From Tobacco Fatwas to Constitutional Reform and a Cavalry Officer
The history you should know to understand Iran: Part 1
The history of Iran in the West, particularly in left/liberal circles, is told as a simple story that starts in 1953 with a CIA/MI6-backed coup that ‘installed’ a dictator, and that led to the Islamic Revolution, which, if lamentable in some dimensions, was an understandable development. This is largely ahistorical and highly selective, and prioritises Western grand narratives over the agency of Iranians in shaping their history. This two-part series is an attempt to offer a corrective to that narrative.
In Part 1, we will set the scene with the extreme theory at the core of the Islamic Revolution, before covering the period from the late years of the Qajar Dynasty in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the ascension of the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1925. This period contains important antecedents in the relationship between religion and the state, constitutional reform and the tensions between modernisation and religious leadership, and the influence of imperial powers in shaping a revived Iranian nationalism oriented towards strong central government and military strength. In Part 2, we will cover the period of the Pahlavi Dynasty from 1925 up to the 1978–1979 Islamic Revolution. Note: Romanised Persian names are given their Persian, not Arabic, spelling, and ‘Iran’ is primarily used over ‘Persia’, the latter only used in specific historical contexts.
The elderly cleric had a dangerous vision.
It was 1974, and the Shi’ite cleric was wondering whether he was destined to live out his days in Najaf, Iraq, having been exiled from Iran in 1963 for attempting to foment an uprising against the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s modernising reforms. Najaf is one of the holiest Shia cities, the site of the shrine of the first Shia Imam, and home to one of the most important Shia religious seminaries, from which the elderly cleric was relatively free to teach, write, and promote his theories. The cleric’s name was Ruhollah Khomeini. And his theories were fanatical and dangerous.
In Twelver Shia, the dominant branch of Shia Islam, so-called because the 12th Shia Imam, Muhammad al-Mahdi, went into ‘occultation’ (hiding) in the 9th century, the return of the Mahdi is the event that will result in the formation of the perfect Islamic state. Twelver Shia was instituted as the state religion of Persia in 1501 by Ismail I, the first Shah of the Safavid dynasty, which ruled until 1736. The adoption of Twelver Shia was political and strategic, providing an ideological distinction from the expanding Sunni Ottoman Empire, Persia’s primary rival. As temporal political rulers, the Shahs were the Guardians of the Faith, while clerical scholars, the mujtahid, provided religious guidance and interpretations of Islam, but remained outside of politics; fallible men could not undertake a fusion of Islam with worldly politics, which could only occur with the return of the infallible Mahdi.
But Khomeini had a vision that a worldly state could indeed be ruled by a clerical scholar, a faqih; that, he argued, there was no need to await the return of the Madhi to implement a perfect Islamic state, as the Quran and Imam Ali, the First Shia imam, had provided instructions for such a state: an Islamic state governed by Islamic law, ruled by an scholarly Islamic jurist, a concept known as velâyat-e faqih, or ‘Guardianship of the Jurist’. Khomeini’s ideas were considered so unhinged that another Iranian Shia Imam, Musa al-Sadr, termed his writings ‘the juice of a sick mind.’1 When he arrived in Najaf, he had implored senior clerics to support a Shia uprising in Iraq and Iran; he was summarily dismissed and told it was not the clergy’s place to send people to their deaths. But the senior clerics were facing into a gale-force wind of change in the Islamic world, and that wind was behind Khomeini and his sick mind.
The problem was that the elderly cleric remained in exile and lacked the political means to bring about his velayat-e faqih. What Khomeini did have, despite his exile, was standing and influence among Iran’s religious community. What he needed was political organisation and agitation. In 1974, that came to him in the form of Iranian Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries and anti-monarchy nationalists, themselves exiled in Lebanon, who saw in Khomeini a means to leverage religious fervour in service of their own ends: the overthrow of the Shah and an end to monarchy in Iran.
What could motivate secular far-Leftists and anti-monarchists to join hands with a reactionary (in Western terms, far-Right) Islamic cleric?
And what forces were acting and interacting within Iran to create the antecedents and drivers of what would become the Islamic Revolution?
To understand this, we need to step back into the late 19th century, where the seeds of secular-religious alliances were sown, and the weakness of Iran against imperial powers rejuvenated Iranian nationalism and led to a dynastic change for the ~2,500-year-old Iranian monarchy.
