Mohammad Ali Shah
Mohammad Ali Shah was shah of Persia from January 1907 to July 1909, the Qajar who inherited the constitution his father had signed on his deathbed and spent two and a half years trying to be rid of it. He was the first Persian monarch deposed by his own subjects since the eighteenth century. He had been governor of Azerbaijan, as crown princes were, tutored by a Russian, Shapshal, who stayed at his side. He came to the throne owing the Russian bank money and the Russian legation loyalty. He did not attend the Majlis's opening or take its oath until it made him. The quarrel was over everything, the budget, the ministers, the Anglo-Russian convention of August 1907 that divided the country into spheres over the Majlis's head. It ended on 23 June 1908, when the Persian Cossack Brigade under its Russian commander Liakhov shelled the Majlis building and the Sepahsalar mosque next to it, hanged the constitutionalist preachers, jailed the deputies, and closed the newspapers. He ruled by decree for a year. The year was Tabriz. The city refused the coup, the street fighter Sattar Khan and the Bakhtiari khans held it through a siege by the royal army until the Russians marched in to lift it in April 1909 and, in doing so, ended the shah's argument that he alone could keep order. The Bakhtiari came north from Isfahan and the Gilan fighters came south from Rasht under the Armenian Yeprem Khan. On 13 July 1909 the two columns took Tehran. He fled to the Russian legation on 16 July. He was deposed by the assembly of notables the same day in favour of his son Ahmad, aged eleven. He went to Odessa on a Russian pension. He came back in July 1911 with Turkoman irregulars and a landing at Gomesh Tepe to take the throne again. He was beaten at Firuzkuh in September by a government force under Yeprem. He went back to Russia and then, after 1917, to Constantinople and San Remo, where he died in April 1925, eight months before the Majlis abolished his dynasty. He was born in Tabriz, the son of Muzaffar al-Din Shah. The constitution he shelled outlived him, on paper, until 1979.
- Lived: 1872 CE – 1925 CE
- Nationality: Persian
- Roles: shah, monarch
