Muzaffar al-Din Shah

Muzaffar al-Din Shah was the Qajar king of Iran who conceded a parliament, the Majlis, to the constitutional movement in August 1906, signed the constitution it wrote on 30 December, and died five days later, an ill, mild and indebted man who had spent ten years on the throne borrowing from Russia to pay for three journeys to Europe and had sold, for a few thousand pounds, the concession that became the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. He was the fifth son of Nasir al-Din Shah and had waited forty years as governor of Azerbaijan at Tabriz, the heir's traditional post, until his father was shot in 1896. He came to Tehran with the Tabriz courtiers and a nervous illness the European doctors called neurasthenia. The government stayed with the ministers who had served his father, the Amin al-Sultan above all, who raised the money for the shah's travels with Russian loans of 1900 and 1902 secured on the customs, which were put under a Belgian, Naus, to collect. In 1901 he granted William Knox D'Arcy the right to search for oil in the whole country outside the five northern provinces for sixty years, for twenty thousand pounds, sixteen per cent of profits and twenty thousand shares. The oil was found at Masjed Soleyman in 1908, after his death. The protest that became the constitutional revolution began in December 1905 when the governor of Tehran had merchants bastinadoed over the price of sugar. The bazaar closed, the clergy took sanctuary at the shrine of Shah Abd al-Azim, and in July 1906 some twelve thousand people took sanctuary in the garden of the British legation. He dismissed the grand vizier, and on 5 August 1906 issued the decree for an elected national assembly, which met in October and wrote a fundamental law modelled on Belgium's. He signed it in his sickbed on 30 December 1906 and died on 3 January 1907; his son Muhammad Ali, who had never wanted it, bombarded the Majlis in 1908.

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