A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  What were the real interests of Britain and Russia in Persia at this time? How damaging was their involvement? There are a number of different elements to these questions. Britain and Russia stood for different things in the nineteenth century, and for different aspects of the European model. Britain stood for, or appeared to stand for, progress, liberalism, science, commerce, and improvement. In contrast, Russia stood for the traditional order in Europe—for the adaptation of modern tools to maintain the status quo of the old dynastic monarchies, for the Orthodox Christian church, and against political radicalism. Both had their attractions for different interests and groups in Persia. But both states, whatever impression they might have given, were primarily concerned with their own strategic interests, in which the interests of the Persians had little part. Both had other, greater priorities. And both loomed much larger to Persians than did Persia in the calculations of either. Each power would edge ahead of the other, if it could, but was normally content to reach a modus vivendi with the other over Persia—which meant stasis and avoiding surprises. This rivalry was good in one way: it made it difficult for either power to take Persia as a colony. One could claim that Britain prevented Russia from overwhelming Persia altogether in the nineteenth century, and vice versa. But the negative was that both powers were suspicious of change or of vigorous Persian reformers who might shake things up or give an advantage to their rival. As time went on, the shah was more and more suspicious of change and reform, too. The result was stagnation.

  After a decade of personal rule, in 1871 the shah appointed a first minister again. This was Mirza Hosein Khan, who had served the shah overseas as a diplomat, notably in Istanbul, where he had seen the effects of some of the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire. Convinced that similar change needed to happen in Persia, he encouraged Naser od-Din Shah to travel so that he could see for himself some of the developments taking place in other countries. In 1872 Mirza Hosein Khan succeeded in persuading the shah to agree to what was called the Reuter concession. This was a remarkable initiative, a blueprint for development of the most sweeping kind, including a railway from the Caspian to the south, mining rights, and all kinds of industrial and other economic improvements. It could have brought benefits, but the trade-off was that it abandoned a huge swath of sovereign rights to the foreigner putting up the money for those improvements: the Baron de Reuter, a British Jew born in Germany and the founder of the Reuters news agency. In return for the concession, the shah received £40,000 as an advance.

  Over the previous decades, the Iranian economy had changed and shifted in response to an increasing penetration of markets by foreigners. Many Iranian products proved unable to compete with cheap imports, while agriculture began producing more for export (cotton and opium, for example). The reduced capacity for domestic food production contributed to a number of severe famines, especially in 1870–1871, in which it has been estimated that up to one-tenth of the population perished.12 The changes left many people angry and contributed to the opposition to the Reuter concession. The shah returned from a visit to Europe in 1873 to powerful demands for the removal of Mirza Hosein Khan, and he duly went.

  The Reuter concession was also strongly disliked by the Russians, and the shah had discovered while in Europe that the British were no better than lukewarm about it. Along with the domestic opposition, this was enough for the shah to find an excuse to cancel it in the same year. But there followed an extended dispute over the advance, which the shah held on to. Eventually, in 1889, Baron de Reuter was given another concession in compensation—he was allowed to set up the Imperial Bank of Persia, with the exclusive right to print paper currency. Up to that time, the British were able to use the Reuter dispute to prevent Russian proposals for a railway from going ahead. But in 1879 the Russians helped the shah set up the Iranian Cossack Brigade, which was led by Russian officers. This became the most modern, best-disciplined armed force in the country, and was loyal to the shah—but it was also an instrument of Russian influence.

  For a period in the 1870s, the British government considered a more positive attitude toward Persia, which could have resulted in Persia becoming a genuine ally rather than a dupe and a cat’s-paw.13 This episode was prompted by Russian conquests in Central Asia—notably the surrender to them of Khiva in 1873—but also by the deterioration of British influence in Afghanistan. In 1879 the foreign secretary Lord Salisbury, briefly setting aside the policy of “masterly inactivity” governing Britain’s attitude to the borders of India, considered a plan that would have given Herat to Naser od-Din Shah, along with a subsidy from the British government and help with internal reforms. Persia would have become a partner and an ally, an essential element in Britain’s colonial defenses rather than a theater for spoiling actions to prevent the Russians gaining influence. It would have been in Britain’s interests to help build up Persia, rather than keeping Persia down. Talks went on between the British and the Persians in London, led on the Persian side by Malkom Khan, head of the Persian diplomatic mission there. But in the end Naser od-Din Shah broke off the negotiations. The British believed that this was because the Russians had intervened to block them. The liberal government that followed was not inclined to take up the talks again, and the opportunity was lost, but the episode shows that the realpolitik pursued by Britain vis-à-vis Persia was not necessarily the inevitable and logical corollary to their imperial position. A cynical policy, or a policy of realpolitik as its proponents would call it, may sometimes be pursued out of laziness and lack of imagination rather than anything else. The cynical policy maker cannot predict the future any more than the moralist can, but he knows that at least he cannot be accused of starry-eyed idealism. Sometimes that edge is all it takes to allow the cynic to dominate. Truly farsighted politicians sometimes insist that if you get the principles right, then the small change of policy will look after itself. But often the principles get lost along the way, and cynicism and short-termism prevail. The cynicism of British policy in Persia was to do great damage in the longer term.