The Seeds of a Dangerous Revolutionary Liaison
Before the Islamic Revolution, there was the Tobacco Revolution of 1890-1892 and the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911. The origins of these revolutions contain several themes that would reemerge later in the 20th century. In 1794, the Qajar Dynasty came to power in Iran, ruling until 1925. The Qajar period brought what was, in its terminal stages, a relatively weak ruling dynasty into contact with the political competition and machinations of ‘the Great Game’ between Great Britain and Russia. Fath-Ali, the second Qajar Shah [1797–1834], presided over two costly wars with Russia between 1804–1813 and 1826–1828, which collectively saw the loss of territory under Iranian control, including what today is Georgia, Armenia, Dagestan, and Azerbaijan, to Russia.
The conflicts and territorial losses to Russia brought Iran into the geopolitical orbit of Great Britain. After an initial conflict in the Anglo-Persian War of 1857, in which Iran agreed to withdraw from the city of Herat (now in western Afghanistan) in return for a withdrawal of British troops from southern Iran, the Qajars moved to diplomacy to leverage their position between Britain and Russia, realising their inability to restore lost lands and defeat either power militarily. Favouring engaging with Britain over Russia, the fourth Qajar Shah, Nasser od-Din, was feckless in trading Iran’s resources to Britain on terms overly favourable to British interests, and to the detriment of the bazaar merchants in Iran.
In 1890, Naser od-Din Shah granted a full monopoly of the Iranian tobacco industry to a British businessman. This concession proved to be the final straw for several disgruntled strata of Iranian society, triggering the so-called Tobacco Revolution protests against the Shah’s decision, which eventually culminated in Naser od-Din cancelling the agreement. Yet the Tobacco Revolution was notable for a very specific reason: it marked the first alliance between religious leaders and secularists in Iran to achieve a political outcome.2 The secularists included modernisers and liberals, in particular, Melkum Khan, an Armenian Christian who served as the first Iranian ambassador to Britain. Khan sought reform in Iran from the arbitrary rule of dynastic power to a government based on the rule of law.
However, Khan believed that for modernisation of Iran to have any hope, political reforms would have to be presented as originating in the Islamic tradition, rather than seen as an imported European concept. On the opposite end of the spectrum to Khan’s liberal modernising ambitions lay Jamal al-Afghani, a religious radical proponent of pan-Islamism who was profoundly influential in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and inspired the radicalisation of Islam far beyond his death in 1897. Afghani believed that religious sentiment could be mobilised to rouse the masses, particularly when harnessed against foreign, non-Islamic powers. Thus, the secular reformists and modernisers saw a weak and incompetent ruling dynasty auctioning off the nation’s precious assets. In contrast, the ulama—religious scholars and jurists—saw the Qajars as temporal rulers who issued a concession that, as the mujtahids (authorities on Islamic law) interpreted it, contravened religious law by selling the produce of Islamic lands to an infidel foreign power.
These dynamics came together for the first time in the Tobacco Revolution.3 For the first time in Iranian history, the ulama emerged as a mobilising force, with the mujtahid even issuing a fatwa against tobacco consumption as a means of boycotting the concession. An important element of the ulama’s role in the Tobacco Revolution was that several of the main Shia holy cities and seminaries were in what was then Ottoman Iraq. This put clerical leaders and their ability to issue directions and mobilise political support beyond the reach of the Qajar rulers in Iran: a similar dynamic would also be crucial ~80 years later in the Islamic Revolution. The ulama were viewed by the bazaar merchants as beyond the petty politics of the state, holding Iran’s best interests at heart against a foreign power draining their livelihoods. In the eyes of the merchant class and the craft guilds, the clerics became the counterweight to the arbitrary rule of the Qajar Shah. And in the view of the secular reformers and modernisers, the ulama provided a means to leverage a mass movement in service of their political goals.
The seeds of what would grow into a dangerous liaison between clerics and secularists were sown in the Tobacco Revolution.
