1906 Persian Constitutional Revolution

2017 Mirhady Endowed Lecture - Ali Ansari - The Politics of Nationalism in

Modern Iran
- The event that shapes the political terrain of Iranian history to present day
- The constitutionalists are indivs who not only wanted to define new type of state –
limitations on rule of the monarchy, parl, a legislature but they also understood that
in order to make this work you needed to develop a concept of civic nationalism – u
need individuals who are interested – cant have democracy w/o democrats – can’t
build new national state from embers of an imperial state
- Need to build structures to facilitate patriots – rule of law – to build legal system you
need patriots
- They pursued ideas of civilisation – eradication of superstition -not necessarily
religion – misnomer – religious but not necessarily belief in organised religion imp. In
the public sphere. they believed in education above all other things.
- Building an identity around shared history and language – language reform dictated
by practicalities – persian was the language of high culture and govt. and the second
language of people on majority of the plateau – need to develop mass education in
Persian – conception, awareness and understanding of ‘real’ Iranian History
- They also understood that if you want to develop a sense of civic nationalism, you
have to educate people not just of the facts, but of the morals – how do you educate
people in civilised behaviour, in manners? Mass movement – you have to educate
everyone – not just princes like in the early modern period
- Iranian poetic literature – guide for how to behave – the Shahnameh – series of
historical mythologies/examples – so imp to the consolidation and development of
Iranian identity – essential to Iranian culture in this period
- Source – British propaganda document 1941 – tale of Zarok – famous for being
tyrannical and villainous – churchill, stalin and roosevelt as heros to save Iran from
Zarok
- Thing to consider – don’t underestimate the power of myth – nationalist argument –
we Iranians must liberate ourselves – myth of emancipation = imp. In enlightenment
narrative
- Myth sitting side by side with the creation of, and understanding of, historical
narratives – thus for Ansari, we should understand the value of both in unison

Ervand Abrahamian, Iran between two revolutions (Princeton, 1983), ch. 2,

‘The Constitutional Revolution’.

CONCEPT - Impact of the west on the late Qajar state

 - Twofold – econ penetration through bazaars merges interests of diff groups and
facilitates creation of ‘traditional middle class’. Western contact – esp. through
educational institutions introduced ‘new concepts, new aspirations, new
occupations’ and a ‘new professional middle class known as the Intelligentsia’ (50)
- Also introduced new Western words and meanings into contemporary Iranian
vocabulary
- Long term western involvement – humiliating treaties of Gulistan (1813) and
Turkomanchai (1828) Britain invaded southern iran and extracted from the shah the
Treaty of Paris (1857)
- First half of 19th cen – Prince abbas mirza and Amir Kabir – state-led, anti-foreign,
defensive modernization – second half – Naser al-Din Shah eliminates Kabir –
scrapped that form of modernization for less rapid, slow drift toward change and
modernization, not defending state vs. foreign enemies but focused on internal court
strength and invited western interests further into the economy (50-55)
- Notorious example for impact of the west merging as a factor with the internal
indulgent excesses of the Shah – Reuter concession manipulated to finance Naser al-
Din Shah’s European grand tour (56)
- Modernization (key concept) in iranian society taking hold under Naser al-Din Shah

The Traditional Middle Class

- Summary - The incoherent and sometimes contradictory response of the Qajar state
to Western influence allowed a previously splintered traditional middle class across
the country, especially amongst the Bazaars, to eventually unite ‘as a state-wide
political force’ by 1900 (58)
- Impact of the west ‘coalesced the many bazaars into a propertied middle class’ (61)
- Merchants in bazaars being united by common enemy in European products –
refusal by govt. to put on tariffs – inflation weakened their position vs. Europeans
too

