Persian Constitutional Revolution
Iran got a constitution and a parliament in 1906, and the shah bombarded the parliament two years later. The Qajar dynasty had been selling the country in pieces. A tobacco monopoly granted to a British subject in 1890 produced a nationwide boycott backed by a clerical ruling that made smoking forbidden, and was cancelled; Russian and British loans mortgaged the customs revenue; and the court spent the proceeds in Europe. The immediate trigger in December 1905 was the public beating of sugar merchants in Tehran for not lowering prices. The protest that followed used a traditional method to unprecedented effect: bast, taking sanctuary, first in a shrine and then, in July 1906, with some 12,000 people camped in the gardens of the British legation for weeks. The coalition was unusual — merchants of the bazaar, Shia clergy, and western-educated reformers, who agreed on the need to limit the shah and on very little else. Muzaffar al-Din Shah conceded an elected assembly, the Majlis, which met in October and wrote a constitution modelled on Belgium's, with a supplementary law giving a committee of clerics the power to review legislation for conformity with Islam. He died five days after signing it. His son Mohammad Ali Shah shelled the Majlis with Russian-officered Cossacks in June 1908 and suspended the constitution, and constitutionalists from Tabriz and Isfahan took Tehran and deposed him the following year. The Anglo-Russian convention of 1907 had already divided the country into spheres. The alliance that made it did not survive it. Clerics who had backed a parliament against a shah discovered what a parliament would legislate, and the argument about whether Iranian government should be constitutional, clerical or both has been running in one form or another ever since.
- Year: 1905 CE
- Category: Political
