IRAN (Western Colonialism)

While it is convenient to organize Iranian political history in dynastic terms, this does an injustice to the complexity of forces that have shaped modern Iran. Alongside this dynastic history it is important to note that changes in Iran’s economy and political culture did not always coincide with this neat organization but influenced it decisively. When Reza Shah seized power from the Qajar Dynasty, he had to appeal to tradition but also a new constitutional order. The traditions he appro-priated—Twelver Shi’ism, the very sense of Iran’s territorial extent—stretched not back to ancient past, but to a political and religious order established by the Safavid Dynasty in the sixteenth century.

THE SAFAVID DYNASTY (1501-1722)

The Safavid dynasty is mainly important for two reasons. First, as the Ottoman Empire did elsewhere in the Middle East, Iran’s Safavid dynasty consolidated and defined traditional forms of administration and high culture. Second, the Safavid dynasty gave shape to two ideas that have endured as part of modern Iranian society: the dominance of Twelver Shi’ism in Iran and the very concept of where the territory of Iran is ”naturally” or historically located. The boundaries of the Safavid Empire—from southern Iraq to the borders of Herat in modern Afghanistan, from Baku in present-day Azerbaijan to Kandahar in Afghanistan, and from the Caspian Sea to Bahrain—have come to define where Iran is (or ought to be) in the contemporary Iranian national imagination.

The Safavids began as a Sunni Muslim mystical order founded by Sheikh Safi al-Din of Ardabil (12521334) and evolved into a radical Shiite mystical order even as the Safavid family intermarried with the Sunni Aq-qoyyunlu dynasty. When Turkish tribal supporters of the Safavids, known collectively as the qizilbash (”redheads,” for the color of their headgear), helped Esma’il I (d. 1524) defeat his Aq-qoyyunlu rivals for supremacy in northwestern Iran in 1501, a new chapter in both Iranian and Safavid history was inaugurated.

Shah Esma’il suppressed his own mystical order in favor of orthodox Twelver Shi’ism and forcibly converted the majority Sunni population of his expanding empire to Twelver Shi’ism. Twelver Shi’ites follow the example of twelve Imams whom, in contrast to Sunni Muslims, they view as the only legitimate leaders of the Islamic community since the death of the prophet Muhammad in 632 c.e. They await the return of the Twelfth Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, who went into a state of occulta-tion in the Tenth Century until the return of the hidden Imam, Twelver Shi’ites invest religious leadership in the persons of ranking members of the clerical establishment, recongnized as Marja’ al-taqlid (”sources of imitation”). Suppression of the mystical order, paired with a policy of establishing a slave military with its paramount loyalty to the shah (or at least his money) created an enduring tension with the old qizilbash tribes, who remained the indispensable core of Safavid military power until the reign of Shah ‘Abbas I (”the Great,” r. 1587-1629). It was under ‘Abbas I that the Safavid Empire reached its greatest extent, successfully engaging the growing European hegemony over world trade and achieving a fairly durable peace with its chief regional rival, the Ottoman Empire.

The social and institutional strength of Si’ism in the Safavid Empire was achieved through state-sponsored popular preaching, patronage of schools and shrines, and the development of a government-supervised clerical hierarchy, the apex of which was the office of mollah-bashi (head mullah). The office was created in the reign of the last Safavid shah, Soltan Hosayn (r. 1694-1722), and occupied by Mohammad Baqer Majlesi (d. 1698). Majlesi worked to extend clerical influence over court policy and supervised the Bihar al-Anwar (”Oceans of Light”) collection of Twelver Shi’ite hadith (accounts of the sayings and actions of the prophet Muhammad and, in this case, the Imams).

THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE AFSHARS, ZANDS, AND QAJARS, 1722-1997

It was the heavy-handed rule of Soltan Hosayn’s governors in Qandahar that eventually provoked a rebellion among Afghan Sunni tribes in Kandahar, which resulted, ultimately, in an Afghan invasion of Iran. Much of the Safavid royal family was captured after the battle of Golanabad in 1722 and subsequently massacred in the capital, Isfahan. This set the stage for the rivalry of three qizilbash tribes, the members of which had more or less stood by as mercenary troops failed the Safavids at Golanabad, to attempt a restoration of the Safavid Empire.

These three tribes—the Afshars, the Zands, and the Qajars—each championed a different Safavid pretender to the throne as the Afghan tribes were pushed out of Iran. The chief of the Afshars, Nader (d. 1747), was the most successful initially. His restoration of many former territories of the Safavid Empire emboldened him to depose his puppet Safavid leader, Tahmasp II (r. 17221732), in favor of the young ‘Abbas III in 1732. Nader claimed the Iranian throne for himself as Nader Shah in 1736 when ‘Abbas III died. Nader later had Tahmasp II and his remaining sons executed.

