Modern Iran. Peter Avery. New York: Frederick A. Praeger Publishers, 1967. Pages 46-67, 76, 121, 469.
[page 46]
Chapter 4
Nasiru'd-Din Shah's Heritage
As one historian of the Qajar period remarked, the conduct of
Muhammad Shah's vazir, Hajji Mirza Aghasi, a person generally held in slight esteem by
Iranians, while not deserving 'the high opinion which he entertained of his own
performances'
1 was nevertheless sufficiently effective to
prevent Iran disintegrating either into autonomous principalities or appanages of Russia in
Asia and Britain in India. In spite of his 'dervishism', the vazir was not slow to realise that
an influential Iranian nobleman in the eighteen-forties could personally profit from the new
contacts with neighbouring powers. The Russian and British policies included commercial
considerations as well as strategic aims. Mirza Aghasi perceived, as many of his class were
to do, that in the new age then dawning landed estates were no longer useful merely as the
source of food supplies for the absentee-landlord's palace and numerous dependants in the
city; and no longer of the significance as reservoirs of manpower in times of civil war that
they had been in less settled epochs. The settlement imposed on Iran by Agha Muhammad Khan
Qajar had not been completely abrogated and Russian and British efforts to prevent any
major internal explosion had been effective; also the nobility's new preoccupations, the
product of contacts with foreign powers, further inhibited serious outbreaks of internal
conflict.
One of the consequences of the Russian interest in buying
exports from northern Iran, and British trading activities in the south, was that during
Nasiru'd-Din Shah's reign the Iranian landed proprietor gradually ceased to be an influential
and patriarchal protector or arbiter in a domestic, independent, locally balanced and locally
sufficing agrarian system, and became instead a large-scale profiteer able to dispose of
cash-crops, such as cotton, opium, silk, dried fruits and nuts, in foreign markets.
This change is exemplified in Mirza Aghasi's schemes for
developing certain aspects of Iran's internal resources. He revived the cultivation of the
mulberry-tree in the Kirman region, to feed silkworms; and he envisaged the diversion of
the waters of the River Karaj for
1 R. G. Watson, A History of Persia, London, 1866, p.
354.
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH'S HERITAGE
47
Tehran's water-supply, which the Karaj waters do furnish today. His measures were in
accord with an Iranian aristocrat's shrewd perception that the time had come for turning to
personal enrichment the openings provided through new foreign contacts. The failure of
Hajji Mirza Aghasi's countrymen to praise him for his enterprise was partly no doubt due to
an equally shrewd appreciation on their part that new economic alignments emerging during
his period as Prime Minister were not destined to enrich the people, but only to make a
rapacious aristocracy more powerful, while the situation of the cultivator became little
better than slavery.
Muhammad Shah died in the late summer of 1848, Once again
the British and Russian representatives, at this time Colonel Farrant and Prince Dolgorouky
respectively, were on the alert to prevent any major outbreak. The heir-apparent was in
Tabriz, but the new Queen Mother showed firmness and promptitude in the palace at Tehran,
while a group of notables, having first chosen to seek security for their deliberations in the
British Legation, formed an interim council of regency. Nevertheless there were
disturbances, both in the capital and at provincial centres. In the latter the local populations
sought to take advantage of the situation to rid themselves of unwanted Provincial Governors.
In the capital the riots were against the unpopular Mirza Aghasi. Two court factions, the so-
called Azerbaijan Party and the adherents of the Asafu'd-Daulah, Allah Yar Khan, now in
exile, united against Mirza Aghasi, joining in the general demand for his dismissal as the
necessary prelude to a new reign. Mirza Aghasi barricaded himself with a private army in
the Arg or citadel of Tehran but was soon forced to flee and during several difficult days the
British and Russian Missions acted in concert to ensure the sixteen-year-old Shah's safe
arrival on the throne. The young Shah finally reached Tehran under the capable aegis of
Mirza Taqi Khan.
Mirza Taqi Khan, who on his master's arrival in Tehran
received the title of Amir-i-Nizam, Commander-in-Chief, a title he preferred to that of
Sadr-i-'Azam, was the son of a cook who had later become steward to the Qa'im Maqam.
Contemporary foreign observers made much of this, referring to his 'plebeian' origins and
so transferring western European social conceptions to Qajar Irana transference not
confined to westerners' observations on that country but also influencing the minds of some
of the Iranian elite, by this time open to foreign concepts by the journeys to Iran of
foreigners and the journeys abroad of Iranians. But the contrast between classes is none the
less basically alien to the Muslim-Persian social structure.
48 MODERN
IRAN
One of the characteristics of Muslim society was mobility.
Particularly in the Shi'ite social ideal, it was not a man's birth that counted so much as his
ability. A clever man could ascend to the highest degrees of the religious hierarchy, which
were in fact generally filled by men of the people. A great measure of the influence of the
clerics arose from this, for they could claim, and still do, close contact with the common
people and that they were thus better able than others to gauge popular reactions.
Mirza Taqi Khan was not, however, a cleric; but in becoming
the chief officer of the state from the kitchen he was not without exalted precedents in
Persian dynastic and political history. If, as R. G. Watson
suggests,
1 Persians like the Queen Mother were opposed to him
because of his 'humble extraction', already by 1848 European ideas had penetrated certain
Iranian minds to a surprising extent. What is more likely is that opposition to the Amir-i-
Kabir, the Great Amir as Mirza Taqi Khan came to be called, was excited by his stern
integrity and zeal for reform.
His political lineage is much more significant than his
descent, although it might be expected that the son of a steward in a household run to the
satisfaction of a man like the Qa'im Maqam would possess a shrewd sense of affairs. Mirza
Taqi Khan had been the protégé of the Qa'im Maqam, whose work he attempted
to continue. To do this he had to try to mould the mind of the autocrat who was his employer,
so that he at least would support the minister's efforts. In the same way the Qa'im Maqam had
shaped the mind of 'Abbas Mirza and tried to influence Muhammad Shah on 'Abbas Mirza's
untimely death, though then he had made little headway. The fate of both these ministers
demonstrates how difficult and dangerous striving to influence a Shah could be: neither did
the Qa'im Maqam long outlive Muhammad Shah's accession, nor Mirza Taqi Khan that of
Muhammad Shah's successor. Portentous was his initial incapacity to win the confidence of
the Queen Mother and, as he was by no means the first vazir to suffer dismissal and death, so
he was not the first to suffer through failure to obtain support of the harem. At the end of
this book we shall see Iranian women permitted to sit in Parliament. Now they are allowed
openly to play their part in politics, but they always wielded considerable power, even when
strictly confined.
On Nasiru'd-Din Shah's accession, Mirza Aghasi was
supplanted by Mirza Taqi Khan the Amir-i-Kabir, whereupon the Queen Mother became the
rallying point for those members of the elite who, not wanting Mirza Aghasi at the head of
affairs, desired the Amir-i
1 Op. cit., p. 370.
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH'S
HERITAGE 49
Kabir even less. The disturbed state of the country, however, at first allowed no one scope
for action: everyone was too busy securing his own personal safety, and waiting on the
outcome of events, for conspiracy to advance from whispers to action. It was convenient to
leave the Amir-i-Kabir to re-establish a measure of stability before his downfall was
contrived; let him first replenish the coffers of state. There would be time later to bring him
down.
