5
In the second half of the nineteenth century, Qajar Iran survived as a sovereign state in the face of growing foreign pressures and domestic tensions. It did not break up and was not taken over by a colonial power. The Naseri era, as it came to be known, was dominated by Naser al-Din Shah (r. 1848–1896), who ruled over the country for nearly half a century. It was an era of gradual state consolidation, appeasement of the religious establishment, adjustment to European diplomatic and economic realities, and limited success with domestic reforms. Facing a host of economic problems, the era was marked by sporadic urban riots and popular protests. It also witnessed further material and cultural influences from abroad. A new generation of dissidents came to nurture a sense of despair about the future of their country but also a resistance to intervention by European powers. A stronger sense of national resolve began to emerge.
The government’s modernization projects, starting with Amir Kabir’s reform program at the outset of Naser al-Din Shah’s reign, continued piecemeal, although the conservative Qajar elite resisted any substantial changes; there are similarities with what had come about in Meiji Japan or even in Khedivate Egypt or the Ottoman Tanzimat era. No modern industry of any substance emerged, except perhaps workshops established with European capital to export handwoven Persian carpets to Europe and America. Roads and communication remained underdeveloped. The modern educated sector constituted a small and largely ineffective part of the elite, and the political structure of the Qajar state remained more or less intact.
For the Iranian people, the Naseri period entailed some changes in their lifestyle. New technologies such as steamships and the telegraph emerged, and the consumption of commodities such as tea, tobacco, and sugar, as well as the purchase of European fabrics, became more common (map 5.1). Iranians came to learn more about the world beyond their familiar frontiers. The railroad, that great benchmark of the nineteenth-century economic progress, however, remained an unfulfilled dream, primarily because of Anglo-Russian imperial rivalries, but also because of insufficient capital. The lack of a modern rail and road network, whether a curse or a blessing, left Iran far less open than the rest of the Middle East, such as Egypt, to European capital and colonial projects.
The late nineteenth century also generated new intellectual syntheses and fresh artistic creativity in painting and architecture. Contact with Europe invigorated Iran’s artistic and literary potential without, in most cases, undermining its cultural confidence. The Persian artistic imagination and exquisite craftsmanship survived without being entirely enamored of or bedazzled by the West. On the darker side, the Naseri era was marked by calamities—earthquakes and drought, devastating outbreaks of cholera and plague, and periods of famine—often beyond the capacity of the government’s meager resources. Abject poverty and chronic starvation, in part because of changes in the pattern of agricultural production, and hoarding and interference in the flow of essential food items, became common in the cities and in the countryside.
The greater tranquility of a small but powerful landowning elite seldom trickled down to benefit the majority. Rather, wealth discrepancies sharpened social divisions and added to popular discontent. If the first half of the nineteenth century reconstituted the Guarded Domains of Iran under the Qajars, the second half was an age of national consolidation through common bonds of deprivation, and later, popular protest. So often such frustrations manifested in petitions to the shah, in taking refuge in shrines and royal palaces, and in spontaneous food riots. The final demarcation of Iran’s geographic boundaries further distanced Iran from its neighboring ethnic Sunni communities and hence reinforced Iran’s Shi‘i identity. At the turn of the twentieth century, an average inhabitant of Iran, ahl-e Iran, as he or she was likely to be identified, was more conscious of a collective Iranian identity than a subject of the Qajar empire under Fath ‘Ali Shah, even though he or she had not yet been exposed to the modern ideology of nationalism.
THE AGE OF AMIR KABIR
Few figures of the Qajar era have left their mark on Iranian historical awareness as did Mirza Taqi Khan Farahani (1807–1852), better known by his military title, Amir Nezam and, briefly, as Amir Kabir. He has often been celebrated as the champion of national sovereignty and his age as one of the missed opportunities on the path of progress. He was portrayed as a martyr who had fallen victim to the court’s intrigues, vested interests of the nobility, foreign machinations, and a deep-seated culture of despotism. The heroic aura aside, the reality of Amir Kabir’s career is no less illustrative of the domestic and foreign obstacles on the way to the serious program of state modernization. During his brief term of office (1848–1851) as the first chief minister of Naser al-Din Shah, he strove to instill a new governmental order (nazm), one rooted as much in the Persian ideals of “good government” as informed by nineteenth-century notions of reforming the state.
Map 5.1. Trade and trade routes in Qajar Iran
As a middle-ranking bureaucrat in the Tabriz administration, Amir Kabir first made a name for himself in the mid-1840s as Iran’s chief negotiator in the Perso-Ottoman boundary commission, where he negotiated the second Treaty of Erzurum. Eventually concluded in 1847, it placed Perso-Ottoman relations and especially agreement on pilgrimage traffic between the two countries on firmer footing. He later served as the secretary of the all-powerful Azarbaijan New Army and helped incorporate it into Iran’s traditional forces. In his training as a state comptroller and in his reformist perspective, he was a product of the ‘Abbas Mirza era and a protégé of the Qa’em-Maqam family, to whose household his father served as the chief cook. He shared with Haji Mirza Aqasi, to whom he was indebted for patronage and promotion, his humble background. Coming from a village in the Farahan region, Amir Kabir was snubbed by the Qajar elite no less than they had despised Aqasi. His aversion to the parasitic Qajar nobility and his desire to win over the young crown prince Naser al-Din Mirza in Tabriz also followed after Aqasi’s path to power. He was more determined than his predecessor to hold the orderly reins of power and in his plans for reform and his foresight in implementing them.
In Tabriz, Mirza Taqi Khan first gained access to Naser al-Din Mirza, who was serving as prince-governor. The young prince was child of an unhappy arranged union between Mohammad Shah, who held little affection for him, and a powerful and protective mother, Jahan Khanum (later Mahd ‘Olya), of the Qovanlu branch of the Qajars (see chart 2 in chapter 4). She had heavily invested in her son’s accession to the throne, although Naser al-Din’s childhood was one of parental neglect. He was viewed as feeble, unimpressive, and unworthy of the Qajar crown. A capable uncle of his, backed by the Russians, seriously disputed his right to the throne. After Mohammad Shah’s death, Mirza Taqi Khan proved indispensible in bringing the young crown prince to the capital and help consolidate his royal power. He was like a father to Naser al-Din and a tutor, teaching his pupil how to act as a king, conduct the affairs of the state, and resist demands of his family members and court attendants. He intended to hammer out of the young shah a modern ruler: assertive, educated, and disciplined, perhaps having in mind ‘Abbas I, three centuries earlier. To Naser al-Din Shah’s credit, he opted for Amir Kabir and was prepared, to an extent, to listen and learn.
Typical of his age, Amir Kabir saw the military as the way to reorganize the government. His vision of overhauling the state was informed by such state reformers as Peter the Great, who had subdued the all-powerful but unruly Russian nobility, and the Ottoman Mahmud II, who had destroyed the remnants of the Janissary corps as a prelude to the Ottoman military and administrative reforms. Amir Kabir, who three times visited Russia and the Ottoman Empire, witnessed the fruits of these reforms. While in Tabriz he was also close to the British commercial consul, and as early as 1838 he had shared some of his aspirations for political power with the consul. His idea of ministerial control may well have been patterned after the famed Persian viziers of the past.
Amir Kabir’s appointment in 1848, at the beginning of Naser al-Din’s reign, to the triple office of sadr-e a‘zam (chief minister), commander in chief of the army (amir-e kabir), and guardian (atabak) to the young shah came across as an unusual monopoly of power. It was visibly comparable to that of the celebrated Persian minister Abu-‘Ali Hasan Tusi Nezam al-Molk, whose example may have been in Amir Kabir’s mind. The young shah was obliged to grant him emergency powers while the country was in a state of political transition. His control of the Azarbaijan army and the orderly investiture of Naser al-Din to the throne made such a choice almost inevitable. By 1848, the Babi movement had reached revolutionary momentum. At the same time, a serious secessionist revolt in Khorasan, led by Mohammad Khan Salar, of the rival Davalu wing of the Qajar tribe, also loomed large. Salar was backed by Turkmen and Kurdish tribes of the northeast who resisted both the Qajar state’s control over Khorasan and virtual exclusion of the Davalu Qajars from positions of power. To restore order, the premier relied on the New Army of Azarbaijan. In the three years that followed, he further reorganized the Qajars’ mostly tribal military resources along the lines of the Azarbaijan corps. By 1851, the army had crushed both the Babi uprisings and the Khorasan insurrections.
Amir Kabir was also aware of the need for steady revenue to pay and equip a modern army. This required a sound fiscal policy and the creation of supporting institutions. The polytechnic academy that came to be known as Dar al-Fonun (abode of skills), the first Western-style educational institution, was in reality a cadet school designed to meet the army’s needs for engineering, medical, and artillery officers as well as interpreters. Late in 1851, shortly after the downfall of its founder, Dar al-Fonun started to operate with a handful of European instructors and some one hundred pupils handpicked mostly from among the sons of middle-ranking military and bureaucratic officials. The instructors consisted of a mix of Austrian, Italian, and French infantry, artillery, and cavalry junior officers, as well as a capable surgeon, a mine engineer, and a military surveyor, and language instructors in French, English, and Russian. Instructors communicated with their students through mostly Iranian Armenian teaching assistants, who later became part of the teaching staff. The college’s building was an early example of Perso-European style, inspired by the design of the British Woolwich military academy and improvised by an Iranian engineer who studied there (fig. 5.1 and fig. 5.2).
The launching of a government gazette under the new premier was also a step toward modernization. The Vaqaye’-e Ettefaqiyeh (A chronicle of events) was meant to educate the public about Western advances and to enable the state to communicate with its subjects, especially provincial elites, in accessible and concise language. Here, Amir Kabir’s initiative followed in the footsteps of ‘Abbas Mirza’s administration and the publication of the first newspaper in Tehran in 1837 under the editorship of Mirza Saleh Shirazi, later a protégé of Amir Kabir. Nearly two decades earlier a press in Tabriz, sponsored by Manuchehr Khan Mo’tamed al-Dowleh, the Georgian confidant of Fath ‘Ali Shah, used Persian movable type of the naskh style as early as 1819 to print a host of books, including a history of the Qajar dynasty and popular works by Mohammad Baqer Majlesi. By the 1830s other presses in Tehran and elsewhere had begun to produce lithographic publications.
Figure 5.1 and Figure 5.2. Pages from the booklet Qanun-e Nezam (Military drill book) commissioned by Amir Kabir. The title page (left) bears Naser al-Din Shah’s name and the lion and sun emblem of the Iranian state. Drill posture (right) is described with geometric precision.
By ‘Ali-qoli Kho’i (signed at the bottom of the right page). Courtesy of Ulrich Marzolph.
Under Amir Kabir, and for more than a decade after him, the Vaqaye’-e Ettefaqiyeh reported government appointments and decrees, court and provincial news, and public announcements. It also offered foreign news, both Western and regional, and printed some of the earliest commercial advertisements. Emphasis on world geography and politics, including the earliest public information on the American continent and the United States government and people, new geographical explorations, and technological inventions and engineering feats, opened up a new vista for the Iranian readership. The United States was presented as a young nation successfully liberated from the yoke of English colonialism. In the following decades Qajar Iran witnessed, if not a printing revolution, at least a steady growth of private printing houses (fig. 5.3).
A considerable number of Persian books published in the Naseri era included religious texts, works of Shi‘i elegy, ethics, poetry, popular tales, and some translations of European novels (fig. 5.4 and fig. 5.5). Before the turn of the twentieth century, newspaper publications inside Iran remained a listless endeavor firmly controlled by the state.
Figure 5.3. The process of lithographic printing, as shown by master illustrator ‘Ali-qoli Kho’i, consists of seven stages of preparing the slates, calligraphy, and lithographic press. From the closing page of an 1847 edition of Nezami’s Khamseh.
Courtesy of Ulrich Marzolph.
Figure 5.4. Head of Imam Hosain paraded by the enemies (ashqiya) on the day of ‘Ashura. Illustrated books of elegy such as this amplified emotional effects of the Karbala tragedies.
Isma‘il Khan Sarbaz Borujerdi, Asrar al-Shahada (Mysteries of martyrdom), illustrated by ‘Ali-qoli Kho’i (Tehran?, 1268/1851). Courtesy of Ulrich Marzolph.
Figure 5.5. Akvan carries away Rostam in sleep. The transvestite demon (div) was a staple of popular illustrations of the period.
Shahnameh illustrated by Ostad Sattar (Tabriz, 1275/1858). Courtesy of Ulrich Marzolph.
Beyond education and the press, Amir Kabir’s modernizing strategy relied on harnessing the influence of foreign powers in the country’s internal affairs. This is evident, for instance, in his resistance to British intervention in the Khorasan revolt or to Russian demands for a greater say in the affairs of Azarbaijan. His earlier affinity in Tabriz with Colonel James Farrant, who later became the British chargé d’affaires in Tehran in 1848, and with Colonel Justin Sheil, the British envoy who succeeded Farrant (both were British officers of the Indian Army who had been given diplomatic posts) facilitated British support and financing of Naser al-Din’s march to the capital and accession to the throne.
Once in office as the premier, Amir Kabir did not hesitate to assert his independence. Like his predecessors, he viewed the British as a necessary ally and counterweight to the growing Russian threat. Yet he was careful to reserve Iran’s authority over a range of issues, including trade regulations, protégé status for Iranian subjects, sovereignty over the Persian Gulf coasts, and the behavior of foreign diplomats at the Persian court. The dignity and sovereignty of the Persian state, he insisted, required that European representatives respect the Qajar crown but deal exclusively with the premier in all affairs of the state. Reversing Iran’s growing trade deficit, export of precious metals under the pretext of trade, and shortage of cash required the enforcement of a strict monetary policy, an option that was not at Amir Kabir’s disposal. Boosting the domestic manufacturing base was a realistic alternative. Expansion of the Tehran bazaar, including a spacious thoroughfare, the magnificent caravansary Saray-e Amir, and a complex known as Dar al-Sanaye’ (abode of fine arts) devoted to the revival of fine arts and traditional crafts signaled the premier’s interest in reinforcing domestic trade and manufacturing (fig. 5.6).
Finance remained Amir Kabir’s greatest concern as he grappled with losses in state revenue, the legacy of the Aqasi era, and the rise in expenditures. In addition were the heavy cost of military campaigns, court expenses, pensions for the Qajar nobility, and reform projects, including new building construction. His experience as an army accountant no doubt helped with collecting taxes in arrears and reducing expenditures. Given the near bankruptcy of the state in 1848, a balanced budget proved daunting. Enforcing an austerity regime that cut all salaries and pensions in half across the board was daring but contentious. Reducing the young shah’s “pocket money” brought constant nagging, and slashing the pensions of the court and divan officials bred serious grudge. With the accession of Naser al-Din Shah, a host of his maternal relatives gained prominence. Some of the paternal uncles of the shah served as governors and army commanders, but few of his maternal relatives who were given provincial offices rendered useful services.
Figure 5.6. “Weighing merchandise in a caravansary at Tehran” is a realistic portrayal of everyday trade in Saray-e Amir in the Tehran bazaar. The caravansary was founded around 1849 by Amir Kabir.
S. G. W. Benjamin, Persia and the Persians (London, 1887), 75.
Government accountants (mostowfis) resisted centralizing measures that limited their monopoly over finances and threatened their hereditary offices. Qajar Iran’s decentralized state accounting and the many abuses associated with such a system worked against any modernizing initiative, and Amir Kabir’s new appointments only partially strengthened his hand. Bringing some measure of discipline to the divan was a step forward. Likewise, the creation of a new agency, the Government Bureau of Justice (divan-khaneh ‘adalat) aimed to bring discipline to the otherwise muddled division between the mojtaheds’ civil courts and the government’s control of customary law (‘orf), which was responsible for the adjudication of criminal cases.
The new agency also heard some cases involving foreign nationals and addressed other cases related to religious minorities. Frequent petitions from Jewish, Christian, or Zoroastrian families involved cases in which one of the heirs to a deceased person momentarily converted to Islam and appropriated the share of other survivors. Contrary to the shari‘a courts, which routinely ruled in favor of the convert, the Bureau of Justice aimed to prevent such abuses, in part because some non-Muslims subjects involved in foreign trade were affiliated with European embassies. The de facto division of state versus religious courts nevertheless continued to plague the Qajar system after Amir Kabir. The mutual reluctance of the ulama and the government to create a uniform code, such as the Ottoman civil code known as Majilla Ahkam ‘Adliya, compiled during the Tanzimat era, served as a major obstacle to judicial reform.
That Amir Kabir relied on the shah’s goodwill to implement his reform measures ignited, almost from the start, the enmity of the Qajar elite. They viewed him as haughty and monopolizing, and considered his draconian measures an unfair breach of their entitled privileges. His marriage at the age of forty-two to the thirteen-year-old sister of the shah, which he reluctantly complied at the shah’s behest, generated further envy. In particular Mahd ‘Olya (1805–1873) loathed Amir Kabir not only because the premier limited her access to the shah but also because of his effort to rein in the Qajar nobility. His anti-corruption measures to abolish the practice of madakhel as well as bribery and extortion by government agents, and his ban on the practice of taking sanctuary (bast) in holy shrines and in other safe locations by suspects or culprits of crimes, made him even more enemies. Barring many idles and busybodies from access to the shah and reducing the salaries and privileges begrudged many attendants and court functionaries. Close supervision of the shah’s everyday affairs and his whereabouts, even cautioning him against engaging too much pleasure rather than discharging his royal duties, also had a cumulative effect of cooling Naser al-Din’s affection and eventually his support for the chief minister.