From Tobacco Fatwas to Constitutional Reform
If the tobacco concession to the British provided the initial impetus for new political alliances in Iran, the modernisers’ desire for a written constitution and democratic reform revealed the first tensions in this political manoeuvring. The arbitrary nature of monarchical dynastic power meant that the best one could hope for politically, socially, and economically, was that an unjust or incompetent ruler be replaced by a just and/or competent ruler. The arbitrary nature of monarchical rule was also reinforced by the assassination of Naser od-Din Shah in 1896 by a disciple of al-Afghani. The Constitutional Revolution sought to remove this arbitrary element of Iran’s politics and replace arbitrary rule with a government based on laws, with a constitution and an elected parliament to provide a political counterweight to the dynastic ruler.4 Political power would thus be situated in a representative parliament.
The Constitutional Revolution began in 1905 with thousands of Iranians conducting a sit-in strike, a bast, at the shrine of Hazrat-e Abdol’zim, a 9th-century Shia scholar, south of Tehran, that eventually extended to a bast at the British Embassy. A bast is a traditional sanctuary, so by centring the strike at a shrine and the embassy, the protestors were effectively protected from any moves to suppress the demonstrations by Mozaffar od-Din Shah, who had succeeded his father as the fifth Qajar Shah after the assassination. Notwithstanding the crucial role of the bazaar merchants in the demonstrations, the Constitutional Revolution was not necessarily a class conflict; it unified disparate groups across Iranian society and was effectively a society-wide rejection of the arbitrary state.5 Inheriting an unstable nation with a struggling economy, Mozaffar ad-Din had spent the majority of his father’s 48-year reign as a provincial governor and lacked both the preparation and temperament to rule.
In October 1906, he acceded to the demonstrators’ demands, including the formation of an Iranian parliament, known as the Majles, the establishment of independent judicial courts, limitations on the Shah’s power in the affairs of state, and the drafting of Iran’s first written constitution. From Najaf, the ulama argued that arbitrary rule was not legitimate in Islam because it was not accountable to the public, and accordingly supported constitutional government. The merchants, traders, and artisan guilds were mobilised in support of the reforms, desiring representation in parliament themselves, while the secular modernisers achieved their desired end of representative government and the rule of law. The constitution was published in December 1906 and, merely days later, the fifth Qajar Shah, Mozaffar ad-Din, died of a heart attack.
Yet the Constitutional Revolution revealed the tensions in the alliance between the secular modernists and the ulama. The Majles sought to draft a constitution with certain secular provisions, including the equality of all religious communities, and the establishment of secular schools that included education for girls. These provisions, in particular the secularisation and inclusion of girls in education, aggravated the clerics who had supported the revolution, but had anticipated that Islamic law would form the basis of the written constitution. The tension was never fully resolved, with the final enacted 1906 constitution blending elements modelled on the Belgian constitution with elements of Islamic law.6 The constitution would, internal tensions notwithstanding, prove durable as Iran remained a constitutional monarchy, with an elected Majles and an office of prime minister, until the 1906 constitution was repealed and replaced with the 1979 Islamist state constitution.
The enactment of the constitution, however, occurred against a background of the continued Great Game between Russia and Britain, and in the context of the domestic instability of the Qajar dynasty. The constitution was as vulnerable as the nation in which it was conceived. Following Mozaffar ad-Din’s death, he was succeeded by his son, Mohammad Ali Shah, as the sixth Qajar Shah. In 1907, Britain and Russia signed the Anglo-Russian Convention in St. Petersburg, which effectively ended the Great Game. However, the agreement included a severe intrusion on Iranian sovereignty, dividing Iran into three spheres of influence, with a Russian sphere over Iran’s northern territories, a British sphere over the south-east, and a ‘neutral’ middle zone. In the same year, Mohammad Ali Shah, desirous of restoring his executive power as Shah, dissolved the Majles and, in 1908, bombarded the parliamentary buildings and enforced martial law in Tehran with the infamous Persian Cossack Brigade, a cavalry brigade founded by Naser od-Din Shah in 1879 and modelled on the Russian Cossacks.
However, Mohammad Ali Shah’s attempt to restore his executive power reignited the Constitutional Revolution. The Najaf ulama condemned the Shah’s dissolution and bombardment of the Majles, and, in 1909, constitutionalist forces from Iran’s provinces, including Tabriz, Isfahan, and Gilan, descended on Tehran, forced the abdication of Mohammad Ali Shah, and restored the Majles. Mohammad Ali Shah was replaced by his son, Ahmad, the seventh Qajar Shah. Aged only 11 in 1909, when he succeeded his abdicated father, he was formally crowned Shah in 1914. However, as a young and inexperienced ruler, and with the outbreak of the First World War in the year of his crowning and the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, Ahmad Shah was the last of several weak and ineffectual Qajar Shahs in the twilight years of their 130-year dynastic reign in Iran. By the time of Ahmad Shah’s coronation, a talented and dynamic cavalry officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade was about to receive a promotion to colonel. His name was Reza Khan.
