward Tbilisi and up the Caspian coast. Many local leaders went over to the Persian side, and Yermolov abandoned Ganja. But soon Russian reinforcements arrived under more active commanders, and once war was begun, the British refused further help, pointing to the clause in the treaty of 1809 that exempted them from doing so if Persia were the aggressor. Before the year was out the armies of Abbas Mirza and his brother Mohammad Mirza were defeated in separate battles, Ganja was retaken and the Persians were back where they had started. In 1827 the Russians advanced further, taking Yerevan at the beginning of October and Tabriz later in the month.
The mountains and forests of the Caucasus were ideal country for guerrilla warfare and if, especially in this second war, when the local tribes were ill-disposed toward the Russians, the Persians had fought that kind of war, they might have been more successful. The Lezges had fought off Nader Shah in that way in the 1740s and, with the Chechens, they would give the Russians enormous difficulties in the long wars they fought in the decades after 1830 (as one of the participants, the great Leo Tolstoy, would testify in some of his greatest short stories, like Hajji Murat and The Cossacks). But the Persians had seen themselves as equals of the Russians, and had aspired to fight them in the open field. They disdained to fight the hit-and-run war of the ragged Sunni tribesmen of the Caucasus, whose overlords they had been for centuries. That was their mistake; they were not flexible enough, and misjudged the measure of Russian military superiority.
Peace was concluded at Turkmanchai in February 1828, with even more humiliating terms than those of Golestan. Persia lost Yerevan, and the border was set at the river Araxes. Persia had to pay Russia 20 million roubles as reparations and all captives had to be returned to Russian territory, even if they had been taken twenty or more years before. According to commercial agreements made at the same time, Russian merchants were to be allowed to operate freely in Persia, and (these provisions were aptly named capitulations) were effectively exempt from Persian jurisdiction.34
The treaty had a violent and undiplomatic postscript. A distinguished literary man and friend of Pushkin, Alexander Griboyedov, arrived in Tehran as Russian Minister Plenipotentiary and set about enforcing the terms of the treaty, being particularly exercised about the provisions over the return of captives. Among others, he set about extricating women from Persian families who had been taken captive as Christians and subsequently converted. Some of these women were less than keen to be rescued, and the Russians’ interference in private Persian households gave great offence. Mullahs in Tehran who had been agitators for the war reminded their followers that the penalty for apostasy was death, and ordered that the bazaars should close. A mob gathered outside the Russian embassy on 30 January 1829. One account says a Cossack on the roof shot a boy in the crowd.35 The mob broke in, and found and murdered an Armenian eunuch who had previously served the Shah. Two women were also dragged away, and several of the crowd were killed in the fighting as the Cossacks who served as guards tried to protect the building. The bodies were carried away to the mosques, but later the mob returned, broke in again and massacred all the Russians, except one who escaped dressed as a Persian. Griboyedov was apparently convinced that the Shah himself was behind the attacks. It seems his last words were Fath Ali Shah! Je m’en fous! 36
Fath Ali Shah could perhaps have tried harder to control the situation that led to the killings, but it is most unlikely that he was in any serious way to blame (some Russians have blamed the British ambassador also, for inciting the mob, which illustrates the rivalry between the two powers in Persia by this time, but has no basis in fact). Fath Ali Shah had to send a mission to St Petersburg to present his apologies and smooth things over.
The Persian/Russian wars and their consequences illustrated a number of important realities about the state of Fath Ali Shah’s realm. Militarily and economically it was no match for the European powers. The army Abbas Mirza led into the Caucasus in 1826 was 35,000 strong, which was large by comparison with those that had fought the civil wars forty years earlier; but the Russians had lost a larger number of men as casualties in a single day when they fought Napoleon at Borodino in 1812. The Russians had some difficulties getting troops to the Caucasus and in supplying them once there, but their reserves of manpower and war materials were impossible for the Persians to equal, even if the Persians could have come up to the Russian standard of drill, training and staff work.
