Qajar Dynasty

The hostage takes the country

Drafted from Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017)formation

Agha Muhammad Khan left Shiraz within days of Karim Khan's death in 1779, having spent sixteen years there as a hostage, and spent the following fifteen taking Iran. He had been castrated as a child in the aftermath of Nadir's murder, which by every convention of the period disqualified him from ruling and had been the reason he was thought safe to keep alive.

He took the Caspian provinces first, because the Qajar tribe was there, then Tehran — a small town he made his capital in 1786, chosen because it was close to the Qajar pastures and defensible, and which has been the capital ever since. Then Isfahan, then Fars. The last Zand was hunted for four years, captured, blinded and killed in 1794; Kerman, which had sheltered him, was destroyed and its population blinded in numbers the sources put at twenty thousand. In 1795 he invaded Georgia — a Safavid dependency that had put itself under Russian protection — and sacked Tbilisi. In 1796 he was crowned at Tehran with Nadir's jewels, went to Mashhad, and tortured the blind Shahrukh to death to find where the rest of Nadir's treasure was.

In 1797, in camp at Shusha, two of his own servants whom he had condemned to death the previous evening and carelessly left on duty overnight killed him.

The reign is eighteen years of almost unrelieved cruelty and it did one thing that outlasted it: it reassembled Iran. The country Agha Muhammad Khan left to his nephew was, for the first time since 1722, a single state with one government and a capital. The dynasty that governed Iran for the next hundred and thirty years was founded by a man nobody has ever found a good word for, and it is worth being clear that both halves of that sentence are true.

As the dynasty told it

Drafted from historian, The Dynasty of the Kajars, Translated from the Original Persian Manuscript Presented by His Majesty Fath Ali Shah to Sir Harford Jones Brydges (1833)expansion

In 1811 Fath Ali Shah gave the departing British envoy a manuscript history of his own family. It was translated and printed in London twenty years later, and it is the Qajar account of the Qajar conquest — which makes it the best evidence there is for what the dynasty thought was to its credit.

It begins by explaining the Zands away. Muhammad Hasan Khan, the shah's grandfather, had raised the standard of universal sway in Mazandaran while discord and insurrection overspread Iran, had beaten both Azad Khan the Afghan and Karim Khan Zand several times, and had marched into Fars and besieged Karim Khan in Shiraz — at which point several Qajar nobles conspired against him, practised open treachery, and dissolved the camp, so that he had to retire to Mazandaran, where in 1758 he drank the sherbet of martyrdom at the hands of two or three men of his own tribe. The occurrence of this event, says the court historian, furnished to Karim Khan Zand the means of attaining royalty and became the cause of his elevation; and the verse quoted is they removed the diadem from the head of one nation, and bound the royal jewels around another nation's brows. Karim Khan then urged on the charger of usurpation into Mazandaran and afflicted Astarabad, the capital of the illustrious Qajars.

Thirty-six years later the account reaches Kerman, where Lutf Ali Khan, the last Zand, had been taken in by the governor and the townspeople. The siege ran five months. Famine appeared inside; nine thousand people came out of the town and it did not relieve the rest. Then the sentence the manuscript presents as an achievement: his majesty issued forth this order, powerful as the decree of Destiny: let the amirs and soldiers assault the fort and take it by storm, and let the inhabitants perish by the keen-edged scimitar. They stormed it on a Friday in 1794, and the victors gave full loose to plunder, devastation and the making of prisoners. There was such exceeding slaughter made of the people of Kerman, the historian writes, that the blood flowed in streams.

Lutf Ali Khan was not among the dead. He had got out towards Bam, where men of Sistan hamstrung his horse, threw him down, tied him and brought him into the royal presence; his eyes were put out and he was sent to Tehran and killed there. And the paragraph closes on the item the court evidently thought was the point of the whole campaign: two jewels that had belonged to the royal family, named Taj-i Mah and Darya-i Nur, had been in Lutf Ali Khan's possession and were now transferred back to his majesty.

Tiflis came the following year. Erekle, the ruler of Georgia, was defeated, the fortress was entered, and what fell into the soldiers' hands is itemised in the language of a poem — immense riches, maidens beautiful as the moon, jessamine-bosomed youths, rosy-cheeked damsels — with the number of prisoners given as nearly fifteen thousand. His majesty remained nine days at Tiflis. The army then went on to Ganja and reduced Shakki and Shirvan, and returned to Tehran.

