The Persian Constitutional Revolution (Persian: مشروطیت, romanized: Mašrutiat, or انقلاب مشروطه Enqelâb-e Mašrute), also known as the Constitutional Revolution of Iran, took place between 1905 and 1911 during the Qajar era. The revolution led to the establishment of a parliament in Iran (Persia), and has been called an "epoch-making episode in the modern history of Persia".
The revolution was "the first of its kind in the Islamic world, earlier than the revolution of the Young Turks in 1908". It opened the way for the modern era in Iran, and debate in a burgeoning press. Many groups fought to shape the course of the revolution. The old order, which Naser al-Din Shah Qajar had struggled for so long to sustain, was finally replaced by new institutions.
Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar signed the 1906 constitution shortly before his death. He was succeeded by Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, who abolished the constitution and bombarded the parliament in 1908 with Russian and British support. This led to a second effort when constitutionalist forces marched to Tehran, forced Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar's abdication in favour of his young son, Ahmad Shah Qajar, and re-established the constitution in 1909.
The revolution ended in December 1911 when the Shah's ministers oversaw the expulsion of the deputies of the Second Majlis from the parliament "with the support of 12,000 Russian troops".
After the 1921 Persian coup d'état (Persian: کودتای ۳ اسفند ۱۲۹۹), Iran's parliament amended the constitution on 12 December 1925, replacing the 1797–1925 Qajar dynasty with the Pahlavi dynasty as the legitimate sovereigns of Iran. The 1906–1907 constitution, though not adhered to, remained until after the Islamic Revolution, when a new constitution was approved in a referendum on 2 and 3 December 1979, establishing an Islamic republic.
History
The Constitutional Revolution began in 1905 with protest against a foreign director of customs (a Belgian) enforcing "with bureaucratic rigidity" the tariff collections to pay for a loan to another foreign source (Russians) that financed Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar's extravagant tour of Europe. The revolutionaries – bazaari, ulama, radicals – argued that Iran's oil industry was being sold to the British, while tax breaks on imports, exports and manufactured textiles were destroying Iran's economy (which was sustained by the bazaar merchants), and that the shah was selling assets to pay interest on the fortune in foreign debt he had accumulated.
It ended in December 1911 when deputies of the Second Majlis, suffering from "internal dissension, apathy of the masses, antagonisms from the upper class, and open enmity from Britain and Russia", were "roughly" expelled from the Majlis and threatened with death if they returned by "the shah's cabinet, backed by 12,000 Russian troops".
In between there were two different majles (parliaments), a deposed shah and a 1907 division of the country by Britain and Russia capitalizing on Iran's weak government. A new fundamental law created a parliament, giving it final approval of all loans and the budget. The majles was endorsed by the leading clerics of Najaf – Akhund Khurasani, Mirza Husayn Tehrani and Shaykh Abdullah Mazandarani.
Background
In the late 19th century, like most of the Muslim world, Iran suffered from foreign intrusion and exploitation, military weakness, lack of cohesion, and corruption.
In the 1813 Treaty of Gulistan and the 1828 Treaty of Turkmenchay, Iran lost "Georgia, Armenia, and their Caspian navy" to Russia, "gave up its claims to Afghanistan, and paid an indemnity of three million pounds to the tsar". In the Treaty of Paris (1857), it agreed to withdraw from Herat (formerly part of Iran) and signed a commercial treaty with Britain. The lack of a standing Iranian army was part of the problem because the forces that were raised to fight the Russians (for example) were "faction-ridden tribal contingents" and lacked modern artillery.
To compensate for his lack of an army, the Qajar Shah would use loyal tribes, putting down a rebellion by declaring a rebellious city or region open booty for the tribe, who would then appear to rape and pillage – a far more destructive means of discipline than arresting and punishing rebels. Major roads between cities that might have appeared to be investments in improving transportation, provided opportunities not for greater trade and prosperity, but for tax collectors to fleece towns along the road, and thus "encouraged the local peasants to settle in more distant regions". A survey for the British Foreign Office reported:
'There are large tracts of fertile land which remain waste owing to their proximity to the main roads, as no village having cultivators on such spots can possibly prosper or enjoy the least immunity from the pestering visits of Government officials, and thefts and robberies committed by the tribes.'