The point was not that the Persians were bad soldiers, nor really that they had fallen behind technologically (not yet). It was just that the Qajar state was not the same kind of state, and nor was it trying to be.37 It
controlled its territory loosely, through proxies and alliances with local tribes. The state bureaucracy was small, and revolved around the court, much as it had in the days of the Safavids. It has been estimated that between a half and a third of the population were still nomadic or semi-nomadic pastoralists.38 Provincial governors were often tribal leaders. They ruled independently, with little interference from the capital, and sent there what tax revenue was left after they had deducted their own expenses, which was not usually very much (Abbas Mirza’s army was largely recruited and paid for from the province of Azerbaijan in which he was governor). To raise money for the wars, Fath Ali Shah had alienated crown lands, increasing the devolved tendency. Nader Shah would have handled matters differently, but the apparent lesson of his reign was that ambition, greater integration, centralisation, militarism and higher taxation went together; they alienated important supporters, created opposition and revolt, and led to civil war. All Persian rulers after Nader from Karim Khan Zand onward (even Agha Mohammad Shah) seemed to have absorbed that lesson, to have rejected Nader’s model, and to have accepted a more devolved state as the price of stability and popular consent to their rule.
The other side of the story is that most Iranians at the time probably preferred it this way. In the smaller towns and villages of the country (where most still lived) the wars in Armenia and Shirvan were a long way off, and there would have been only sporadic (and inaccurate) news of them. The civil wars between the Qajars and the Zands, let alone the earlier revolts in the time of Nader Shah and the Afghans, affected many more Iranians either directly, or indirectly through economic dislocation. Those terrible events were still within living memory, and most Iranians would have been grateful to have been spared them. Under Fath Ali Shah some moderate prosperity returned to these traditional communities.
But the popular agitation for war and the murder of Griboyedov showed the influence of the mullahs, and the closeness of some of them to at least one important strand of popular feeling in the towns (as always, one should be wary of assuming all the mullahs thought the same way—they did not). In later decades, as other European powers demanded, secured and exploited the same privileges as those accorded the Russians at Turkmanchai, popular feeling became more and more bitter at the apparent inability of the Qajar monarchy to uphold Persian sovereignty and dignity.
6
THE CRISIS OF THE QAJAR MONARCHY, THE
REVOLUTION OF 1905-1911 AND THE ACCESSION
OF THE PAHLAVI DYNASTY
Whatever happens will be for the worse, and therefore it is in our interest that as
little should happen as possible
Lord Salisbury, writing about Persian affairs in December 1879
[Aya] ma ra az mum sakhta-and?
Are we made of wax?
Naser od-Din Shah, March 18551
Fath Ali Shah died in 1834, shortly after his son, Abbas Mirza, who had been his designated heir for many years. This meant that another son, Mohammad, took the throne. Mohammad Shah’s accession was supported by both the Russians and the British (they judged, correctly, that he would uphold the treaties that gave them their privileges within Persia), and was achieved peacefully. But his reign brought few benefits for the Persian people. He made little real effort to develop the country or defend its essential interests, despite the increasingly manifest developmental gap between Persia and Europe. His first prime minister was in fact a reformer, but the Shah had him strangled in 1835. Persian merchants began to protest about the way that cheap European products, especially textiles, coming onto Persian markets with low or no tariffs, undercut domestic craftsmen and destroyed their livelihoods (though other merchants, who made a profit from handling the imports, kept quiet).
Perhaps partly in reaction to the defeat in war, the humiliating treaty of Turkmanchai, and the increasing and unwelcome presence of foreigners and foreign influences, there were attacks on minorities in the 1830s, especially the Jews. These tended to be led, as at other times, by preachers or mullahs of marginal status who (like some religious enthusiasts and ideologues of most faiths through the ages) disregarded the established, humane and dignified precepts of their faith for the temporary popularity that could accrue from extremism and hatred. There was a serious attack by a mob in Tabriz in 1830, which seems to have resulted in the death or flight of most of the previous Jewish population there. It may have begun (like similar attacks in medieval Europe) with a false allegation that a Muslim child had been murdered by a Jew.2 It was followed by similar attacks elsewhere in Azerbaijan, which led Jews to avoid the whole province thereafter; and there were forced conversions of Jews in Shiraz. A riot broke out in Mashhad in 1839, and many Jews were killed before moderate Shi‘a clergy intervened. The Jews were then forced to convert, or flee.3 For many years the converts still kept in their own communities, being called jadidi; in other places many such converts still observed Jewish rites in private and some later reverted to Judaism (though they risked being accused of apostasy if they did). Later in the century there were similar outbreaks at Babol on the Caspian in 1866, in Hamadan in 1892,4 and elsewhere. Jewish and other travellers recorded that the Jews they saw were generally living in poor ghettoes and subject to daily, low-level intimidation and humiliation (though the position may have improved toward the end of the century in some places at least). There was persecution elsewhere in the Islamic world at the same time, and some have suggested that the impact of European anti-Semitic writings was a factor.5 No doubt only a small minority of Muslims were actively involved in attacks, and there is evidence that some ulema and others did what they could to prevent or limit them; but as in other times and places, it could not have happened at all without the majority preferring to look away. The Armenians seem generally to have avoided this degree of persecution in this period.
