In Tehran in June 1905 there was a demonstration in the mourning month of Moharram that fused economic and religious elements in a way that was to become typical. Two hundred shopkeepers and moneylenders closed their businesses and walked to the shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim, protesting against the latest damaging government measures and demanding the removal of Monsieur Naus, the Belgian customs chief. The demonstrators passed around offensive pictures of Naus dressed as a mullah at a fancy-dress party. The shah, still sick and suffering, talked to the protestors and promised to satisfy their demands when he came back from his imminent trip to Europe. But this did not happen, and a more serious protest broke out in December 1905 after two sugar merchants from the Tehran bazaar were given beatings on the feet at the orders of the governor of Tehran; their offense had been charging too much for sugar. One of the men was a revered elder of the bazaar who had paid to repair the bazaar and three mosques. His protests—that he was not profiteering and that the prices were high because of the situation in Russia—availed him nothing.
Again the bazaar closed, and this time two thousand or more merchants, religious students, ulema, and others went—led by the mojtaheds Behbehani and Seyyed Mohammad Tabatabai—to the shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim and took sanctuary there.
From the shrine they issued their demands: removal of the governor who had ordered the beatings, enforcement of shari‘a law, dismissal of Naus, and the establishment of a representative assembly or adalatkhaneh (House of Justice). Initially the government was defiant. But the bazaar stayed closed, and after a month the shah dismissed the governor and accepted the protestors’ demands.
But there was no attempt to convene the House of Justice in the following months. Further street protests occurred in the summer of 1906, after the government had tried to take action against some radical preachers, and one of them—a seyyed, someone believed to be descended from the Prophet Mohammad—was shot dead by the police. This killing created a huge uproar. Ayatollahs Behbehani and Tabatabai, accompanied by two thousand ulema and their students, left Tehran for Qom (then as now the main center for theological study in the country), and a larger group of merchants, mullahs, and others took sanctuary at the grounds of the summer residence of the British legation at Golhak, then north of Tehran. The British chargé d’affaires respected the Persian tradition of sanctuary, or bast, and the numbers there eventually reached fourteen thousand. Their accommodation and other needs were organized by the bazaar merchants’ guilds. This meant that both the ulema and the bazaar were on strike, which effectively brought the capital to a standstill. Meanwhile, the Golhak compound became a hotbed of political discussion and speculation, with liberal and nationalist intellectuals joining in and addressing the assembled crowds. Many of these began to speak of the need to limit the powers of the shah by establishing a constitution (mashruteh), and the demand for a House of Justice became more specific, shifting to a call for a properly representative national assembly. Coordinated by the ulema, similar groups from the provinces sent many telegrams to the shah in support of these demands.
MASHRUTEH
On August 5, 1906, nearly a month after the first protestors took refuge in Golhak—and menaced by a potential mutiny among the Cossack Brigade, whom the shah had been unable to pay—Mozaffar od-Din Shah gave in and signed an order for the convening of a national assembly, or Majles. It convened for the first time in October 1906 and rapidly set about drafting a constitution, the central structure of which took the form of what were called the Fundamental Laws. They were ratified by Mozaffar od-Din Shah on December 30, and he died only five days later. The creation of a constitution was a major event, not just in Iranian history but also in regional and world history. In the 1870s in Turkey, a movement often called the Young Ottomans had established a kind of national assembly in an attempt to recast the Ottoman Empire as a constitutional monarchy, but the experiment had only lasted for a couple of years. The constitutional movement in Iran had a more enduring effect, and even though its revolution is often described as a failure, the Majles survived, and the movement’s achievements influenced events throughout the rest of the twentieth century. And the initial success of the revolution was achieved by peaceful, dignified protest—almost wholly without bloodshed.