Perhaps worst of all the indignities Iran suffered from the superior militaries of European powers were "a series of commercial capitulations."
While the sales by the shah of titles, patents, privileges, concessions, monopolies, lands, ... high offices" paid for some improvements, such as a telegraph network and in Tehran a regular police force, a municipal civil service, etc., they were also spent on consumption by the shah's court.
Under the Qajar dynasty (1789–1925), foreign (Western) mass-manufactured products, "especially textiles, undermined the traditional handicrafts, and consequently presented for many bazaars a mutual enemy – the foreigner." In Isfahan at least, 10% of "the guilds in this city were weavers; not even 1/5 of those survived" competition from imported textiles. Widows and orphans were hurt, and farmers suffered: by 1894 the price they were paid for wheat harvest dropped to 1/6 what it had been in 1871; irrigation systems had fallen into ruin, "turning fields and villages into desert".
In 1872, Naser al-Din Shah negotiated a concession granting a British citizen control over Iranian roads, telegraphs, mills, factories, extraction of resources, and other public works in exchange for a fixed sum and 60% of net revenue. This concession was rolled back after bitter local opposition. Other concessions to the British included giving the new Imperial Bank of Persia exclusive rights to issue banknotes, and opening up the Karun River to navigation.
Nikki Keddie has pointed out that
The Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05 and the Russian revolution of 1905 gave impetus to an Iranian opposition movement that had been growing since 1901. After a century of successive defeats, an Asian power had defeated a European power, an event that bolstered pride throughout Asia. This feeling was particularly strong in those countries, like Iran, that had experienced Russian penetration and oppression. Many considered it significant that the only Asian power with a constitution had defeated the only Western power without one, and constitutions came to be looked upon as the "secret of strength" of Western governments.
Discontented groups
The political base of the constitutionalist movement to control the power of the shah was an alliance of the ulama, liberal and radical intellectuals, and the bazaar. But the alliance was based on common enemies rather than common goals. The ulama sought "to extend their own power and to have Shi'i Islam more strictly enforced"; the liberals and radicals desired "greater political and social democracy and economic development"; and the bazaaris "to restrict favored foreign economic status and competition".
The intellectuals were a "small but growing" group, many of whom learned of Western ways while travelling abroad and "were generally struck by Western economic development, comparative justice, and lack of arbitrary rule". In their writings these intellectuals criticized Iran's "autocratic rulers, petty officials, venal clerics, and arbitrary courts, and of the low status of women."
The "mercantile class" or bazaari became convinced that "law and order, security of property, and immunity from arbitrary power could all be achieved by importing parliamentary democracy" from Europe.
The ulama (i.e. Islamic scholars) had less to gain and a less direct incentive to support a constitution, but were convinced (at least for a time) that their "hierocracy vis-a-vis the monarchy" would not be weakened.
Tobacco protest
The tobacco protest of February 1891–January 1892 was "the first mass nationwide popular movement in Iran", and described as a "dress rehearsal for the...Constitutional Revolution", formed from an anti-imperialist and antimonarchist coalition of "clerics, mercantile interests, and dissident intellectuals".
In March 1890, Naser al-Din Shah granted a concession to an Englishman, Baron Paul Julius Reuter, for a 50-year monopoly over the distribution and exportation of tobacco in exchange for £25,000 to the Shah personally and £15,000 a year to the state. Iranians cultivated a variety of tobacco "much prized in foreign markets" that was not grown elsewhere, and the arrangement threatened the job security of a significant portion of the Iranian population – hundreds of thousands of workers in agriculture and the bazaars.