Mirza Taqi Khan found a serious deficit due to the Mirza
Aghasi's irresponsible dispensations of grants to undeserving hangers-onhis distribution
of
baráts, demands for the payment of pensions and rewards to various people,
addressed to provincial tax authorities and chargeable on local revenues. Many of these drafts
had not been honoured. In some instances the Mirza Aghasi probably never intended that they
should be; issuing them was a way of silencing the importunate. Thus, in addition to an empty
treasury, the new minister found the throne encumbered with debts. As one of his main
objectives was the preservation and enhancement of the Shah's prestige, he strove to satisfy
all the creditors. Somehow at the same time he had to finance the suppression of rebellion in
the province of Khurasan. There the son of Allah Yar Khan was conducting a full-scale war
against the central Government. Allah Yar Khan, the Asafu'd-Daulah and he whom we have
met in connection with the Griboedov scandal, had been made Governor of that rich province.
He had sought to have his partner in the affairs of Khurasan removed because in effect in the
governorship of Khurasan the system provided for the provincial governor to be watched by
another great official, the Nayibu't-Tauliyyah, a layman entrusted by the Shah with the
guardianship and the administration of the large revenues of the shrine at Meshed, the
provincial capital. This office is still highly prized and still in the Shah's personal gift. Allah
Yar Khan tried to acquire it for a member of his own family, thus to gain virtually sole
charge of the province and become independent of the capital. His attempt resulted in
Muhammad Shah sending him into exile, but his son rebelled against Muhammad Shah's
successor and presented Mirza Taqi Khan with one of his most difficult and expensive initial
tasks.
Khurasan was ultimately brought back into the fold, but it
continued to be extremely distracted, chiefly because of the boldness of Turkoman raiders
across the northern borders. Rebellion in Khurasan had given them an opportunity, not only
for taking sides with the rebels, but also for raiding, sometimes as far south as the
neighbourhood of Isfahan. The raiders carried off cattle and kidnapped men and women, who
were sold into slavery in the market of Khiva.
50 MODERN
IRAN
When Nasiru'd-Din Shah sent an embassy to protest against this traffic to the Khan of Khiva,
the Khan said that as they were Sunnites his people and those of the other Central Asian
Khanates considered it legal to possess Persian Shi'ites as slaves, whom they employed as
cultivators. It was only the Russian pacification of the border between Turkistan and Persia
in the 1880's that put an end to this scourge. In the preceding years it had reached such a
pitch that Nasiru'd-Din Shah himself had been unable safely to make the journey from
Tehran to Meshed.
The Amir-i-Kabir continued the Qa'im Maqam's efforts to
clarify the official language. Among other things he reduced the number of honorifics with
which it was customary to address people in the beautifully, and artfully, worded and
inscribed communications of those days. Thus the Minister's work forms part of the history
of the development of modern Persian literature as well as of modern Iran. Had he survived
to carry his reforms further, a measure of modernisation would almost certainly have been
achieved earlier, and on firmer foundations, than it was. He had been at the meetings of the
mixed frontier commission convened in 1842 to study Irano-Turkish border problems and had
been for some time in the Turkish city of Erzerum, where he had heard of the reforms of the
tanzimat in Turkey, among the very first attempts at systematic modernisation of a Muslim
state. Also Mirza Taqi Khan had travelled to St. Petersburg with Prince Khusrau, in the
special embassy sent from Iran to express regret for the murder of Griboedov. This visit had
early impressed upon his mind Iran's need for reform; while the movement in Turkey had
shown him that reform of an Oriental and Islamic government was within the bounds of
possibility.
We have noticed some of the less attractive consequences of
increased contact with foreign nations. The results of new relations with the outside world,
however, were not entirely unbeneficial A very important result of these new relationships
was the mental awakening which they engendered. For example the Government of India began
recruiting Iranians to teach its British officers a pronunciation of Persian which would be
less offensive to Iranian ears than the one they learnt from Indian teachers. The Indian
munshi, as local teachers of the Indian and Persian languages were called, taught a
pronunciation of Persian somewhat analogous to the English spoken in Boston as compared
with the standard English of England. The trade between southern Iran and India was
increasing and young Iranians, mostly the sons of merchants or of noblemen in the southern
provinces of the country, were being sent to India for advanced education. Thus an
intellectual and commercial relation-
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH'S
HERITAGE 51
ship between one great oriental territory under western rule and Iran, which had for many
years been almost completely sealed off from the rest of the world, was now flourishing. It
was relationships of this kind which were to hasten Iran's 'Awakening'. In the course of the
nineteenth century Iranian merchants began to move all over the Near East as well as
visiting India, and they were men of quick discernment and men of culture and patriotism.
The lessons they gained from familiarity with cities like Istanboul, Tiflis, Baku, Batum,
Odessa, Cairo, Bombay and Calcutta were to have a profound effect on events in their
homeland.
Mirza Taqi Khan was the merchants' friend. He built the great
bazaar at Tehran and encouraged a rising mercantile class which differed from the elite in
that its influence rested on individual honesty, a correct appraisal of world events and well-
filled cash-boxes; not on inherited privileges and the fruits of extortion; intriguing round a
small and ignorant court; dissimulation and treachery. By the time Mirza Taqi Khan
relinquished office, there were three potentially active political and social classes in Iran:
an aristocracy of ignorant but tenacious nobles; the merchants with international contacts
and increased wealth due to revived foreign trade; and the clergy. Above all these was the
throne, and the court which revolved round it. Mirza Taqi Khan had succeeded in forming
some semblance of an army and, which is more important, making sure that the soldiers
were paid. He had reduced rebellion and strengthened the Crown. The tribes were, therefore,
reasonably quiescent; they only became restless in times of trouble.
The chief source of restlessness that manifested itself at the
time of Mirza Taqi Khan's fall from power was the religious classes. Mirza Taqi Khan first
and foremost showed himself opposed to any circumstance that might damage the prestige of
the throne. In accordance with this policy he had brooked no interference in political affairs
from the clergy. Not only had he regarded clerical interference with suspicion, but he had
also striven to diminish the influence of the foreign legations, particularly the Russian and
the British These legations had come to be regarded by some Persian dignitaries as legitimate
places of refuge and while some people preferred the Russian others preferred the British,
depending upon which way their sympathies lay or which of the two powers they thought
would best serve their interests. The Amir-i-Kabir was careful to make it clear that this
kind of reliance on foreigners was unpatriotic and that encouragement of it by foreigners
constituted an insult to his country's sovereignty and would not be tolerated. He attempted to
make resorting to foreigners an unfashionable practice
52 MODERN
IRAN
and, so far as he was able, withstood the demands of the two great powers. Admittedly he gave
way to the Russians on the question of their having a naval base on the island of Ashurada in
the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea and very close to Iranian territory, but in this
prudence was certainly uppermost: the minister's motive was not so much a desire to avoid
exciting Russian anger as the desire to free the Caspian coast of Turkoman pirates. This
Russian ships could achieve to the benefit of merchant shipping generally and the trade of
Iran's northern provinces.