The Majles was elected on the basis of partial suffrage, on a two-stage system, and represented primarily the middle and upper classes that had headed the protests in the first place. The electors were landowners (only above a middling size), ulema and theological students, and merchants and bazaar-guild members with businesses of average size or above. In each region, these electors chose delegates to regional assemblies, and those delegates nominated the 156 Majles members (except in Tehran where they were elected directly). Numerically, the Majles was dominated by the bazaar merchants and guild elders, and it divided roughly into liberal, moderate, and royalist groupings—of which the moderates were the most numerous by a large margin. Ayatollahs Behbehani and Tabatabai supported the moderates but were not themselves Majles members. Outside the Majles, both in the capital and in the regional centers, the elections stimulated the creation of further political societies (anjoman), some of which grew powerful and influenced the deliberations of the Majles itself. Some of these societies represented occupations, others regions like Azerbaijan, and still others ethnic or religious groups like the Jews and Armenians. There were political societies for women for the first time. A great upsurge in political activity and debate took place across the country, resulting in an expansion of the number of newspapers—from just six before the revolution to more than one hundred.19 This upsurge was disturbing to the more tradition minded, especially the more conservative members of the ulema.
The Majles expected to govern, and to govern on new principles. The constitution (which remained formally in force until 1979, and was based on the Belgian constitution) stated explicitly that the shah’s sovereignty derived from the people, as a power given to him in trust, not as a right bestowed directly by God. The power of the ulema, and their frame of thought, was also manifest in the constitution. Shi‘ism was declared to be the state religion, shari‘a law was recognized, clerical courts were given a significant role, and there was to be a five-man committee of senior ulema to scrutinize legislation passed by the Majles, to confirm its spiritual legitimacy (that is, until the reappearance of the Hidden Emam, whose proper responsibility this was). But the civil rights of non-Shi‘a minorities were also protected, reflecting the involvement of many Jews, Babis, Armenians, and others in the constitutional project. Jews and Armenians had their own protected seats for their representatives in the Majles (though the first Jewish representative withdrew after encountering anti-Semitism from other members of the Majles, and the Jews thereafter chose Behbehani to represent them—another important example of a mojtahed sympathetic to the Jewish minority20).
All revolutions are about movement and change—that is obvious. They are also about leadership. The Constitutional Revolution marked the effective end of the Qajar era of government, and promised to usher in a period of government under more regular, legitimate, modern principles. Instead, for a variety of reasons, many of which had nothing to do with the revolution itself, it inaugurated a period of conflict and uncertainty. It was still a major change, a watershed. But in addition to that kind of change, most revolutions bring their own dynamic of change within the human groupings and systems of values involved in the revolution. The players in the revolution find their expectations, assumptions, and illusions challenged and, in some cases, subverted or overturned by the progress of the revolution itself. As with other revolutions, notably the French, the Constitutional Revolution in Iran provided a playground for the law of unintended consequences.
The prime revolutionary classes were the ulema and the bazaari merchants, whose motivations, if not their mode of expressing them, were at root conservative. They wanted the removal of foreign interference and a restoration of traditional patterns of commerce and religi
ous authority. In the earliest phase of the revolution, the ulema were in charge. It was their authority that gave the protests authority, and it was their hierarchy and their system of relationships that organized and coordinated the protest. But once the protesters were installed in the British legation, it was a question of “where next,” and the ulema had no clear answer. The simple removal of ministers and objectionable Qajar initiatives was plainly not enough; the shah’s good faith could not be relied upon, and previous protests had failed to secure future good behavior. The call for a constitution was not just for a vague construct, the pet project of Westernizers; it was manifest that the country needed to commit itself to a permanent change of direction more definitive than anything tried before. The constitution really was an idea whose time had arrived—even the leaders of the ulema initially embraced it, despite its being clearly a Western-inspired idea. But their acceptance, whether or not they realized it straightaway, effectively handed over the initiative, and therefore the leadership, to the owners of the constitutional idea: the liberals and nationalists whose models were secular and Western. Many of these men were members of the state bureaucracy and were spiritual heirs of Amir Kabir. They were eager for reform of the state along Western lines, especially the state’s finances, but also its education and justice systems. One could think of them as a new intelligentsia, suddenly grown into importance to rival the traditional intelligentsia, the ulema. They were to be found disproportionally among the Majles delegates from Azerbaijan and Tabriz, and one of their most prominent leaders, Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh, was from that region. Their agenda extended beyond just a constitution. It soon became increasingly clear to many ulema that the revolution was taking a direction they had neither anticipated nor wanted.