Treading a narrow noncommittal path toward either of the two neighboring empires also caused trouble. Amir Kabir’s diplomatic conduct was proper and considerate, but he did not hesitate to assert his independence and, if necessary, voice his opposition. He nurtured a controlled sense of resentment for European emissaries’ unjustified interference in Iran’s domestic affairs. Without idealizing him beyond his reality—as many nationalist narratives of the twentieth century have done—Amir Kabir can be seen as an anti-imperialist with a protonationalist vision. He resented the obsessive nitpicking of foreign envoys, who at every turn tried to check him and his policies even if they were not remotely threatening to the vested interests of their countries.
During the Aqasi era, when the full effects of the Treaty of Torkamanchay became evident, the neighboring powers missed no opportunity to embarrass and humiliate the chief minister, the shah, and the government, and to employ whatever was in their means to display their imperial superiority. Amir Kabir was adamant that he would not budge in the face of the kind of demands and pressures that were sustained by his predecessor. Yet he had to give in to their reasonable demands. He agreed, for instance, at least nominally, to the British request to ban torture. After much resistance he gave his implicit consent to ban the slave trade in the Persian Gulf as well. Contrary to Aqasi’s time, seldom under Amir Kabir were there diplomatic crises caused by the Russian or British envoy demanding official satisfaction from the Iranian government for trivial cases.
It is undeniable that Amir Kabir had come to power with the British diplomats’ financial and moral support. In response, he remained, for a while at least, indebted to them. His dismissal of the French military officers in the Iranian service and the subsequent break in relations with France, in order to please the British, was one obvious error of judgment. Aqasi had nurtured relations with France, despite the condescending attitude of the French representative, so as to balance the pressures from the British side. Friendly gestures toward Britain, although limited, had the additional cost of incensing the Russians. Although after assuming power Amir Kabir sufficiently distanced himself from the British, and in due course developed genuine differences with them on a range of issues, the Russian envoy in Tehran refused to label him anything other than pro-British.
By late 1851, Amir Kabir’s growing isolation and diminishing power base became more apparent. The young shah, under pressure from his mother and her allies in the conspiring court and among ranking officials, turned increasingly fearful of his chief minister and guardian. He dismissed Amir Kabir from office in December 1851, a decision that proved to have grave consequences. Fearing for his life, a fate similar to Qa’em-Maqam’s fifteen years earlier, Amir Kabir first sought some form of security from the shah and, later, when disappointed, from other quarters. Yet neither his plea for protection from the British envoy in Tehran, which was quietly denied, nor an offer of protection from the Russian legation in Tehran proved effective. Diplomatic involvement only added to the shah’s suspicions and gave Amir Kabir’s enemies a perfect excuse to conspire for his destruction. He subsequently was banished to Kashan, where he briefly stayed under house arrest in the nearby royal garden in Fin. Soon after, in January 1852, the shah dispatched a court confidant to Kashan with the secret mission of murdering Amir Kabir. While he was in a bathhouse in the Fin Garden, the executioners arrived. They cut his wrists open and let him bleed to death.
As some observers noted even in his own time, Amir Kabir was an exceptionally capable though autocratic statesman in the mold of the nineteenth-century modernizers. His vision of reform was top down, functional, and clearly designed to create a disciplined and orderly regime. He was inspired by the European ideas of material progress, by industrialization under the shield of a militarized state. Naturally such a vision could not tolerate an indigenous movement of religious reform such as that of the Babis, which was rooted in messianic aspirations and seeking finality to the unresolved Shi‘i problem of authority. Clashes between the two visions were inevitable. Yet as it turned out, they both succumbed to the conservative Qajar rule that soon prevailed and endured in one way or another until the end of the nineteenth century.
OBSTACLES TO REFORM
The fall of Amir Kabir illustrated many obstacles in the way of state modernization. Above all, there was a clear shortage of financial and human resources. The state-enforced initiative envisioned by Amir Kabir lacked an independent base of power. His anticorruption agenda and his resolute conduct also deprived him of a network of allies and exposed him to the onslaughts of the Qajar nobility. It was another painful demonstration of the divan’s inherent inability to free itself of the hegemony of the shah and his court. The Qajar establishment viewed Amir Kabir as a necessary tool and tolerated him insofar as he could return security to the land, prevail over the Babis and the Salar revolt in Khorasan, and bring about a semblance of order. Once these tasks were reasonably accomplished, the Qajar elite was ready to remove him from office, as in the past they had eliminated other “slaves of the sublime Shadow of God.”
The formidable task Amir Kabir faced can best be measured by the state’s income and expenditures. Iran’s total revenue for the tax year 1851–1852, at the end of Amir Kabir’s era, was no more than 3,177,000 tumans (US$7,731,000), of which 84 percent was in cash and the rest in grains and other agricultural products. In the late 1840s Iran’s total revenue stood at 2,991,000 tumans ($7,475,000), of which some 60 percent came from four provinces: Azarbaijan, 20 percent; Tehran and adjacent provinces of central Iran, 16 percent; Fars, 13 percent; and Isfahan, 11 percent. The remaining 40 percent was raised from nine other provinces of the realm. This explains how the four major centers of political power in Qajar Iran—Tehran, Tabriz, Isfahan, and Shiraz—could maintain a certain degree of autonomy by relying on their own resources.
Even after Amir Kabir’s financial overhaul, a quarter of the state income, almost 800,000 tumans ($2,000,000), was still spent on salaries, pensions, and divan expenditures, of which 67 percent was devoted to the ranking officials and to the royal household. Of this latter figure, one-third (i.e., 8 percent of state revenue) went to salaries of the shah and the royal family; 15 percent to Qajar khans and nobles; at least 20 percent to the court attendants, servants, royal guards, and the royal stable; and about 5 percent to the chief minister and his office and household. Of the remaining 33.5 percent, only 3.25 percent went to the officials and secretaries of the divan-khaneh and 2.85 percent to poets, physicians, interpreters, and the ulama. The huge discrepancy between the Qajar establishment, which received 66.5 percent of the salaries, and the divan, which took only 3.25 percent, demonstrates the power and privilege of the ruling elite versus the rank and file of the central bureaucracy.
In the same tax year of 1851–1852, the total of 2,656,601 tumans ($6,640,000) of the state’s annual cash revenue, some 12 percent went to such general expenses as gift giving, construction, the postal service, and other limited public works, and only 10.9 percent went to provincial expenses. A staggering 45 percent, however, went toward upkeep of the military. In early 1852 Iran’s armed forces stood at least on paper at 137,248 strong, which included 94,570 infantry in fifty regiments, 23,419 cavalry in twelve regiments, 9,927 riflemen, 6,349 artillerymen (working with one thousand pieces of artillery), and 2,733 rural police. By comparison, in 1849, at the outset of Amir Kabir’s term, the Iranian army was 92,724 strong. Sixty-seven percent growth in the size of the military in three years presumably was in response to the challenges the Qajar state faced, but also it is indicative of Amir Kabir’s desire to build up Iran’s defenses. The cavalry and most of the infantry were recruited from among the tribes. In the 1850s, of Iran’s total population of nearly five million, no less than 50 percent were nomadic or seminomadic, 30 percent were villagers, and some 20 percent (about eight hundred thousand) were urbanites.
The tribal population scattered throughout the country made up more than 343,000 tents (the nomads were tallied by number of tents), consisting of eighteen tribes and subtribes in Azarbaijan (20 percent of the tribal population), nineteen in Fars (16 percent), twenty-seven in Khorasan (24 percent), and the remaining 40 percent in other provinces. There were at least nine major tribal groups: the Turkish-speaking tribes of Azarbaijan and elsewhere, the Kurds, the Lurs, the Bakhtiyaris, the Qashqa’is, the Arabs, the Baluch, and the Turkmens, as well as tribes throughout Gilan, Mazandaran, and Astarabad. These four divisions all together comprised at least 188 subtribes and clans of different sizes, languages, and ethnicities. They were vastly different in their habitats and often barely accessible to central or provincial authorities. Their extraordinary diversity made collection of taxes from them an arduous task, let alone any attempt toward greater centralization. Nevertheless, some form of capitation was collected from the tribes, which applied not only to women and children but also to animals. The tribal leadership was also obliged to render a seasonal tribute in the form of fighting men in addition to or in place of the taxes. That tribes honored even such a degree of compliance was a credit to the Qajar state.
Taxes on the urban population were set figures, about 10 percent in most cases, collectible through the bazaar guilds, to whose coffers individual members contributed according to the size of their business. There was also up to a 20 percent tax on rental properties. The greater burden of the taxes, however, was on the most accessible and the most vulnerable agrarian sector, which made up no more than 30 percent of the population. Invariably, government tax collectors were responsible for collecting the peasants’ share of the taxes directly from them on the location and often in kind. The rates differed from province to province and ranged between 10 percent and 20 percent. The lack of a consistent and updated tax register and the diverse and complex system of land tenure and sharecropping allowed for a range of abuses, often taken for granted.
Amir Kabir’s short term of office did not allow him to complete his intended reassessment and update of the land survey that had originally been made at the time of Karim Khan Zand, some eighty years earlier. His efforts to repossess some of the land tenures (toyul) and the crown lands that were misappropriated by the high officials in earlier decades barely contributed to the government’s revenue growth. The vast number of estates around the capital, as many as ten thousand, that were appropriated under Aqasi and eventually brought into the possession of the divan, seems to have been returned to their owners. Yet even an increase in land taxes by as much as 10 percent angered the landed nobility. By the time Amir Kabir was deposed, the Qajar establishment was ready to return to the familiar pattern of governance.1
OLD WAYS AND NEW AMBITIONS
The appointment of a new chief minister (sadr-e a‘zam), Mirza Aqa Khan Nuri (1807–1865), was a return to the traditional governance of the Fath ‘Ali Shah era. It had every sign of a conservative “palace coup” aiming to benefit the Qajar nobility and affiliated bureaucratic elite. Beyond the influential Mahd ‘Olya who was in cahoots with Nuri, the appointment of the new premier also enjoyed the active approval of the British envoy, Colonel Justin Sheil. At the time, Sheil shared with the young and insecure Naser al-Din Shah his suspicions of Amir Kabir’s Russian leanings. Both sides, therefore, viewed the Anglophile Nuri as the way to block the possibility of Amir Kabir’s return to power with Russia’s blessing. The course of events further proved the intensity of the European powers’ rivalry. Not only did it contribute to Amir Kabir’s murder; it also plunged the shah and his new chief minister into a serious quagmire, most visibly in the disputed province of Herat, which the Qajars had long claimed as an inseparable part of Iranian Khorasan.
Nuri was a statesman of some complexity. A great tactician, though lacking strategic foresight and scruples, he was a persuasive negotiator and a skilled maneuverer. His gift was in the art of compromise, and he was seasoned by many years of the divan’s scheming. His political conduct was conditioned by a mix of self-preservation—hence earlier acquiring the British status of protégé—and his advocacy of the old Qajar values was untouched by the modernizing outlook of his predecessor. His very appearance—he wore a long beard and a longer sheepskin hat, an embroidered silk gown, and loose trousers—was reminiscent of the style of Fath ‘Ali Shah’s era. His wit and comforting demeanor made him a new fatherly figure to the young shah, far gentler than Amir Kabir. Yet the tragic fate of his predecessor, a fate for which Nuri was partially responsible, persuaded him not to lose sight of the royal wishes and fickleness. To assert his maturity and independence, the young shah’s rite de passage necessitated not only the destruction of Amir Kabir, his old tutor and guardian, but also reverting to the Qajar dream of territorial conquest and military glory.
Capturing Herat province was an obvious objective, even though it was bound to run counter to British wishes. The policy of keeping Afghanistan as a virtual protectorate, a costly Great Game enterprise, had already taken many British lives. Fearful of Russian advances through Central Asia, the Russophobes in Calcutta and London saw it as a move toward the Persian Gulf and the Indian subcontinent. Lord Palmerston (1784–1865), the British Foreign Secretary and conservative architect of British colonial policy in the early Victorian era, viewed Iran as a weak link, vulnerable to Russian pressure and an obstacle to the British grand strategy to unify Afghanistan. The 1853 agreement between Iran and Britain was an undeniable success for Nuri, who negotiated it with great diplomatic skill. It allowed Iran to interfere in Herat if Britain, or its adventurous Afghan ally, Dost Mohammad Khan, infringed on that province’s neutrality. The young Naser al-Din Shah saw this diplomatic advantage as a prelude to securing Iranian suzerainty over Herat, what his father and, before him, his grandfather, ‘Abbas Mirza, had failed to accomplish. London, however, began to have qualms about the agreement and his rapport with the Qajar government began to deteriorate.
The Crimean War (1853–1856) offered the shah and his premier a chance to strike a secret deal with Russia, at war with Britain and its allies, to secure support for the capture of Herat while British attention was diverted to other quarters. Suspicious of Iran’s secret deal, London sent a new envoy, Charles Murray, to Tehran to underscore its annoyance with the Iranian government’s desire to reassert control over Herat. But the quarrelsome British representative, who from the start was determined to teach the shah and his minister a lesson, soon found himself in the midst of an scandal caused as much by his own foolhardy conduct as by Nuri’s scheme.
An utter scandal by diplomatic standards of the Victorian era, Murray was accused not only of having an illicit relationship with a sister-in-law of the shah but also of harboring her and her husband, enemies of the premier, inside the British legation. The envoy’s hard-to-satisfy gentlemanly honor, so closely tied up with the British colonial ethos and prestige, was injured. The resulting break in diplomatic relations between the two countries came as a golden opportunity to the shah, who almost immediately dispatched troops to Herat. Over the protests of the British authorities and at the expense of draining the treasury, the Iranian troops captured the city in October 1856 after many months of laying siege against Herat and the seemingly impenetrable walls of its citadel. The conquering prince commander Morad Mirza Hosam al-Saltaneh, a valiant uncle of the shah, even struck a victory coin and ordered the Shi‘i call to prayers to be announced from the minarets and the name of the shah to be included in the Friday sermon in Herat’s mosques.
Qajar sovereignty over Herat did not last long. Soon the British Indian fleet appeared at Bushehr with as many as fifteen thousand British troops and sepoys. By January 1857, British forces had penetrated deep into Fars province. Although the tribal militia of Tangestan and Dashtestan in southern Fars put up a stiff resistance and inflicted some casualties on the advancing British, the regular Iranian forces were slaughtered by the enemy in the battle of Khushab. Fearing further territorial loss, the demoralized Qajar government hastily withdrew from Herat with no visible accomplishment in exchange for the cessation of all hostilities with Britain and the resumption of protracted peace negotiations. Yet British punitive actions did not end even after a peace treaty was negotiated in March 1857 in Paris. Under General Outram, a commander with many colonial credits under his belt—including humbling the rebellious people of Afghanistan and Sindh, the British fleet reached the head of the Persian Gulf and in late March heavily bombarded the Iranian port of Mohammara (today’s Khorramshahr) (fig. 5.7). At the end of the 1857 Paris peace treaty, mediated by the French emperor Napoleon III, Iran was obligated to renounce any territorial claims over Herat or any other part of Afghanistan.
The Paris peace treaty represented a turning point in Iran’s relations with Britain just as the 1828 Torkamanchay Treaty did with Russia. The Herat affair made clear to the Qajar state the grave consequences of militarily engaging a European colonial power. The shah and his government realized that negotiation, brinksmanship, and the politics of balancing the two empires on Iran’s opposite borders were the only realistic alternative. In the age of empires, it became painfully apparent that Iran would have to accept the loss of territory on its periphery for the sake of preserving its center. The loss of Herat, like the Caucasian provinces earlier, demonstrated the limits of sovereignty over regions that historically and culturally were parts of greater Iran but could no longer remain provinces of the Guarded Domains.
Figure 5.7. British Indian Navy bombarding Mohammara in 1857.
G. H. Hunt, Outram and Havelock’s Persian Campaign (London, 1858), frontispiece.
Four years later, another loss of a nominal vassalage, the city of Marv and the surrounding province of Iran’s northeast, further proved the inevitability of abandoning the difficult-to-control frontier lands. The continued Turkmen raids in northern Khorasan and the abduction of thousands of Iranian captives further blemished the image of the Qajar crown. In 1861, a campaign against the Tekkeh confederacy was poorly organized and badly executed, ending disastrously with many casualties and troops falling into Turkmen captivity. By 1862, it was reported, the price of Persian slaves in the Bukhara market dropped to as low as five English shillings.
DISCONTENT AND HALFHEARTED REMEDIES
By the early 1860s Iran began to experience new forms of popular unrest. Recurring famine and devastating outbreaks of cholera, which continued well into the twentieth century, became familiar features of the Iranian social landscape. The state’s failure to effectively deal with these calamities lowered its prestige among its subjects, as did shifts in the economy. Riots in the capital and in the provinces, and a string of real or suspected assassination attempts, resulted in the government’s repeated punitive actions but to no avail.
Violence toward urban and rural subjects visibly increased, putting the government on the defensive. Cruel practices, such as bodily mutilation, subsided in number except in the case of such heretics as the Babis and later the Baha’is. Yet there were enough punitive actions still in place to intimidate the public. The widely used dagh va derafsh (branding and piercing), carried out by the court’s chief discipliner (nasaqchi-bashi), was a reminder of the centrality of punishment to the Qajar system. It ranged from the most popular bastinado (falak) to more violent modes of torture, imprisonment, and execution. That even the ranking state officials were not entirely immune from bastinado, at times by instantaneous order of the shah or a prince-governor, pointed to the egalitarian nature of the practice—a symbolic display of royal control over the fate of servants and subjects at large.