Nader fueled his military ambitions with the wealth of the Mughal court when he invaded India in 1738 and sacked Delhi in 1739. He negotiated with the Ottomans for a marriage alliance and a reconciliation of Sunni and Twelver Shi’ism, but these efforts collapsed when Nader Shah was assassinated in 1747. The contest among Afsharid tribal factions to claim Nader Shah’s throne provided an opening for Karim Khan Zand (d. 1779) to assert his control over central Iran by 1760 in the name of yet another Safavid pretender, Esma cil III (d. 1773).

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The Qajars had managed to survive the previous decades as masters of Gilan and Mazandaran provinces; their own factional strife was quashed by the brutal chieftain, Agha Mohammad Khan. After destroying the remnants of the Zand tribe (in 1794) and Afsharid power, Agha Mohammad was crowned shah in 1796. His assassination in 1797 might have spelled a quick end to the Qajar Empire because Agha Mohammad Shah, castrated as a young man while in the captivity of an Afghan warlord, had no heirs. However, Agha Mohammad had consolidated his power over the Qajar tribe, in part by arranging for his younger brother’s son, crowned Fath cAli Shah (1797-1834), to succeed him.

Another important consequence of the interregnum that preceded the hegemony of the Qajars was a wave of Iranian ShWte clerics that emigrated to Najaf and Karbala in Iraq. The surplus of clerical talent aggravated the ideological dispute between “traditionalist” (akhbari) clerics and “fundamentalist” (osuli) clerics, with the latter coming to dominate the shrine and religious school economies in southern Iraq. As Iranian clerics continued to train in Iraq and return to Iran once the relative stability of the Qajar period was established, the osuli dominance of Shi’ism in Iran was assured as well.

THE QAJAR PERIOD, 1797-1925

The Qajars had the daunting task of establishing their own legitimacy without disavowing certain crucial and useful aspects of the Safavid legacy: Twelver Shi’ism and Safavid administrative practices. The Qajar kings and aristocrats sponsored the renovation of Shiite shrines in Iran and Iraq and encouraged the production of tacziyeh (passion play) performances commemorating the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad, at Karbala in 680. But in maintaining their political and religious legitimacy, the Qajars faced two challenges. From the outside, the pace of European “bal-ance-of-power” politics would bring semicolonial domination of Iran by Great Britain and Russia, making the preservation of the Qajar Empire’s borders a difficult challenge, to say nothing of expanding them (though the Qajars tried throughout the nineteenth century to do so). Internally, the Qajars would be rocked by a religious rebellion: the Babi/Baha’i movement. These combined pressures forced questions of reform and modernization on the Qajars as it had on the neighboring Ottoman Empire.

Fath ‘Ali Shah was successful in consolidating Qajar control over the Iranian plateau, but he failed to reestablish Iranian control over the Caucasus and lost control of Azerbaijan north of the Aras River in two disastrous wars with the Russian Empire (1804-1812 and 1826-1828). The treaties that concluded these wars (Golestan, 1813, and Turcomanchai, 1828) formalized the unequal relationship between the Qajars and their northern neighbors.

Russian gains in Iran gave further impetus for Great Britain to strengthen its presence there also. As various princes vied to succeed the present king or sought to secure their positions in Iran’s provincial capitals, the aid of Russia and Great Britain was sought by all. From 1828 onward, no Qajar king or politician could simply ignore the wishes of Moscow or London, with the best strategy often being to play the two ”Great Game” rivals off of one another.

Another strategy, which did not bear much fruit, was the cultivation of better relations with other Western countries (France, Prussia, Austria, and, ironically, the United States). The relationship with the United States, in fact, produced another challenge to the religious legitimacy of the Qajars in that American Christian missionaries had an expanding presence in Iran over the course of the nineteenth century. At the same time, Russia became Iran’s main trading partner, insisting on the sort of favorable trade terms it had exacted from the Ottoman Empire. Other European countries (or their colonies, such as British India) also secured terms of trade akin to that of Russia. These limits on import taxes and accompanying privileges of legal “extraterritoriality” for European subjects and their clients further eroded Iranian sovereignty.

The Qajars inherited an administrative system that was largely a Safavid creation—a military patronage state in which the Qajar tribe was only first among tribal equals. The unreliability of tribal levies in times of war or internal crisis was the primary spur to reform. Indeed, the inadequacy of its military, its bureaucracy, and its education system was brought home to the Qajars by the difficult encounters with Russia and Great Britain. As early as 1815, Iranians were being sent abroad to receive training in military and medical arts. The Ottoman Empire also served as a model for Qajar modernization.