In 1795 he placed the crown on his own head and set out to subdue Khurasan.

None of that is an accusation made by an enemy. It is a dynasty's official account of its founder, written by his nephew's court, presented by a reigning shah to a foreign government as a description of who his family were. The massacre at Kerman and the recovery of the Darya-i Nur are set down in the same paragraph and in the same tone, because to the men who wrote it they were the same kind of fact: the restoration of what had been taken from the Qajars, and the punishment of the people who had sheltered the man who took it.

Nine days at Tiflis produced a debt that Iran was still paying in 1828, and the chapter that records it does not mention the Russians at all.

The century's terms are set

Drafted from Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017)expansion

Fath Ali Shah ruled from 1797 to 1834 over a court of legendary display — the long beard, the jewelled robes, the enormous number of sons — and a state whose central problem had just changed shape. Iran's neighbours were no longer the Ottomans and the Uzbeks. They were Russia, expanding steadily south through the Caucasus, and Britain, increasingly concerned about the approaches to India.

The first Russian war ran from 1804 to 1813 and ended at Gulistan with the loss of Georgia, Daghestan and most of what is now Azerbaijan. The second ran from 1826 to 1828 and ended at Turkmanchay with the loss of Erevan and Nakhchivan, an indemnity the treasury could not pay, a commercial treaty fixing tariffs, and extraterritorial jurisdiction for Russian subjects — the capitulations, which meant that a foreigner in Iran was not subject to Iranian law.

The frontier drawn at Turkmanchay has not moved since. But the more consequential clauses are the other ones, and Amanat's account puts the emphasis there. A state that has been beaten twice and cannot pay an indemnity begins granting things instead of money: legal privileges, tariff ceilings, and eventually concessions. Everything in the following century that looks like a sale of the country to foreigners begins as a way of settling a debt from these wars.

The one serious attempt to prevent it was made by the crown prince. Abbas Mirza, governor of Azerbaijan and commander in both wars, understood exactly what he had lost to and built a nizam-i jadid — a new-model army with European drill, uniforms, artillery and British and French advisers — and sent the first Iranian students to Europe. He was, by the general verdict, the ablest Qajar. He ran out of money for it repeatedly, because the revenue to support a standing army did not exist, and he died in 1833 before his father.

This is the same argument as Otlukbeli in 1473 and Chaldiran in 1514 and Nadir's army in the 1730s, arriving intact in the nineteenth century. The technology changes and the shape does not: a cavalry state meets a drilled one with better guns, understands exactly what beat it, and cannot reproduce it in time.

Forty-eight years

Drafted from Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017)peak

Nasir al-Din Shah ruled from 1848 to 1896, which is the longest reign in Iranian history after Shapur II and Tahmasp I. He came to the throne at sixteen with a chief minister, Amir Kabir, who in three years did more to reform the Iranian state than anyone had since Abbas I: reorganised the revenue, cut court expenditure, disciplined the provincial governors, founded the Dar al-Funun — the polytechnic that trained the country's first European-educated officer and administrative class — and suppressed the Babi movement.

The shah had him dismissed at the urging of the court, whose incomes he had cut, and then murdered in a bath-house at Kashan in 1852. Nasir al-Din is reported to have regretted it for the rest of his life, which was another forty-four years.

The reign that followed is genuinely difficult to characterise and Amanat's biography of him is largely an argument against the two easy versions — the frivolous despot of the nationalist historiography and the helpless victim of the imperial powers. The state acquired a telegraph network, a postal service, a census, newspapers, photography (the shah was a serious amateur photographer and the royal albums are a major visual record), a European-style ministry structure on paper, and three royal tours of Europe that produced a travel diary published in Persian and in translation.

What it did not acquire was revenue. The land tax was farmed to governors who bid for their provinces and recouped the bid; the customs were farmed; there was no central bank, no budget in any useful sense, and no way to pay for the army the wars with Russia had shown was needed. So the government sold things instead, and the fourth chapter is about that.

He was shot in 1896 at the shrine of Shah Abd al-Azim, a few days before the celebration of his fiftieth year, by a follower of the reformist agitator Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. The assassin said at his trial that he had killed him because the country was being sold.

The humbler designation

Drafted from Watson, A History of Persia from the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century to the Year 1858 (1866)peak

Nasir al-Din was sixteen when he was crowned at midnight on 20 October 1848, and Watson — who was at the British legation and knew a good many of the people involved — credits him with one piece of judgement: he had brought with him from Tabriz a man who could run the country.