Bread riots were a common feature of urban life with greater regularity from the mid-1850s onward. They were in part caused by the landowners and government officials who hoarded their grain to bring about a price hike, and so maximize their profits. Poor interprovincial communication was another cause. Moving toward a market economy and the production of cash crops, such as tobacco and opium, also affected grain production (see map 5.1). Occasional tax relief lightened the burden of the peasants in famine-stricken regions, but taxes were often recouped by a heavy-handed collection in the following year. In the long term, concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny elite, including the landowning notables, Qajar princes, high-ranking officials, and tribal khans, meant the impoverishment of the multitudes. The house of Qavam (the family of Mirza Ibrahim Kalantar Shirazi, the fateful first premier of the Qajar era) is but one example of urban elites’ ability to endure throughout the Zand, Qajar, and early Pahlavi periods thanks to large landholdings, control over urban offices, and the administration of tribal confederacies in their provinces.
Nuri’s regime itself was grounded in amassing wealth. His network of relatives and subordinates drew enormous salaries from the state’s coffers. By the late 1850s his annual salary alone topped sixty-five thousand tumans. It was not without reason that he remained suspicious of, if not entirely opposed to, measures that could improve the government’s performance and increase revenue. Contrary to Amir Kabir, he kept the shah at bay and indulged him with nighttime feasts, hunting, leisure, and a barrage of gifts and flattery. Even the shah’s favorite wife, Jayran Khanum, a dancer of humble origins whose meteoric rise inside the royal harem caused much envy, fell short of derailing Nuri. Yet the premier’s old-school politicking was bound to run aground as the shah, then more financially astute, came to realize the enormous cost of Nuri’s administration. The Nizamiyeh mansion Nuri had built for his family was the most ostentatious symbol of his wealth. By 1858, after seven years serving as sadr-e a‘zam, the Nuri era came to an abrupt end. Not unlike Amir Kabir, he was dismissed and exiled to the Iranian interior, from which he never returned. Humiliated and broke, in 1865 he died under suspicious circumstances, clearly arranged by his enemies and with the shah’s consent.
Nuri’s dismissal brought to an end the prime ministerial epoch that had been in place since the 1800s. Even if chief ministers were frequently dismissed, and occasionally destroyed, the office itself survived apart from the court. Direct rule—the shah’s taking on of government responsibilities—removed even partial ministerial autonomy, at least for the time being. It also promised a more efficient government, a desperate move, no doubt, to break through the chief ministers’ monopoly. In the long term, direct rule resulted in a haphazard system of petty bickering between the conservative and reformist factions of the government. It also ransomed off the government to the whims of a capricious but shrewd ruler. He organized new ministries and created a cabinet of ministers under his direct supervision. Shortly afterward, he also convened a consultative council, whose members were mostly from among the officials and elites, with a few progressives in their midst. Yet once the council embarked on even minor municipal reforms, these were sufficient to raise the shah’s innate suspicion toward delegation of power. Within a year the council became almost defunct—the same pattern would repeat itself many times in later years.
In introducing reform measures, the shah for a while was inspired by the French model under Napoleon III and his project of reconstituting an authoritarian imperial regime. Among Iranian advocates of reforms was the celebrated Mirza Malkom Khan (1833–1908), a young French-educated diplomat, teacher, and political essayist who was close to the shah. An Armenian from New Julfa who converted to Islam, he had witnessed the 1848 revolution and the Paris Commune. After his return to Iran, he was discovered by Nuri and included in the Iranian mission to the Paris peace negotiations. His political essays, written in simple Persian prose and mostly circulated anonymously and in manuscript form, sought a model of state reform compliant with the Qajar establishment’s conservative view of government. His “Essay from the Invisible” (ketabcheh-ye ghaybi), written circa 1858, promoted a model of government not dissimilar from that of the Ottoman Tanzimat (which had been reaffirmed by the sultan’s 1856 Imperial Rescript) but also inspired by Russian constitutional absolutism and the French Second Republic. His “orderly absolute monarchy” called for a constitutional government based on enforcement of the law (qanun) and a legislative council (majles) whose members were to be appointed by the shah. Most of Malkom’s proposed constitution concerned administrative and state affairs and steered clear of the domain of the shari‘a. The shah was recognized as the ultimate source of all decisions, but the legislative task of the council was clearly distinguished from the executive power of the cabinet. The latter consisted of ministers appointed by the shah for education, justice, war, foreign affairs, and other departments.
Malkom’s call for the urgent undertaking of state reforms was closely tied in his essay to the danger of Europe’s colonial expansion and how Iran should withstand it. In a dramatic tone, he urged the “chief minister” to whom he addressed his essay:
Put the map of Asia in front of yourself and read the history of the past one hundred years and examine carefully the course of the two bursting deluges that were propelled in the direction of Iran from Calcutta [the first administrative capital of British India] and St. Petersburg and see how these two streams which in the beginning were not noticeable in a short time became so great. . . . [You can then] see two deluges that from one side reached Tabriz and Astarabad and from the other side entered Herat and Sistan. Then you can tell how many minutes remain in the life of this state.2
Malkom’s cautionary words were among the earliest conceptual expressions in Persian political literature of Europe’s imperial threat. It is doubtful that the newly appointed council ever considered such a caution or took into account Malkom’s recommendations, let alone implement them.
Shortly after Malkom Khan produced his early treatises, he also formed a semi-clandestine society around 1861 in Tehran to further his reformist agenda. The Faramush-khaneh (house of oblivion), presumably modeled after Masonic lodges (and vocally sounded like the word Freemasonry), was the earliest modern political association independent of the state. As in his “Essay from the Invisible,” here, too, Malkom relied on the familiar Persian notion of secret society to further his political agenda. The society was headed by the progressive prince Jalal al-Din Mirza, a son of Fath ‘Ali Shah, and later the author of the first modern history textbook in a “pure” Persian prose devoid of Arabic words and with a nationalist overtone. The society included a handful of literary figures, poets, historians, liberal clergy, and a number of Babi affiliates and freethinkers. Though little is known about the society’s activities, thanks to the Qajar state’s effective eradication of most evidence, it must have been significant enough to draw the hostility of conservative elements within the court who managed to invoke the shah’s gravest suspicions.
As quickly as Naser al-Din Shah forgot about the council, he also lost interest in Malkom and his initiative to create a semblance of a political party. Retracting his earlier reform measures, in what could only be called a military coup, in 1864 the shah appointed a conservative Qajar army officer, the head of the royal guards, as commander in chief of the army and granted him extensive civilian responsibilities. Soon a royal decree banning the Faramush-khaneh was followed by raids on the society’s headquarters, arresting some, intimidating others, and driving into exile the most vociferous among the members. Some may also have been murdered. Malkom himself, along with his father, Y‘aqub Khan, who served as Persian secretary of the Russian mission in Tehran, was allowed to take refuge in the Ottoman capital. Alleged subversive activities were the official cause for the clampdown, even though the society’s debates, insofar as we know, barely went beyond Malkom’s proposed program of orderly constitutionalism. Even debating such issues as civil liberties was sufficiently threatening to the shah and the conservative elite to bring about the closure of the clandestine Faramush-khaneh, let alone an alleged call for republicanism.
With its closure, all hopes for political reforms were dashed for at least another decade. The conservative camp, whose advocates viewed any measure of political modernization as a conspiracy to destroy their vested interests, prevailed, and in the coming years the shah and his government opted for minimum, and mostly cosmetic, changes in the organization of the state.
ECONOMY IN DISARRAY
Fiscal and monetary reforms that had been earlier contemplated, even on a limited scale, also were met with laxity and nonchalance. The powerful class of government accountants (the mostowfis) jealously guarded their trade secrets and resisted a centralized revenue and expenditure regime. The Ministry of Finance (maliyeh), created in the early 1860s on the Ottoman model, proved largely window dressing, with minimal operational control over the mostowfis. It was neither capable of implementing an efficient fiscal policy nor able to put an end to bickering between the rival factions. By the very end of the Naseri period, the Qajar statesmen still could not clearly or permanently differentiate the government treasury from the shah’s own private purse, the latter normally administered by some trusted wife of the shah—one of the many whom he kept busy with a variety of semiofficial tasks. Even basic measures introduced by Amir Kabir were left to wither.
The practice of annually auctioning off provincial posts to the highest bidder was more damaging than beneficial for efficient governance of the provinces. From the late 1860s, the shah pursued the sale of offices with greater vigor once his senior uncles were no longer in full control of provincial posts. The sale of provincial posts were intended to maximize revenue rather than bar governors from laying roots in provincial seats, a policy leading to increased abuse over the decades. Often irrespective of the suitability of the appointee or the methods of tax collection, and to the detriment of the peasants who ultimately bore the burden, the shah and his ministers received in advance a fixed sum in exchange for approving a candidate to office. The appointees to these revolving-door governorships came from a small clique of princes of the royal family, ranking bureaucrats, and court hangers-on. They bid for these offices in the expectation of regaining their investment plus a handsome profit, which was essentially the royally approved form of extortion.
Even if the appointees were experienced and merciful souls, often the unrealistically high monetary commitments that they made to the central treasury left little room but for them to pressure the district governors and their menacing tax collectors. They were responsible for extracting taxes from the peasantry, at times up to their last penny or the last bag of fodder for their donkeys. The landowners, who were mostly local nobility and tribal chiefs, often bore little or no responsibility for honoring their share of taxes and offered little, if any, shelter to their peasants from the state’s tax collectors. Once the landlords took their share from the harvest, based on a sharecropping arrangement, the field was open for government agents to collect, and by means of physical punishment if necessary. Crop failure because of droughts, locusts, or other natural disasters occasionally exempted villagers, but not always. It was not uncommon that villagers would evade the tax collectors by taking refuge in the mountains or hiding in underground shelters, even at the expense of losing their crops and livestock, their livelihood.
Yet despite all the harsh measures, the voracious governors not infrequently ended their annual term with a loss, collecting less than they paid the state’s treasury. Although from the 1860s, improved security and reduced troop movements—which often relied on villagers for provisions—brought greater prosperity, they did not substantially improve the peasants’ lot. The shift in the patterns of landownership—most significantly, the transfer from crown lands to private ownership—reduced the state’s direct control over properties that for generations had been assigned as toyulsto government servants and beneficiaries. Other incentives, especially the production and export of cash crops, did not substantially increase the state’s revenue from the agricultural sector.
Like most non-Western societies of the time, Iran simply did not generate a substantial volume of wealth comparable to that of the industrial world. Beyond cash crops that could be marketed abroad to earn currency and the foreign trade that enriched a handful of Iranian merchants, but mostly European firms and their subsidiaries in the import-export trade, no other sector promised a major source of income (see map 5.1). The bazaar chronically suffered from decline in traditional manufacturing and loss of market share to European imports, especially for textiles, metals, and luxury goods. Foreign trade was brisk and merchants engaged in it were the chief beneficiaries. In the second half of the nineteenth century, opium and tobacco increasingly came to dominate the export market and helped maintain Iran’s fragile balance of foreign trade. Only from the 1870s did the Persian carpet industry offer a viable export alternative to agricultural commodities. The export of Persian carpets to the United States, Europe, and Russia remained mostly in the hands of English and Italian firms or Greek and Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire.
To the elite of the Naseri period, however, any concerted effort to industrialize appeared untenable. A program of introducing modern industries, even remotely comparable to that of Meiji Japan or the Khedivate period in Egypt, was perceived as unrealistic. Naser al-Din Shah simply could not see the advantage—and there were good reasons for his technophobia. Lack of capital, either in the private or the public sector, was the most obvious. The urge to industrialize was absent from the Qajars’ reform agenda since most reform-minded statesmen of the period continued to advocate for reorganization of the machinery of the state rather than expanding the country’s economic base. The few efforts under Amir Kabir, and later under Moshir al-Dowleh, to establish small-scale industries, such as candle making, glassworks, and sugar refineries, were short lived. Inept management and inadequate capital played a role, but so did the absence of an industrial infrastructure. A trade-oriented market economy, as opposed to an industrial economy, was traditionally held as the accepted, even revered, norm. Private capital was perceived as being far better invested in foreign and domestic trade than in industry. Even the surplus capital from trade, which was substantial, was reinvested in agriculture or moneylending rather than in the risky business of factory-based industries. The merchant capital that financed much of the small-scale local industries in and around the bazaar, such as textile looms, never grew into larger industrial concerns.
The high interest rates common in the market, as high as 20 percent or 25 percent annually, absorbed much of the merchants’ surplus capital. Despite Islam’s strict prohibition on usury, merchants borrowed from or acted as moneylenders through such religiously sanctioned practices as the interest-bearing agricultural and commercial loans. Before the establishment of European-style banking in Iran, the Muslim merchants competed with the small-scale Jewish and Zoroastrian moneylenders in one of the few areas that minorities could excel. The chronic paucity of funds, which was in part due to monetary disorders caused by the European export of Iranian precious metals, further added to the sky-high interest rates and in turn the shift of excess capital to moneylending. Before the turn of the twentieth century, there was a near consensus that Western industries were supreme, and any competition with them would be fierce and insurmountable. And surely British trade policies of the Victorian era knew no bounds in undermining their competition overseas, least of all in a fragile economy such as Iran’s.
At no time over the course of the Qajar period did European powers encourage the import of new technologies and industries or allow Iran to adopt policies to protect domestic manufacturing. As far as they were concerned, Iran was a limited but promising export market for European manufactured goods. To reduce the yawning gap in its balance of payments, all Iran could hope for was to export raw materials in exchange for European imports, which in reality meant only a few agricultural commodities, carpets, and livestock (especially horses and mules) to British India. The shah and his advisers were content that Iran was a partner, albeit a minor one, in the world economy (fig. 5.8). Even the construction of railroad, the backbone of a modern infrastructure, was largely seen as a means of expanding trade rather than creating an industrial base.
As demand for market commodities such as cotton, opium, and tobacco grew in the international and domestic markets, so did the merchants’ direct investments, especially in Fars, Isfahan, and Azarbaijan (see map 5.1). Streamlining all stages, from production to processing to wholesale and export, promised a higher rate of return. When it came to the profitable opium trade, Iranian exporters were willing to dodge the British maritime regime and compete with the British opium monopoly in the Chinese market (fig. 5.9).
An enormous increase in the domestic consumption of tobacco also offered new investment opportunities. Increasingly, landowners, among them merchants and mojtaheds who purchased crown lands directly from the government or indirectly from fief holders, turned into cash crops, notably because the production of raw silk had been nearly wiped out by diseases. The shift in commodities was one contributing factor to the horrible famine that ravaged Iran between 1869 and 1871, claiming, according to some estimates, more than a million lives, or about one-sixth of Iran’s population. This was perhaps the greatest calamity to strike Iran in the nineteenth century.
Figure 5.8. Amin al-Molk’s caravansary, created with a charitable endowment in Kashan, is an architectural masterpiece of the early Naseri era. It is one of many multifunctional trading establishments in the Iranian bazaars and a venue for domestic and export trade.
J. Dieulafoy, “La Perse, la Chaldée, et la Susiane,” Le tour de monde (1881–1882), fascicule xi, 99.
Figure 5.9. A Frenchman supervises preparation of pharmaceutical opium in Isfahan in 1881. British and European firms initiated export of the Iranian opium, but Iranian merchants soon began to participate in the production and export of this lucrative commodity.
J. Dieulafoy, “La Perse, la Chaldée et la Susiane,” Le tour du monde (1881–1882), fascicule xiii, p.125.
Food shortages during the 1871 famine were compounded by consecutive bad harvests as a result of exceptionally harsh winters. Export of grains to neighboring countries for higher prices also contributed to the shortage. Bread riots and disturbances across the country became more common in response to the mischief of those landowners, prince-governors, wealthy clergy, and the high-ranking officials who hoarded their grain supplies in the pitiless expectation of higher prices. The starving crowds, often with women at the forefront, gathered in the mosques in protest and in front of government houses, cursing the Qajars, the mojtaheds, and the landlords alike and even attacking and plundering the grain silos.
As the famine intensified and food supplies further dwindled, people were forced to eat grass, tree bark, stray dogs and cats, beasts of burden, rodents, crows, and the entrails and blood of slaughtered animals. There were plausible reports, as in Qom, of eating corpses and abduction of young children—mostly orphans—as well as widows and homeless strangers. Even though the starving population mostly viewed recurring famine and ravaging epidemics as acts of divine punishment and fateful calamities, there was also growing resentment toward the state authorities for their indifference and for collaborating with the hoarders. The famine further revealed to the people the government’s inability, if not incompetence, to remedy in a meaningful way the misfortunes that had befallen them. The means of relief available to the government were limited. The shah’s decree (farman) banning the export to Russia of grain produced in the north was largely ignored, and at any rate it would have little impact on the central and southern provinces, where the famine was worst. With the famine compounded by raging cholera and banditry, it became almost impossible for the government to transport large quantities of grain on the backs of camels and mules.
