A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  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, nor was it trying to be.37 It controlled its territory loosely, through proxies and alliances with local tribes. The state bureaucracy was small, revolving 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, centralization, 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. They rejected Nader’s model and 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, had 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.

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  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 the death of his son, Abbas Mirza, who had been his designated heir. This meant that another son, Mohammad, took the throne. Mohammad Shah’s accession was supported by both the Russians and the British and was achieved peacefully—they judged, correctly, that he would uphold the treaties that gave them their privileges within Persia. 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 a reformer, but the shah had him strangled in 1835. Persian merchants began to protest the fact that cheap European products, especially textiles, were coming onto Persian markets with low or no tariffs and were undercutting domestic craftsmen, destroying their livelihoods. Predictably, the 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 disregarded the established, humane, and dignified precepts of their faith for the temporary popularity that could accrue from extremism and hatred. A serious attack by a mob in Tabriz in 1830 seems to have resulted in the death or flight of most of the previous Jewish population there. It may have begun (like similar cases in medieval Europe) with a false allegation that a Muslim child had been murdered by a Jew.2 Other such attacks followed elsewhere in Azerbaijan, prompting Jews to begin avoiding the whole province. There were also forced conversions of Jews in Shiraz and other places: in Mashhad in 1839 a riot broke out 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, called jadidi, kept to themselves in their own communities; many such converts still observed Jewish rites in private, and some eventually reverted to Judaism, risking being accused of apostasy if they did. Later in the century there were similar outbreaks at Babol on the Caspian Sea (in 1866) and in Hamadan (1892).4 Jewish and other travelers recorded that the Jews they saw were generally living in poor ghettoes and were subject to daily low-level intimidation and humiliation, though their 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 other 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. This rivalry came to be called The Great Game. Before the war of 1826–1828, the British had supported the Persians against the Russians; now the Russians encouraged Mohammad Shah to take compensation for Persia’s loss of territory in that war by grabbing back the former territories of Herat and Kandahar in the east. Mohammad Shah sent troops to Herat in 1837, besieging the place for a few months.6 But the British, who disliked the prospect of any encroachment in Afghanistan that might threaten India or make Russian access to India any easier, occupied Kharg Island in the Persian Gulf and demanded that Mohammed Shah quit Afghanistan. He withdrew in 1838 and 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-Sufi and 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 everlatent Shi‘a antagonism 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, which was 1260 in the Muslim calendar—a year that had been long awaited as the one-thousandth anniversary of the disappearance of the twelfth Emam. Since the eighteenth century, followers of a branch of Shi‘ism called Shaykhism had speculated that there must be a gate (“Bab”) through which the Hidden Emam could communicate with the faithful. This Bab was expected to take the form of a person, and as the year 1260 approached, some Shaykhis grew increasingly excited that the Bab might be revealed in that year. When the time finally came, some people identified a particular pious young man from Shiraz, Seyyed Ali Mohammad, as the Bab. In May 1844 he declared that he was indeed the Bab and began preaching against the shortcomings of
the ulema. He advocated better treatment of women (thereby attracting many female followers), recommended that the Islamic ban on interest be lifted, argued that judicial punishments should be made less harsh, and urged that children should be better treated. From one perspective his teaching looks progressive; from another it appears as little more than the conventional teaching of the milder strand of orthodox Shi‘ism. But in 1848 the Bab and his followers began preaching that the Bab was in fact the Hidden Emam himself, and that their faith was a new belief—one superseding the previous revelation of Islam. This changed the position, putting the Babis and the ulema in direct conflict. The Bab was soon taken into custody.

  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 poet, debated theology with the ulema, and preached the emancipation of women. She was sent into exile in Iraq at one point, but later returned. Like the Bab, she was arrested. But unlike him, she was still able to speak to her followers while under house arrest.

  When Mohammad Shah died in 1848 his seventeen-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 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. Animosity between the Babis and the monarchy escalated rapidly. In August 1852 three Babis tried to assassinate the new shah. Although they failed, there was a harsh backlash. Later that same year Qorrat al-Ain was killed by her captors, 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 Babis died, and others left the country.

  The movement continued to grow in exile. In the 1860s it split, with a new leader, Baha’ullah, announcing himself as the new prophet (“He Whom God Shall Make Manifest”) predicted by the Bab. Most Babis followed Baha’ullah, and since that time his movement has been known as the Baha’i faith. Within Iran, Baha’is have been persecuted and killed in almost every decade since that time.

  The story of Qorrat al-Ain and her advocacy of women’s emancipation is an important point in the history of women in Persia, and therefore for the story of Iranian society as a whole. There are some surprises here. From our viewpoint in the early twenty-first century, with the Islamic regime in power in Iran and with what is often perceived (not entirely accurately) as a traditional role for women reimposed since the revolution of 1979, one might assume that before the twentieth century all Iranian women were closeted at home and never went out except when heavily veiled. But this is not at all the case. Before the social changes brought by industrialization and urbanization, the structure of society was very different. Before 1900, up to half the population were nomadic or semi-nomadic, and in such societies, tightly integrated and often living at both the geographical and economic margins, women’s roles were of necessity more equal and less restricted. Broadly speaking, women oversaw the domestic arrangements while men ranged widely looking after the flocks. But with the men away, the women had to make important decisions, often as a group, and bear responsibility. When time came to move, everyone had to take an active part.8 Traditional tribal costumes vary enormously across Iran even today, and are often colorful and eye-catching, with no veil in sight.