Mirza Taqi Khan's father had been a cook, promoted to steward in the household of Muhammad Shah's first minister. The son entered the service of the army's commander-in-chief, went to St Petersburg with the mission sent after the murder of the Russian envoy Griboyedov — his only visit to Europe — and came back a mirza, a writer. He was made a khan, became vizier of the Azerbaijan army, and was sent to represent Iran at the Erzurum conferences on the Ottoman frontier, where an English observer thought him beyond comparison the most interesting man among the commissioners of four countries, and where he watched the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms working at first hand.

When the new shah offered him the premiership on the road to Tehran, he did an arithmetic that turns out to be the whole story. Each of the two preceding Qajar shahs had put his first chief vizier to death. So he declined the title of sadr-azam, which a prime minister normally took, and asked instead for the humbler designation of amir-i nizam, commander of the army — hoping, as Watson puts it, to reconcile ambition with prudence.

He found every department of the government in confusion and set about it: the army paid, the peculation stopped, the tax farms audited, a polytechnic founded, a newspaper started, the provincial governors made to account for what they collected. Three years.

Then the measures proved distasteful to enough people that the shah listened to the complaints, and the minister was dismissed and ordered to retire in disgrace to Kashan. His guards called him out of his room every day to make sure he had not escaped. His wife — a princess, the shah's own sister — went out with him at first, and when she saw that the inspection was a formality she stopped, and contented herself instead with tasting every dish set in front of him.

So a man was found who would do it without her knowing. Hajji Ali Khan, whom Watson calls a clever and worthless adventurer, had been brought into the shah's service by Mirza Taqi himself and made chief of the farrashes; to demonstrate his zeal for his new master he volunteered to be his benefactor's executioner. When he arrived at Kashan the household was delighted, assuming that a man who owed his career to their lord had been sent with good news.

On 9 January 1852 the guards called the minister out as usual. He came alone. He was seized, gagged and dragged into a nearby house, thrown on the floor, stripped and tied, and the veins of both his arms and both his legs were opened, and he was left to take several hours to die. Watson says he bore it with a resignation in keeping with the consistent greatness of his life. When the princess grew alarmed at her husband's absence, Hajji Ali Khan told her he had gone to the bath to prepare himself for a robe of honour which the shah had sent.

What followed was undone at once, and Watson lists it without pleasure: the soldiers unpaid again for years, peculation rampant in every department, the clergy recovering their influence, and titles distributed to the great more lavishly than before. Then the protests from foreign governments arrived, and then the remorse. The shah is said to have resolved to keep every anniversary of the death as a day of fasting, and the dead man's two infant daughters were betrothed to two of his sons.

Watson draws a moral from it that says as much about 1866 as about 1852. He cites Buckle for the proposition that a people makes its own government and that no government can force progress on an unsound people, and concludes that the upright minister fell because his measures displeased too many, and was replaced by a vizier whose character was better matched to the men he had to govern. It is a Victorian's answer and it does a certain amount of work for a British legation official explaining why Iranian reform failed. The facts he assembled underneath it support a narrower and harder reading: that the office was survivable and the title was not, that Mirza Taqi had understood this precisely enough to refuse the title, and that it made no difference at all.

Selling what was left

Drafted from Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017)contraction

The Qajar state's characteristic financial act was to grant a foreigner an exclusive right in exchange for cash now and a share later, and it is worth being precise about what kind of transaction that is, because it is not any of the things pre-modern governments did for money.

It is not a monopoly in the old sense: the state did not operate these monopolies, it sold them. It is not tribute, because nobody was formally subordinate to anybody. It is not a toll. What was happening was the alienation of future revenue by a government that needed cash in the current year — a modern instrument, in a country with a medieval fisc, sold to buyers who understood the instrument much better than the seller did.

The list is long and a few entries carry it. In 1872 the Reuter concession gave a British subject the exclusive right to build railways and tramways, exploit all mineral resources, run the customs, and found a national bank — Lord Curzon called it the most complete surrender of the entire industrial resources of a kingdom into foreign hands that had ever been dreamed of. Russian pressure and domestic outrage killed it. In 1889 the Imperial Bank of Persia got the note issue. In 1890 a British company got the monopoly on the purchase, sale and export of all Iranian tobacco, which the country refused to let him keep. In 1901 William Knox D'Arcy got a sixty-year concession over oil across most of the country for twenty thousand pounds and a sixteen per cent royalty.