Mozaffar od-Din Shah’s successor was his son Mohammad Ali Shah, whose instincts were more autocratic than those of his father. Although he took an oath of loyalty to the constitution, he was resolved from the start to overturn it and restore the previous form of untrammeled monarchy. Through 1907 and the first half of 1908 the Majles passed measures for the reform of taxation and finance, as well as education and judicial matters. The latter were particularly disturbing to the ulema, because they saw their traditional role encroached upon.
The figure of Shaykh Fazlollah Nuri symbolized the change of mind among many of the ulema and their followers at this time. Nuri had been a prominent Tehrani mojtahed in 1905, supporting the protests of 1905–1906. But by 1907 he was arguing that the Majles and its plans were leading away from the initial aims of the protesters—that it was unacceptable that sacred law should be tampered with. It was also unacceptable that other religious groups be treated equally with Muslims before the law, and that the constitutionalists were importing “the customs and practices of the abode of unbelief” (i.e., the West). At one point Nuri led a group of supporters into bast at the shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim. From there his attacks on the constitutionalists grew stronger, and he expressed open support for the monarchy against the Majles, which he denounced as illegitimate. He also railed against Jews, Bahais, and Zoroastrians, exaggerating their part in the constitutionalist movement. A group of clerics sent telegrams supporting him from the theological center in Najaf.21 Other mojtaheds, like Tabatabai, were more willing to accept Western ideas into the framework of political structures that were to govern human affairs in the absence of the Hidden Emam. But it is probably also fair to say that Nuri understood better than many of the ulema the direction that constitutionalism was leading, and from his perspective, the dangers of it. The general ferment of ideas precipitated by the revolution and the years of dissent before it had affected the ulema too. The ulema had never been a united bloc of opinion (no more than any group of intellectuals ever is). Eventually, another leading cleric, Khorasani, attacked Nuri from Najaf, declaring him to be a non-Muslim.
Just as the fighting around Troy in the Iliad is paralleled by the disputes of the gods on Mount Olympus, so the struggle between radicals and conservatives in Tehran was paralleled by a struggle between the mojtaheds in Najaf. Before 1906, the most eminent of these—the marja, or religious role model, for many Shi‘a Muslims—was Mohammad Kazem Khorasani, who had supported the constitution and the line taken by Tabatabai when the revolution came. But the ferment caused among the ulema by the revolution was such that as Nuri came to prominence in Tehran, Khorasani lost ground to a more conservative rival, Seyyed Mohammad Kazem Yazdi. This shift took concrete form at prayer: followers sat behind their chosen marja, and one account says that when the struggle was at its height only thirty or so still prayed behind Khorasani, while several thousand took their place behind Yazdi. Later on there was rioting in Najaf between the supporters of the different factions.22
In June 1908 the shah, deciding that feeling had moved far enough in his direction for him to act, launched the Cossack Brigade in an attack against the Majles. The troops fired shells at the building until the delegates gave in, and the assembly was closed. Many leading members were arrested and executed, while others, like Taqizadeh, escaped overseas. The shah’s coup was successful in Tehran, but not in all the provinces. In Tabriz, delegates from the constitutionalist regional assembly and their supporters (notably the charismatic ex-brigand Sattar Khan) successfully held the city against the royal governor and his forces.
In 1907, newly allied to each other and to France, and concerned at Germany’s burgeoning overseas presence, Britain and Russia had finally compounded their mutual suspicions and reached a treaty over their interests in Persia. The treaty showed no respect for the new conditions of popular sovereignty in the country, showing that the apparent British protection of the revolutionaries in their legation in 1906 had had little real significance. This new treaty divided Persia into three zones: a zone of Russian influence in the north, including Tabriz, Tehran, Mashhad, and Isfahan—most of the major cities; a British zone in the southeast, adjacent to the border with British India; and a neutral zone in the middle.