THE AGE OF MOSHIR AL-DOWLEH
The dire situation helped in the appointment in early 1870 of Mirza Hosain Khan Moshir al-Dowleh (1828–1881) as sadr-e a‘zam. A seasoned diplomat, one who for many years had served as ambassador to the Ottoman court, his rise to power signaled the shah’s periodic return to the idea of reform. First serving as minister of justice in 1870 and soon after as sadr-e a‘zam (1871–1873), Moshir al-Dowleh later intermittently, or concomitantly, depending on the shah’s fickle mood or his fear of a conservative revolt, served as foreign minister and war minister. In reality, his wide range of responsibilities turned him into the leading statesman for the rest of the 1870s.
Frequent vacillation in Moshir al-Dowleh’s posts no doubt was because of the shah’s ambivalence to revert to the office of sadr-e a‘zam after a hiatus of seven years. Hosain Khan Moshir al-Dowleh, who would later receive the title sepahsalar (commander in chief of the army), brought new hopes for the stranded program of institutional reforms but also posed the danger of monopolizing power. Having served many years in Tiflis, Mumbai, and Istanbul, Moshir al-Dowleh’s vision was largely shaped by a centralizing model of state governance through a diplomatic prism. He was a keen observer of the Tanzimat and a close friend of the Ottoman statesmen who presided over it. He was sharp, amicable, and politically skilled, and also corrupt, willing to amass massive wealth at the expense of his professional integrity.
By the beginning of the 1870s there was a new concern, fueled by the British, that Iran and Afghanistan would eventually fall victim to Russian expansionism and become vassalages of the tsar. As an astute statesman, Moshir al-Dowleh hoped to capitalize on these anxieties. By presenting Iran as a viable buffer state on the road to modernization, he also hoped to overcome the shah’s earlier ambivalence toward reforms and to make gains against the conservative camp. By appointing Mirza Malkom Khan as the Persian minister plenipotentiary to London, he anticipated making a fresh diplomatic start with London. Malkom’s return from exile was followed by the appointment of a number of other reform-minded statesmen and, to some degree, the opening of the public sphere. All the same, he proved vulnerable to the wishes of the shah and unable to ward off the conservatives in the divan and among the nobility, who eventually outmaneuvered him just as they had his predecessors.
Expanding and streamlining the institutions of the state were the primary objectives of Moshir al-Dowleh’s administration, most significantly in the ministerial divisions, but he also aimed to create a centralized judiciary, a unified fiscal policy, and an efficient army. His efforts to remedy the chaotic divisions between the jurisdiction of the mojtaheds’ civil law courts and the divan’s haphazard enforcement of an unwritten customary penal code encountered antagonism from both sides. The ulama opposed even modest measures such as transparency in boundaries of clerical jurisdiction or the creation of an administrative sorting house to allot litigation to the appropriate court. The local governors and their judicial officers, especially such powerful prince-governors as Mas‘ud Mirza Zell al-Soltan in Isfahan, however, viewed centralized supervision as irksome meddling in their prestige and authority.
Modernizing Iran’s military, to the extent of maintaining a viable force for the purpose of domestic security, also ran into trouble. Despite the Qajars’ inflated pride in their military culture and their pretense of power, military reforms ever since ‘Abbas Mirza’s New Army had been plagued by a host of problems. Old tribal recruitment practices, the haphazard adoption of European military organization and tactics, and discrepancies between the assumed and real strength of the forces were all chronic maladies. Frequent reshuffling and reorganization of the regiments, insufficient training of the troops, old methods of managing the logistics, and misappropriation of military funds by ranking officers compounded to further plague the system. Bickering among Qajar officials, the sale of military posts to unqualified nobility and favorites of the court, and the shah’s inconsistent attention to military affairs also undermined reform.
Since the first decade of the nineteenth century, as the Qajar army lost confidence in its own methods of warfare, the state had placed undue faith in the presumed miracle of European training. Through the course of the century Qajar Iran employed at least three French, two British, two Austrian, and one Italian mission to train its army, not to mention miscellaneous Polish, Prussian, and Italian officers in the Iranian service. Increases in the number of European drill officers, some with questionable skills, encouraged more parades and other illusory exhibitions of military prowess. Condescending attitudes toward Iranian subordinates and undue proximity of some of these hired officers to various European missions in Iran, as well as profiteering through lucrative arms deals, were not uncommon.
To be sure, Iran’s military rank and file were kept large enough to preserve a semblance of peace and border security. Reasserting Iran’s sovereignty over Bandar Abbas in 1868, once the tenancy agreement with the Sultanate of Muscat came to a close, was but one example. The Qajar military also quelled Shaykh ‘Obaydollah’s rebellion in northern Kurdistan in 1881. But the cost to maintain an army far exceeded its benefits. Naser al-Din Shah and the Ministry of War, first established in the 1858, no doubt kept up appearances of supervision and efficiency. Handguns and ammunitions were manufactured in military workshops in Tehran, Tabriz, and elsewhere. European arms consignments, such as a vast number of Austrian Werndl rifles, were purchased at high prices. Barracks and garrisons, even in remote parts of the country, were maintained and their operations monitored. With all the problems that riddled the Qajar army, it was evident that the costly upkeep of a large force served purposes other than sheer domestic security. Beyond serving as a conduit for embezzlement, the sheer prestige and appearance of power helped perpetuate the military.
The creation of a small Cossack cavalry regiment (later brigade) in 1879 on the Russian imperial model, manned by a Russian commander, was one of Naser al-Din Shah’s later military enterprises. Favorably impressed by the Cossacks in the imperial army during his second Russian tour in 1878, the shah may have intended to counter Moshir al-Dowleh’s tilt toward the British. The Iranian Cossack force, which by the end of the century included no more than 1,500 personnel, was primarily manned by the Muslim émigrés from the Caucasus and their children. That the commander of the force remained almost entirely loyal to Russia, and often in cahoots with the Russian embassy, raises a question as to the raison d’être of this force. At best, one can attribute it to Naser al-Din’s policy of keeping the tsar on his side by offering him an affordable token of friendship. At worst, it was an impulsive blunder that for decades to come would help protect the throne while exposing Iranian subjects to the overbearing conduct of the Cossack commanders and their troops.
Beyond the military, Moshir al-Dowleh’s intention was to expose the shah and the Qajar elite to advances in science and industry. He also sought to attract European capital and technology, build up a viable infrastructure, and facilitate development of Iran’s yet unexplored minerals and other natural resources. The most symbolic development, of course, was the construction of a railroad, which was key to the nineteenth-century notion of progress. The project had remained unfulfilled largely because of the neighboring powers’ paranoid wrangling over the strategic repercussions of constructing a trans-Iranian railroad linking the Persian Gulf to the Caspian shore. There was a new air of optimism, though, that the astute and well-connected premier would overcome obstacles standing in the way of Iran’s technological progress and facilitate catching up with European “civilization.” Naser al-Din Shah welcomed Moshir al-Dowleh’s overture primarily because he had been anxious to visit Europe since his youth. He viewed Moshir al-Dowleh as one statesman capable of negotiating Iran’s case internationally and containing the resistance domestically to his travel abroad.
ROYAL TOURS ON BEHALF OF THE SUBJECTS
To test the waters, the new premier negotiated the shah’s visit to the Shi‘i holy cities of Iraq with the Ottoman Sublime Porte. Accompanied by a huge retinue, the shah’s pilgrimage in 1871 was the first time in recent history that any Iranian ruler had left his domain in peacetime. On the Ottoman side the authorities were apprehensive that a royal visit to the predominantly Shi‘i province might cause a flare-up of anti-Ottoman sentiments at the time of great tension. In practice, however, the amicable reception of the royal guest by the capable Ottoman governor, Midhat Pasha (1822–1884), a friend of Moshir al-Dowleh with a comparably modernist outlook, demonstrated the advantages of implementing reforms in a neglected Arab province of the Ottoman Empire.
The Tanzimat under Midhat had weakened the Shi‘i mojtaheds’ grip over the civil courts and public life. Although it had added to communal tensions and caused recurring Shi‘i unrest, it also had the benefit of undercutting the ulama’s hold on the community. There was a lesson to be learned by the shah. The royal pilgrimage elevated Naser al-Din’s religious devotion beyond a blemish in the public eye. The shah’s account of his pilgrimage published in the same year was no doubt meant to communicate this image to his subjects. As the guest of the Ottoman sultan, he was revered and respected not only by local authorities but also by the ulama and the population at large.
Throughout his tour Naser al-Din was received as the shah of Iran and as a king, with an extraterritorial aura and symbolic authority over the Shi‘is of Iraq, as when he visited the shrine of ‘Ali, the first Shi‘i Imam, in Najaf. The treasury of the shrine that had been walled up since the time of the Wahhabi attack on Shi‘i Iraq in 1802 was reopened in his honor. In the shah’s presence, the shrine’s treasures, mostly of the Safavid era, were reassessed and listed in a register before the treasury was sealed off again by royal Qajar and Ottoman seals. Standing before the shrine’s casket (zarih), he then offered his own diamond hatpin to be placed atop the shrine as a sign of his humility and devotion. The royal pilgrimage went on while the famine of 1870 and 1871 was at its peak. On his way back to Iran, the royal cavalcade camped at the outskirts of the city of Qom, where the shah witnessed the extent of the human disaster. Upon his departure two days later he ordered four hundred kharvar (equal to 120 tons) of grain stored in government silos to be distributed among the city’s poor.
Naser al-Din Shah’s subsequent royal European tour in 1873 began at a time when the worst of the famine was over. This and the two ensuing royal European tours in 1878 and 1889 captured much attention at home and abroad and broke a major taboo. That a Persian ruler, with pivotal place in the symbolic stability of his kingdom, could travel abroad despite a religious ban on entering lands of nonbelievers, was a novelty even in the late nineteenth century. The visit proved to be a successful public relations exercise, consolidating Iran’s image abroad as a sovereign state and reasserting its independence during the age of colonial expansion. His royal counterparts in European capitals respectfully received the “Shah of Persia” as the heir to an ancient civilization that, though possibly diminished in its prowess, still carried some weight. The shah conveyed an image of grandeur equal to that of his European hosts, capable of holding his own as a wise and independent ruler—weaker and more vulnerable, perhaps, but one who could converse, negotiate, and stand his ground. His success in this endeavor, especially during the 1873 tour, contrasted with earlier setbacks and reminded the Western powers that Iran was not up for grabs in the imperial game, at least not for the time being. The royal trip attracted more attention than the royal visits by Sultan ‘Abd al-Aziz (r. 1861–1876) of the Ottoman Empire and the Egyptian Khedive Isma‘il (r. 1863–1879), which took place about the same time (fig. 5.10).
For Europe’s elites and its public, Persia called to mind the biblical Persian Empire of Cyrus the Great and Ahasuerus (presumably Xerxes I of the Achaemenid Empire). It also recalled the land of Zarathustra, the rediscovered wise prophet of the Enlightenment. It invoked the romantic memory of the Persian Empire that once had fought a decisive war with the ancient Greeks and later was a formidable rival to the Roman Empire. This was an empire of which they could see its many archeological remains displayed in the newly founded museums. This was the shah whom they knew from classical accounts and modern travel literature.
An air of fanfare was attached to such distant memories, as if the shah and his retinue had turned into a spectacle to be gazed at, teased and even condescendingly looked upon. Proud Europe was eager to see how this ruler of a distant land, once their formidable nemesis, had adapted to the ways of their civilization; how he followed European mannerisms and etiquette; and how he was astounded by the magnificence of its technological, architectural, military, and communications advances. The shah was yet another showcase for displaying imperial power, similar to the artifacts and mummies of ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia on display in European and American museums, in the world exhibitions of London, Vienna, Paris, and Chicago. He was a living testimony, complementing the statues and memorials that glorified the heroes of colonial exploits.
Figure 5.10. Naser al-Din Shah during his 1873 European tour. He is seated in the royal carriage, entering Balmoral Castle in the Scottish Highlands, together with the premier Mirza Hosain Khan Moshir al-Dowleh and Prince Leopold, the youngest son of Queen Victoria. Standing next to the carriage appears to be Mirza Malkom Khan, then Iranian envoy in London.
Period photograph. Author’s collection.
Sailing through the Caspian Sea to the port of Astrakhan, the royal company visited Moscow and St. Petersburg, the first major stops on a long journey that between April and September 1873 included Prussia, the Rhine Valley, Belgium, Britain (mostly London and Manchester), France, Switzerland, Italy, and Austria, then via Istanbul and Georgia back to the Caspian port of Anzali. The shah’s busy schedule throughout his visit included burdensome welcome and farewell ceremonies, military parades, elaborate balls and banquets, as well as visits to barracks, cannon foundries, and ammunition factories. There was enough time, however, to also stroll in parks, go to concert halls and opera houses, visit museums, see London’s Crystal Palace and the Vienna World Exhibition, and tour hunting grounds.
Fire engine drills, fireworks, rides on trains and carriages, and horseback excursions all proved amusing, and throughout the shah maintained his royal comportment with dignity. Customs and appearances of nobility and such novelties as electrical lighting, steamships, railroad stations, hotels with hot and cold water, circuses, concert halls, and brass bands fascinated him. He was as majestic in calling upon Tsar Alexander II, Queen Victoria, and Emperor Franz Joseph as he was astute in negotiating with English, Russian, and French statesmen. In Berlin he attended the coronation of Wilhelm I (as first emperor of the united Germany) and had two long conversations with the architect of the new empire, Otto von Bismarck, the substance of which remained unknown to the readers of the shah’s published diary. He marveled at the chancellor’s political skill in piloting a divided Germany into a united empire of great power.
What emerged from the European visit was not exactly what Moshir al-Dowleh had in mind. Naser al-Din and the princes, ranking statesmen, and senior court officials who were accompanying him could appreciate the advantages of a strong state over the revolutionary alternative that was then in progress. Beyond Russia, the shah could see the advancements and military glory of autocratic Prussia becoming the German Empire, as opposed to defeated and revolutionary-stricken France. In July 1873 the shah described in his diary the ruinous outcome of the Franco-German war; the melancholic mood of the people; divisions within the Paris Commune, including the “red republicans”; and the material destruction that turned palaces and government buildings into rubble.
His observations of England did not persuade the shah to substantially transform his own country’s political order. He witnessed English democracy in action with its bicameral parliament, judicial independence, government accountability, and above all, limitations on the monarchy. He was an avid reader of history and knew about the English Civil War and the fate of Charles I. Yet he preferred to focus on those aspects of government that were in harmony with his own vision. In effect, he and many of his contemporaries among the Qajar elite self-servingly internalized an assumption that the gap in political culture with Europe was unbridgeable. Europe, unlike Iran, so the shah believed, did not have restive tribes on its periphery, nor did it have an intransigent clergy wielding its power over the state with the weapon of shari‘a.
Upon his July 1873 visit to the Palace of Westminster, the shah’s description of the House of Commons was brief and devoid of any apparent interest in parliamentary deliberation, at least in the printed version of his diary:
Lord Gladstone, Disraeli, and the other Ministers, Whig and Tory, were present. The Whigs were (seated) on one side (of the house), the Tories on the other side. . . . They brought forward a question, on which there was a difference of opinion. The President (Speaker) of the House adjudged according to the “majority,” i.e. the greater number, the lesser number being called the “minority.” The whole of the members went forth, to be counted outside; the (place of) assembly remained vacant, no one being left except the President. After a minute or so they came (back); the Whigs were the victorious party, who now hold office. Then Lord Gladstone—the Premier, came up to us, and we had a little conversation.3
It is difficult to see how much the shah was impressed with the display of the British parliamentary debate, but whatever his opinion, the orderly fashion in which the Whigs and the Tories abided by the vote of the majority could not have escaped his notice. Perhaps it wasn’t sheer coincidence that after his return to Iran, the dividing line between conservative and reformist factions in the shah’s government became more pronounced. It was as if he had recognized even more clearly the need to strike some form of balance between the two factions. Yet at no time did he go so far as granting any of the “government consultative councils” that he periodically convened, and then dissolved, the authority to conduct affairs of the state free of his personal control.
Likewise, while the shah was impressed with Europe’s material culture, he hardly was convinced to build an industrial base in his own country, at least not along the lines that reformists of his time wished would happen instantaneously. An imported modernity seemed to the shah, and to like-minded Iranian elites, untenable. Who, after all, would wish to re-create, so the shah must have reckoned, the suffocating, polluted, poverty-stricken, regimented, revolution-ripe, smokestack-filled urban environment of the kind he saw in places like industrial Yorkshire or the Ruhr Valley? He surely did not wish to add to the existing problems of his country a set of new ones by creating manufacturing plants for which he did not have, or remotely hope to have, capital or know-how.
And imperial Europe of the late nineteenth century was not generous in sharing its jealously guarded knowledge with others, nor would it abandon its long-nurtured export markets. The lure of Europe’s material culture, though, knew no bounds. The more the shah and his company traveled, the more they were charmed by urban spaces, royal gardens, palaces, and public buildings, as well as by European modes and manners, especially timekeeping, dress, and appearance, as well as the ease of travel and communication, the variety of foods and produce, and of course the presence of women in public life.
The latter created a moral crisis of sorts for the shah and his retinue. Not accustomed to encountering unveiled women outside their own harems, here members of the royal party were obliged to mingle happily not only with women of royalty and nobility, who conversed with them intelligently and freely, but also with female opera singers, ballerinas, popular performers, circus girls, and prostitutes, as well as ordinary women in the streets and parks. The presence of women in the public space was in sharp contrast to the limitations on Iranian women of all classes.