From 1898 the customs were administered by Belgian officials, on the reasoning that a neutral third party was preferable to either of the two powers. The state borrowed from Russia to pay for a royal tour, and from Britain to pay Russia.

By 1907 the two powers formalised what they had been doing informally: the Anglo-Russian Convention divided Iran into a Russian sphere in the north, a British sphere in the south-east and a neutral zone between, without consulting the Iranian government and while it was in the middle of a constitutional revolution.

The institution the Safavids built, arriving

Drafted from Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017)aside?What aside means

In 1890 the shah sold a British company the exclusive right to buy, sell and export every leaf of tobacco grown in Iran. Tobacco was a smallholder crop, a merchant commodity and a universal habit, and the concession put every grower, every dealer and every smoker under a foreign monopoly at once.

The bazaar organised. Handbills appeared; the ulama preached; and in late 1891 a ruling was circulated in the name of Mirza Hasan Shirazi, the senior Shi'i jurist of the age, resident in Samarra in Ottoman Iraq, declaring the use of tobacco to be war against the hidden imam for as long as the concession stood.

The country stopped smoking. It stopped so completely that the shah's own household is reported to have refused to prepare his water-pipe. Within weeks the government cancelled the concession and borrowed half a million pounds from a British bank to pay the compensation, which was the country's first foreign debt.

The line of this runs back four hundred years. A dynasty declared Twelver Shi'ism the religion of Iran in 1501, discovered it had no clergy to enforce the decision with, and imported jurists from Jabal Amil and Iraq to build one. Those jurists and their successors developed, over the following two centuries, a doctrine that in the hidden imam's absence his authority devolves on the qualified scholars rather than on a king.

The Tobacco Protest is that doctrine cashed. A ruling issued from outside the country, by a man holding no office in it, overturned an act of state in eight weeks, and it did so because the clerical establishment had endowments the shah did not control, a communication network he could not interrupt, and an alliance with the merchant class whose interests the concession had destroyed.

Three hundred and ninety years after a fourteen-year-old imported an institution to make his authority lawful, that institution demonstrated it could unmake his successor's.

Rulers had borrowed legitimacy from clergy before and been embarrassed by it — the Mamluks kept a shadow caliph in Cairo for exactly this purpose and had to manage him. This is the completed version of the problem, and it performs twice more, in 1906 and in 1979.

A law the shah did not make

Drafted from Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017)contraction

In December 1905, after the governor of Tehran had sugar merchants beaten on the soles of their feet for the price of sugar, the bazaar closed and a large number of clerics and merchants took sanctuary — first at a shrine, then, in the summer of 1906, some twelve thousand of them in the garden of the British legation. They asked for a house of justice. By the time the movement finished asking, they wanted a constitution and an elected assembly.

They got both. Muzaffar al-Din Shah signed the fundamental law in December 1906 and died five days later. The first majles met, drafted a supplementary law modelled partly on the Belgian constitution with a clause giving a committee of senior clerics a veto over legislation contrary to Islamic law, and began trying to audit the government's finances.

His successor Muhammad Ali Shah bombarded it. In June 1908 the Persian Cossack Brigade, under its Russian commander, shelled the majles building and the constitutionalists were killed, imprisoned or driven out. Resistance held out at Tabriz through a siege, and in 1909 constitutionalist forces from Gilan and Bakhtiari tribesmen from the south converged on Tehran, took it, deposed the shah and put his eleven-year-old son on the throne.

The constitution survived. What did not survive was the possibility of an independent Iranian government in this period. The 1907 convention had already divided the country into spheres; in 1911 Russia sent an ultimatum demanding the dismissal of the American treasurer-general the majles had hired to reform the finances, and when the assembly refused, Russian troops occupied the north and the assembly was closed by the cabinet. During the First World War, in which Iran was neutral, Russian, British and Ottoman armies fought across it, and the resulting disruption and famine killed a large share of the population.

The Constitutional Revolution is the hinge of the whole dynasty all the same. It made law into something a body other than the monarch could make, and it is the reference point for every Iranian political argument of the following century, including the one in 1979 that ended the monarchy altogether.

The brigade

Drafted from Amanat, Iran: A Modern History (2017)end

The Persian Cossack Brigade was raised in 1879, on Russian advice, with Russian officers, as a personal guard for the shah and a model unit. It was paid, permanent and centrally commanded — the only force in Iran that reliably was — and by the end of the First World War, with the country occupied and the government without revenue, it was the only military organisation in the country that functioned.