  Of the remainder of the population, the majority were peasant farmers and laborers. But among these people, too, women had an essential economic role and some independence (insofar as anyone in the poorer classes could properly be thought of as independent). Women had to work hard in the fields and probably did the majority of the routine work—of all but the heaviest sort. Again, a veil of the enveloping chador kind was normally quite incompatible with that sort of activity.

  Even in the towns and cities, the majority of people were relatively poor, and in those households most women would have had to work outside the home. And there were significant numbers of prostitutes, to whom the rules of respectability certainly did not apply. So the setup we might think of as typical—of heavily veiled women seldom leaving the home and even in the home kept apart from males who were not relatives—was in fact atypical before 1900. When it did occur, it was limited to middle-or high-class families in towns (precisely the class that looms large historically, being the book-writing, book-reading class—perhaps only four percent or less of families overall). But that arrangement was, or became, an aspiration for many men who could not afford to make it a reality. One could think of the heavy veil as a kind of elite fetish, similar to some of the fashions of nineteenth-century Europe that immobilized women, being wholly impractical and incompatible with work of any kind. For a man’s wife to be out of the house and out of his control, especially in the towns, perhaps partly because of the presence of prostitutes in the towns, potentially exposed him to derision and ridicule. But for her to be kept at home and to emerge only veiled was expensive and a sign of the man’s status. It would be easy to overlook or underestimate the significance and implications of this trope among men in Iranian society and elsewhere. Rather than being an outgrowth of traditional religion and society—there is little justification for it in the Qor’an or the earliest hadith, which originated in different social circumstances—it may largely underpin them. Possession of material goods had its patterns and its social consequences, but so also did the possession of women.

  As the population later became steadily more urban and in some ways at least more prosperous, more women were more restricted, stayed in the home more, and wore the heavy veil. But we should not think of those arrangements as typical of pre-industrial Iran; one could accurately say that for the majority of Iranian women, they were a twentieth-century innovation.

  The conflict with the Babis around the time of Naser od-Din’s accession was only one of the problems he had to deal with. There was a serious revolt in Khorasan that took two years to overcome, an army mutiny in Tehran, and serious infighting between officials at court in which the Russian and British ambassadors both meddled, anxious that each might outdo the other. In this confused and dangerous situation, the shah’s first minister, Amir Kabir, attempted to steer the government in a reforming direction, urging the shah to take a personal interest in the details of government. Kabir’s influence over the young shah stemmed from the time he had spent with him as Naser od-Din’s right-hand man, when Naser od-Din had been crown prince and governor of Azerbaijan. Kabir was disliked by the Russians because they thought him to be pro-British, but the British were none too keen on him either.9

  An able and intelligent man, Amir Kabir was dedicated to the interests of the monarchy and the country. He made a review of finances and enforced a retrenchment in state expenditures, especially on payments and pensions to courtiers. This inevitably made him unpopular with some members of the court. He set up a state-funded school or polytechnic along western lines—the Dar al-Funun, which in later years collaborated to publish translations of Western technical books and literature—and organized a thoroughgoing reform of the army to bring it properly up-to-date. He set about some improvements in agriculture, and even tried to build some factories for manufactured products. All this was achieved within three years, showing what was possible and promising greater things for the future. But the thickets of court politics proved too much for Amir Kabir. He made the mistake of trying to intercede with Naser od-D
in on behalf of the shah’s half-brother, an effort that offended both the shah and the shah’s mother, who had significant influence at court. In time, Amir Kabir’s critics succeeded in eroding the shah’s confidence in him, without which he was powerless. In November 1851 Amir Kabir was dismissed as prime minister and sent to Kashan. At the beginning of 1852 Naser od-Din, influenced by his courtiers and relatives and following the precedent set by his grandfather and father before him, had his former first minister murdered. When Amir Kabir died, so did hope for any kind of serious push for development in Persia, at a time when elsewhere in the world, not just in Europe, the motors of industrialization and major structural change were accelerating.

  UGLY SISTERS: RUSSIA, BRITAIN, AND THE CONCESSIONS

  A new first minister, Mirza Agha Khan Nuri, took Amir Kabir’s place and proved more to the liking of the court: he was as corrupt and reactionary as they could have wished, and no further reform went forward. Later in the decade the Russians gained influence, and another Persian army set out to reconquer Herat. This time they succeeded in taking the city (in October 1856), but they also precipitated war with Britain. British troops landed at Bushire and defeated Persian troops there, and again the Persians were obliged to make peace. The Peace of Paris, signed in March 1857, stipulated that Persia must abandon all claim to Afghan territory. In 1858, Nuri fell from office, and from that time Naser od-Din Shah ruled as his own first minister, but he never found fully satisfactory arrangements for doing so.10

  Throughout this period and the decades that followed, the British and Russians interfered so insistently in Persian government that in some respects the shah’s independence appeared merely nominal. That this was not made more obvious was only due to the shah’s unwillingness to pursue projects that might displease the European powers. He was willing to offend one of them at any time—if he had the support of the other—but could not afford to alienate both together. Thus, for example, at a time when railways—rightly seen as the very embodiment of progress—were spreading all over the globe, yielding benefits for communications and commerce that could have been highly valuable for Persia too, particularly so given the huge distances and impossible roads of the Iranian plateau, no railways were built. The British and Russians disliked the idea for strategic reasons; railways could have delivered hostile armies more rapidly to their respective borders. By the end of Naser od-Din’s reign in 1896 there was still only one railway in Persia. It was a narrow-gauge line built by the Belgians, running out of Tehran to a little shrine town five miles away—the shrine of Shah Abd ol-Azim—which was to prove a fateful backdrop to several important events over the next few years.11