An incident involving a senior wife of the shah is a case in point. Fatemeh-Soltan Khanum Lavasani, better known by her title Anis al-Dowleh (companion of the state), an influential and astute favorite of the shah from humble origins who had risen in the harem to become his chief wife and adviser, a de facto queen to the shah, persuaded Naser al-Din to include her in the 1873 European tour. Surrounded by her female attendants, Anis al-Dowleh, who was receptive to European ways and most likely prepared to adopt to them, reached as far as Moscow, all along covered with a facial veil and segregated from the men. However, once in the Russian capital, it became apparent that the shah’s wife could no longer stay out of sight, for the tsar and tsarina insisted that she be present and unveiled at official functions.
Facing the dilemma of Russian court protocol there was little alternative to the shah but to send Anis al-Dowleh home. She complied, but with bitter dismay, holding Moshir al-Dowleh responsible for the disgraceful termination of her visit. It is not difficult to imagine, however, the dire consequences of the ulama’s disapproval back home should a royal wife be unveiled in the land of Farang. Back in Tehran, Anis al-Dowleh retaliated by participating in a palace coup involving Qajar princes and Tehran mojtaheds, which upon the shah’s return led to the temporary dismissal of Moshir al-Dowleh. Saving the royal honor that was safely protected back home did not stop the shah from indulging in the world of carnal pleasure. Among other escapades he purchased a Circassian (or possibly Chechen) slave girl as a portable pleasure companion. Her disguise as a page boy in the shah’s retinue became an open secret and something of an embarrassment.
In his 1878 private tour and his official state visit in 1889, Naser al-Din Shah met more statesmen, royalty, concessionaires, and celebrities. He visited more palaces, manors, arms factories and barracks, parks and hunting grounds, operas and music halls, museums, and zoos. He attended both the 1878 and 1889 Paris World Expositions (fig. 5.11).
Figure 5.11. Iran’s pavilion at the 1878 Paris Exposition Universelle, designed and built by Hosain ‘Ali Ma‘mar Isfahani. Persian handicrafts and specialty fabrics and carpets displayed in the mirror hall and on the upper floor drew public attention.
Contemporary postcard. Author’s collection.
The shah’s published diaries, especially that of the 1873 visit, no doubt were intended to remind his subjects of the esteem and attention he received, especially in Russia and Britain. They were part of a public relations exercise to buttress the royal image at home and abroad. The diaries also narrated to his subjects the spectacular Farang the king had observed on their behalf. The shah’s simple and unencumbered Persian, brought to life, almost like a camera, the momentous and the mundane. As much as the shah’s journals were masterful in describing novelties, they were devoid of depth, let alone critical reflection, as if meant to see but not observe. A sense of envious inaccessibility, moreover, is most evident in the journals in their descriptions of voluptuous fair ladies, powdered, bejeweled, fragranced, and revealing. In contrast to the aesthetic values and mores he was accustomed to, the Western women he met conversed, smiled, danced, and even courted in public. Fascination with Farang permeated even through the controlled tone of the closely edited published version of the diaries.
THE REUTER FIASCO
Even before his forthcoming European tour of 1873, the shah and Moshir al-Dowleh hoped to accelerate modernization projects by attracting European capital. The outcome, the granting and then repeal of the Reuter Concession (1871–1873), proved a bizarre episode, driven as much by the Qajar shah and his statesmen’s naïveté and bewilderment in their first direct experience of Europe as by their greed. It also displayed a brazen example of European profiteering in the early age of capital venture and acquiring unbridled concessions. Only through massive investment by European private capital, Iran’s chief minister argued, would Iran ever be able to leap forward to be counted among the world’s advanced nations. He, and his chief collaborator, Mirza Malkom Khan, focused on an investment proposal that was tabled by a well-known communications magnate of his time, Baron Julius de Reuter.
Reuter was a shrewd and persuasive German-born immigrant to England who made his fortune in the early days of telegraphic telecommunication and had bought his title from a duke of a defunct minor German principality. In 1851 Reuters, one of the first modern news agencies (and one of the most enduring) began to transmit stock market quotes between London and Paris. By the early 1870s, Reuter had expanded his operation worldwide while fortifying his connections to men of money and influence in his adopted country. His appetite for investing in Iran seems to have been whetted by the successful operation of the British owned Indo-European Telegraph Department. He understood Iran’s strategic potential as a railroad link between India and Europe, but he also sensed the shah’s rush to secure a purchasable piece of European progress. He saw profit in both opportunities. The 1869 completion of the Suez Canal was hailed worldwide as a major engineering marvel made possible through private financing.
By July 1872, when the Reuter Concession, a monopoly on construction of a railway line and other development projects in Iran, was finally signed after a remarkably short span of secret negotiations, the level of fascination with Europe’s technological advances and its financial power easily overrode any skepticism in and outside of Iranian government circles. With virtually no chance for debate, even within elite circles, the royal advisory council, consisting of mostly pro-reform statesmen, ratified the unbelievably generous concession. It was taken for granted that Iranians could neither raise the capital nor master the technology to undertake a project of such a scale. Beyond the inferiority complex of the Iranian negotiators, however, there were important ulterior motives. A few, including the premier and Malkom Khan, had received substantial bribes from Julius de Reuter, who had spent £200,000 ($1,100,000) in advance to lubricate the granting of the concession.
The sweeping terms granted a seventy-year concession to the person of Reuter for the construction of a single-track trans-Iranian railroad with its direction still to be decided, possibly from the port of Bushehr in the Persian Gulf to the port of Anzali at the Caspian Sea. In exchange, the government of Iran agreed to offer enormous facilities to Reuter unconditionally, including all the public and privately owned land and property required, as well as labor and security free of any taxes, customs, or other dues. Moreover, the Qajar state granted to Reuter what amounted to exploitation of all of Iran’s natural resources and its future economic and financial potential for the duration of the concession. This included a monopoly on the exploration and development of all of Iran’s mines and minerals, forests, underground and surface water resources, and all future industrial and infrastructural developments such as the telegraph, urban transportation, steelworks, textile mills, and other industries as well as a monopoly commission on all of Iran’s customs for twenty-five years.
It further allowed the concessionaire to establish modern banks, including issuing Iranian banknotes and the right to change at some future time the base of Iran’s metal-backed currency from silver to gold. Reuter reserved all rights to transfer, sell, or let to whomever and whatever entity he wished all or part of the above monopolies. He would pay 20 percent annually of the net railroad income and 15 percent on all other monopolies. And of course Reuter would provide the shah with a loan for his forthcoming European visit. The only redeeming feature was that the concessionaire was obliged to start construction within fifteen months of the signing of the concession or risk its cancellation.
The whole enterprise sounded nothing short of an outrageous swindle. Reuter had yet to raise any of the £6,000,000 in capital on the volatile European stock markets that he was obligated to provide by issuing public shares. No one in his right mind would purchase such shares, except of course for the Iranian government, who had agreed to pay a minimum of 7 percent interest and principal on Reuter’s capital. Besides, since Reuter’s company had virtually no technical expertise in any of the areas of the concession, he was bound to subcontract or otherwise auction off or rent out nearly all of his monopolies, a fact that cast further doubt on the success of the operation. The British Foreign Office and most of the English establishment were the least convinced. Only concession hunters across Europe, who had already managed to bring Egypt, the Ottoman Empire, and Tunisia to the verge of bankruptcy, and the African-coast safari slave hunters of earlier times who bartered copper wire and looking glasses for slaves, must have marveled at Reuter’s scheme and laughed at Naser al-Din Shah, his modernizing premier, and the eight high-ranking ministers and dignitaries who put their seals of approval on the concession.
What blinded these otherwise seasoned officials and led them to believe they had struck a good deal was complex. In part, it was their sycophantic desire to give the shah what he wanted, namely the necessary funds for his European tour, which also included many of them in the retinue. They had let themselves, moreover, be bamboozled by Reuter’s negotiator and the argument that because Iran could not afford the necessary security to guarantee the railroad project, the only alternative was to pay it through monopolies. Not before reaching St. Petersburg, however, did the shah realize the gravity of his blunder. The Russian authorities, including Tsar Alexander II himself, in no uncertain terms confidentially warned the shah that the concession was diametrically opposed to Russian interests, not least because it gave the British access to the Caspian and thus to Russian frontiers. By the time he reached London, the shah had serious second thoughts. Snubbing Reuter was an early sign of what was to come.
On the shah’s return home in September 1873, resistance to the concession among the Qajar princes, his favorite wife Anis al-Dowleh, elements in the palace, and some of the Tehran ulama was so vehement that upon arriving at the port of Anzali, the shah had to immediately dismiss Moshir al-Dowleh. To preempt further trouble, Moshir al-Dowleh was temporarily appointed governor of Gilan and instructed to stay there. Once the immediate threat of a palace revolt subsided, the shah summoned back Moshir al-Dowleh, reappointed him as minister of foreign affairs, and instructed him to immediately repeal the concession. The shah’s concern with the conservative faction required circumspection at first and a balancing act afterward. The sum total of counterbalancing the conservatives and the progressives meant a loss of momentum for Moshir al-Dowleh and a tangible slowdown for the reform measures.
A master negotiator and a flatterer toward his royal master, Moshir al-Dowleh argued long and hard with Reuter’s representatives that since they had not started the railroad construction project within the first fifteen months, the concession was automatically canceled. To the British Foreign Office, lukewarm in its support of Reuter, he justified the repeal by recalling the usual ghost of Russian reprisal. By 1874, it seemed that at least for the time being, Reuter no longer had a case. Yet he was a man of perseverance who patiently awaited opportunities and doggedly nurtured the support of the British authorities. Naser al-Din, who anxiously asked for and received the original copy of the Reuter concession to strike it out with his own hand as null and void, must have realized that long after Moshir al-Dowleh, he again would have to face the claims of the shrewd concessionaire, this time under British pressure. After sixteen years had passed Reuter eventually succeeded in securing a new concession on the grounds of the original for the creation of the Imperial Bank of Persia to issue banknotes on behalf of the Iranian government. Reuter’s company also again received the monopoly to develop all of Iran’s unused mine and mineral resources.
Iran’s first experience with large-scale Western capital bore all the marks of unreserved exploitation. One redeeming point, however, was the degree of resistance to the concession. Even if the shah and most of his pro-reform advisers were intimidated by the material power and glamour of the West, there were some who voiced criticism and persuaded the shah to change course. The motives of princes of the royal family and their associates during the palace revolt were mostly hostility toward Moshir al-Dowleh, in part because of his open homosexual orientation but also his modernizing scheme. They shared grievances with a handful of high-ranking ulama who felt that a railroad and such Western-style developments would open the way to the Farangis and corrupt the faith of the Iranians. Yet their argument was not based entirely on the demerits of imitating Westerners. Chief among them, Mulla ‘Ali Kani, the influential mojtahed of the capital, in a reproachful letter to the shah, criticized the Reuter concession not because it robbed Iran of its economic sovereignty but for the provisions in the concession that violated private ownership contrary to Islamic law. The ulama’s defiance of Europe’s economic intrusion had to wait for another two decades before it would flare up during the Tobacco Protest.
By the late 1870s Moshir al-Dowleh’s high hopes for transforming Iran had run aground. The state bureaucracy and diplomatic corps grew in size, but despite the introduction of Western-style ministries and attempts to rationalize the government machinery, such measures did not greatly improve efficiency or accountability. Finance, military, and the judiciary remained almost unchanged; the old elite’s inertia effectively offset any serious overhaul. Efforts to introduce modern education and a relatively free press and publication proved short lived.
That a skilled statesman with twenty years of experience abroad should have made a blunder as evident as Reuter concession—which tarnished Moshir al-Dowleh’s image even in his own time—remains a mystery. Tilting toward the British as a counter to an impending Russian threat may be one motive. One cannot rule out his wide-eyed rush for a wholesale purchase of modernity either, not unusual to many modernizers of his period, intoxicated with the myth of European progress. Yet Moshir al-Dowleh may have also been driven by greed, and other instances of graft marred his career. In this respect he was not an exception to the rule, as many Qajar statesmen used their high offices to acquire wealth as a security against their many occupational hazards.
By November 1881, when he died in Mashhad at the age of fifty-three, he was serving as trustee of the shrine of the Eighth Imam in Mashhad. His death under suspicious circumstances may well have been carried out by administration of the venomous “Qajar coffee” (qahveh-e qajar), which was a swift and quiet method preferred by Naser al-Din to rid unwanted officials who had fallen victim to his suspicion or grudge. Afterward, there was little appreciation for him and his services from the Qajar establishment, and nothing but apathy from the shah, not unlike what had happened with Amir Kabir three decades earlier.
Upon hearing the news of Moshir al-Dowleh’s death, Mohammad Hasan Khan E‘temad al-Saltaneh, the shah’s astute confidant and dragoman, observed in his secret diaries on November 15, 1881:
Despite all his deplorable habits, he [Moshir al-Dowleh] was wise and shrewd and aware of political stratagem [politik] and European customs. If the shah hadn’t turned him mad with undue promotion, he would have been the best servant of the government. But within one year the shah first made him the justice minister, then the war minster, and then the chief minister; and [the latter] with such an autonomy as if the very [office of] kingship was delegated to him. That is what made him mad and arrogant. Today the shah was saying: “He offended me much. . . . This man had reached a stage that there was no way out for him but to die. He put us into much trouble. He almost behaved like Midhat Pasha.” What [the shah] meant was treason toward his [royal] benefactor.4
The reference to Midhat Pasha was not mere coincidence. Only a few months earlier, in April 1881, Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid had arrested the celebrated reformer and architect of the 1876 Ottoman constitution, put him on trial, and condemned him to death on the unproven charge of the murder of Sultan ‘Abd al-Aziz. Less than three years later Midhat was executed. Naser al-Din Shah, who was well aware of the friendship of the two statesmen, must have feared a similar fate at the hand of his former chief minister. The doomed Moshir al-Dowleh was the fourth chief minister to fall victim to the shah’s paranoid fears.
As it was the royal practice, the shah soon appropriated all of Moshir al-Dowleh’s possession, including his Baharestan mansion, designed in 1880 by a French-educated Iranian architect in grand Baroque style. It was adjacent to the still incomplete Naseri complex, the trusteeship of which Moshir al-Dowleh had offered to Naser al-Din Shah out of a mix of fear and devotion. The shah granted the use of the mansion to his own favorite page boy, Malijak (which in Kurdish means “little sparrow”—he was also known as Aziz al-Soltan, “the favorite of the king”), an ultimate affront to the deceased minister. The Baharestan mansion later became the seat of the Majles, the Iranian parliament, during the Constitutional Revolution and after.
Moshir al-Dowleh’s decadelong era marked the third and final attempt of Naser al-Din Shah to undertake reform in a serious and systematic fashion. The limited success once more revealed the structural barriers in the way of transforming the state and the economy of the country. While the vacillating shah saw his own survival in playing off factions within the Qajar polity, the entrenched conservative nobility and ulama class remained deeply suspicious of European-style reforms.
REFASHIONING THE CAPITAL
If the shah consciously stayed away from the import of major state institutions and political culture, far more than his Ottoman and Egyptian counterparts had, he was eager to absorb and adopt symbols of Europe’s material culture. Unlike technology and industrialization, which were hard to import, material culture and luxury commodities traveled well. And it was these, rather than Europe’s industrial and political achievements, that first left their mark on Iran’s urban life, culture, and artistic expressions. They served as physical projections of Qajar power and its quest for grandeur, pleasing changes that could elevate the image of the shah as a progressive, on par with his Ottoman and European counterparts.
The Qajars were always good builders, as evident in the numerous palaces, gardens, and public buildings constructed under Fath ‘Ali Shah and later. In the same vein, the Naseri era, from the late 1860s on, witnessed an unprecedented urban revival, partly under Moshir al-Dowleh. Princes and statesmen, as well as tribal khans, wealthy merchants, and mojtaheds, built sizable residences and private gardens and created charitable endowments, including mosques, madrasas, caravansaries, bazaars, qanats, bridges, bathhouses, and water reservoirs. Examples of Naseri-age construction that survived ravages of later Pahlavi modernity are examples of great architectural endeavors that express serenity and delicateness.
As may be expected, the first changes in style appeared in the architecture and decoration of Golestan Palace. The great Reception Hall (Talar-e Salam), perhaps the most significant interior court architecture of the late Qajar period, was in part inspired by the Hermitage in St. Petersburg (which it shared with Dolmabahce Palace in Istanbul) but built at a smaller scale and with an exquisite taste, indicative of the technical and architectural abilities of Qajar master builders (fig. 5.12). The adjacent Mirror Hall obviously alluded to Versailles but was decorated with elaborate Persian mirror tile-work. As part of his construction program, Naser al-Din restored or reconstructed earlier royal buildings in the Golestan complex as well (pl. 5.1).
Even before the shah’s European tour in 1873, the new Perso-European style had appeared in the five-story Shams al-‘Emareh (sun of the palaces) in the Golestan complex, with a view of the capital’s panorama. Completed in 1867 possibly with the Safavid ‘Āli Qapu in mind, construction was supervised by the chief of royal palaces, Dust-‘Ali Khan Mo‘ayyer al-Mamalek, a descendant of a family of masters of the royal mint with roots in the Safavid era. It was built by ‘Ali Mohammad Kashani, a master builder who, presumably for the first time in Iran, used a steel frame in a multistory building. The design was meant to evoke a house of amusement reminiscent of the stories of the “Seven Domes” (Haft Gonbad), a well-known romance by the twelfth-century Persian poet Nezami Ganjavi. Atop the building was a clock tower housing a massive two-faced clock, a gift from Queen Victoria, which invited the people of the capital to keep time accurately (pl. 5.2). Poor maintenance and complaints from the women of the harem, though, soon brought the clock to a standstill, a sign the Qajar era was more accustomed to its own dawn-to-dusk timekeeping than the disciplined timekeeping of the state.