From the Great Game to the Great War and a New Shah
To understand the transition from the Qajar to the Pahlavi Dynasty, it is important to grasp how the destabilising dynamics of the First World War and the fall of Imperial Russia influenced a growing sense of Iranian nationalism through the early 20th century. The Bolshevik Revolution and the propagation of Marxist-Leninist ideology in this period are also crucial to understanding the subsequent development of ‘Red Shi’ism’ and its role in the Islamic Revolution, which we will come to in Part 2. The ripple effects of two acts from the short reign of Mozaffar ad-Din Shah will also be relevant. The first was the ratification of the 1907 constitution, ushering in the period of constitutional monarchy that lasted until the Islamists seized power in 1979. The second was the 1901 D’Arcy Concession in which, failing to learn from his father’s mistakes, Mozaffar ad-Din Shah granted a monopoly concession for oil prospecting in Persia to the British.
The Russian defeat by Japan in the 1905 Russo-Japanese War was particularly significant for the emergence of Iranian nationalism in the early 20th century. Russia was a menacing imperial power looming over domestic Iranian affairs, and the fact that the only Asian power with a constitution had defeated the only European power without one was interpreted as a reflection of the strength of constitutional government over arbitrary rule.7 The timing of Russia’s defeat and the subsequent revolt against the Tsar in 1905, which resulted in a constitutional monarchy, would be instrumental in motivating the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. Russia, however, remained a destabilised but militarily more powerful neighbour to the nascent Iranian constitutional monarchy. Within Iran, there was an ongoing debate over whether the new constitutional monarchy should emphasise centralised government or more autonomous provincial authority. Meanwhile, in Europe, the Belle Époque was blissfully ignorant of its borrowed time in the years before the Great War.
In 1910, the Royal Navy, the world’s most powerful navy at the time, switched from coal to oil combustion to power its ships, offering significant advantages in operating range and speed. Lacking domestic oil production, however, Britain was largely reliant on overseas sources of oil. The decision and the Royal Navy’s capacity to shift to oil combustion were bolstered by the discovery of oil in the southwest of Iran in 1908, which led to the formation of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909. To preserve its primary oil source and with the dark clouds of war hanging over Europe, in 1914, the British government purchased a majority share in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company under a 20-year contract to guarantee the Royal Navy a reliable supply of fuel. This relationship between Britain, oil, and Iran would prove to be pivotal in shaping Iranian nationalism in the 20th century.
If oil provided a compelling reason for the British presence in Iran, the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention, which had divided Iran into ‘spheres of influence’, motivated continued Russian presence. In 1911, the fledgling Iranian parliament (Majles) appointed an American civil servant, William Morgan Schuster, as treasurer to the Iranian government with a brief to reform the government’s finances and modernise the economy. Scornful of the Russian and British presence in Iran and their damaging influence on the nation’s prospects, Schuster was determined to enact reforms regardless of their impacts on Russian and British interests. The Russian government, fearing that Schuster’s taxation reforms impinged on their ‘sphere of influence’, issued the Majles with an ultimatum to fire Schuster: the Iranian parliament refused. Russian forces had occupied the city of Tabriz in northern Iran in 1908, and the issuing of the ultimatum to the Iranian parliament caused an uprising against the Russians in Tabriz, which was violently suppressed. Threatening to invade further into Iran, the teenage Ahmad Shah panicked and dissolved the Majles and agreed to the Russian ultimatum.
