# Treatise on Leadership, Risalih-i Siyasiyyih: Treatise on Leadership

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-18 — 1 clipping.*

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> `Abdu'l-Bahá's *Risalih-'i Siyasiyyih* or Treatise on
> Leadership (as I think it should be translated) was written in 1891-92
> during the Tobacco Revolt in Iran. The Tobacco Revolt, 1890-92, was a
> popular insurrection against Nasiru'd-Din Shah
>  for his having granted a monopoly on the marketing of Iranian tobacco to
> a British carpetbagger. It was among the first truly national protest
> movements, uniting merchants, money lenders, tobacco farmers and the
> Shi`ite religious leadership in opposition
>  to this give-away of Iranian resources.
> 
> The Treatise was published in
> Bombay in 1892 and was the first policy statement of `Abdu'l-Bahá upon
> taking the reins of the leadership of the Bahá'í community. It shows his
> alarm at the increasing involvement of religious leaders and communities
> in this populist movement against the civil Iranian state, and cites the
> way past such religious populist movements have led to foreign
> intervention or increased absolutism (i.e. the `Urabi Revolt in Egypt and
> the 1876
>  Constitutional Revolution in Istanbul). `Abdu'l-Bahá argues forcefully
> for a separation of religion and state as a basis for Bahá'í
> non-involvement in such anti-state violence.
> 
> I myself see the Treatise
> as, in many ways, a reversal of the stances adopted by Bahá'u'lláh in his
> 1891 Tablet to the World (also a response to the Tobacco Revolt), which
> denounced Qajar tyranny and severely counselled the Shah that only calling
> a parliament on the British model could hope to save him from such popular
> turmoil, which was provoked by his high-handed authoritarian approach to
> rule. `Abdu'l-Bahá, on the contrary, seems to have had (provisionally) a
> more Prussian than a British model of ideal governance in mind (as did
> many Ottoman thinkers of the 1890s), and for
>  him strengthening the civil state against the encroachments of groups
> like the radical clergy took precedence over any democratic imperative,
> for the time being. Decisive was his view that democratic movements in the
> Middle East of the time tended to weaken the indigenous state so fatally
> that they opened the way to European colonization--something he was
> desperate to see Iran avoid. It appears to me that this shift to the Right
> in `Abdu'l-Bahá's thinking resulted from the disappointments in Istanbul
> and
>  Egypt of 1878-1882. (A movement for parliamentary democracy in Egypt
> 1878-1882 had led to turmoil and finally to British invasion and
> occupation). `Abdu'l-Bahá indirectly refers to these events in the
> Treatise.
>
> — *Treatise on Leadership, Risalih-i Siyasiyyih: Treatise on Leadership (Used by permission of the curator)*