In addition to the Golestan complex, the late Naseri age witnessed the building of at least eight other palaces and numerous royal gardens in and around the capital. The palace of ‘Eshratabad (lit. “abode of indulgence”) on the eastern side of the capital was Naser al-Din Shah’s version of jardin d’amour. The Saltanatabad summer palace, first built in 1850 to the north of the capital, was lavishly restored and rededicated in 1878 as Sahebqarniyeh, to celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Naser al-Din’s reign. The palace of Shahrestanak (now demolished) was built high in the Alborz, overlooking Tehran and the Farahabad garden palace on the eastern outskirts of the capital (known as Qasr-e Firuzeh), an expanded version of the royal hunting lodge.
Figure 5.12. Reception Hall of Golestan Palace. The enclosure has a typical Persian architectural ambiance, though decorative patterns and much of the ornamentation reveal the Europeanization of Qajar taste, especially after Naser al-Din Shah’s 1873 European tour.
S. G. W. Benjamin, Persia and the Persians (London, 1887), 79.
The remarkable Takkiyeh-e Dowlat, the state hall designed to perform the mourning ceremonies of Muharram, was another landmark of the Naseri age (fig. 5.13). Commissioned by the shah in 1868, its building was supervised by Mo‘ayyer al-Mamalek, and its design, in the style of European opera houses, benefited from the advice of the Frenchman Jules Richard, once a French teacher to Naser al-Din and later a teacher at Dar al-Fonun and an antique dealer. The design of Takkiyeh—with its massive hall, steel-framed semipermanent dome, arched private balconies, several lower-levels seats for city folk, and circular center stage—was particularly designed for the performance of Shi‘i passion plays known as ta‘ziyeh. The royal edifice was in sharp contrast to the modest sites where ta‘ziyeh was usually performed in towns and villages throughout the country (fig. 5.14).
Figure 5.13. Takkiyeh-e Dowlat in Tehran was the focal point of the royal homage to the Moharram ceremonies.
S. G. W. Benjamin, Persia and the Persians (London, 1887), 373.
Figure 5.14 Humble ta‘ziyeh settings, such as this one in Qazvin, revealed grassroots devotion to the visual representation of Karbala tragedies.
J. Dieulafoy, “La Perse, la Chaldée et la Susiane,” Le tour du monde (1881–1882), 57.
In this state-owned takkiyeh, too, under one roof the Qajar elite gathered along with ordinary men and women of the city to witness, for free, not only the most elaborate ta‘ziyeh in town but also the shah in person, to marvel at his state’s great symbol of devotion to Shi‘i martyrs. Greatly appreciated by the Qajar public and by the elite, the staging of the tragedies of Karbala was an old tradition that went back at least to the tenth century. The art of ta‘ziyeh involved the melodic recitation of rhymed set verses, both by protagonists and by antagonists, use of wind and percussion instruments, costumes in the Arab style of the seventh century, horses and camels, and a great deal of dramatic—often bloody—action. No doubt the performative aspect of the ta‘ziyeh was a motivation for the construction of an elaborate state takkiyeh. Not only members of the diplomatic corps in the Qajar court were invited to attend the performance; the ta‘ziyeh of the Qajar era also included in the cast an imaginary delegation from the land of Farang, which toward the end of the performance offered its support and sympathies for the anguished Imam Hosain. There was, however, an entertaining aspect of the performance, and to lighten the mood of religious tragedies at times the court clowns performed comedies in the state takkiyeh.
Through the medium of architecture Qajar Iran borrowed and internalized occidental concepts and technologies while preserving Persian character and function. Beside constructions in the citadel (arg) and other royal complexes, the most significant development was the expansion of the capital, including the construction of new city walls, modern thoroughfares, European-style stores, and, a decade later, a horse-driven tramway with three lines and many stops. By the 1870s the four and half miles of Tehran’s old city walls—first built by the Safavid Shah Tahmasp in the sixteenth century and reinforced by Fath ‘Ali Shah—could no longer house the city’s growing population, which had reached more than 150,000 (pl. 5.3). By 1900 Tehran’s population had reached about two hundred thousand. The old Tehran consisted of four wards (mahalleh), a royal citadel, and six city grates, but the new city walls, which took ten years to complete, encompassed twelve miles surrounding five wards, each of which had numerous quarters (patoq). No fewer than twelve city gates had handsome designs and Persian tile work with designs invoking the signs of zodiac and in honor of the twelve Shi‘i Imams.
According to a survey of the capital completed in 1853, there were 7,872 houses and 4,220 shops and businesses in Tehran. By 1867 the total population of 147,256 resided in 9,581 houses: 68 percent owned their house, and 32 percent were tenants. By 1900 the number of houses had grown to 16,275, with 9,420 shops and businesses, a growth of roughly 45 percent from 1853. The 1853 survey also identified that 2,580 of the houses, or 32 percent of them, belonged to government employees. Twenty of these were large complexes consisting of four or more units, which housed the extended families of senior officials. Of the 5,844 houses belonging to civilians, some 95 percent were Shi‘i Muslims; 96 houses belonged to 180 Armenian households and 129 houses to 134 Jewish families. By 1867 there were some 130 European families residing in the capital.
A typical house of the Naseri era sheltered an extended family of three or more generations. But even smaller houses belonging to the urban middle classes improved in quality and size. An affluent Qajar household included a sizable number of domestic workers, cooks, and gardeners, as well as male and female slaves, often from Zanzibar or Abyssinia, who had been in Iran for generations and had their own families. According to 1867 statistics, more than seventeen thousand people, or 11.5 percent, of the total population of Tehran belonged to the servant (nowkar) class, attached to 9,581 houses—and among them, 10,568 were servants, 3,802 were domestic workers, and 3,014 were slaves. These servants and slaves almost entirely were attached to or resided in households of the nobility, ranking officials, large landowners, merchants, and affluent ulama. Yet outside the small but very prosperous urban elite, discrepancies in wealth among the rest of the population were not that extreme, even including the immigrant population of the city. In 1867, even before the physical expansion of the capital, immigrants from the provinces—mostly Azarbaijan, Isfahan, and Kashan—constituted 71 percent of Tehran’s population.
The statistics on public spaces is also noticeable. The survey of Tehran in 1867 counted 47 mosques, 35 madrasas, and 34 takkiyehs, as well as 190 public bathhouses, 130 caravansaries, and 20 ice makers (yakhchal). By 1900 there were 80 mosques and madrasas, 43 takkiyehs, 182 public bathhouses, 184 caravansaries, and 24 ice makers. The 1900 statistics also identified seven churches, two synagogues, seven barracks, two hospitals, two government schools, and 215 gardens and orchards in and around the city. Almost in all areas, perhaps with the exception of mosques and madrasas, Tehran witnessed steady urban growth, indicative of its political centrality, even though provincial centers such as Tabriz, Mashhad and Yazd still held an economic and demographic edge over the capital. Such a diversity of functions, which remained in place until the early decades of the twentieth century, was a hallmark of the decentralized Qajar system.
Yet as part of Tehran’s urban development, municipal services began to emerge in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Naser al-Din Shah created a small sanitation department responsible for removal of unsightly rubbish from street corners. The leaders of the city wards continued to serve under the city mayor but were overshadowed by the capital’s office of governor under Kamran Mirza, Naser al-Din Shah’s younger son. The newly created post of chief of police, held by an Italian officer with a dubious claim to nobility, overlooked a growing force that came to replace the old policing style in the wards and the bazaar. With the Italian police chief arrived new police administration and new methods of surveillance and control. Wary of anti-Qajar dissent in the final decades of the nineteenth century, the police force, under the supervision of Kamran Mirza, created a rudimentary secret police responsible for rounding up dissidents among officials, intellectuals, and the Babis.
Overall, Tehran’s modernization project was extensive, but not as much as that of Cairo, the so-called Paris on the Nile under the Khedive Isma‘il, or of Istanbul under Sultan ‘Abd al-Majid and his successors. Nor was it as Westernized as those cities in style and construction. Much of old Tehran remained intact up until the 1920s and 1930s, as was the case for other Iranian cities, perhaps with the exception of a handful of Western-style structures such as missionary schools and hospitals that were built in Tabriz and Isfahan. The old streets and alleys, forming a network that crisscrossed through the city wards and meandered between houses and gardens, were seldom paved or laid with stone; instead, passersby had to negotiate their way through the mud and dirt of the narrow streets. It would still be another half century, though, before the Western notion of the urban grid would ruin the fabric of the old city.
A few modern avenues built in the Naseri era, as early as the 1860s, cut through the old wards but seldom disturbed the coherence of the city’s original space (pl. 5.4). Most visible among the new developments was Naseri Avenue, north of the bazaar and west of the citadel complex—both sides of the wide thoroughfare were lined with shops offering goods and commodities not available inside the bazaar. Further north, Lalehzar Avenue, connected the Arg through Maydan-e Mashq (Drill Square) in the older part of the city to the newly developed Dowlat ward and the northern outskirts of the city. It was the first for-profit housing and shopping project developed by Naser al-Din Shah himself. As a shortage of empty land within the city walls raised prices, the shah saw an opportunity to turn Lalehzar (meaning “tulip field”), a delightful royal garden built by Fath ‘Ali Shah, into a moneymaker for his ever-hungry royal purse. It remained the most fashionable sector of the capital well into the twentieth century. The 1853 survey identified 113 trades and professions in Tehran; almost all were traditional wholesale and retail occupations based either in the central bazaar or in neighborhood shopping alleys. A similar pattern was also in place in major provincial centers. Only in the latter decades of the century, though, did shops and businesses offering Western luxury goods gradually appear in the newly developed streets of the capital. Although European woolen and cotton fabrics and some metalwares were popular since the 1840s, the number and variety of Western goods—such as china, glassware, and women’s toiletries—were negligible even at the turn of the twentieth century.
Moshir al-Dowleh’s construction of the massive Naseri mosque and madrasa complex east of the capital soon became a landmark. Built in the “seven dome” (haft kaseh) style, between 1878 and 1883, it was a testimony to the achievements of late Qajar architecture. Aimed to introduce a reformed curriculum and teaching method to Shi‘i madrasa education, the Naseri madrasa held one of the richest libraries of Islamic manuscripts in Iran, including rare scientific and geographical texts. Many private collections belonging to the Qajar nobility were closed to the public, and numerous libraries in the shrines and madrasas, such as the valuable collection in the shrine of Imam Reza in Mashhad, were limited to teachers and students. And because the Royal Library at Golestan Palace, with a rich manuscript collection going back to the thirteenth century, was for the shah’s private use, and the small library of Dar al-Fonun was largely for teaching purposes, the Naseri library was the closest concept to a public library in the Naseri era.
Trading centers all over Iran also witnessed a degree of expansion and improvement. Mansions built in innovative styles housed members of the provincial elite. In Kashan, Yazd, and Isfahan, merchants and landowners built numerous grand houses with revenue from the tobacco, opium, and textile trades (see map 5.1). Kashan merchant families in particular thrived in the latter decades of the century and, in addition to their mansions, built new alleys and bazaars, caravansaries, mosques, and water reservoirs.
NARRATING EUROPE: REAL AND IMAGINARY
The “Persianizing” of European styles was also evident in other areas of material culture throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century. A sense of confidence in freely adopting and adapting is notable in painting and the decorative arts, popular stories, music and performance, the introduction of new foods, dress and cosmetics, urban planning and beautification, garden designs and new plants and flowers. Arguably, the most Persian of all cultural expressions, poetry, also began to experience new form and content. These cultural adaptations did not imply bowing to Europe’s imperial power. Contrary to what purists often claim, art and architecture of the Qajar period were neither decadent nor bastardized replicas of European archetypes. Rather, they emerged out of a period of cultural florescence, which displayed a distinct Persian taste.
The works of Abol-Hasan Ghaffari, with the title of Sani‘ al-Molk, the great painter and graphic artist of the period, is but one example. Born in 1814 to an old family of great artists and statesmen from Kashan, he was trained in the Isfahan school of portraiture before developing his own technique and perspective. He visited Italy in the mid-1840s to be trained in the European style and returned a few years later with a nuanced view of Western art, more socially contextualized than any other Iranian artist of his time. After he visited Italy, his choice of subject matter diversified, without being overwhelmed by the European masters (although he did copy a few works for practice and for teaching purposes). Upon his return to Iran in 1851, just after Amir Kabir’s downfall, and as part of the former premier’s patronage of Persian arts and crafts, Abol-Hasan established the first modern studio in the newly founded Dar al-Sanaye‘ (house of crafts) complex in the Tehran bazaar. Besides promoting painting, Dar al-Sanaye’ was a notable attempt, possibly inspired by Safavid royal workshops, to preserve and promote Persian handicrafts and small industries such as textiles, carpet weaving, lacquerwork, bookbinding, mosaics, and silver works as well as modern crafts, such as manufacturing horse carriages.
In his studio Sani‘ al-Molk displayed his copies of the European masters Raphael, Michelangelo, and Titian, as well as classical Greek torsos. He admitted apprentices to work in the new style and every Friday invited the public to view the new artwork. He gave instruction not only in drawing and painting but also in graphic arts, the printing press, and lithography, and he accepted orders for lithographic reproductions. Illustrating the famous One Thousand and One Nights (Hezar o Yek-shab), a collection of Indo-Persian and Arabian stories (sometimes known in the West as the Arabian Nights), was one early achievement. In 1851 he was commissioned by Naser al-Din Shah, under the patronage of Mo‘ayyer al-Mamalek, to illustrate a royal copy of the text, which a talented writer and a poet jointly had translated from Arabic into Persian around the same time. This was perhaps the greatest artistic project of the post-Safavid period and one of the most notable in the nineteenth-century Muslim world. Supervising thirty-four assistants and apprentices in his workshop (not including calligraphers, bookbinders, and illuminators) for a period of three years, Sani‘ al-Molk created a six-volume manuscript consisting of 3,600 watercolor illustrations on 1,134 pages. He was paid the hefty sum of 6,580 tumans (almost $65,000) for the commission.
Sani‘ al-Molk’s artistic creativity is evident in his realist style, which had been unknown to the Persian tradition of illuminated books. He placed the scenes of One Thousand and One Nights not in an imaginary era of the Baghdad caliphate but in his own time and surroundings. He used the ancient tale to comment on Qajar society and politics, making subtle allusions to contemporary personalities and events. Everyday life in the bazaar and the street, dress, food, musical instruments, transportation, and, of course, Europeans were the subjects of many of the illustrations. He highlighted the private life of women, servants, slaves, and eunuchs, as well as leisure, entertainment, dancing, and drinking, and he presented daring illustrations of love and sexuality. To make the narratives more accessible and relevant, he used bright colors and dynamic designs, almost bordering on caricature. The illustrated manuscript preserved in the library of Golestan Palace was only viewable by the shah and his courtiers and was never published—a sad fate of artistic works with royal patronage even in the age of printing (pl. 5.5).
The same spirit of acerbic humor is evident in a number of Sani‘ al-Molk’s watercolors with social themes. The complex scene of a brawl in Tabriz involving lutis (pl. 5.6), or an odd bunch of court attendants surrounding a dandy Qajar prince (pl. 5.7), or a group of ludicrous court hangers-on—these were critical commentaries on violence, greed, and the absurdity of the Qajar court, all wrapped up with a fresh wit. As the editor of the government gazette, Sani‘ al-Molk introduced for the first time sketches and cartoons of daily crime scenes and urban unrest, as well as royal parades, horse races, and hunts, often with subtle references to social undercurrents of the time. It is probable that his critical eye caused a fallout with the Qajar establishment shortly before his mysterious death in 1866 at the age of fifty-four, perhaps another victim of the notorious Qajar coffee.
Later painters of the Naseri period continued in the Perso-European hybrid style, with great innovations. The works of Mahmud Khan Kashani Malek al-Sho‘ara not only captured the delicacy of the royal architecture of his time but also arrived at a novel expressionist style (pl. 5.8). Works of Mohammad Ghaffari Kashani, better known as Kamal al-Molk (1859–1940), a relative of Sani‘ al-Molk, in contrast, was directly inspired by European realism of his time. His scenery and portrayal work, much admired by Naser al-Din Shah, proved more influential in the development of Persian painting in the early twentieth century. By the time of the Constitutional Revolution, there was a visible shift toward European realism and away from the artistic innocence of the earlier period. Pictorial traits characteristic of Persian cultural identity nevertheless remained strong. Likewise, the music of the Naseri period mostly under court patronage, paved the way for the efflorescence of the Persian classical radif system around the time of the Constitutional Revolution (pl. 5.9).
The Persian popular imagination also explored Farang and its exotic delights. The humorous romance of Amir Arsalan Rumi, a popular adventure yarn bridging old Persian folktales with the modern novel, reflected an ambivalence toward Europe between seduction and violence. Narrated by Mohammad ‘Ali Naqib al-Mamalek, the chief storyteller (naqqal) of the court, to Naser al-Din Shah as his bedtime entertainment, the adventurous story evidently appealed to women of the royal harem. Tuman Agha Fakhr al-Dowleh, a gifted daughter of the shah, who transcribed the story while being narrated by the storyteller, apparently also illustrated it. Once the printed editions came out, as early as 1898, the novel not only appealed to the literate public but also became part of the naqqals’ repertoire.