The Majles reconvened in response to the outbreak of the First World War, and Iran formally declared neutrality with a royal decree in November 1914. Yet with war coming at a time when the fledgling constitutional Iranian state lacked strong central authority over the nation’s provinces and tribes, and without a strong military under the control of a central government, Iran found itself vulnerable to the strategic imperial alliances of the Great War, and Iran’s neutrality was ignored. With Britain allied with Russia at the outset of the war, and with both powers considered direct existential threats to Iran’s sovereignty, Germany appeared as an attractive potential ally, which alarmed both the Russians and the British. In response, Russian forces marched on Tehran in 1914 and captured the capital, forcing the Majles to relocate to Kermanshah, where it adjourned in 1915: parliament would not reconvene until 1921. In 1915, the Ottomans invaded and captured Tabriz from the Russians; Russian counterattacks not only resulted in the recapture of Tabriz but also extended Russian occupation into central Iran. Meanwhile, Britain’s defeat of the Ottomans in Iraq and the Levant removed the threats to Britain’s oil supply from the Ottomans and cemented British control over the south of Iran.
The 1917 Russian Revolution effectively put an end to direct Russian occupation in Iran, as the Bolsheviks repudiated the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention and renounced the Tsarist claims over Iranian sovereign territory. Russian forces dissolved and retreated from central and northern Iran. However, in the chaotic transition from the Tsarist Imperial Army to the Red Army, remnants of Russian forces remained in northern Iran. The Ottomans immediately moved to occupy Tabriz and north-western Iran. To counter, in 1918, the British also sent a force into northern Iran to block any further Ottoman advances and consolidate their control over the region in the power vacuum left by the Russians. With the signing of the Armistice of Mudros in October 1918, which marked the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the Middle Eastern theatre of the First World War, Ottoman forces fully withdrew from Iran. By the end of the First World War in Europe in November 1918, Iran found itself weak, economically ruined, ravaged by a famine in 1917 and widespread poverty, lacking any effective central government, and with Britain left with primacy of the entire country following the collapse of the Tsarist and Ottoman Empires.
These characteristics of vulnerability to the depredations of foreign powers, military weakness, economic ruin, and ineffectual central government would all interact to create the conditions for the end of the Qajar Dynasty and the ascension of the Pahlavi Dynasty.8 This pivotal point in Iran’s history was fostered primarily by Iranian nationalism, asserted during the period between 1918 and 1925, which, as the dust of the Great War settled, would prove to be an extension of the tumultuous war years for Iran. Two events would act as catalysts: the 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement and the establishment of the ‘Persian Socialist Republic’ in Gilan province in 1920. Fearful of potential Bolshevik encroachment and with Britain’s ongoing interest in securing its primary source of oil, the British Foreign Secretary, Lord Curzon, proposed the 1919 Anglo-Persian Agreement. Under the terms of the treaty, Britain would oversee the formation (and arming) of a new national Iranian army, construct railroads, and reorganise the treasury, all financed with a loan to be repaid by taxes collected by British customs officials.9
However, while the provisional treaty certainly intended to strengthen Iran militarily and economically, the terms were widely viewed by Iranian nationalists as attempting to turn Iran into a British protectorate. Further, the negotiations had taken place in secret between the British and Iran’s prime minister and ministers for finance and foreign affairs, respectively, known to the British as ‘the Triumvirate’, who had each received bribes from the British to sign the treaty. The agreement was signed in August 1919, but the Iranian constitution required the Majles to ratify the treaty, which had not convened since 1915. When the secret negotiations and bribes were revealed, ‘the Triumvirate’ were forced to resign. In 1920, the new prime minister suspended the agreement as the Majles had not ratified it. For Iranian nationalists, the debacle of the Anglo-Persian Agreement represented a continuation of the administrative weakness of the state and the young Ahmad Shah Qajar, and provided further evidence to Iran’s nationalists that a strong centralised government and leader were necessary ingredients for national renewal.10
The weakness of the ineffectual Ahmad Shah Qajar and the question of centralised government were also tested by autonomous provincial movements in Gilan, Khorasan, and Azeri provinces, which threatened the central government. Gilan held particular importance as the location of the ‘Jangali Movement’, a guerrilla rebellion against Russian and British influence led by Mirza Kuckek Khan from 1915 to 1920, which sought provincial autonomy from the weak central government in Tehran. The Jangali Movement was a broad church, incorporating anti-imperialist, Shi’ite, and, with the influence of the Bolshevik revolution, Marxist-Leninist doctrines, but its overarching character was nationalist. It was not initially a separatist movement, but promoted provincial autonomy as a mechanism to assert the national sovereignty that the flailing Qajars could not mobilise. The Jangali Movement culminated, however, in a merging of Iranian, Caucasian, and Russian Bolshevik revolutionaries with Mirza Khan’s nationalist Jangalis, who allied to capture the provincial capital of Rasht in May 1920 and proclaimed the existence of the ‘Soviet Socialist Republic of Iran’ (SSRI) in Gilan.