Despite their agreement on the succession, in the time of Mohammad Shah the British and Russians were still rivals in Persia, Afghanistan and Central Asia in what came to be called the Great Game. The British had supported the Persians against the Russians before the war of 1826-1828, and now the Russians encouraged Mohammad Shah to take compensation for the loss of territory in that war by grabbing territory in the east—in Herat and Kandahar (which had been Persian lands as recently as the reign of Nader Shah, and long before). The British disliked the prospect of any encroachment in Afghanistan that might threaten India or make Russian access to India any easier. Mohammad Shah sent troops to Herat in 1837, and besieged the place for a few months,6 but withdrew in 1838 after the British occupied Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf and demanded that he quit Afghanistan. Mohammad Shah made further trading concessions to Britain in a new treaty in 1841.
Hajji Mirza Aqasi, Mohammad Shah’s second prime minister (who had been instrumental in the removal and killing of the first) was pro-Sufiand encouraged the Shah to follow his example. Fath Ali Shah had always been careful to conciliate the ulema, but Mohammad Shah’s Sufi inclinations made him deeply unpopular with them, bringing forward again the ever-latent Shi‘a antigonism toward secular authority.
The Babi Movement, Naser od-Din Shah, and Amir Kabir
Another development during the reign of Mohammad Shah was the appearance in Iran of the Babi movement, which eventually gave rise to the Baha’i religion. This originated around the year 1844 (1260 in the Muslim calendar)—a year that had been awaited with millenarian enthusiasm as the 1,000th anniversary of the disappearance of the twelfth Emam. Followers of a branch of Shi‘ism called Shaykhism had speculated since the eighteenth century that there must be a gate (‘Bab’) through which the Hidden Emam could communicate with the faithful. As the year 1260 approached, some Shaykhis grew increasingly excited that the Bab might be revealed in that year, and when the time came some people identified a particular, pious young man from Shiraz, Seyyed Ali Mohammad, as the Bab. In May 1844 he declared he was indeed the Bab, and began preaching against the shortcomings of the ulema. His preaching and that of his followers grew more ra
dical, and he was taken into custody. He advocated better treatment of women (and attracted many female followers), that the Islamic ban on interest be lifted, that judicial punishments should be made less harsh and that children should be better treated. From one perspective his teaching looks progressive; from another it appears as little more than the conventional, gentle teaching of the milder strand of orthodox Shi‘ism. But in 1848 he and his followers began preaching that the Bab was the Hidden Emam himself, and that their faith was a new belief, superseding the previous revelation of Islam. This changed the position, putting the Babis and the ulema in direct conflict.
One of the most remarkable and radical of the Bab’s followers was a woman from Qazvin, Qorrat al-Ain, who discarded the veil as a sign that Shari‘a law had been set aside. She was a poetess, debated theology with the ulema and preached the emancipation of women. She was sent into exile in Iraq at one point, but returned. Like the Bab she was arrested, but was able still to speak to her followers while under house arrest.
When Mohammad Shah died in 1848 his 17-year-old son Naser od-Din took the throne, again with the support of the Russians and the British. The boy was thoughtful and intelligent in appearance, with large dark eyes and a dreamy tendency; he could lose himself for hours in books of Persian folk tales.7
But after the accession of the new Shah there were revolts involving Babis in Fars, Mazanderan and in Zanjan, which were crushed by the government with great severity. Following these disturbances, which have been linked to linked to social upheavals elsewhere in the world at this time, the Bab was executed in Tabriz in 1850 (the story is that the firing squad had to shoot twice, because the first time the bullets only cut the ropes binding him, setting him free), and animosity between the Babis and the monarchy escalated rapidly. Three Babis tried to assassinate the new Shah in August 1852—they failed, but there was a harsh backlash thereafter, Qorrat al-Ain was killed by her captors in the same year along with most of the other leaders of the movement, and the Bab’s followers were viciously persecuted as heretics and apostates. The new faith appeared to be a challenge to both the secular and the religious authorities, and as such stood little chance, despite converting quite large numbers. Many thousands of them died, and others left the country.
Iran: Empire of the Mind Page 22