  Malkom Khan was a significant figure in the latter part of the nineteenth century. He was born in 1833, the son of an Armenian father who had converted to Islam, and who had so admired Sir John Malcolm that he named his son after him. Malkom Khan was educated in Paris, and on his return to Persia taught at the Dar al-Funun. But the shah became suspicious of his reforming ideas and his influence, and his later service as a diplomat outside Iran had something of the character of exile. Eventually, at the end of the 1880s, Malkom Khan fell from favor altogether. He stayed on in London to produce the newspaper Qanun, which pressed for an end to arbitrary government and for the establishment of the rule of law, based on a constitution. This paper was distributed in Iran and was widely read among the educated elite. After Naser od-Din’s death, Malkom Khan was reconciled to the government. He died in 1908.

  Reform-minded officials continued to come and go in Persia through the 1880s, but without the full support of the shah they were unable to get any traction. The shah continued to negotiate concessions to foreigners, but in 1890 he went too far with a tobacco concession, granting monopoly rights to a British company that enabled them to buy, sell, and export tobacco without competition. This drew opposition from a formidable alliance of opponents: landlords and tobacco growers, who found themselves forced to sell at a fixed price; bazaar traders, who saw themselves once more frozen out of a lucrative sector of the economy; the readership of new reform- and nationalist-oriented newspapers operating from overseas; and the ulema, who were closely aligned to the bazaar traders and disliked the foreign presence in the country. This combination of interests became the classic pattern, repeated in later movements. Coordinated largely through the network of connections between the mullahs across the country (making use of the new telegraph system), mass protests against the concession took place in most of the major cities in 1891. They culminated in something like a revolt in Tabriz and a demonstration in Tehran that was fired on by tro
ops, leading to further demonstrations. One of the most important mojtaheds, Hajji Mirza Hasan Shirazi, issued a fatwa in December 1891 calling for a nationwide boycott, and this was so widely obeyed that even the shah’s wives stopped smoking. Early in 1892 the government was forced to cancel the concession, incurring a large debt.

  Naser od-Din was bruised by the furor over the tobacco concession. From around this time onward, the Russian interest tended to predominate at court, and the shah followed a more repressive policy, restricting contacts with Europe, banning the Persian-language newspapers imported from overseas, limiting the expansion of education that he had earlier championed, and again favoring reactionary, anti-reform ministers. Some contemporary observers apparently said the shah now preferred courtiers who did not know whether Brussels was a place or a vegetable.14

  JAMAL AL-DIN AL-AFGHANI

  By the latter part of the nineteenth century some thinkers in Iran, and in the Middle East more generally, had gone from an initial response to the West of bafflement, reactionary resentment, or uncritical admiration to adaptation, resistance, or reform. Notable among these was Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who despite his name was probably born in Iran and brought up as a Shi‘a in the 1830s and 1840s. Later he traveled widely, including in India, Afghanistan, Europe, and Egypt, and he lived in Egypt for some years in the 1870s. It is thought that he adopted the name al-Afghani in order to be accepted more easily in a Sunni milieu. In all these places he attracted a following for his strong resistance to European influences. Al-Afghani was energetic and charismatic, with a talent for getting access to powerful people in a variety of countries. But he also tended to be bumptious and seems to have disliked women.

  More specifically, al-Afghani opposed British influence, whether in Afghanistan, Egypt, Sudan, or Iran. He was more ambivalent about the Russians. He wanted to see a revival in the Islamic world and believed that the message of Islam had to be revised in the light of reason, to adapt to different conditions in different times. He asserted that there was nothing inconsistent between Islam and reform, or Islam and science. The scientific and technological achievements of the West could be equaled or surpassed by a science based on Islam. But al-Afghani’s attitude even to Islam was ambivalent, and his message was different for different audiences at different times. There are undercurrents of Shaykhism and mysticism in his thinking that probably reflect his traditional education. Yet he was a politician and a pragmatist rather than an ascetic or religious dogmatist, and he did not have a reputation for personal holiness. His flirtations with various contemporary governments in Islamic countries usually ended badly, but he became a major influence on later thinkers of Islamism—especially in Egypt and in Iran—though his ideas were too boldly innovative to be accepted by the classically trained ulema, whether Shi‘a or Sunni.15

  Al-Afghani returned to Iran in the 1880s at the invitation of the shah, but when they met there was no meeting of minds. Al-Afghani’s ideas were too strongly anti-British for the shah, at least at that stage. Al-Afghani left again and returned again, but was eventually forced out of the country—to Iraq, in 1891—after pamphlets appeared, apparently under his influence, attacking concessions to foreigners.