The first Qajar military and administrative reforms under Crown Prince ‘Abbas Mirza (d. 1833) were called nezam-e jadid (new order). Under Naser al-Din Shah (1831-1896), several top-down reforms were initiated. Before he fell out of favor with Naser al-Din Shah, the prime minister, Mirza Taqi Khan Amir Kabir (d. 1852), had created a state technical school (the Dar al-Fonun) and the beginnings of a state media. Subsequent modernization efforts sought to expand the effective administrative control of the government and to fund the education of modern military officers and bureaucrats for the state.

Later modernization efforts, with Ottoman-inspired names such as tanzimat-e hasaneh (the good reordering), advanced in fits and starts. These efforts generally languished due to lack of funding. No matter how forward-looking the planning, the Qajar state presided over a medieval, agricultural economy. Money could not be raised to support the modernization of Iran’s transportation and communication infrastructure, let alone the industrialization of the agricultural or manufacturing sectors of the Iranian economy.

The Qajars resorted to development concessions (such as the aborted De Reuter concession of 1872 and the much narrower tobacco concession of 1890) to attract foreign capital for Iran’s development schemes. Owing to a mix of local opposition and rivalry between Great Britain and Russia for winning such concessions, the more ambitious concession schemes failed. The Iranian government under Naser al-Din Shah began to go into debt and to hand over key government functions, such as the collection of customs and the creation of a reliable unit of the military (the Persian Cossack Brigade), to foreign companies or foreign governments.

The Anglo—Russian rivalry in Iran had complex effects on the modernization of Iran’s infrastructure. British concern over imperial communication with India undoubtedly helped the development of telegraph communications in Iran. On the other hand, the Iranian government was forced to postpone the development of rail transportation throughout the nineteenth century because the British and Russians could not come to an accord about how such development contracts would be shared between them.

In 1896 Naser al-Din Shah was assassinated near the Shah ‘Abd al-’Azim cemetery by Reza Khan Kermani (d. 1897). In Kermani’s desperate act can be found strands of two important movements: the religious movement of Baha’ism and the more amorphous cultural movement known, mainly in retrospect, as the tajaddod (renewal) movement. Baha’ism began as the Shi’ite heresy of Babism when its founder, Mohammad ‘Ali Shirazi (d. 1850), proclaimed himself to be the Bab, or “gate,” facilitating the arrival of the mahdi (“The Guided One”) and later serving as the gateway to new divine revelation. It was mainly during the reign of Naser al-Din Shah that the Qajars examined and finally condemned Shirazi as a heretic and engaged in a civil war to suppress the movement, driving its leaders underground or overseas.

In exile in the Ottoman Empire in 1866, one of the followers of the Bab, Hosayn ‘Ali Nuri Baha’ollah (d. 1892), declared himself to be the true heir of the Bab for leadership of the Babi community. This led to a split between the majority Baha’is, who accepted the teachings of Baha’ollah, and the Azali Babis, who considered themselves to be correct followers of the teaching of the Bab under the leadership of Baha’ollah’s younger half-brother, Mirza Yahya Nuri (Sobh-e Azal, d. 1912).

Many Iranian followers of Babism and Baha’ism proved receptive to the ideals of renewalism. These ideals were advanced in the writings of Mirza Fath ‘Ali Akhundzadeh (d. 1878, an atheist), Mirza Malkam Khan (d. 1908, an Armenian convert to Islam and disgruntled member of the Qajar bureaucracy), and Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani. These writers expressed a desire to restore a pristine Iranian national character through the modernization of education, social reforms, and the democratization of politics.

Renewalist writings also expressed a resentment of Western hegemony and suspicion of religious tradition. Nonetheless, Iranian renewalists forged relationships with other activists, such as the pan-Islamist Jalal al-Din Asadabadi (“Al-Afghani,” 1838-1897). The Qajar court had also flirted with Al-Afghani, but Naser al-Din Shah fell out with him over the tobacco concession of 1890, expelling him from Iran in 1891. Once outside Iran, Al-Afghani was quoted in Mirza Malkom Khan’s London-based newspaper Qanun (The Law) on many issues, including opposition to the tobacco concession. In the end, renewalist intellectuals, the traditional clergy, and elite merchants forged an alliance and sustained a nationwide protest (facilitated, ironically, by the British-built telegraph network and the inviolate nature of the diplomatic post, which allowed Qanun and other expatriate Iranian newspapers to be smuggled past Qajar censors) that forced the cancellation of the tobacco concession in 1892.