Before returning to his policy towards the religious classes,
it is necessary to note that he was not only faced with potential interference from the
orthodox religious, but also found himself confronted by heresy in the form of the religious
movement known as Babism. Babism may be taken as a sign that the mercantile class and
some of the religious classes associated with merchants were aware of the necessity for
taking the matter of reform and modernisation into their own hands. The Persian religious
classes, as might be expected, included a number of men of great intelligence. Not
surprisingly, these men were sensitively attuned to the desire for change and to the
preparations for meeting the modern world on its own terms which were very much in the
minds of some of their compatriots, especially those who travelled abroad. The capacity to
sense a situation quickly, assessing shifts in outlook and trimming sails accordingly, is not
less a feature of Iranian clerics than it is of the nation as a whole. After the deaths of Nadir
Shah and Karim Khan the Zand, the situation had become extremely confused and in many
parts of the country the people were subjected to great hardship and privation. As William
Francklin
1 and George Foster
2
both demonstrate, the Iranian people in those troubled times turned to religion, with the sad
result that the mullas were able to use their influence to produce a fanatical attitude among
the masses: an attitude basically alien to the Persian character, although less so to the
Turkish.
Mirza Taqi Khan's secularism reduced the scope of the
religious classes' influence but left them in search of some diversion whereby they could
again make their presence felt. Babism was just such a diversion. Babism began in Fars, the
southern province with its capital at Shiraz, in the year 1844. The new religion's founder
was Sayyid 'Ali Muhammad, who was born in 1819 in Shiraz of a merchant family. For our
purposes, the following elements may
1 William Francklin, Observations made on a Tour from Bengal
to Persia in the Years 1784-7, London, 1790.
2 George Foster, A Journey from Bengal to England (in 1783), London,
1798.
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH'S
HERITAGE 53
be noted among those which formed the basis of the Babi movement.
First, there was an element, in the movement's origin, of the
protest of the south against the north: a protest articulated by merchants who were
prospering from trade through Shiraz and its port of Bushire, and through the cities of Yazd
and Kirman with their port of Bandar 'Abbas, with both the Indian sub-continent and
Mesopotamia; the latter being served by the port of Basra, for southern Persian merchants
the key to the Levant.
Second, there was the protest of an awakened and intelligent
community against an apparently inert, excessively conservative orthodox religious class
which accepted subordination to the dictates of the central government situated at a
sufficiently remote distance in Tehran, and which thus represented a power the south felt no
particular sympathy for, but rather, with those memories in Shiraz and Kirman of Agha
Muhammad Khan's atrocities still fresh, the contrary. As an example of the recent alignment
of the religious classes, when in Isfahan on Muhammad Shah's death the people had rebelled
against the governor, the Imam Jum'a of the citythe most important religious dignitary
had sided with the government against the people.
Third, the Babi movement reflected a response to the
advancing and menacing outside world, against which Iran could not contend on the material
plane, but against which a spiritual regeneration and some new religious assertion might
prevail. In other words, Iran lacked guns and ships such as the powers of the West possessed
so formidably, but religious genius and theological subtlety were certainly part of Iran's
inheritance. Instead of being completely overawed by the foreigners, here to hand were
peculiarly Iranian advantages, ready for use in the resuscitation of the nation and as a means
of quelling defeatism and despair. Despair in the people might in the early days of the
movement be expressed and to some extent assuaged by the dismissal of this world and its
institutions as no longer valid once the new dispensation had been revealed; but ultimately
this new dispensation was to conquer the world. This was a form of spiritual conquest Iran
could still arrogate to itself while materially her people were already confronted by defeat
and ignominy at the hands of materially more advanced nations.
However, before Babism began to embark on its mission as a
world faith, its chief preoccupation was at home. As just suggested the south of Iran had
never been entirely in accord with the north, and the Qajars had not imitated the example of
Shah 'Abbas the Safavid in making Isfahan, the half-way point between north and south,
54 MODERN
IRAN
their capital. By the middle of the nineteenth century Tehran was in some respects less close
to Shiraz and Yazd and Kirman than were Bombay and Basrah. Yet Tehran controlled cities
like Shiraz and Yazd through the governors and tax-gatherers which Tehran appointed and
whose presence in the south could not be expected to endear the distant capital to the hearts of
the Yazdis or Shirazis. Shiraz was a natural centre for the emergence of a new movement and
it was there that Sayyid 'Ali Muhammad declared himself as the Bab or Gate of the Shi'ite
tradition, the man who could announce the Coming of the Mehdi. He went further than this,
passing beyond established tradition, for he claimed that he had come to inaugurate a new
tradition which made all earlier teachings noxious and nugatory.
Yazd soon also became the scene of a serious and Babi-
inspired revolt; next, Kirman was chosen as a centre for the new propaganda. The Shah
possessed that knack which certainly rulers of Iran need, for scenting danger from quasi-
esoteric movements. The Babi movement was outlawed and fulminated against from the
pulpits of the mosques, but only to flourish under persecution and to become a vendetta
against the Shah. Its aims were to effect the spiritual and moral regeneration of mankind and
to achieve, in world political unity, the halting of world conflicts. Aims of this kind assured
the movement considerable appeal to a growing number of adherents among enlightened
people. The masses of the people were not much affected. It was the middle and educated
classes, merchants and the younger generation who were the most attracted; but those who
joined the movement included intellectuals whose intellectual awakening had not yet
displaced a traditional concern for the state of the soul. Equality of the sexes, world political
and legal organisation, encouragement of education regardless of class, were the kind of
objectives the new movement later established for itself, but, though in the course of its
development Babism, and its offshoot Bahá'ísm, became a world faith, which attempted a
synthesis of the best elements in other great religions and adopted a stand against the
exclusiveness and negative pride of Muslim clericalism, in its origins and initial appeal it
was a Messianic cult with roots deep in the whole complex of Iranian spirituality.
The roots of this millennialist anticipation and aspiration
may be considered implicit in the dualist religious and originally entirely Iranian resolution
of the problem of evil, in which Ahriman, the evil force, is ultimately defeated and destroyed
by the power of goodness. Without himself going into details, Ahmad Kasravi, in
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH'S
HERITAGE 55
his pamphlet on Bahá'ísm
1 asserts that anciently 'Iranians
believed in Ahriman and ascribed to him the world's evils, believing that a day would come
when someone of the race of Zoroaster named Sayushiyant [sic] would appear and, having
slain Ahriman, empty the world of all evil.' He links the Iranians and the Jews as having
belief in a Messiah in common and ascribes this belief's strength to the sufferings and
oppressions endured by these two peoples at various times in their respective histories. He
then discusses the injection of the Messiah belief into Islam, a religion within which it
initially had no place. The belief in a saviour was, he explains, added to Islamic theory by
Iranians; certainly by non-Arab converts to Islam in the eighth century, most of whom were
Iranian, the movement taking its rise round the personality of a man named al-Mukhtar at
Kufa in the southern Euphrates region of Mesopotamia where a number of Iranians were
active. It was there that the doctrine was promulgated of the 'Concealment' of Muhammad ibn
al-Hanafiya, one of 'Ali's sons, and of his not having died, only disappeared someday to
return.