In the story, Amir Arsalan is an orphaned prince whose father was slain and whose Rum kingdom (the Ottoman Empire) was attacked and occupied by forces of the powerful Petros Shah, a king of Farang, perhaps an allusion to Peter the Great of Russia. In revenge, Amir Arsalan, who had been brought up in Egypt, recaptures Rum and ascends to the throne. In the bloody campaign of cleansing Istanbul of all Christian churches and priests, he discovers a portrait of Farrokh Laqa (blessed countenance), the dazzling daughter of Petros Shah, and immediately falls in love with her. A handsome, hotheaded youth with a taste for Christian blood, Amir Arsalan abandons his kingdom in search of his beloved to arrive incognito in the perilous land of Farang. There, with the help of secret Muslim converts in high offices, he eventually meets Farrokh Laqa, who also had seen Amir Arsalan’s picture and fallen in love with him. Working as a bartender in the theater, Amir Arsalan, who fluently speaks several languages of the land of Farang, becomes involved in a series of escapades that lands him in a magical world of demons and fairies, where after many adventures he eventually rescues his beloved and returns with her to the land of Farang. Impressed with Amir Arsalan’s valor and devotion, Petros Shah is obliged to allow the couple to get married. Amir Arsalan returns to his seat of power, Farrokh Laqa is duly transferred to the harem, and peace is restored between the two kingdoms (fig. 5.15).
While drenched in mindless violence, the story is also colored with hilarious dialogue, sentimental romance, and childish antics. Such material was meant to entertain the shah (and later on readers and the coffeehouse audiences) and to satisfy their curiosity about Europe. Such fanciful Persianizing of Europe as a hostile yet seductive realm may be read as symptomatic of Iran’s conflicting aspirations; a Layli and Majnun (or English Romeo and Juliet) paradigm of the amorous hero falling in love with the chaste beauty from a hostile land. Yet contrary to the languishing Majnun of medieval romance, Amir Arsalan embodies all Iranian aspirations for power, virility, and success (even though he is an Ottoman prince born in Egypt).
Figure 5.15. Amir Arsalan serves incognito as a bartender (here conveniently modified to teahouse waiter) in his quest for Farrokh Laqa in the land of Farang.
Naqib al-Mamalek, Dastan-e Amir Arsalan-e Rumi (Tehran, 1317/1900). Illustrated by Hosain ‘Ali. Courtesy of Ulrich Marzolph.
Another fictional character of the period displayed the other side of the dilemma of incorporating Western modernity. Ibrahim Bag’s Travelogue is a realistic novel by Zayn al-‘Abedin Maraghehi, an Iranian émigré merchant who spent most of his life in the Caucasus, Russia and the Ottoman Empire. Based on the author’s own experiences, the novel narrates the story of a young and idealistic merchant of Azarbaijani origin whose glorified perception of Iran is rudely shattered once he visits his ancestral homeland. Ibrahim Bag is a prosperous, widely traveled, and educated man with lofty moral values and wholesome Shi‘i faith. He is deeply pained by the decay, corruption, and backwardness his country suffers from and aspires to bring to it material progress, social justice, and moral reconstruction. Yet at every turn he faces intransigence.
Maraghehi’s account, an excellent example of the simple prose of the late Naseri period, is a passionate litany on the flaws of the Iranian state and society as voiced by a Babi sympathizer. Unlike Naser al-Din’s rather nonchalant attitude, Ibrahim Bag’s encounter with the West makes him see the weaknesses of his own society, state, and culture. He further observes Iran’s economic stagnation and lack of investments, as well as the poverty of the majority in contrast to the wealth of a few, recurring famines and starvation, and diseases. He comments on the growth of petty crimes and an unproductive culture of peddling and usury. In particular, he notices a lack of public hygiene in bathhouses, the scarcity of modern medication, and an absence of modern hospitals. The financial chaos and mismanagement, the scarcity of money in the market, and nonexistence of modern financial institutions such as banks all incense the author. He is also troubled with lack of modern industries and modern road communication, disinterest in exploring Iran’s rich mineral resources, the tragic destruction of Iran’s forests, unemployment, mass migration to neighboring countries in search of menial jobs, lack of planning and statistics, and absence of standardized weights and measures.
Like most non-Western reform-minded writers of the late nineteenth century, he laments the lack of modern education and Western-style schools and secular curricula, for which he blames the conservative clerical establishment. He held the Qajar elite, along with the ulama, responsible for Iran’s chronic weaknesses and its curse of being subordinate to superior powers. Domestic culprits aside, there was little blame on the Western powers’ territorial and economic exploits. Typically, he does not foresee a chance of the West respecting Iran’s sovereignty or caring for its well-being, so long as the state and the people are in their “deep slumber” and do not wake to care for themselves. Ibrahim Bag’s critical outlook is of course complemented by a conscious sense of patriotism and a love for his homeland, for its glorious past and a desire to reconstruct it again—a viewpoint no doubt idealized by the author’s long years residing abroad. Here we see the crux of an Iranian bourgeois ethos aspiring to reconcile adopted modernity with Perso-Shi‘i identity, a trait that was to be sharpened with the Constitutional Revolution. Not surprisingly, in the wake of the Constitutional Revolution Ibrahim Beg’s imaginary travels were widely appreciated in the prerevolutionary secret societies of the time.
THE IMPERIAL BANK OF PERSIA
Even by the 1880s the Reuter Concession entanglement had still not gone away. The persistent financier pushed the British Foreign Office and pulled strings at home in the hope of being compensated for his canceled concession. For fifteen years, his pleas to the British government had only served to block Iran from granting concessions to any other agent for the construction of railroads or other projects. This was a mixed blessing, for although it discouraged economic and financial dependence on European interests, as for example, happened in Egypt and the neighboring Ottoman Empire, it also hindered capital investment and slowed Iran’s economic and human development. Yet it is important to note that the construction of railroads, despite the high hopes in this enterprise, failed to play a key role in the industrialization of the Middle East. It did, however, increase the mobility of the population, as well as of foreign goods and the export of cash crops. Even in the Pahlavi era, construction of the trans-Iranian railroad did not result in any industrial miracle.
If no major railroad project was ever undertaken in Iran before 1928, there was discussion, negotiation, and preliminary schemes throughout the 1880s and beyond. The building of a railway, the favorite pastime topic of discussion of the shah and his advisers, was often aborted by concerns over rival European powers and lack of capital. And although there was no railroad, Qajar Iran did have a five-and-a-half-mile narrow-gauge tramway built by a Belgian firm to ease Tehran’s pilgrimage traffic to the nearby Shah ‘Abd al-‘Azim shrine south of the capital. Opened in 1887, this pride of Qajar modernity, called Chemins de Fer, but soon to be known by the public as mashin dudi (smoke machine), remained in service until 1961, a relic of the Qajar desire for progress and a sad remark on the dictates of geopolitics.
In 1888, the appointment of the flamboyant English envoy Sir Henry Drummond Wolff dramatically shifted the situation in favor of greater British economic involvement in Iran. Wolff was the son of an eccentric convert to Protestantism, Josef Wolff, who in the 1820s had traveled to Iran and Central Asia as a missionary, in search of the lost tribes of Israel. Before coming to Iran, Henry Drummond Wolff had served as a diplomat in Egypt and later as a British member of Parliament. He nurtured strong ties with the London financial community, including the Rothschilds, the Sassoons, and Julius Reuter. He was a vocal advocate of British economic investment abroad and of the use of capital finance to leverage British imperial supremacy. A friend of Lord Randolph Churchill and Arthur Balfour and a founding member of the influential conservative Primrose League, with its quasi-Masonic hierarchy, Wolff shared his vision of economic expansionism with Lord Salisbury and, in many respects, foreshadowed George Curzon. He listened to Julius Reuter and found in his repealed concession the potential for opening Iran to British venture capital as an arm of imperial diplomacy.
Already in 1887, after a decade of hard negotiation, Naser al-Din Shah had been pressured by the British Foreign Office to open up the Karun River, Iran’s only navigable waterway, to international shipping between the Persian Gulf and to Shushtar, in central Khuzestan, and from there over a new carriage road through Bakhtiyari land to Isfahan. Learning his lesson from the Reuter episode, Naser al-Din and his government were cautious in drafting the terms of this concession so as to avoid a British monopoly. They strictly regulated the shipping companies in doing business, purchasing property, and collaborating with their Iranian counterparts. Having in mind the fate of the Suez Canal and the British occupation of Egypt some six years earlier, the shah was adamant that he would not be remembered as the prey of British capitalism.
In the following decade, the Karun navigation thrived as British and Iranian shipping companies competed for cargo and passengers, hence supporting the local labor market (see map 5.1). The privately owned English company, Lynch Brothers, with years of operation along the Tigris and Euphrates, was engaged in healthy competition with a number of European and Iranian companies, of which the most successful, the Naseri Navigation company, was run by the Iranian government. The volume of trade in the Karun region increased nearly seventeen-fold between 1891 and 1902, and the building of the Bakhtiyari road anticipated even larger economic advances after the first production of Khuzestan oil in 1908.
Wolff brought with him a number of proposals, plans, and potential concessions for development. Chief among them, and as it turned out the most successful, was renegotiating the Reuter concession, now a valuable instrument of British diplomacy. If a railroad was not strategically feasible, there were other projects to pursue. Establishing a modern bank seemed the most tangible and more in line with the spirit of European capital investment. The Imperial Bank of Persia (Bank-e Shahi-e Iran), established in 1889, took over the operations of the existing Oriental Bank, which had been active since 1885. The concession allowed for the first time branches to be established all over the country and to engage in all aspects of modern banking and finances, except mortgage loans for the purchase of property. Most remarkably, the government of Iran granted the bank the exclusive right to issue currency banknotes—a new development in Iran, as until then, currency had been exclusively coins. For the remainder of the Reuter concession, the Imperial Bank in effect gained control not only over the volume of the money in the Iranian market but also over Iran’s finances and monetary policy. It also reserved once again the right to exploit Iran’s unexplored mineral resources, as collateral for the success of the bank operation.
The Imperial Bank relied on a cadre of colonial bankers and employees brought from Egypt and elsewhere to quickly start operations, first in Tehran and soon after in major commercial centers in Iran and abroad. The issue of public shares on the London Stock Exchange raised the initial capital of £6,000,000 ($29,210,000). This hefty sum by Iranian standards dwarfed the volume of funds available to the private bankers in the bazaar (sarrafs) and posed immediate challenges to the usurers. As the bank began lending, the outrageous interest rates in the bazaar dropped sharply and the bank’s modern operations soon supplanted the arcane practices of local competitors in many areas. Most notably, the long-distance transfer of money for domestic and foreign trade and other financial transactions was substantially eased, as bank transfers and commercial credit gradually replaced the old barat money orders.
The bank’s greatest advantage was its monopoly on issuing banknotes, which, despite some initial resistance, was quickly accepted as the preferred medium of transaction, over the cumbersome and unreliable silver and copper coins that had long plagued the Iranian economy. The issue of banknotes of various values was a clear sign of a centralizing monetary system. While the shah’s government had a limited say in the volume and issue of the new currency, the appearance of the shah’s portrait on the banknotes was a symbol of his sovereignty (fig. 5.16). This proved a mixed blessing for the Iranian government, which in the following years was associated even more closely with financial downturns. The reversals of fortune were not limited to the merchants who declared bankruptcy because of mismanagement or vacillations in the worldwide markets or the bank’s manipulations. The state and the Imperial Bank were blamed for market fluctuations.
Figure 5.16. Even in 1910, nine years into the Constitutional Revolution, Naser al-Din Shah’s portrait still appeared on banknotes issued by the Imperial Bank of Persia. The five-tuman note was payable only in Yazd.
World Banknotes and Coins (http://www.worldbanknotescoins.com/2014/12/iran-5–tomans-banknote-1910–imperial-bank-of-persia-naser-al-din-shah.html).
In 1895, for instance, the British legation’s “news writer” in Shiraz reported that a leading merchant in the city in the opium export trade, Mirza Aqa Shirazi, declared bankruptcy, with debts amounting to 400,000 tumans (about $1,000,000) of which about 90,000 tumans were owed to the Imperial Bank of Persia. He wished to pay back his debts provided that the amount of 80,000 tumans that he had already paid to the bank as interest be deducted. Reaching a deadlock, the merchant subsequently took sanctuary (bast) in Shiraz’s New Mosque. Even a visit by the bank’s vice director and pressure from the provincial government, which had cut off the supply of water and food to the mosque, did not persuade him to come out. Eventually under the prime minister’s direct instruction, Mirza Aqa accepted the arbitration of the Imam Jum‘eh, the chief religious officer of Shiraz and a prestigious mojtahed of the city. Not only did Mirza Aqa have to plea to the Imam Jum‘eh for arbitration, but also to the powerful chief of the Qashqa’i tribe of Fars, who was indebted to the bank to the tune of 73,000 tumans. To pay off his debt on a seven-year arrangement, the khan settled by mortgaging a number of his villages in the Qashqa’i land to the bank.
By the 1890s a mortgage bank funded by Russian capital and backed by the Russian legation in Tehran, cornered another financial market, making loans to the Iranian elite for their purchase of properties and other oft-unsuccessful enterprises. The riches of many of the nobility were lost to this bank, squandered on luxury goods, ostentatious mansions, horses, carriages, and travel abroad. Yet the Russian bank never came close to the breadth of the Imperial Bank’s activities. As the sphere of activities of these foreign banks grew, so did the dependency of the merchants and notables on these institutions. Banks operated within a regulated framework very different from the flexible bazaar finances to which the Iranian merchants were accustomed. As the high-ranking mojtaheds became more involved in economic affairs of the community, they became more critical of the government and its foreign associates.
THE TOBACCO PROTEST AND RISE OF CLERICAL INFLUENCE
By the late 1880s the Qajar state began to experience fresh financial pressures caused by worldwide inflation and the collapse of silver-based currencies. The growth of the state and the increasing royal and ministerial appetite for luxury and good living also demanded new sources of income, which could not be secured through agrarian and other traditional taxation. Even the increasing sale of crown lands to private ownership, mostly to influential merchants and the wealthy ulama, and farming out of the customhouses to domestic agents, could not meet the state’s needs. To Naser al-Din Shah and his advisers, the sale of concessions seemed the easiest and most efficient option. And imposing a monopoly on tobacco seemed the most promising.
The politics of the late Naseri era also paved the way for greater foreign presence. Coinciding with the Karun River concession, in 1888 the British government bestowed the highly coveted decoration of the Star of India on the pro-British prince Mas‘ud Mirza Zell al-Soltan (1849–1922), the Shah’s powerful senior son and the semiautonomous governor of Isfahan and a number of central and western provinces of Iran. The decoration was in return for the prince’s friendship to the British government, and especially his services toward the conclusion of the Karun concession and in hopes of further concessions and greater British influence in the south. Whether a premeditated move or out of fear for Zell al-Soltan’s pro-British bent, the shah almost immediately dismissed the prince from all his posts except the governorship of Isfahan. The move orchestrated by the shah’s shrewd new premier, ‘Ali Asghar Khan Amin al-Soltan (1858–1907), was meant to curb Zell al-Soltan’s unchecked ambition and to direct Britain’s attention solely to Tehran.
Amin al-Soltan, son of the shah’s butler who was of Georgian slave origin, started his service as a page boy in the shah’s private quarters (khalvat) and moved his way up, first to the court and then to the divan. After the demise of Moshir al-Dowleh, he emerged as a partner in power with the chief government accountant Mirza Yusef Ashtiyani—better known as Mostawfi al-Mamalek (chief state accountant of the empire)—the shrewd leader of the government’s conservative camp and a man who had served in his hereditary post since the mid-1840s. Known merely as “His Excellency” (Jenab-e Aqa), Mostawfi had enough skeletons in his closet to make even the shah deferential toward him and mindful of his intrigues. His death in 1890, however, opened the way for Amin al-Soltan, as the new sadr-e a‘zam, to push for greater accession to foreign capital and expertise. A cunning confidant of the shah and a master of realpolitik—more in the style of Aqasi and Nuri than Amir Kabir and Moshir al-Dowleh—he symbolized the eventual triumph of the Naseri courtiers over the divan class. With no grand vision for overhauling the divan and no illusions of steering an independent course in foreign policy, he had vacillated between the Russian and the British embassies in search of the best deal for his royal master and himself. Struggling for survival in the age of empires, he came to share with the shah a progressively cynical attitude toward government. With the prime ministerial landscape littered with dead and disgraced predecessors, to what else could he aspire other than pleasing the shah and persuading him to comply with his schemes? The relationship between the shah and his last premier turned increasingly complex and mutually exploitative.
The shah and Amin al-Soltan, who had earlier decided against a plan to impose a state monopoly on the production of tobacco, later entered into negotiations with a British concessionaire. By 1889, during the royal visit to Europe as a guest of the British government, the shah finalized the granting of a monopoly on Iranian tobacco to a certain Major G. F. Talbot. Then probably the largest grower and exporter of tobacco in the Middle East, Iran exported largely to the Ottoman Empire and supplied its own growing domestic market (see map 5.1). The Regie monopoly, as the company came to be known, after an earlier tobacco monopoly granted to it by the Ottomans, was given a fifty-year concession for the purchase, distribution, sale, and export of all tobacco products throughout Iran. As a major income-earning commodity, tobacco was also a vital to Iranian daily life. By the 1890s as many as two and a half million people, a good 25 percent of the Iranian population, both men and women, were regular smokers, mostly in the form of water pipes (qaliyan, better known today in the West as hookah). Peasants and the poorer classes used long pipes (chopoq) and consumed inferior-quality tobacco. No other commodity, except perhaps tea, held such sway over the public. Since its introduction in the late sixteenth century, the production of Iranian tobacco increased all over the country, especially in the provinces of Azarbaijan, Khorasan, Isfahan, and Fars.