The consequences of all these connections were visited upon Naser al-Din Shah in 1896. His assassin was a disciple of Al-Afghani and implicated Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani as well. Both men were in the Ottoman Empire at the time of the assassination. Al-Afghani was under house arrest, dying of cancer, but Kermani was extradited and ultimately executed along with Mirza Reza Khan Kermani in 1896. The reign of Mozaffar al-Din Shah (1896-1907) continued the trend of political suppression, top-down reforms, and development concessions (most notably, the d’Arcy concession of 1901 that led to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909, the first oil company in the Middle East) that simultaneously deepened Iran’s financial problems and trained a westernized elite increasingly drawn to the democratic strands of renewalism. Economic disruptions caused by the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 and resentment over heavy-handed government tactics to prevent hoarding by merchants sparked a new alliance of intellectuals, merchants, and ranking clergy against the monarchy.

Politicians with renewalist sympathies channeled the protest toward the creation of a Parliament (Majles) and a constitution over the course of 1906 to 1907. But no sooner was constitutional order established than disputes broke out over the nature of democracy in Iran. Some religious clerics felt that Islamic law was being flouted by the constitution and efforts to draft supplementary articles to the constitution failed to win the conservatives back. When Mohammad ‘Ali Shah (1872-1925) ascended the throne in 1907, it was with a mind toward using this conservative reaction (and Russian support) to restore the autocratic rule his father lost.

In 1908 the Parliament was bombarded by the Persian Cossack Brigade, and civil war broke out throughout the country. Constitutionalist forces gained the upper hand in 1909, and Mohammad ‘Ali Shah was deposed in favor his young son, Soltan Ahmad (r. 19091925). Parliamentary leaders quickly moved to bolster their positions with the creation of the Swedish-officered gendarmes as a counterweight to the Persian Cossack Brigade.

In 1911 Russia invaded Iran again over the employment of American Morgan C. Shuster as a financial adviser. Much to the chagrin of some British intellectuals and politicians who formed the Persia Committee to lobby against the British foreign policy (led by Cambridge Persianist and chronicler of the constitutional revolution E. G. Browne [1862-1926]), Great Britain offered no effective support for Iran’s fledgling democracy, choosing to remain bound instead by a 1907 agreement with Russia to divide Iran into ”spheres of influence.”

The British attitude toward Russian involvement in Iran changed over the course of World War I (19141918) and the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Russian, British, German, and Ottoman agents and forces all violated Iran’s official neutrality during the war, leaving both the central government and the promise of parliamentary rule in tatters. In addition to consolidating its colonial gains in the Middle East, the fiercely anti-Bolshevik policy of Great Britain led it to attempt the creation of an Anglo-Persian protectorate in 1919. This was foiled by parliamentary opposition. The British then tried another tactic. They cultivated Colonel Reza Khan (1878-1944) of the Persian Cossack Brigade, and in February 1921 Reza Khan and the pro-British journalist Sayyed Ziya’ al-Din Tabataba’i (d. 1969) organized a coup. The coup supporters were ostensibly loyal to the Qajar court, but many prominent Qajar aristocrats found themselves in jail for a time.

Initially securing the portfolio of the minister of war and the title sardar sepah (commander of the army), Reza Khan moved quickly to displace Tabataba’i, and by 1923 had secured the position of prime minister. Reza Khan combined a ruthless military campaign against an array of separatist movements (e.g., Kurds under Isma’il Simko and the Jangali movement of Mirza Kuchek Khan of Gilan) and autonomous provincial and tribal leaders with the shrewd cultivation of parliamentary politicians.

Early political factions, such as the Social Democrats and others, had developed into more ideologically coherent parties by the end of World War I in 1918. Despite the passage of universal male suffrage in 1913, these parties did not represent large organized constituencies and still depended on the personalities and patronage networks of their leaders. The Socialist Party, for example, was led by a Qajar prince. Reza Khan developed especially close relations with the nationalist Tajaddod (Renewal) Party, which had influential press organs both inside and outside Iran and appealed to frustrated supporters of the constitution, who were increasingly interested in strong central leadership of the state to force through modernization programs.

Nonetheless, Reza Khan’s first attempt to remove the Qajars backfired badly when a proposal to turn Iran into a Turkish-style republic was met with clerical, popular, and parliamentary opposition in 1924. He quickly regrouped and pressured the Parliament into deposing Ahmad Shah (1898-1930), who hardly helped himself by refusing to return to Iran from an extended European holiday, and into proclaiming Reza Khan’s Pahlavi family as the new dynasty of constitutional monarchs on December 15, 1925. The parliamentary vote to end the Qajar dynasty prolonged the institution of the monarchy, but also cemented the role of an elected legislature in Iranian politics.

Even the Islamic Republic of Iran could not completely dispense with the institution of parliament, as it did with the monarchy in 1979. The Qajar-era constitution (1906-1907) had guaranteed clerical oversight of the legislative process, but neither parliamentary politicians nor the Pahlavis enforced that guarantee. Such religious oversight became a central principle of the constitution of the Islamic Republic in 1980.

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