Expectations of the concealed Mehdi's manifestation, to lead
forth armies of the righteous and put right the affairs of the world, is one of the principal
tenets of even the moderate Shi'itism recognised officially in Iran; but during the reign of
Fath 'Ali Shah a dissenting Shi'ite theologian of Persia named Shaikh Ahmad Ahsa'i carried
the theory of the Mahdi and of the Emamate, that is to say, of the system of divinely inspired
leadership by Emams descended from 'Ali, a stage further. He preached that the Emams are
collectively the sole surrogate upon earth for God on high and that it is through them that the
world is sustained, as it was created through their having been created first before all else.
A great deal of Shaikh Ahsa'i's teachings represented an
attempt to bring into a philosophical system the popular belief in and craving for the
appearance of the 'Hidden Emam'. Shi'ism had become the established religion of Iran, as we
have seen, under the Safavids, but since their fall the country had been subjected to a variety
of stresses and was, by the time of Shaikh Ahsa'i, also already beginning to feel the effects of
foreign pressures and influences. The restlessness and dissatisfaction of the people, to which
allusion has already been made, had for a considerable period been evinced to an increasing
degree by public and private prayers for the Hidden Emam's return. In the history of what
may be called Emamism in the Near East this was not new; there had centuries before been
times when parties of
1 Bahá'ígari, in Persian, Tehran
undated but probably written in the early 1940's.
56 MODERN
IRAN
people went daily to the spot whence the Emam was expected to reappear and where they beat
drums and cried out for him. But when Shaikh Ahsa'i began his new teaching, the act of
praying for the Mehdi and bewailing his non-appearance was claiming a startling proportion
of the people's attention. Kasravi describes how, 'Up to the Constitutional Movement, the
people of Iran's sole source of hope was the Hidden Emam: only through his Appearance did
they expect future happiness, the country's salvation from misfortune and so on. Everyday
they cried . . . 'Peace be upon Thee, O Lord of the Age', and with wailing and lamentation was
his early coming sought.' These are things, Kasravi adds, 'that went on until our own time
and we remember them well.'
1
Shaikh Ahsa'i called himself the Gate,
Bab, for the
Hidden Emam and in his vigorous revival of this aspect of Shi'ite Islam, his revival of
Emamism, he seems at times to have gone even further. His and his disciples' voluminous
writings gave a fillip to religious thought in general. New theories were widely discussed,
while the disputations between the Shaikh's followers and those opposed to him conferred on
religious controversy and speculation a fresh vitality; albeit what chiefly emerged was a
plethora of fine-spun theorising in the worst kind of scholastic tradition and of a nature that
makes one question the sanity and seek some social and historical explanation for the
fantasies of its exponents.
When Shaikh Ahmad of Ahsa died in 1826, his cause was
carried on by two leaders of whom the most influential was Sayyid Kazim of Rasht. On this
Sayyid's death in 1843 he left no clear indication about who should be regarded as his
successor; instead he hinted that the time of the Emam's Appearance was not far distant. After
Sayyid Kazim's death three separate calls developed out of the original Shaikhi movement.
One was that of Hajji (the title
Hajji means that its holder had performed the
Pilgrimage to Mecca) Karim Khan at Kerman and Hajji Karim Khan's descendants still enjoy
rank, wealth and veneration as religious notabilities in the city of Kirman, where they have
the title, Sirkar Agha. Another was the movement of Hajji Mirza Shafi' of Tabriz, whose
followers were termed 'Shaikhi' to distinguish them from their rivals in Kirman, the 'Karim
Khanis', who also had agents in Tabriz. Thirdly there was the Babi movement itself, which
was initially promoted by one Mulla Husain of Bushruyah round the saintly young Sayyid
Muhammad 'Ali of Shiraz, and the prime motivation of which may be attributed to Sayyid
Kazim's prognostication about the early manifestation of the Hidden Emam. For though Sayyid
Muhammad
1 Ahmad Kasravi, op cit., p. 16.
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH'S
HERITAGE 57
'Ali only declared himself the Gate or Bab for the Appearance, it seems evident that when he
found the youthful Sayyid in Shiraz Mulla Husain was on a quest to discover the man who
might be the vehicle for the Emam's return among men.
In addition to these three groups, Tabriz saw the rise of a
counter movement in the
Mutasharri'yun, those who saw the Shaikhis etc. as
deviators from orthodox Shi'ite theology. Tabriz became a centre of vigorous religious
arguments and sporadic outbursts of religious factionalism. It was there that the then Crown
Prince, who was Governor of Azerbaijan and later, as Nasiru'd-Din, the Shah of Persia, had
the Bab, Sayyid Muhammad 'Ali, fetched from a fortress on the Turkish border where he was
being kept prisoner and, in September 1848, subjected to the ordeal of a religious debate
with prominent divines. Nasiru'd-Din's report of these proceedings to his father, Muhammad
Shah, still exists and from it we learn that the Sayyid's theology was extremely faulty, that
all he would say was 'I do not know' or 'I cannot say', and that when he ventured to utter a
string of pious clichés and spiritual ejaculations, his incorrect Arabic grammarfor
he said these things in the language of theology, Arabic brought scorn and laughter from his
interlocutors. In the end they had him beaten and he wrote, in, it must be confessed, the most
exquisite handwriting, whatever the state of his Arabic grammar might have been, a kind of,
but by no means complete recantation. He said that he was only the humblest of God's
servants and that he had never claimed supernatural powers.
Nevertheless it was not long before the poor Sayyid, still not
thirty years of age, suffered death for his mission in the manner shortly to be described; but
the point needs emphasising that the mission had probably been chiefly foisted upon him by
men who believed it
their mission to find either the Emam in human guise or the Bab
who should herald his coming. Thus a man of the calibre of Mulla Husain of Bushruyah, who
made the Babi movement a militant and politically dangerous one extending all over Iran,
lighted upon the Sayyid in Shiraz and, after being closeted alone with him for three days,
apparently convinced him that he was somebody special. By the time the Bab was executed in
1850 the movement had attained such dimensions that the emissary sent from Tehran to
supervise his execution was careful to have the captive sent round to the chief divines of
Tabriz for
fatwas, decrees, to be obtained sanctioning his death; and, incidentally, it
seems that only three such sanctioning decrees were in the end issued. But before describing
the Bab's death a reference will have to be made to what had been happening between 1845
and 1850, during the last two
58 MODERN
IRAN
years of which period the Bab himself had been in prison and not active.
