A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  Adel Shah’s brother Ebrahim had initially controlled Isfahan, but after he moved east Karim Khan Zand and Ali Mardan Khan Bakhtiari took over the western provinces, coming to an agreement with each other and ruling in the name of another Safavid prince, Esma‘il III. Step-by-step Karim Khan removed his rivals, killing Ali Mardan Khan in 1754 and deposing Esma‘il in 1759. Karim Khan stabilized his regime by fighting off external rivals as well: Azad Khan, another of Nader Shah’s Afghan commanders, who controlled Azerbaijan; and Mohammad Hasan Khan Qajar, who had his power base in Mazanderan. Karim Khan also fought the Ottomans and conquered Basra, something Nader Shah had never achieved.

  The rule of Karim Khan Zand created an island of relative calm and peace in an otherwise bloody and destructive period. In the years of the Afghan revolt and the reign of Nader Shah, many cities in Iran were devastated by war and repression (some, like Kerman, more than once—in 1719 and 1747—and it was to suffer terribly again in 1794). By mid-century most of the built-up area of Isfahan, the former capital, was deserted and inhabited only by owls and wild animals. In the last years of the Safavids it had been a thriving city of 550,000 people, one of the world’s largest cities—similar in size to London at the time, or even bigger.16 By the end of the siege of 1722 only 100,000 people were left. Although many citizens later returned, the number fell yet further during the Afghan occupation and beyond. By 1736 there were only 50,000 left.17 It has been estimated that the overall total population of Persia fell from around nine million at the beginning of the century to perhaps six million or less by mid-century—through war, disease, and emigration. Population levels did not begin to rise significantly again until after 180018 (by contrast, the population of England rose from around six million in 1700 to around nine million in 1800). Trade fell to one-fifth of its previous level.19

  But despite the pitiful state into which the country had descended, the major outside powers, Russia and the Ottoman Empire, did not intervene as they had in 1722–1725. It was partly that they were busy elsewhere, and surely also that the outcome of their previous attempts had not encouraged them to repeat the experiment.

  The eighteenth century has been portrayed as a period of tribal resurgence, and the names of the main parties contending for supremacy for much of the century—Afshar, Zand, and Qajar—alone point in that direction.20 Many of the troops that fought in the civil wars, most of them horsemen, were recruited from the nomadic tribes who still would have comprised between one-third and one-half of the population. The makeup of the tribes was complex and far from static—here were many different terms to express different kinds of clans, tribal subdivisions, tribes, and tribal confederations, and alliances between tribes occasionally formed, broke, and reformed in new combinations. In the best of times—for centuries if not millennia—the tribes lived in uneasy tension with the more settled people of the towns and villages. The tribes and the townspeople were usually divided by ethnicity, language, or religion, or by a combination of all three. The tribesmen, living in more rugged mountain and arid territory, had rugged attitudes to go with their more marginal existence. They raised livestock and traded their surplus to supply the towns and villages with wool and meat. In return they received goods they could not make for themselves—some foodstuffs as well as weapons. But in addition to this more open form of exchange, there was often an exchange on the basis of security, one that was more or less disguised. Peasants might pay tribute to a local tribal leader to have their crops left alone at harvest time, or to avoid raids that might otherwise result in their being carried off as slaves (especially in the northeast). On the other hand, the local tribal leader might have been co-opted to serve as the regional governor, in which case he would collect tax instead of protection money. But in general, the tribes and their leaders tended to have the upper hand, which they exploited politically. Their position of supremacy was only decisively overturned when the twentieth century was quite well advanced.

  Karim Khan Zand did not have Nader’s insatiable love of war or his lust for conquest, and his governmental system was less highly geared. After removing Esma‘il, Karim Khan refused to make himself shah, ruling instead as vakil-e ra‘aya (deputy or regent of the people)—a modern-sounding title that probably reflected his awareness of the weariness of the Iranian people and their longing for peace. He restored traditional Shi‘ism as the religion in his territories, dropping Nader’s experiment with Sunnism. Karim Khan chose Shiraz as his capital, and built mosques, elegant gardens, and palaces that still stand—erasing the scars of the revolt of 1744 and beautifying the city that had been the home of Sa‘di and Hafez. Karim Khan ruled there until his death in 1779. He was a ruthless, tough leader, as was necessary in those harsh times, but he also acquired an enduring reputation for modesty, compassion, pragmatism, and good government, unlike most of his rivals. His reputation shone the brighter for the surrounding ugliness and violence of his times.

  RENEWED WAR

  After Karim Khan’s death, Persia lapsed again into the misery of civil war. This time the struggle was between various Zand princes on the one side and the Qajars, based in Mazanderan, on the other. The Qajars were united by Agha Mohammad Khan (son of Mohammad Hasan Khan Qajar), who had fallen into the hands of Adel Shah in 1747 or 1748 and had been castrated at Adel Shah’s orders when he was only five or six years old. After that Agha Mohammad was kept as a hostage by Karim Khan but was treated kindly.21 Agha Mohammad grew up to be a fiercely intelligent, pragmatic man, but also grim and bitter, with a bad temper and a vicious cruel streak that grew worse as he got older. He was never able to overcome the loss of his manhood. Contemporary illustrations depicted him as looking drawn and beardless as a sign of it.

