# Modern Iran

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> 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 Iran—a 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-on—his 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 
> Francklin1 and George Foster2 
> 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 city—the 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'ísm1 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 grammar—for 
> 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, and—I myself have had to witness it—the 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 
> hysteria—the 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 ways—by 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 governments—a 
> 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....
>
> — *Modern Iran (Used by permission of the curator)*