Babism announced its secession from Islam at the convention
of Behdasht in 1848. Thereafter the movement assumed a distinctly militant policy, which
resulted in increased persecution. The Bab had been imprisoned in the north, near Tabriz, as
a result of Mirza Aghasi's letter to the religious dignitaries of Isfahan, on 1st January
1847, charging the Bab with laying claim to prophethood and, interestingly enough
commenting that most of 'these Shaikhis' were addicted to the use of Indian hemp or
Bang, and that their acts and pretensions were the product of intoxication from these
drugs. Then, in the spring of 1850, a renegade Muslim cleric who had turned Babi led a band
of his brethren in rebellion in the city of Zanjan. Zanjan is not a very large city, but it is
situated in a rich agricultural region and on the main road from Tabriz to Tehran, nearer the
former. With extraordinary courage and resource the insurgents for nearly a year withstood
attempts by the Shah's army to reduce them. Eventually their leader was killed and they lost
heart and surrendered. It was during the insurrection that the Bab was brought from his
prison to Tabriz and placed before a firing squad. A party of Christians was engaged to shoot
him and any claims to supernatural powers that he may have made seemed to have been
vindicated when, after the firing squad's first volley, he was found, not dead but to have
vanished. The bullets had severed the cords by which he was suspended from a wall and had
left him unscathed. He ran away under cover of the smoke from the volley. Unfortunately he
ran into the Guard Room and was immediately recaptured and dispatched.
The Amir-i-Kabir might feel gratified that one piece of Babi
perfidy had been, not without difficulty, eradicated at Zanjan, but then he was faced with
troubles from orthodox religious quarters. Not wishing the Babis to have the monopoly in
miracles, the orthodox clerics of Tabriz concocted miraculous-seeming events in one of the
city's mosques. A cow that was being led to slaughter twice ran into the mosque. Its drover on
trying to prevent it doing this a third time dropped down dead. This was ascribed to divine
intervention on behalf of the cow and the mosque soon acquired a reputation for other virtues
such as healing. The city was illuminated and there was great excitement. Few things are
more effective in boosting religion among the simple than a miracle or two: the mullas gained
great prestige among the people of Tabriz as a result of these stories, but Mirza Taqi Khan
was not the man quietly to watch one of the most important and prosperous cities in the
empire fall entirely under
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH'S
HERITAGE 59
religious influence. He ordered an Afsharid tribal chief to enter Tabriz with an army and
forcibly kidnap the Shaikh al-Islam, the leading religious personality.
Thus we see Mirza Taqi Khan on the one hand ridding himself
of the leader of a heterodox religious movement, and on the other dealing a blow to orthodox
religious influence in one of the country's principal proclamation centres.
Mirza Taqi Khan the Amir-i-Kabir was dismissed in
November 1851; his death followed a year later. Then he was dragged from the side of his
wife, the Shah's only sister, who remained devoted to him to the very end, and taken into a
bath in the Palace of Fin at Kashan, where the pair had been kept as prisoners. In the bath
the great Minister's veins were opened so that he bled to death before his wife could realise
what had happened to him. Ironically, the attempts made by the Russian minister to save the
Amir probably precipitated his execution. The Shah and his councillors were alarmed by the
Russian protests for they thought that an order to spare the great Amir's life might
ultimately come from the Tsar himself. They therefore decided to make away with Mirza Taqi
Khan before such an embarrassing diplomatic situation arose. The British did not repeat the
rather clumsy efforts of Prince Dolgorouky to save the Minister. It is perhaps on account of
this tactful behaviour that the British have, for some otherwise inexplicable reason, often
been charged by Iranians with having had a hand in the Amir's fall and subsequent death. Yet
contemporary English observers expressed the greatest admiration for the Amir-i-Kabir
and regarded him as one of the greatest statesmen Iran had ever had or was ever likely to
have. These observers were prone, correctly as events showed, to see in his death the
suspension of any improvement in the conditions of the country.
[page 60]
Chapter 5
Nasiru'd-Din Shah on his Own
In 1852 the King was slightly wounded by a bullet fired at
him while out hunting in the neighbourhood of Tehran. Three men were arrested and
tortured in an effort to establish who directed this attack on the Shah's life. All that could be
discovered was that they belonged to the Babi sect and consequently the signal was given for
the interrogation and ultimately execution of those Babi leaders who were at the time in
prison in the capital. These leaders were eventually brought into the bazaar of the city and
slowly done to death in the manner described by an Austrian officer in the Shah's service who
was so disgusted by what he saw that he resigned; his own words, from a letter written at
Tehran in August 1852, give the story of an extraordinary outburst of cruelty and hysteria
only paralleled in the nineteenth century history of Persia by the episode of Griboedov's
murder and the massacre of the Russian mission twenty-three years before. Captain von
Goumoens wrote that the first leader of the Babis, the Bab himself, had 'pointed out to the
disciples of his teaching that the way to Paradise lay through the torture-chamber. If he
spoke truly, then the present Shah has deserved great merit, for he strenuously endeavours
to people all the realms of the Saints with Babis! His last edict still further enjoins on the
royal servants the annihilation of the sect. If these simply followed the Royal command and
rendered harmless such of the fanatics as are arrested, by inflicting on them a swift and
lawful death, one must needs, from the Oriental standpoint, approve of this; but the manner
of inflicting the sentence, the circumstances which precede the end, the agonies which
consume the bodies of the victims until their life is extinguished in the last convulsion are so
horrible that the blood curdles in my veins if I now endeavour to depict the scene for you,
even in outline. Innumerable blows with sticks which fall heavily on the back and soles of the
feet, brandings of different parts of the body with red-hot irons, are such usual inflictions
that the victim who undergoes only such caresses is to be accounted fortunate. But follow me
my friend, you who lay claim to a heart and European ethics, follow me to the unhappy ones
who, with gouged-out eyes, must eat,
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH ON HIS OWN
61
on the scene of the deed, without any sauce, their own amputated ears; or whose teeth are
torn out with inhuman violence by the hand of the executioner; or whose bare skulls are
simply crushed by blows from a hammer; or where the
bazar is illuminated with
unhappy victims, because on right and left the people dig deep holes in their breasts and
shoulders and insert burning wicks in the wounds. I saw some dragged in chains through the
bazar, preceded by a military band, in whom these wicks had burned so deep that now
the fat flickered convulsively in the wound like a newly extinguished lamp.
'Not seldom it happens that the unwearying ingenuity of the
Orientals leads to fresh tortures. They will skin the soles of the Babi's feet, soak the wounds
in boiling oil, shoe the foot like the hoof of a horse, and compel the victim to run. No cry
escaped from the victim's breast; the torment is endured in dark silence by the numbed
sensation of the fanatic; now he must run; the body cannot endure what the soul has endured;
he falls! Give him the
coup de grace! Put him out of his pain! No! The executioner
swings the whip, andI myself have had to witness itthe unhappy victim of hundred-fold
tortures runs! This is the beginning of the end. As for the end itself, they hang the scorched
and perforated bodies by their hands and feet to a tree head-downwards, and now every
Persian may try his marksmanship to his heart's content.... I saw corpses torn by nearly
150 bullets.... Not only the executioner and the common people took part in this massacre:
sometimes Justice would present some of the unhappy Babis to various dignitaries, and the
Persian (recipient) would be well content, deeming it an honour to imbrue his own hands in
the blood of the pinioned and defenceless victim. Infantry, cavalry, artillery, the ghulams or
guards of the King, and the guilds of butchers, bakers etc., all took their fair share in these
bloody deeds.
1
There we can leave the Austrian officer's letter, recalling
ruefully that in 1952 it would have been less easy to draw an odious comparison between
'European ethics' and 'the unwearying ingenuity of the Oriental' in devising fresh tortures.
