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)