  From Iraq, al-Afghani was an influence in the campaign against the tobacco concession, corresponding in particular with the mojtahed Hajji Mirza Hasan Shirazi before the cleric ordered the tobacco boycott. Al-Afghani was active thereafter with the two main Persian newspapers printed overseas, Qanun and Akhtar, published in London and Istanbul, respectively. While he was in Istanbul in 1895, he was visited by a Persian ex-prisoner called Mirza Reza Kermani. They discussed future plans, and Kermani later returned to Iran. On May 1, 1896, Kermani shot and killed Naser od-Din Shah, having approached him with a petition while the shah was visiting the shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim. Naser od-Din was buried there shortly afterward. Kermani was executed by public hanging the following August, and Al-Afghani died of cancer in 1897.

  One aspect of the assassination illustrates the complexity of attitudes toward Jews in Iran. Apparently in his interrogation Kermani said that he had had an earlier opportunity to kill the shah, while he was walking in a park, and had not done so—despite the fact that he could easily have escaped because he knew that a number of Jews had been in the park that day and that they would be blamed for the killing. Kermani did not want the assassination to be blamed on the Jews and did not want to be responsible for the riots and attacks on Jews that might follow.16 For every anti-Semitic preacher or rabble-rouser, there were many educated, humane Iranians—clerics and others—for whom it was a matter of conscience to do what they could to help the Jews and other minorities, irrespective of the radicalism that might characterize their other beliefs.

  The sudden death of the shah could have brought disorder and confusion. But for a time courtiers were able to conceal what had happened, and the Cossack Brigade kept order in Tehran until Naser od-Din’s appointed successor, his son Mozaffar od-Din, could arrive from Tabriz and assume the throne.

  THE SLIDE TO REVOLUTION

  Mozaffar od-Din was sick when he became shah and was surrounded by a gaggle of greedy courtiers and hangers-on. They had waited a long time with him in Tabriz for their chance to take over in Tehran, and the shah did not have the energy or force of personality to keep them in check. Initially he had a reforming prime minister, Amin od-Dowleh, who was especially active in improving education. He opened many new schools, including schools for girls. Censorship was lifted, and the shah permitted the formation of cultural and educational associations. Most of this new activity was independent of the state and had little financial cost to the government. But this shah had to pay more for the court than his father had, in addition to his own frequent and expensive trips to Europe for medical treatment. With the exception of the debt incurred after the cancellation of the tobacco concession, Naser od-Din had succeeded in keeping the state finances in order. But state debt accumulated under Mozaffar od-Din Shah, necessitating new loans from the Russians and the granting of new monopolistic concessions. One of Prime Minister Amin od-Dowleh’s money-raising innovations was the introduction of Belgian customs administrators, but in 1898 the shah dismissed him after he failed to secure a British loan. A new prime minister, Amin ol-Sultan, came in and set up Joseph Naus, a Belgian, as customs minister. As time went on Naus effectively became finance minister.17

  The new customs arrangements were unpopular with many bazaar merchants, who seemed to be paying more than before—and also more than foreign traders. Not only that, they were paying the money to foreigners. The Russian loans were unpopular. The ulema disliked the new schools, which weakened their traditional grip on education. They also took a dim view of the shah’s trips to Europe. The lifting of censorship and the freedom to form associations made criticism of the government easier and more public. This gratified the inclinations of a new intelligentsia, a diverse mix of liberal, nationalist, socialist, and Islamic reformist elements, all of whom tended to be hostile to the monarchy for different or overlapping reasons. It was a time of change and ferment, but also resentment and unease.

  Among other concessions granted around this time, for fisheries and other rights, was one in 1901 to another British entrepreneur, William Knox D’Arcy. This concession was to prove much more important than was apparent initially: he was allowed to explore the southern part of the country for oil.

  The British, feeling their loss of the latest round in The Great Game, decided in 1902/1903 to liaise with some members of the ulema, notably Ayatollah Abdollah Behbehani, to oppose the customs arrangements, including the Belgian administrators and the Russian loans. Money changed hands. There was agitation by the ulema in several cities, but it turned against foreigners and non-Muslims in general. Riots in Isfahan and Yazd in the summer of 1903 led to the killing of several Baha’is, and there were attacks on Jews and Christian minorities, too.

  The following year the harvest was bad. Next, the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese wa
r, followed by the 1905 revolution in Russia, interrupted imports from the north and made them more expensive. The significance of the outcome of the war, in which the Japanese inflicted a humiliating defeat on the Russians (with the help of British-built battleships), was eagerly taken in by Iranian intellectuals, for whom it demonstrated that the dominance of the imperialist Europeans was not unshakeable. Meanwhile, the disruption of commerce meant that in northern cities like Tabriz and Tehran wheat prices in the early months of 1905 went up by ninety percent, and sugar prices went up by thirty-three percent. The government was hit hard, fiscally, because its customs revenues went down. The shah tried to secure another Russian loan and was offered £350,000, but the condition was that he should accept Russian commanders to lead all of his military units. Rejecting these terms, the shah instead raised internal tariffs and postponed payments to local creditors, increasing yet further the pressure on the bazaar merchants.18 The government’s financial problems also meant that the salaries of some ulema went unpaid.