One of the most interesting points which emerges from his narrative is how people of all
ranks dipped their hands in the blood of the martyrs, a fact attested from other sources.
Although the Austrian's account must be recognised as that of a man brought up in a very
different tradition to the one then prevailing in Nasiru'd-Din Shah's Persia, and the
document of a person obviously not anxious to admit any extenuating circumstances in the
case he was describing, there is no reason to doubt its accuracy,
1 Cited from Edward G. Browne, Materials for the Study of
the Bab Religion, Cambridge, 1918, pp. 268-270.
62 MODERN
IRAN
however emotive its tone. Indeed Iranians commenting on this singular episode in the recent
history of their country have generally remarked on the wide-scale audience-participation,
as it were, which was a feature of that frightful day in 1852. It is said that, not to be thought
dilatory in demonstrating loyalty to their injured sovereign, Ministers and their minions
rushed to the scene of execution in order to stain their hands with the victims' blood. The
Austrian reports that one Babi actually fell 'to the share of the
Imam-jumia, who put
him to death'.
This kind of action can be accounted for in two ways: the
division of responsibility for the holocaust entailed by the participation in it of numerous
people, so that it could never be laid at the door of one man; and the fact already alluded to, of
wishing to prove devotion to the man whose attempted assassination afforded the pretext for
it; there would also be the factor of nobody's daring not to conform to the dictates of mass
hysteriathe
Imam Jum'a may not have liked doing what the pressure of the moment
forced upon him. But there must have been more to it than this: Iranian commentators, their
comment coloured by an instinctual understanding of their country's history through ages
before 1852 and by pessimism about its state in subsequent times, draw attention, perhaps
superfluously, to the fact that such cruelties were symptoms of a terrible degree of national
frustration and desperation.
An outlet for the nation's sorrows has, until very recent
years, been provided by the annual mourning ceremonies commemorating the death of Husain
and his family, massacred on the 1oth of the Arabic month of Muharram in the 61St year of
the Muslim era, the 10th October A.D. 680. Husain was the son of 'Ali by the Prophet
Muhammad's daughter, Fatima. He is reputed to have been the object of his maternal
grandfather's special affection. On his father's death and after Hasan, his brother's, he
became head of the Shi'a. Shortly afterwards he was surrounded by the soldiers of the rival,
Umayyad Caliph, Yazid I, and slain with all his people. Subsequently the spot where this
event took place, on the site of Kerbela in Iraq a few miles to the west of the River
Euphrates, became a centre of pilgrimage for Shi'ite Muslims, by whom the first ten days of
the month of Muharram are observed as a period of yearly mourning.
Although discouraged under the secularising policy of the late
Reza Shah, and again today under his son, these mourning rituals were for a long time a
prominent feature of the Persian religious calendar. Each evening preachers used to fill
black-draped tented arenas with audiences from whose eyes they wrung tears with
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH ON HIS OWN
63
sermons, chanted in accordance with established formulae, describing the massacre. These
sermons were a kind of verbal preview of the mystery plays performed on the tenth day.
Then the massacre was re-enacted with such passionate realism that sometimes counterfeit
death became that which could not be undone, while the unfortunates cast in the roles of the
murdering Umayyad general, Shimr, his immediate commander, 'Umar ibn Sa'd, and the
rival Caliph, Yazid, not rarely courted disaster at the hands of the crowd. The participation
of the audience in the grief engendered by these sermons and performances was intense, the
emotion aroused infectious. Another form of demonstration which marked these days were
processions of flagellants through the streets, drawing blood from their own breasts and
chests with many-thonged, spiked whips of chain and thumping the skin off their flesh with
pummelling fists as they walked, repeating the names of the Shi'ite martyrs in unison,
marching and beating themselves in unbroken rhythm.
The passion-plays, called
ta'ziyas, present several
features of interest to the mythologist. One such item is the appearance of the Christian
Prior, who pronounces the Muslim confession of faith before the head of the martyred Husain
when it is being carried in dolorous procession to the wicked Yazid in Damascus. There a
Frankish Ambassador, likewise representing a different faith and dressed in an alien garb,
intercedes with the Caliph to ensure the head's proper burial, and a lion pays homage to it. In
the roles of the Ambassador and the Prior, the mythologist may wish to see parallels to the
role of the 'Doctor' in certain European re-enactments of the death and resurrection of the
Vegetation Deity; or the Spirit of the Year of old Russia. The analogy may seem far-fetched,
but it is worth bearing in mind; it conveys some sense of how, like old European folk rituals,
these
ta'ziyas answered a popular emotional need. They were in some sort an annual
festival of sorrow, with the difference that in Iran a kind of deep, ineradicable pessimism
overclouded them, prohibiting the sudden transition from grief to the joy of rebirth and
resurrection characteristic of their European counterparts. It is in their function of
affording an annual release of universal grief, a flowing of tears, a passionate tearing of the
flesh and buffeting of the body to express contempt for the vileness of our depraved human
state, that these maudlin incidents are being looked at here. Here, too, they are to be seen in
the context of that extra though much more sinister 'Muharram' outburst of 1852, when a
whole city participated in the mutilation of the living flesh of the silent or simply hymn-
singing Babis. For the slaying of the Babis gives evidence, additional to the regular
Muharram ceremonies, of how a nation's
64 MODERN
IRAN
accumulated sense of grievance can suddenly manifest itself in an orgy of blood. Contrary to
the general temper of the time, the Amir-i-Kabir had discouraged such scenes. Had he been
alive it is probable that he would have been equally averse to the scenes which occurred after
the attempt on Nasiru'd-Din-Shah's life. As it was, the Tehran tumult of 1852 provided
dismal proof of how wretched the nation was becoming at the time of the great reformer's
death.
Western observers, kept informed through the publication in
Europe of letters like the Austrian's, were deeply shocked by the victimisation of the Babis,
both at the time and later, when Iran was exciting greater interest in the West than in 1852.
Already, in the middle of the century, the incident in Tehran soon became news, to be a topic
of conversation in Vienna and London. Already to this extent contact with the outside world
had destroyed the nation's privacy. It was not long before the expansion of Europe brought to
Iran the pressure of Europe's assumed right to judge and criticise the acts, the follies, the
angers, the inadequacies, the humiliations, the cruelties of 'the Oriental'.