The Intelligentsia
- Contact with the West through travel and cultural exchange also created modern
intellectual social class – assigning to themselves the label rushanfekr (enlightened
thinkers) – history not the revelation of god’s will (ulama) but rather the ‘continual
march of human progress’ (61)
- Qualitative learning over quantitative years of scholarly leaning of the trad literati to
build modern society – imp distinction
- Key CONCEPTS – constitutionalism, secularism and nationalism
- Key intellectual in this contradictory but formative Intelligentsia movement –
Malkum Khan – wrote for the court a Daftar-I Tanzimat (Book of Reform) – one of
the first systematic proposals for reform written in nineteenth-century Iran (66) –
 new laws based on improvement of public welfare and equality of all citizens – new
democratic structures recommended – separation of govt. into a legislative council
and exec. Cabinet etc.
- Both Khan and jamar al-Din exiled to ottoman empire by the shah once religious
authorities stepped in
- My take; it seems what these Iranian middle-class intellectuals shared in the latter
half of the 19th century was a difficult, often contradictory internal balance
between advocating some of the liberal reformist ideas of the West that they had
often been exposed to in their travels, and thought would bring Iran forward into
the modern age, and forwarding an anti-Western, anti-imperial rhetoric back in
Iran (e.g. ending concessions to foreign ‘exploiters’ - 69) so as not to threaten the
fabric of traditional Iranian society as represented best by the ulama – thus the
early developments towards founding a constitution in Iran were always going to
be contentious and unevenly implemented in some regard
- One of first times the demand for parliamentary government was expressed in
Persian was in an issue of the newspaper Qanun founded by Malkum Khan, which
would prove to be a decisive publication in the outbreak of the Constitutional
Revolution (68-69)
- Nature of evidence point – lack of coherent, hard data on the economy
during the late Qajar dynasty, but there exists some ‘impressionistic
evidence’ to show a decline in the average person’s standard of living;
with early twentieth-century observers noting the inherent poverty
and instability of rural life contrasted with early nineteenth-century
foreign observers who saw relatively promising conditions for the
peasantry (see Abrahamian, 70)
- ……………………………………..

REVIEW BY KINGSHUK CHATTERJEE, Department of History, Calcutta

University, Calcutta, India of Vanessa Martin, Iran between Islamic
Nationalism and Secularism: The Constitutional Revolution of 1906 (London:
I.B.Tauris, 2013).
- The dominant narrative on the Constitutional Revolution has tended to revolve
around how the disenchantment with the weak and ineffective Qajar rulers brought
together a wide cross-section of the people of the kingdom of Persia in their demand
for a constitution, on which the shah relented in 1906 (789)
- Most historical accounts of the Const. Rev. centre on Tehran, where most secular
reformists were located, therefore arguing that a key facilitator of the revolution was
the lack of activity/pushback from the religious orders in Tehran.
- Vanessa Martin instead looks at the provinces in run-up to 1906 and then 1906-08
 - The author argues that the dislocation caused by European economic penetration of
Iran and the inability of the shah of Persia to prevent the suffering of his subjects
were the principal reasons behind the demand for reform of the Qajar state.
- She identifies three events in particular—the opening of the Imperial Bank of Persia
in 1889, the Tobacco concessions of 1892, and the handing over of the customs
operations to the Belgians in 1898—as having generated a lot of opposition across
the country and brought home the need for reform.
- General recognition across society that Persia had to be modernised to be able to
withstand pressures of Britain and Russia – how this was to be achieved was a source
of contention – centred on the how much a role religion would continue to play in
society.
- IDEA – how diff sections of society in Iran reacted to foreign economic and cultural
penetration
- The experience of economic dislocation wrought by foreign penetration affected the
mercantile community most, who therefore were among the prime subscribers of
the reformist agenda Martin argues that such a neat convergence between the
secularist and Islamist or reformist and loyalist would be misleading. She contends
that in the provinces of Iran, reformists were not necessarily secularists.
- Martin takes up the issues she left unresolved in her earlier two works—Islam and
Modernism (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1989) and The Qajar Pact
(London: I.B.Tauris, 2005).
- ‘Votaries of constitutionalism’ – votaries is good word to use
- Her principal thesis in the first book had been that quite often the votaries of
constitutionalism included those who did not subscribe to secularism, and that Islam
was not considered by them to be incompatible with either modernity or
modernization. That of the second was to explore the kind of politics of resistance to
absolutism that developed during the later Qajar era, and the role Islam played in
shaping that language of politics.
- Historiographical Debate point - Towards the beginning of her book, Martin is quite
emphatic that contrary to what Ahmed Kasravi and others like him used to believe,
the secular agenda was neither clearly formulated nor clearly understood at the time
of the Mashruta revolution. Perhaps it is time to acknowledge that neither was the
“Islamic” agenda clearly formulated or understood, except in an instrumental way.

Ridgeon, Lloyd. "Aḥmad Kasravī's Criticisms of Edward Granville Browne."

Iran 42 (2004): 219-33
- Both histories of Browne and Kasravi share a sympathy for the efforts of the
constitutionalists in looking to end the rule of the Qajar dynasty and both criticised
the Soviet Union’s support of the anti-constitutionalist monarch, Muhammad 'Ali
Shah (219)