The establishment of the SSRI alarmed the British, who feared Bolshevik expansion in Iran. To Britain’s surprise, the Soviets had also launched an attack on the Gilani port city of Bandar-e Anzali, where White Russian ships had sought refuge in 1919, which resulted in the capture of the British garrison in the city. The British appointed Major-General Sir Edmond Ironside to lead the North-West Persia Force and bolster Iran against further Bolshevik expansion. Yet by 1920, the British military was stretched across the Levant, Ireland, India, and now Iran. Ironside sought to promote an autonomous Iranian military capable of dealing with the fractious conditions on the ground, and turned to the elite Persian Cossack Brigade. His first move was to ‘Persianify’ the Brigade and purge it of its dominance of Russian officers and its Russian commander. Ironside promoted Colonel Reza Khan, a man described as ‘tough as leather boots’, to command the Cossack Brigade; Ironside himself would remark that Reza Khan was ‘the straightest I have met yet, the real life and soul of the show’.11 With the government in Tehran powerless against unrest in the provinces, the establishment of the SSRI in particular, Ironside informed Reza Khan that the British would stand aside if he moved to overthrow the government.
In February 1921, Reza Khan led a force of ~2,000 of the Persian Cossack Brigade to Tehran, ignoring Ahmad Shah Qajar’s orders to return to their barracks. Khan informed Ahmad Shah Qajar and the British legation that he intended to form a strong government to resist Bolshevik expansion and centralise authority over the provinces from Tehran. In a practically bloodless coup, Reza Khan overthrew the cabinet and was appointed as the minister for war and commander-in-chief of the military by Ahmad Shah Qajar, alongside the prime minister, Zia ad-Din. Following the coup, Reza Khan declared:
‘Our aim is to establish a government that will not plunder the treasury. A strong government, that will create a powerful and respected army, because a strong army is the only means of saving the country from the miserable state of its affairs. We want a government that will not discriminate among Gilanis, Tabrizis, and Kermanis. We want to establish a government that will not be an instrument of foreign politics.’
Reza Khan and Zia ad-Din immediately moved to assert Iranian sovereignty, reconvening the Majles in 1921, whose first act was to unanimously annul the Anglo-Persian Agreement. On the same day that the Anglo-Persian Agreement was annulled, an Iranian delegation in Moscow signed the Russo-Persian Treaty of Friendship, in which the Soviets renounced any territorial claims over Iran, ending the looming threat of further Soviet incursions into Iran. However, when Zia ad-Din made it clear that he intended to rely on British loans to fund his domestic agenda, his cabinet collapsed, leaving Reza Khan in sole control of the government.
In Gilan, cracks had already appeared in the uneasy alliance between the Communists and Khan’s nationalist factions. The Communists desired political subordination to the Moscow-based Comintern; Khan’s nationalists were anti-imperialist but prioritised Iranian national sovereignty and local autonomy over international proletariat revolution. With internal divisions resulting in a form of localised civil war in Gilan, Reza Khan turned his attention to asserting the central government’s control over the provinces and marched on Gilan with the Cossack Brigade, capturing the capital, Rasht, in October 1921. The short-lived ‘Soviet Socialist Republic in Iran’ collapsed. Supported by Iranian nationalists, between 1921 and 1924, Reza Khan proceeded to reestablish a unified Iran with authority in the central government in Tehran, of which he was appointed prime minister in 1923. With the thwarting of an attempt by Sheikh Khazal to form his own kingdom in Khuzestan in 1922-1924, the provincial tribal unrest of the post-war years was finally quelled. By 1924, Reza Khan had a military force of ~18,000 at his disposal and had succeeded in establishing a unitary Iranian state under the control of his government, to the satisfaction of Iranian liberal and conservative nationalists alike.