The unflinching courage of the Babis, those sacrificial
victims in a moment of Persian despair, and the fact that among them was a woman, a poetess
moreover, called Qur'atu'l-'Ain, gave their tragedy an appeal the more stirring to liberal
sympathisers in Europe. This was especially so because Babism and later its offshoot,
Bahá'ísm, presented the novelty of a new religion, complete with a Prophet and a Prophecy,
from a land traditionally the home of spiritual force and religious innovation, at a time when
many in Europe were suffering disenchantment with their own established faith and
becoming increasingly imbued with ideas of social progress and enlightenment. Not having
yet, however, accepted the view that societies might be reformed without the adjunct of
religious reform, the idea of a religious movement against conservative orthodoxy and
coupled with a programme of social reform was extremely attractive; few things can be more
seductive in the transmission of influence and ideas than the feeling that the conduct of others
is due to dissatisfaction similar to one's own and therefore, though at a dangerously
superficial level, seemingly more easily understandable and deserving of sympathy. The Babi
movement was seen as an attempt to break out of the backwoods of rigid Muslim orthodoxy
and ensure a new enlightenment, rather on modern European lines, under the aegis of a new
religious teaching. An advance was made from the original Babi position when the first Bab,
who merely claimed to be the Gate for the coming of one greater than he, was succeeded by
Bahá'ullah, who declared himself the one 'whom God
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH ON HIS OWN
65
shall manifest'. This declaration was not made in Iran but in exile in 1863. It meant that in
effect Bahá'ullah was the expected incarnation of divine power; Bahá'ísm was entering on its
mission as a world faith. Bahá'ullah died in Palestine in 1892 and during practically thirty
years of separation from Iran, the country of the Babis' and Bahá'ís' origin, the sect had had
plenty of time, and plenty of compulsion, to develop a world mission.
The course of Babism became difficult after the death of the
Bab because of a split among his followers. Some supported Bahá'ullah, the chosen successor;
others preferred his brother, Mirza Yahya Nuri, designated the Subh-i-Azal, Morning of
Eternity. The Subh-i-Azal's adherents were in the minority and it is as Bahá'ísm that the
Babi teachings have become most widely known internationally. So far as Iranian history of
the mid-nineteenth century is concerned, mention of the two brothers who followed the first
leader, Sayyid 'Ali Muhammad the Bab, has significance apart from their religious
enterprise. These two men were from the North of Iran, from the province of Mazandaran,
whereas it will be recalled that the original Babi movement had begun in the South. They
were of courtier, land-owning stock, whereas it will be remembered that the founders of the
faith had generally speaking been of the merchant and mulla classes. Thus they show the
introduction of a fresh element into the movement. Few of their own class followed their
example. Nevertheless the fact that they set it at all shows how the Babi propaganda had
spread over the whole country and indicates the possibility that it could attract a wide
variety of social types to its teaching and ultimately against the established order. Nasiru'd-
Din Shah's stern commands after the attempt on his life were clearly neither entirely
accidental nor lacking in foresight. Drastic action was considered necessary.
Among the Europeans who became interested in the movement
notable were the French Comte de Gobineau and the British Professor E. G.
Browne.
1 E. G. Browne, who became a Professor of Arabic at
Cambridge, was keenly interested in the Persian language and literature and, though his
initial enthusiasm for the Babi-Bahá'í movement appears later to have somewhat cooled, in
it he was doubtless as much motivated by personal liberal sympathies as by his excitement
on discovering that an ancient seat of religious speculation like Iran could in modern times
give proof of continuing religious genius.
1 See particularly, de Gobineau, Les Religions et Les Philosophies
dans l'Asie Centrale, Paris, 1865, E. G. Brown, op. cit., and A Year Amongst the
Persians, Cambridge, 197.
66 MODERN
IRAN
Such men were moved by the courage of the Babis under
persecution. For their part the Babis must have been profoundly interested in the amount of
foreign sympathy they so soon began to attract to themselves, if not to their tenets. After all,
they were Persians: no Iranian would forget that men like de Gobineau or a professor in a
famous British University belonged to nations capable of influencing Iranian Shahs and
governments. In these religious ferments' political aspects, in so far as they were in conflict
with the Iranian Government, expressions of liberal and spiritual sympathy from eminent
Europeans were useful. Whether, as in the case of Browne, the views of those foreigners
were often at variance with the official policies of their own governments made no
difference: Iranians when impelled to seek strength through the approbation or merely the
benign interest of influential foreigners do not draw too fine a distinction between what the
individual says and what his government's policy is. It is enough to have discovered a point of
reference abroad; a source of strength to allude to and with which to impress people.
Browne's later change of heart towards Bahá'ísm might be
ascribed to the rise after 905 of the Iranian Constitutional Movement, one of his major
preoccupations. Then the social and political reform of Iran had passed into hands which,
where they were religious were orthodox, and where they were secular, bordered on the
anti-religious and agnostic. In other words, by 905 it had become obvious that Iran's
regeneration was not to be the task and the glory of heterodox religious sectarianism, but
rather, of politicians in conjunction with divines who played, not at presenting the world
with a new kind of religion, but at being politicians. The Babis in Iran in the eighteen fifties
had, as events later showed, acted too precipitately. They had arisen, with the support of
sundry people of greater enlightenment than their compatriots and more experience of
countries better organised than Iran, to express dissatisfaction with the established
religious and political institutions; but they had been premature. So had the Amir-i-Kabir:
1852 saw the end of his attempts to regenerate Iran and also saw the end of the Babis as a
body that might ultimately have undertaken Iran's reform. In effect all that the Babis
achieved was the awakening of certain elements of the orthodox religious classes, for whom,
no less than the Amir-i-Kabir himself had, Babism acted as a warning.
This is to anticipate developments which were not to take
place for another three decades after 1852. On the dismissal of the Amir-i-Kabir, affairs
deteriorated until early within the next century revolution came to arrest and temporarily
reverse the down-hill trend. In studying the build-up to revolution, the situation in 1852 is
inter-
NASIRU'D-DIN SHAH ON HIS OWN
67
esting because then both a significant rift and a significant challenge became manifest. The
rift was in the breakdown of sympathy between the throne and influential sections of the
community such as the Babis, or those who were secretly attracted towards them. The
challenge was that which confronted the clergy, first in the Amir-i-Kabir's erastianism,
second, in the Babi movement. The latter had threatened to cut Iranian society into opposing
ideological groups. Its rigorous suppression prevented any such plain and dramatic
development; but nonetheless the throne had been overtly threatened, for the first time in
many years, and a strong leavening of progressively minded people had already made up their
minds about the Shah. His prestige was damaged: the potency of the Crown's charismatic
essence reduced. Meanwhile Nasiru'd-Din Shah had dismissed and connived in the execution
of the wisest man in his Empire, who had been his Chief Minister. Thus early in his reign the
young King set in train the process of his own increasing isolation and ineffectiveness. His
rule was no longer based upon consent but upon there being no obvious alternative to him
immediately available and on fear. Certainly fear must be regarded as the converse of the
hysteria against the Babis and would be the natural consequence of the stern orders from the
injured Shah for their extermination. In a country like Iran, however much one group may
seem to revel in the discomfiture of another, nobody is unwise enough to forget that, in the
caprice of events, their own turn to suffer a similar fate may quickly follow.
The Shah began increasingly to seek an escape from loneliness
in the harem. Favourites whose demands on his time and his purse were only equalled by
their ignorance and levity became an obsession. Their company was tantamount to a drug
with which to assuage his fits of disillusionment between bouts of his own efforts to renew
attempts to reform and regenerate the country. The clergy were, of course, not on the side of
Babis. Nor were they invariably in unison with the sedimentarily ignorant but ebulliently,
or cunningly, self-seeking elite. At the same time, it is not to be expected that shrewd
mullas, anxiety for their own potentially threatened position growing, would gladly commit
themselves to the cause of an embarrassed monarch. There was little trust between them and
a ruling prince whose obsessive passions ranged from a gardener's daughter to an ugly small
boy, and whose conduct generally increasingly gave rise to scandal. The gravity of the Cloth
could not but seek dissociation from the follies of the Throne, while in its wiser moments the
Throne felt little sympathy for the Cloth, regarding it as representative of backwardness....