It is remarkable to note how imprudently the shah had once again fallen victim to a foreign concession, and for a commodity vital to a large sector of Iranian producers and consumers. It was as though the memories of the ill-fated Reuter concession had all but faded. No doubt, the glamour of the English surroundings, the subtle hints of his British host, and the not-so-subtle persuasions of his chief minister convinced the shah to go ahead with the concession at the time the ruling elite was ever more oblivious to the public’s growing anti-Qajar sentiment. The shah’s hopes for short-term gain had no bounds, even at the expense of the growers and merchants whose sustenance was crucial to the national economy. If the merchants could pocket a substantial profit from the tobacco trade, the shah must have reasoned, why not him? The royal gain, of course, came at the expense of a large sector of Iranian exporters, wholesalers, distributors—perhaps as many as five thousand—and a much larger body of medium- and small-scale tobacco growers.
Yet even the hope for a hefty profit was illusory. The Regie concession allocated to the Iranian state no more than a meager royalty of £15,000 ($75,000) and one-quarter of annual net profits, after deducting expenses. By early 1890, the Regie monopoly had begun to establish a network of provincial offices throughout Iran, manned mostly by colonial bureaucrats, and had started to purchase tobacco from the Iranian growers soon found, to their dismay, that they had no choice but to sell to the Regie at uncompetitive fixed prices. Yet the main opposition came from the tobacco merchants and their associates. Contrary to the hopes of the shah and the Regie, eliminating the Iranian middleman and breaking the exporting merchants’ hold on the market did not pass uneventfully.
Standing to lose their livelihoods, they began to mobilize whatever popular and clerical support they could muster to oppose the monopoly and persuade the state to repeal it. A movement of mass protests between late 1890 and early 1892 successfully challenged both the foreign monopoly and the authority of the Qajar state. This was the first nationwide protest movement, at least since the collapse of the Babi resistance in the 1850s, with popular participation and a pronounced anti-imperialist agenda, a rebellion that anticipated and in some ways paved the way for the Constitutional Revolution some fifteen years later. The Tobacco Protest was the first time that the merchants of the bazaar, a number of high-ranking clergy, and a handful of dissidents found common ground to mobilize the public nationwide and challenge the authority of the shah.
Sporadic protests in the cities began in Shiraz in late 1890 and continued over the course of the next year in Isfahan, Tabriz, Mashhad, and other tobacco-growing centers (map 5.2). In nearly all instances, it was the merchants who pleaded with local mojtaheds to render their support and voice the merchants’ grievances. Public gatherings in the mosques denounced the Farangis for their intrusion into the affairs of the Muslims and, more urgently, for ritually polluting the handling of tobacco. Condemnations such as these were familiar staples of anti-European rhetoric in the Qajar period. Yet the mojtaheds of influence and wealth were generally reluctant to sever their traditional ties with the state and openly criticize the shah’s initiative, for fear they would make themselves targets of government retaliation. They nevertheless soon realized that they had no choice but to side with the merchants and large-scale growers. The slowing of the flow of religious taxes and dues originating in the bazaar brought the message home. By the beginning of 1891, the mojtaheds, especially in Isfahan, with the Najafi family at the helm, came to occupy a prominent place in the protest movement.
It was Tabriz, however, that witnessed the most serious protests against the monopoly by ordinary men and women. To be sure, there are traces of anti-Regie provocation by the Russians in the Tabriz bazaar. Iran’s powerful northern neighbor viewed the Regie as a British operation designed to infiltrate Azarbaijan, a province Russia traditionally considered its own backyard. But the thrust of opposition again came from exporting merchants whose very livelihood had been jeopardized. Facing the angry crowd and Russian objections, the crown prince Mozaffar al-Din Mirza (1853–1907) and his provincial minister alerted Tehran that unless something was done, they could not guarantee the safety of the province or the Regie agents against the gathering revolutionary storm. In response, the Regie company, in consultation with the shah, decided to temporarily cease operations in Azarbaijan. This obvious setback was the first victory for the growing opposition. That a protest movement that had started in the south of the country was fully embraced in the northern commercial center signified a shared economy that surpassed Iran’s typical regional polarity.
Map 5.2. The Tobacco Protest and the Constitutional Revolution, 1891–1911
The final act of the anti-Regie revolt, however, played out in a dramatic boycott that involved more than the merchants and their allies. In November 1892, a fatwa attributed to Mirza Hasan Shirazi was widely distributed throughout Iran; it called for a ban on smoking tobacco so long as its distribution remained in the hands of the infidels. Even though as early as 1891, rumors of the ban on smoking were in circulation in Shiraz, it was the name of the chief mojtahed in the ‘Atabat (the shrine cities of southern Iraq) that gave the legal opinion the necessary weight. “Smoking under such circumstances,” the fatwa declared, “is tantamount to combating the Imam of the Age, may God hasten his return.” That the fatwa was rumored to be fabricated by the head of Tehran’s merchant guild, Haji Mohammad Kazem Malek al-Tojjar, and his associates in the name of Shirazi proved of secondary importance. The ranking mojtaheds in Isfahan and Tehran—who were in contact via telegraph with Shirazi in the town of Samarra in southern Iraq—made sure that he would approve the fatwa issued in his name (fig. 5.17).
By early 1890s Shirazi was recognized and referred to as the marja‘-e taqlid (the source of [universal] emulation) throughout the Shi‘i world, a position for which he was at least in part indebted to the celebrated advocate of pan-Islamism, Sayyed Jamal al-Din Asadabadi (better known as Afghani). In a widely circulated letter to Shirazi in 1891, Afghani praised his clerical compatriot as the leader of the Shi‘i world and called on him to oppose Naser al-Din Shah’s despotism, corruption, and selling out to foreign interests. Aside from the Babi anti-Qajar opposition, some four decades earlier, this was the first open call in modern Iranian history for the overthrow of the shah, even though it did not call for the fall of the Qajar dynasty or the monarchy as a whole. Afghani, who earlier had been invited back to his homeland by the shah shortly before the Regie crisis to serve as an adviser to the state, soon came under suspicion for his implicit criticism of the shah. He received the cold shoulder from the shah and shortly thereafter, coinciding with the beginning of the Regie protest, was disgracefully dragged out of the shrine of ‘Abd al-‘Azim, where he had taken sanctuary (bast), and escorted to the Iraqi border.
A renowned dissident, who appeared all his mature life in the guise of a Sunni Afghan, and chief advocate of pan-Islamism, Afghani stirred anti-British sentiments from British India to Afghanistan to Istanbul to Egypt. Born in 1839 in the village of Asadabad, 32 miles east of Hamadan in western Iran, a region known for its heterodox Ahl-e Haqq community, Afghani received some standard Islamic philosophical training before moving to the Shi‘i cities of southern Iraq, where as a seminarian he was exposed to Shaykhi and Babi ideas. By the 1880s his magnetic presence had earned him a few devotees in Iran, including Malek al-Tojjar, and a few Naseri courtiers and statesmen. Yet contrary to his popularity in Egypt and India, and admirers such as the celebrated Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abdu, Afghani never earned great support in Iran in his own time. The complexity of his personality, his peripatetic lifestyle, his political versatility, and above all concealing his Shi‘i identity under a Sunni façade could allow his message to be heard only through insidious channels. Having been humiliated in Iran in 1891, Afghani nursed a deep grudge against the shah, a resentment that no doubt contributed some years later to Naser al-Din Shah’s assassination. His collaboration with former Babis, such as the celebrated writer and intellectual Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani, may have influenced Afghani’s emphasis on the shah’s illegitimate rule. His plea to Shirazi as the “head” (ra’is) and supreme exemplar (marja‘-e taqlid) of the Shi‘i community served to propel Shirazi to the forefront of the political struggle.
Figure 5.17. The Regie Protest further raised Mirza Hasan Shirazi’s standing as the undisputed marja‘-e taqlid. The multitudes sitting for the Friday prayer behind the leader of prayer here, identified as Shirazi, presumably in the town of Samarra in southern Iraq, is a testament to his popularity.
Postcard c. 1910. Author’s collection.
Whether it was Afghani’s provocation or the emerging consensus among dissidents and discontent merchants, the Tobacco Protest had widened the gap between the state and the ulama, and displayed the latter’s compliance with the grievances of their mercantile clients. Popular involvement was an unexpected outcome of a protest rooted in deeper economic problems. In Iran men and women complied with Shirazi’s fatwa in public and in private. Water pipes were broken and thrown into the streets, or otherwise stored in backrooms and out of sight. Tobacco retailers shut their businesses, and banners were brought out to demonstrate public solidarity. To the shah’s great annoyance, apparently even women of his own harem refrained from smoking on the grounds that they followed the marja‘-e taqlid on religious issues, not the shah. The public ban, perhaps aggravated by tobacco withdrawal symptoms, demonstrated the power of mass protest and persuaded people to take even bolder steps. Negotiations with Amin al-Soltan, exchanges of telegrams between the shah and the ulama, and between the mojtaheds in the capital and in the provincial centers, added to the sense of urgency. The rebellion was no longer localized or confined to one economic sector but increasingly gave voice to popular frustrations on a national scale.
The prerevolutionary scene—complete with vigilante enforcement of the smoking ban, appearance of clandestine posters and leaflets known as “night-letters,” and declaring a curfew in the capital—reached its climax in January 1892. The government’s threat to expel from the capital the chief mojtahed of Tehran, Mirza Hasan Ashtiyani, if he continued to provoke the public and refrain from breaking the smoking ban, backfired. He refused to accept the terms offered by the government. The violent demonstration soon after, following the closure of the bazaar, brought a huge crowd to the Arg square in front of the royal citadel calling not only for the repeal of the tobacco monopoly but also for an end to government corruption and the shah’s despotic rule. The crowd showered insults not only on Kamran Mirza, who served as governor of the capital and minister of war, but also on the premier Amin al-Soltan and on the person of the shah. This was followed by an attempt to break through the gates of the citadel. The armed confrontation with the royal guards and the elite troops who were brought in to defend the royal compound, ended in the deaths of ten demonstrators, with many more injured.
The open revolt and clandestine propaganda denouncing the shah for despotism and corruption but also chastising the mojtaheds for compromise and inaction, were sufficient that both the shah and the ulama recognize the greater danger—an imminent uprising that threatened the very survival of both institutions. Immediately following the demonstration, the shah announced the complete repeal of the Regie monopoly in the domestic market and for the export of tobacco. The latter issue nevertheless remained a matter of dispute with Regie for a long time afterward. The shah also made sure that the mojtaheds who threatened mass migration to Iraq in sympathy with Ashtiyani were financially rewarded in the capital and in the provinces.
Despite his initial hesitation, Mirza Hasan Shirazi consented to lifting the tobacco ban. Once the shah was assured of British support, he went along with the terms of the repeal, including payment to the Regie of a cancellation penalty. To do so, the Iranian government was forced for the first time to borrow the necessary sum from the British-controlled Imperial Bank of Persia—a half million pounds sterling ($2,500,000), with an interest rate of six percent over a forty-year period. Foreign borrowing was a road well trodden by the Egyptian khedive and the Ottoman sultan, and in both cases it led to bankruptcy. The shah and his government, perhaps the Qajar establishment as a whole, however, had a more urgent issue than bankruptcy to worry about.
The Tobacco Protest was able to destabilize the hard-won order of the Naseri era and ignite a popular protest led by a fragile coalition of merchants, the ulama, and dissidents. In the months and years after the Regie, Iran more frequently witnessed expressions of turmoil in the provinces, often with mojtaheds at the helm. In Isfahan, a center of Shi‘i activism, the notorious Aqa Najafi, the doyen of a wealthy and powerful clerical family (who for years had fought a dirty war with Zell al-Soltan, prince-governor of the city), even declared the advent of an “Islamic government” on the heels of a declining monarchy. It was as though faith in the shah as an icon of stability had been shattered. Some four years after the end of Regie, on May 1, 1896, Naser al-Din Shah was assassinated on the eve of a jubilee celebrating his fiftieth lunar year on the Qajar throne (AH 1264–1313). He had gone to the ‘Abd al-‘Azim shrine to pay homage to the Shi‘i saint and give thanks for his long rule, which had been the longest since the Safavid Tahmasp I. After saying his prayers, he walked freely among the pilgrims, who, contrary to the normal practice of royal visits, were allowed to stay inside the shrine. There he was shot point-blank by Mirza Reza Kermani, a devotee of Jamal al-Din Afghani. Kermani was an eccentric itinerant dealer in luxury goods and expensive fabrics, who harbored a grudge against the shah’s son, Kamran Mirza, for torturing him and subjecting him to years of imprisonment.
The bullet that killed the shah heralded the end of an era, a half a century of relative constancy. The veneer of modernization that covered the Qajar state was just that. The reformist measures by statesmen such as Amir Kabir and Moshir al-Dowleh never truly transformed Qajar society. Some features of European material culture came to shape urban space, art and architecture, dress, food, and music. The foundations of the state, however, remained largely unchanged. The old Qajar elite were being gradually replaced by a new class of court appointees who were more dependent on the person of the shah, yet the general conduct of the court and divan remained essentially the same.
Naser al-Din’s private life, and the life of the royal harem, also remained unchanged, except that his numerous wives, sisters, and concubines became more languid and, with few exceptions, more vain. With age, the shah’s inner court acquired a prurient ambiance, well evident in many entries in the secret diaries of E’temad al-Saltaneh. With a sarcastic eye, he observed changes in the shah’s conduct, the degrading quality of his companions and favorites, his endless daily sorties to the outskirts of the capital to visit royal resorts, pleasure gardens, and mountain retreats, and his camping out with a huge retinue around Tehran and elsewhere. He quietly recorded the childish pleasures that punctuated the hideous routine of the court. Among his recurring topics were the shah’s obsessive affection for his favorite page boy Malijak, trivial envies and enmities in the harem and inner court, the shah’s curious taste in dress and appearance, and above all his patronizing strategies of favor and fury (see fig. 5.17).
After the failure of Herat during the first decade of his rule, Naser al-Din’s relations with European powers also remained constant, if not entirely uneventful. The shah’s success in keeping the imperial neighbors at arm’s length is one of his notable achievements. European intrusion into economic and commercial spheres seemed inevitable, as had happened with the Reuter concession, the Imperial Bank of Persia, the Karun River concession, concession for a large scale export of Caspian lumber to a Russian private concern in 1883, and the Regie monopoly. Yet Naser al-Din had been far more successful than his contemporaries—Sultan ‘Abd al-Hamid, the khedives of Egypt, Central Asian khanates, the amir of Afghanistan, and the subjugated rajas of the Indian princely states—in preserving his country’s political sovereignty and territorial integrity in the age of colonial expansion. He learned how to turn the terms of the European presumption of Iran as a buffer state to his favor, and how to play the Russian territorial threat in the north against British ambitions in the south and in the Persian Gulf. The 1857 loss of Herat province, a major territorial setback, comparable to the loss of the Caucasus, and minor border compromises to peacefully settle Iran’s eastern boundaries, did not minimize the achievements of the Naseri era.
The state’s relations with social groups also remained largely unchanged until the last decade of the nineteenth century and especially after the Tobacco Protest when the tacit state-ulama relationship went through a momentary crisis. The merchants and artisans also began to voice their discontent as their economic livelihood was further exposed to vacillations in world markets, foreign trade, and foreign concessions. More than ever before, people held the state responsible for its inability to shield the country against such vulnerabilities, for the lack of security in their everyday life, and for weak economic infrastructure. Greater contact with the neighboring world—Russian-annexed Caucasian and Central Asian provinces, the Ottoman capital and Ottoman provinces such as Iraq and Syria, Egypt under British occupation, and British India—made many émigré Iranians aware of their country’s relative underdevelopment, economic disadvantages, and the Iranian government’s failure to deal with mounting poverty, health, and social problems. By the last decade of the nineteenth century more than quarter of a million Iranians had emigrated in search of work and a better life to neighboring cities and regions, especially Baku, Tiflis, Ashkhabad, Istanbul, Cairo, Alexandria, Mumbai, and the pilgrimage cities of southern Iraq.
The Tobacco Protest, and later the assassination of the shah, were symptoms of deeper discontent that first surfaced in makeshift jellygraph posters denouncing the shah and his government, in the exile newspapers such as Qanun published in London by Malkom Khan and smuggled to Iran to clandestine reading groups and discussion circles. Dissent found wider and more organized public expression in the coming years as the Naseri age gave way to a more relaxed decade under Mozaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896–1906). Broader access to the printed word through newspapers and books broadened the intellectual horizons. The nascent press was hardly allowed to criticize the Qajar state and its local agents, but newspapers and translations of Western popular knowledge brought greater awareness of scientific and technological advances, world geography and history, institutions of a modern state, discovery of new lands, and Western colonial advances and economic penetration. The Constitutional Revolution of 1905–1911 signified the rise of a new national community conscious of itself and its deprivations largely through press and telegraph communication inside Iran and with the outside world.