This led to unprecedented nationwide protest erupting first among the bazaari, and then the ulama.
In December 1891, the most important religious authority in Iran, marja'-e taqlid Mirza Hasan Shirazi, issued a fatwa declaring the use of tobacco to be tantamount to war against the Hidden Imam, using the strongest possible language to oppose the Régie (tobacco monopoly). Bazaars shut down, and Iranians stopped smoking tobacco, despite the popularity of tobacco – which Iranians were said to be less likely to forego than bread – the religious ban was so successful that it was said that women in the shah's harem quit smoking.
The protest demonstrated to the Iranians "for the first time that it was possible to win out against the Shah and foreign interests… there is a direct line from the coalition which participated in the tobacco movement… culminating in the Constitutional Revolution" and arguably the Iranian Revolution as well, according to Historian Nikki Keddie.
Mozaffar ad-Din Shah Qajar
The fourth Qajar monarch, Naser al-Din Shah, was assassinated on 1 May 1896 by Mirza Reza Kermani, a follower of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī, when he was visiting and praying in the Shah Abdol-Azim Shrine. At Mozaffar al-Din Shah's accession Iran faced a financial crisis, with annual governmental expenditures far in excess of revenues as a result of the policies of his father. Mozaffar ad-Din Shah signed the 1906 constitution shortly before he died on 8 January 1907.
Weakness and extravagance continued during the reign of Mozaffar ad-Din Shah (1896–1907), who often relied on his chancellor to manage his decentralized state. His dire financial straits caused him to sign many concessions to foreign powers on trade items ranging from weapons to tobacco. The aristocracy, religious authorities, and educated elite began demanding a curb on royal authority and the establishment of the rule of law as their concern about foreign (especially Russian) influence grew. The Qajars had taken large loans from Russia and Britain to pay for the Shah's extravagant lifestyle and the cost of the government; the shah financed a royal tour of Europe in 1900 by borrowing ₽22 million from Russia, using Iranian customs receipts as collateral.
First protests
In 1905, protests erupted about the imposition of Iranian tariffs to repay the Russian loan for Mozaffar ad-Din Shah's royal tour. In December of that year, two merchants in Tehran were bastinadoed for price-gouging. The city's merchants rebelled, closing its bazaar. The clergy followed suit as a result of the alliance formed during the Tobacco Protest.
The two protesting groups sought sanctuary in a Tehran mosque, but the government entered the mosque and dispersed them. The dispersal triggered a larger movement that sought refuge at a shrine outside Tehran. The shah yielded to the demonstrators on January 12, 1906, agreeing to dismiss his prime minister and transfer power to a "house of justice" (forerunner of the Iranian parliament). The basti protesters returned from the shrine in triumph, riding royal carriages and hailed by a jubilant crowd.
During a fight in early 1906, government forces killed a sayyid (a descendant of Muhammad). In a skirmish shortly afterwards, Cossacks killed 22 protesters and injured 100. The bazaar again closed and the ulama went on strike, a large number taking sanctuary in the holy city of Qom. Many merchants went to the British embassy in Tehran, which agreed to shelter the basti on the grounds of the embassy.
Creation of the constitution
During the summer of 1906, about 12,000 men camped in the gardens of the British embassy in what has been called a "vast open-air school of political science". Demand for a parliament (majlis) began, with the goal of limiting the power of the shah. Mozaffar ad-Din Shah agreed on a parliament in August 1906, and the first elections were held that fall. One hundred fifty-six members were elected, the overwhelming majority from Tehran and the merchant class.
The National Consultative Assembly first met in October 1906. The shah was old and frail, and attending the inauguration of parliament was one of his last official acts. Mozaffar ad-Din Shah's son, Mohammad Ali Shah Qajar, was unsympathetic to constitutionalism; the shah signed the constitution (modeled on the Belgian constitution) by 31 December 1906, making his power contingent on the will of the people, and died three days later.