76
MODERN IRAN
... Agha Muhammad Khan Qajar was destined to be the last
medieval type of Persian ruler. Even had Nasiru'd-Din Shah had the force of character of his
ancestor, it was no longer possible for him to indulge in the military exploits whereby the
rule of an autocrat could be sustained, while liberal ideas from abroad and increasing royal
ineffectiveness at home were in any case shaking the whole basis of his position to a profound
extent. The holocaust of 1852 may have been an attempt to impose the rule of fear. It had had
the strange result of a mass sharing in the letting of blood ordered by the monarch, as if to
show him that execution was no longer the royal prerogative only, but could be turned into a
disquieting demonstration of the subjects' discontent.
The Babi movement had itself sprung from among the
mercantile classes, a fact which recalls us to the realisation that, as political strains can be
symptoms of economic ills, so in a country like Iran can religious movements reflect the
anxieties of classes engaged in commerce. In terms of a new religious hope, the Babi
movement was part of a syndrome indicating the stress of mounting economic and social
tension. Ironically the fostering by the early Qajar kings of the merchants had done a great
deal to bring about this tension. European observers early in the nineteenth century had
noted the Qajars' policy of exempting merchants from all exactions other than Customs
duties. Agha Muhammad Khan had been swift to punish anyone guilty of molesting wealthy
burghers. This was a change from conditions under the last Zand rulers, when the merchants
of Shiraz had at times been compelled to disgorge large sums to the government and its
military adjuncts. Fath-'Ali Shah had apparently carried royal support of commerce to the
lengths of discouraging imports in order to protect home industries.2 Thus between 1800
and 1857 the merchants had in effect become a rather pampered class. The forceful
redefinition of the frontiers and the care exercised by Agha Muhammad over the border
entrepot cities had given the Iranian merchant greater scope than he had enjoyed since the
middle of the Safavid period....
2 In a very interesting article, where new ground in the study of the
Qajars is broken, An Introduction to the Economic Organisation of Early Qajar Iran, in the
Journal of the British Institute of Persian Studies, Vol. II, 1964, Dr. Hambly cites a
reference to Fath-'Ali Shah's discouragement of the import of Kashmir shawls to protect the
home production of, presumably, Kirman shawls.
PROLOGUE TO REVOLUTION
121
... The King was fond of outings. It was springtime when the
air and flowers in the most beautiful season of the Persian year attract people out of doors
for picnics and visits to favourite gardens and shrines. It is said that the Shah had originally
thought of going to Shah Abdul-Azim the day before, but the trip had been postponed to the
morrow because his astrologers had warned him that the day was inauspicious. It is related
that the King was so delighted by the fine weather and prospect of a holiday that on leaving
the palace he threw his hat in the air. This stuck in people's memories because the Shah very
rarely took his hat off in public. From childhood he had suffered from a disease of the scalp;
he was, as the Persians say, kachal, scaldheaded.
When the Shah reached the shrine of Shah Abdul-Azim, Mirza
Muhammad Kirmani was waiting. He approached him with a petition and shot the King at
point-blank range. The Aminu's-Sultan acted with great promptitude and had the Shah's
uniformed body sent back in the carriage to Tehran, propped up in a sitting position so that
nobody would know he was dead. The clerics passed the blame on to the Babis as far as they
could and by inaccurate reporting the European press helped in this. Not that the Iranian
clerics would have gone to the extent of murdering the Shah themselves. Mirza Muhammad
Kirmani, with his recent association with Sayyid Jamalu'd-Din Afghani, was not
representative of them; and they had found in 1892 over the Tobacco Concession that the
Shah could be brought to heel in other waysby a decree from a great mujtahid for example.
But his murder provided the clerics with an opportunity too good to be missed of denigrating
the Babis; and for various subtle reasons of their own it would have been inconvenient for
Sayyid Jamalu'd-Din Afghani himself to be openly implicated.
It was naturally not difficult to inculpate the Babis: ever
since 1852 they had been regarded as the arch plotters against the Shah; but it is interesting
that the mullas should have been at such pains to ensure for themselves freedom from blame
or suspicion, because their sensitivity on this point indicates the extent to which they too
had come to be considered opponents of the Shah. It also indicates a desire to keep their cloth
free from any stain of ignominy at a time when they knew that events were moving towards a
showdown in which it would be essential for the religious classes to embark upon a major
role with a clear record; a record that did not include connivance at political assassination.
The coming revolution was one in which the religious classes would have to act in the
interests of rectifying the evils to which the state had fallen a prey....
THE SHAH'S RULE
469
... Reference was made earlier to the diffusion of power in the
immediate post-Musaddiq period, and while any coalition of forces which could threaten the
Throne was prevented, efforts were made to win over certain extremists. One particular
effort, designed to win over the
'ulama, deserves a passing reference. In 1955
observers were surprised when the Government suddenly instituted moves against the
religious minority of the Bahá'ís; although there is religious toleration in Iran, action
against the Bahá'ís was condoned on the grounds that their faith is not recognised as a
separate religion. No less a person than the Army Chief of Staff took charge of the
sequestration of the Bahá'ís' main centre in Tehran. The dome of this building was destroyed
and the building itself made the headquarters of the city's military government. The true
motives for this persecution are still not clear, but it seems likely that there was some
desire to placate Muslim religious zealots: the persecution might also have been prompted by
less extreme members of the religious hierarchy, who wanted to make a horse-deal between
themselves and the Shah. The move may also have been intended to placate extreme
nationalists in so far as charges had been levelled against the Bahá'ís of being pro-foreign
their chief centre is outside the country, on Mount Carmel, and they have a number of
adherents and important centres in the United States. Criticism of their persecution in the
United States was strong and the Government very soon abandoned it. Some restrictions on
the employment of Bahá'ís were promulgated but, since Bahá'ís tend to be among the most
conscientious and best educated people in the realm, not employing them was an
inconvenience from which their persecutors suffered as much as the victims. It was not long
before those who molested them were arrested and this short but ugly recrudescence of
religious intolerance was at an end.
In 1956 the Iranian Government announced that it was no
longer prohibited for foreigners to call the country Persia; either Iran or Persia was
equally permitted, although of course Iranians themselves never call their country by any
other name than Iran.
When Dr. Iqbal became Prime Minister, on 3rd April 1957
as has already been noticed in connection with the withdrawal of military governmentsa
new phase was inaugurated. Dr. Iqbal showed himself the man to do the Shah's bidding, the
completely docile Prime Minister. His energy was a commendation in his favour and his
impressive mien also an asset. He had succeeded Dr. Siasi as Chancellor of the University of
Tehran in 1954 and had later been made Minister of Court, when Mr. 'Ala became Prime
Minister. While Chancellor of the University, Dr. Iqbal had proved himself vigilant, and
thoughtful for others....