In February 1921 its Iranian commander, Reza Khan, marched it on Tehran together with a journalist named Sayyid Zia and took the government. Reza Khan became minister of war, then prime minister, put down the separatist republics in Gilan and Khurasan, and in 1925 had the majles depose the absent Ahmad Shah and vote him the throne. He was crowned the following year and took the dynastic name Pahlavi.

It was an internal usurpation of exactly the kind that had ended the Ayyubids in 1250, and the recurrence is not a coincidence.

The same failure runs from Samarra in the ninth century to Tehran in the twentieth. A ruler who cannot raise a loyal army from his own society builds or hires a professional one that owes him personally; the professional force becomes the only effective power in the state; and eventually it makes a ruler it prefers. Samarra in the 860s. The Ghaznavids out of the Samanid guard in 962. The Bahriyya in 1250. The Safavid ghulams, who did not quite. The Ottoman janissaries, repeatedly.

Tehran in 1921 is the last performance of it, and the details have moved with the century: the force was raised by a foreign power on a foreign model, its officers had been Russian until the revolution recalled them, and the man who used it did not claim descent from anybody. He had the parliament vote for him.

The dynasty that ended had reassembled Iran in 1796 out of fifty years of anarchy and handed on a state with fixed borders, a constitution, a national assembly and an oil industry, having lost the Caucasus, most of Central Asia and a good deal of its own sovereignty in the process. Both halves of that are true and the second is the one Iranian historiography has mostly recorded.

A poor attempt to trace

Drafted from Browne, The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909 (1910)afterlife

The dynasty was deposed in 1925 by the parliament it had granted in 1906 and shelled in 1908, which is a tidy enough ending. What outlived it is the parliament, the argument the parliament was about, and — in English at least — one book.

The professor

Edward Browne was the Cambridge professor of Persian who had spent his career on mystical poetry and the biographical dictionaries. In 1910 he published The Persian Revolution of 1905-1909, and he tells the reader in the first paragraph of the preface exactly what kind of book it is.

He declines to call it a history, in view of the difficulty of impartially criticising contemporary events, though he says it is intended for one. He then explains why he wrote it: Not willingly or without regret have I forsaken for a while the pleasant paths of Persian literature to enter into the arid deserts of international politics. But the call was imperious and the summons urgent to neglect nothing of that little which lay in my power in order to arouse in the hearts of my countrymen some sympathy for a people who have, in my opinion, hitherto received less than they deserve.

The dedication is in verse and is dedicated to everyone who had aided Persia in her hour of need, whether by tongue or pen or sword, and asks that they approve his poor attempt to trace this final effort of an ancient race to burst its bondage and rise to life a nation once again.

That is not the preface of a disinterested account, and Browne does not pretend it is. He was campaigning — writing to newspapers, raising money, lobbying the Foreign Office against the Anglo-Russian Agreement of 1907 that had carved Iran into spheres over the heads of the people who lived there. His chapter on that agreement is titled as seen through Persian eyes, which was not the usual way of putting it in London.

Why that matters to the record

Because it is the book. For most of a century, what an English-speaking reader knew about the Constitutional Revolution came from a partisan of one side, who had the documents, read the language, corresponded with the participants, and said on page one that he had a case to make.

There are worse arrangements. Browne is candid where a concealed partisan would not be — he gives his own analogy for the limits of argument, that two travellers can usefully discuss the best road to Penzance but not if one of them wants to go to John o'Groats — and he prints the constitutional documents in full as appendices so a reader can check him. The dishonest version of this book would have been written in the same tone with the preface removed.

What the revolution left

The constitution of 1906 was never repealed. Reza Shah ruled under it and ignored it; his son ruled under it and ignored it; and it was still the formal law of Iran until 1979, when it was replaced by an argument the clerical establishment had been developing since the Safavids imported it — that in the imam's absence authority belongs to the qualified scholars and not to a king.

Three things came out of the Qajar century and all three are still running. A parliament that has been suspended, packed, shelled and reconstituted and has never quite gone away. A clerical establishment with its own money that discovered in 1891, over a tobacco monopoly, that it could overturn an act of state in eight weeks. And a settled national conviction that the country's resources are sold too cheaply to foreigners by governments that need cash this year.

The dynasty is remembered for losing the Caucasus and granting the concessions. What it actually bequeathed was the three parties to every Iranian political argument since.