  When Karim Khan died, Agha Mohammad escaped to the north, where he successfully conciliated other branches of the Qajar tribe that had previously feuded with his family. But he had to fight his own brothers to establish his dominance. Agha Mohammad’s rise was much more firmly based on his lineage and on the Qajar tribe than that of Nader Shah had been based on the Afshars. Once his supremacy within the tribe was achieved, Agha Mohammad ejected Zand forces from Mazanderan and began campaigning south of the Alborz mountains, with the help of the Yomut Turkmen allies that had long supported his family. But when he arrived outside Tehran, the gates were closed against him. The citizens politely told him that the Zands were in charge in Isfahan. That meant that the people of Tehran had to obey the Zands, but it also implied that if Agha Mohammad Khan could take Isfahan, they would obey him, too. Agha Mohammad marched on to Isfahan, taking it in the early part of 1785. He was then duly accepted into Tehran in March 1786, after other successful campaigning in the west. From then on it became clear that he intended to establish himself as ruler of the whole country, and Tehran has been the capital since that time.

  There was to be much more fighting before Agha Mohammad could rule supreme, and he was still far from secure in the south. Isfahan changed hands several times. But the Zands could not deliver a knockout blow either, and in January 1789 their leader (Ja‘far Khan) was assassinated. The ruling family of the Zands then fought among themselves for the leadership, until Lotf Ali Khan Zand, a young grand-nephew of Karim Khan, entered Shiraz in May 1789, establishing his control.

  Lotf Ali Khan was young and charismatic and a natural focus for the hopes of those who remembered the prestige of his great uncle, but militarily he was at a disadvantage from the start. He fought off an attack by Agha Mohammad in June 1789, but when he made a move on Isfahan in 1791 Shiraz revolted against him behind his back. He returned but was blocked from re-entering his former capital and was forced to lay siege to the city. The Shirazis sent for help to Agha Mohammad—and sent Lotf Ali Khan’s family as prisoners to him too. Lotf Ali Khan was able to defeat a combined force of Qajars and troops from Shiraz, but the city still held out. Then in 1792 Agha Mohammad himself marched south with a large army. By this time Agha Mohammad was showing some of the fierce anger and vicious cruelty for
which he later became notorious. At one point he saw a coin minted in Lotf Ali’s name and became so enraged that he gave orders for the Zand’s son to be castrated.

  Lotf Ali Khan now nearly brought off a coup that could have won him the war. As Agha Mohammad approached Shiraz, he camped with his Qajar troops near the ancient sites of Persepolis and Istakhr. After night fell, Lotf Ali approached the camp with a smaller force and attacked from several directions in the dark. Chaos erupted. Lotf Ali sent thirty or forty men right into the camp, penetrating as far as Agha Mohammad’s private compound, which was defended against them by a few musketeers. At this point one of Agha Mohammad’s courtiers went to Lotf Ali and told him that Agha Mohammad had fled. The battle appeared to be over and Lotf Ali was persuaded that further fighting would only risk his own troops killing one another in the dark. He ordered his men to sheathe their sabres. Many of them dispersed, plundered the parts of the camp they were in control of, and left the scene with the booty. But when dawn came Lotf Ali discovered to his horror that Agha Mohammad was still there. He had not fled, and the Qajar troops were regrouping around him. With only one thousand of his own men still with him, Lotf Ali Khan was surrounded and outnumbered. He quickly withdrew, fleeing eastward.22

  From this point on Lotf Ali Khan’s support began to dwindle away. He captured Kerman, but Agha Mohammad Khan moved against the city and besieged it. The Qajars broke into the city by treachery in October 1794 and Lotf Ali Khan fled to Bam. Agha Mohammad ordered that the women and children of Kerman be given over to his soldiers as slaves; the surviving men were to be blinded. To ensure that his orders were followed, he demanded that the men’s eyeballs be cut out, brought to him in baskets, and poured out on the floor. There were twenty thousand of them. Sir John Malcolm recorded that these blinded victims were later to be found begging across Persia, telling the story of the disaster that had befallen their city.23

  Lotf Ali Khan was betrayed in Bam and was 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

  Agha Mohammad Khan was now the undisputed master of the Iranian plateau. He turned to the northwest, where he marched into Georgia and reasserted Persian sovereignty. In September 1795 he conquered Tbilisi after a furious battle in which the Georgians seemed to be winning at several points, despite their inferior numbers. Thousands were massacred in Tbilisi, and fifteen thousand women and children were taken away as slaves. But the king of Georgia had put himself under Russian protection in 1783, and the destruction of Tbilisi caused anger in St Petersburg. Later on, it was to bring humiliation for Persia in the Caucasus.

  In the spring of 1796 Agha Mohammad had himself crowned on the Moghan plain, where Nader Shah had assumed the same dignity exactly sixty years earlier. At the coronation Agha Mohammad wore armbands on which were mounted the Darya-ye Nur and the Taj-e Mah jewels taken from Lotf Ali Khan, which 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 afterward, 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. This dispute, between what came to be called the Akhbari and Usuli schools, was not to be resolved 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 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). But 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, by which time a theory of interpretation and a hierarchy had 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, which in practice meant only one or two of just a few mojtaheds in each generation. As some were thus elevated, a hierarchy of mojtaheds came to be created. The senior, more authoritative among them became known as hojjatoleslam (proof of Islam), ayatollah (sign of God), or, later, grand ayatollah. Just as in other contexts, competition for the titles produced a kind of inflation:26 as more people acquired the original titles, new, more exalted ones had to be invented.

  In this way, a religion that—in the absence of the hidden Emam—formally still asserted the illegitimacy of all authority on earth 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 organized 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 reenacted 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 symbolic coffins representing the coffin of Hosein, or huge multipointed symbolic banners representing his war standard. Others beat themselves with chains. Some also cut their heads with swords, but this is an excess that has been increasingly frowned upon 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—as mentioned earlier—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 theater, 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. 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 impromptu 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 on street corners.27

  All these manifestations have served to remind Shi‘a Muslims of the central events of their religion. But they have also reinforced a commitment to collective religious feeling based on the sense of injustice that many 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.