Naser al-Din Shah Qajar

Mirza Taqi Khan (1807–1852) was the son of a cook from Hazava in Farahan. He spent four years at Erzurum on the Ottoman–Iranian border commission and in 1848 became Naser al-Din Shah’s chief minister.

He balanced the budget by cutting pensions, built arms factories, founded the newspaper Ruz-nama-ye waqayeʿ-e ettefaqiya and established the Dar al-Fonun. In foreign policy he gave concessions to neither Russia nor Britain. He was dismissed in 1851 and killed at Fin in January 1852.

Algar attributes his fall and murder chiefly to his enemies at court, Mirza Aqa Khan Nuri and the queen mother. Yarshater calls his murder on the shah’s order “an indelible stain” on the shah’s reputation.

Algar warns against seeing Amir Kabir too much as a moderniser: above all he was a loyal servant of the traditional state. His policy has been called “negative equilibrium”. He also ordered the execution of the Bab (1850); Algar thinks his motive was “probably” political, to preserve the state.

In Iranian historiography Amir Kabir is one of the few capable and honest Qajar statesmen, and the Dar al-Fonun, in Algar’s words, “soon became a posthumous monument to its founder”. The bathhouse at Fin is visited today.

The government gave a British company the tobacco monopoly. From spring 1891, when the company began operating, opposition led by the ulama grew. Sayyed Ali Falasiri was expelled from Shiraz and went by way of Basra to Mirza Hasan Shirazi at Samarra.

Mirza Hasan telegraphed the shah in July 1891 and again two months later, without answer. In December the boycott fatwa circulated in Tehran. The shah cancelled the concession, and the episode closed on 26 January 1892.

Iranica calls the movement “the first instance of mass politics in Persia”, and Yarshater sees it as a prelude to the Constitutional Revolution and the first time in the modern period that the ulama successfully rallied the urban population against the government.

We show two disagreements: the year of the concession (1889 in one article, 1872 in another) and whether the fatwa really came from Mirza Hasan Shirazi. Iranica thinks outright forgery unlikely.

Yarshater sees the Tobacco protest as a prelude to the Constitutional Revolution. That it is remembered today as resistance to a foreign concession is our reading of public memory, not a claim from the sources.

Yarshater writes that a railway concession and several others were granted to a British national and cancelled under popular pressure; the dispute that followed led to a new concession for the Imperial Bank of Persia with the exclusive right to issue banknotes. After the tobacco concession was cancelled, too, the country bore the financial consequences.

At the start of this same reign Amir Kabir found the treasury empty and balanced the budget by cutting pensions paid to courtiers and others.

This is our reading: in these concessions the country’s resources, from railways to tobacco and paper money, were treated as property the shah and his government could lease out, and the cost of cancelling them fell on the country, not the court. Yarshater calls Naser al-Din “a well-meaning king as long as his purse and pleasure were not involved”.

The limits of this reading: our sources do not measure what the shah or his ministers personally gained from the concessions, and we do not guess at motives. Amir Kabir shows that another path was tried within the same state.

Iranica writes that finances were one of the major problems facing the First Majles; linking that to the concessions of Naser al-Din’s reign is our reading.

Naser al-Din Shah reigned for a little under fifty years. In his time the telegraph (1857) and a modern postal service arrived, Dar al-Fonun graduates went to study in Europe, and the shah travelled to Europe three times. After a failed Babi attempt on his life, he ordered a massacre of the Babis.

On 1 May 1896 he was killed by Mirza Reza Kermani, who had been influenced by the ideas of Jamal al-Din Asadabadi.

Yarshater writes that contact with the West grew but the country suffered from backwardness, a poor economy, the corruption of the ruling class and the exploitation of the peasantry, and the European trips did not solve the basic problems. At the same time the idea of law and an awareness of the abuse of power spread, especially among the educated.

The diary of Eʿtemad al-Saltana, the minister of publications who read to the shah, is one of the main sources for his court life. The many photographs of him have made his image especially memorable; that second point is our own observation.

Mozaffar al-Din Shah (1896–1907) succeeded his father. In December 1905, after the governor of Tehran had two merchants bastinadoed for raising the price of sugar, the bazaar struck and about 2,000 people took sanctuary at the shrine of Shah Abd al-Azim. A rescript of 10 January 1906 promised a house of justice (ʿadālat-ḵāna).

In July 1906 the ulama left for Qom, and by 2 August 14,000 people had taken sanctuary at the British legation. The farmān of 5 August 1906 was issued, the First Majles opened on 7 October, and the Fundamental Law was adopted on 27 December 1906. The shah endorsed these documents before his death on 9 January 1907.

Yarshater describes Mozaffar al-Din Shah as “weak, pleasure-loving, simple-minded, and considerate”. The revolution was born of an alliance of reformist ulama, merchants and intellectuals; Iranica writes that the vagueness of the demand for a “house of justice” made a compromise between the court and the ulama in sanctuary possible.

The two Iranica articles do not agree about the farmān of 5 August (the Constitutional edict, or a vague text that was rejected); we show the disagreement.

His son, Mohammad-Ali Shah, had the Majles bombarded on 23 June 1908, and in July 1909 the constitutionalists took Tehran and deposed him. Iranica writes that the goals of this era, such as a centralised state with a powerful army and an extensive bureaucracy, set the agenda for the early reforms under Reza Shah.