One consequence of the treaty was that the Russians, intolerant as ever of any form of popular movement, felt obliged to send in troops to restore Qajar rule in Tabriz after the shah’s coup of June 1908. But some of the revolutionaries were able to escape to Gilan and continue their resistance with other locals there. In July 1909 they made a move on Tehran, coordinated with a move from the south, where revolutionaries in Isfahan had allied themselves with the Bakhtiari tribe and successfully taken over that city. Mohammad Ali Shah fled to the Russian legation, was deposed, and went into exile in Russia. He was replaced by his young son, Ahmad, though Ahmad was not crowned until July 1914.
The constitutionalists were back in control once more, but the revolution had entered a new, more dangerous phase. A new Majles came in (on a new electoral law, which yielded a more conservative assembly), but the divisions between the radicals and the conservatives had deepened. The violence that had reinstated the revolution also had its effect—many of the armed groups that had retaken the capital stayed on there. Several prominent Bakhtiaris took office in the government. The ulema were divided and many sided with the royalists, effectively rejecting the whole project of constitutionalism. But within a few days the leader of the conservative ulema, Nuri, was arrested, tried, and hanged for his alleged connections with the coup of June 1908. There were a series of assassinations carried out by both wings of political opinion—Behbehani was killed, and later Sattar Khan. The radicals—the democratic party in the Majles—found themselves denounced by bazaar crowds as heretics and traitors, and some of them, including Taqizadeh, were forced into exile. Rumors ran around that there was a Babi conspiracy behind the democrats, and there were attacks on the Jews—in Kermanshah in 1909, and Shiraz in 1910, instigated as usual by preachers and marginal mullahs. A later, serious riot against the Jews in Tehran in 1922 was put down by Reza Khan.23 There was disorder in many provinces. It became impossible to collect taxation, tribal leaders took over in some areas, and brigands became commonplace. To try to
address this, and to redress the influence of the Russian-officered Cossack Brigade, the Majles set up a gendarmerie trained by Swedish officers.
PRINCE CHARMING
Pushing forward despite these storms, the government appointed a young American, Morgan Schuster, as financial adviser. Schuster presented clearsighted, wide-ranging proposals that addressed law and order and the government’s control of the provinces, as well as more narrowly financial matters, and he began to put them into effect. Fulfilling Iranian (or at least some Iranian) aspirations in ways that British realpolitik had disappointed them, the United States in this phase looked like the partner Iran had long hoped to find in the West—antifeudal, anticolonial, modern, but not imperialist—a truly benevolent foreign power that would, for once, treat Iran with respect, as an agent in her own right, not as an instrument. People have suggested that there are only a limited number of stories in literature and folklore—that all the great variety ever told can be reduced to just a handful of archetypal plots. If that is so, and if we think of the British and the Russians in the nineteenth century as the ugly sisters, then at this time Morgan Schuster and his United States looked like Prince Charming. But the story was not to have a happy ending.
The Russians objected to Schuster’s appointment of a British officer to head up a new gendarmerie, for tax collection, on the basis that it should not have been made within their sphere of influence without their consent, and the British acquiesced with their uglier sister. Schuster assessed, probably correctly, that the deeper Russian motive was to keep the Persian government’s affairs in a state of financial bankruptcy, and thus in a position of relative weakness (as supplicant for Russian loans), the better to manipulate them. Any determined effort to put the government of Persia on a sound financial footing, as Schuster’s reforms threatened to do, was a threat to Russian interests. The Russians presented an ultimatum: Schuster had to go. A group of women surged into the Majles to demand that the ultimatum be rejected, and the Majles agreed with them, insisting that the American should stay. But the Russians sent troops to Tehran and as they drew near, the Bakhtiaris and conservatives in the cabinet enacted what has been called a coup, and dismissed both Schuster and the Majles in December 1911.24
A History of Iran Page 24