The final act came in October 1925, when the Majles voted to depose Ahmad Shah Qajar and declared the end of the Qajar Dynasty. In the power vacuum, Reza Khan advocated for the formation of an Iranian republic with himself as president, taking inspiration from Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s emerging secular Turkey, a nation which Reza Khan viewed as an example of modernising reform. However, the ulama were dismayed by the secularism of a republic and insisted that a republic was contrary to Shia Islam. The ulama would thus, once again, play a pivotal role in shaping the political characteristics of the state. Reza Khan manoeuvred between political factions, renouncing republicanism and declaring that ‘the institution of constitutional monarchy was the best bulwark against Bolshevism’, and accepting the role of the monarch as the symbolic religious head of state.12 In 1925, the Majles declared Reza Khan as the new Shah, who adopted the royal name ‘Pahlavi’, referencing a Middle Persian language that represented Iran’s pre-Islamic heritage during the Sassanian Empire. Reza Shah Pahlavi’s coronation was marked by the invocation of pre-Islamic Persian greatness and promises to advance a modernising agenda, while respecting Islam, to create a strong, independent Iran.
In the West, the story of Reza Shah Pahlavi’s rise to power is told, typical of the Western lens in which ‘only White men have the power to make history’13, as if both Reza Shah and the Iranians were puppets of British control. The reality is somewhat different. As the noted American scholar of Iran, Richard W. Cottam, observed, ‘nowhere in the world is British cleverness so wildly exaggerated as in Iran…’14 The fact is that Reza Shah was an incredibly deft operator who skillfully manipulated the British and played them against the Bolshevik threat to receive arms and their acquiescence for the coup. Yet while Reza Shah was indeed put in a position to succeed by his elevation to commander of the Cossack Brigades by Ironside and material military assistance to him, and while the British were aware that Reza Shah might intend a coup, when the march on Tehran came, they were in the dark. Ironside himself was on his way to the 1921 Cairo Conference at the time of the coup. And Reza Shah immediately acted to curtail British influence, refusing to retain any British officers in the military or British financial advisors in the civil service, and overseeing the annulment of the Anglo-Persian Agreement.
Within Iran, Reza Shah was viewed, rightly, as the man who had reunited the nation from tribal disturbances, established a sense of security in the nation against foreign powers, and had centralised the government’s authority. He was supported by Iranian nationalists from all major political parties, and he courted all political stripes in Iran by appealing to their sense of Iran as a nation with historic greatness and imbued with a desire to reassert its sovereignty and independence. The tribulations of the First World War into the early 1920s convinced Iranian nationalists that a strong military leader was required to facilitate that modernisation and independence. The deposition of the Qajars and the ascension of Reza Shah Pahlavi were expressions of Iranian nationalist desires through the Majles, not a foreign imposition by the British. Reza Shah Pahlavi was, in this respect, the ‘receptacle of the nationalists’ hopes’.15
The crowning of Reza Shah Pahlavi in 1925 represented the long-drawn endpoint of the Constitutional Revolution and the desire of the Constitutionalists to modernise Iran and create a strong, independent state that invoked the greatness of historic Persia.
Ghattas, K. (2020). Black wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the forty-year rivalry that unraveled culture, religion, and collective memory in the Middle East. Wildfire (Headline Publishing Group).
Keddie, N.R. The Origins of the Religious-Radical Alliance in Iran. Past & Present. 1966 Jul;34:70-80.
Keddie, N.R. Iranian Revolutions in Comparative Perspective. The American Historical Review. 1983 June;88:579-598.
Katouzian, H. The Revolution for Law: A Chronographic Analysis of the Constitutional Revolution of Iran. Middle Eastern Studies. 2011 Sept;47(5):757-777.
Ibid.
Abrahamiam, E. The Causes of the Constitutional Revolution in Iran. International Journal of Middle East Studies. 1979 Aug;10(3):381-414
Ref. 3 Ibid.
Ghods, R.M. Iranian Nationalism and Reza Shah. Middle Eastern Studies. 1991 Jan;27(1):35-45.
Blair-Brysac, S. A Very British Coup: How Reza Shah Won and Lost His Throne. World Policy Journal. 2007;24(2 ):90-103.
Ref. 8 Ibid.
Ref 9. Ibid.
Ibid. Ref 8.
Al-Shami, L. The ‘anti-imperialism’ of idiots. https://leilashami.wordpress.com/2018/04/14/the-anti-imperialism-of-idiots/
Ref 9. Ibid.
Ref 8. Ibid.
gratitude my dude and commendations on your parents on the correct spelling choice.
I learned a lot 🤔