The Constitutional Revolution (1905-10)

The Constitutional Revolution began in 1905 as a broad-based urban movement led by the three most important senior clerics in Tehran: Sayyid Abdollah Behbehani, Sayyid Mohammad Tabatabai, and Shaykh Fazlollah Nuri. But the movement eventually broke apart. First, Shaykh Nuri defected to the royalists in 1908, enabling the shah to bomb Parliament and execute some of the revolutionaries. This triggered off the civil war of 1908-9. In changing sides, Shaykh Nuri accused his former colleagues of imitating foreigners, subverting the sacred law, being secret Babis (forerunners of Bahais) and Freemasons, and introducing hereti-

cal notions such as liberty, equality, anarchism, nihilism, socialism, and "naturalism" (the supremacy of natural law over divine law).^[2] He excommunicated the leading constitutionalists on the grounds they were apostates and "sowers of corruption on earth" — both capital offenses according to the sacred law.^[3] After the civil war, Shaykh Nuri himself was hanged for "sowing corruption on earth."

A further split occurred in 1910 when a group of guerrilla fighters headed by Sattar Khan, a hero of the civil war, refused to obey a government order to disarm. After a brief but violent confrontation at Atabek Park in Tehran, Yeprem Khan, the recently appointed police chief, succeeded in disarming them. Yeprem Khan used Bakhtiyari tribesmen as well as fellow Armenian veterans of the civil war. He also received the support of a radical named Haydar Khan, who had recently helped found the secular Democrat party.^[4] After the Atabek Park incident, Sattar Khan, who was wounded in the confrontation, was pensioned off, and his supporters were disbanded. Some hail Sattar Khan as the real hero of the Constitutional Revolution, crediting him with saving Tabriz during the civil war and trying to prevent the revolutionary movement from being disarmed. They also describe him as a "martyr," claiming that his death, four years later, was caused by wounds sustained at Atabek Park.

The Khomeinists, including Khomeini himself, have not always been consistent in their evaluations of the Constitutional Revolution. At times, especially in their prepopulist days, they depicted the revolution, from its very inception, as a wholly British "plot" hatched in their legation, carried out by their "agents" (^cummal ), and designed to undermine the sacred law.^[5] At other times, especially at the height of their populist rhetoric, they have praised the revolution as a mass anti-imperialist struggle that had initially been led by the clergy but had later been taken over by scheming secular radicals.^[6] "The constitutional movement," Khomeini argued, "started well, but in time corrupt individuals took it over and thereby alienated the public."^[7] One of Khomeini's close advisers claimed that leftists began to betray the country as early as 1909 when troublemakers from the Caucasus sowed dissension

among the clergy, causing Shaykh Nuri's martyrdom and Ayatollah Behbehani's assassination.^[8]

In the prepopulist interpretation, Shaykh Nuri was the true hero. Al-Ahmad, in his famous pamphlet Gharbzadegi (The plague from the West), claimed that Shaykh Nuri was martyred in front of a large jeering crowd in Cannon Square because he tried to protect Islam from the likes of "Malkum Khan, the Armenian, and Taliboff, the Caucasian Social Democrat." "To my mind," proclaimed al-Ahmad, "the corpse of that great man dangling on the gallows is like a flag raised to signify the triumph of this deadly disease."^[9] Feraydun Adamiyat, the leading historian of the Constitutional Revolution, retorted that al-Ahmad's praise for traditional culture and denunciation of Western ideas would inevitably lead to the conclusion that Iran should never free itself of its traditional institutions, including that of oriental despotism.^[10]

Khomeini was equally admiring of Shaykh Nuri. He claimed that "enemies of Islam" executed him by cleverly fooling the public as well as the other grand ayatollahs.^[11] Khomeini's disciples have praised Shaykh Nuri as the "Islamic movement's first martyr in contemporary Iran." They have argued that Orientalists as well as Iranian secularists conspired to smear him as a "reactionary mulla" and have said that he was executed by Armenians, Freemasons, and others contaminated with the Western plague.^[12] One newspaper article went so far as to claim that the orders for his execution had come directly from the British Foreign Office.^[13] It is significant that postage stamps issued by the Islamic Republic have honored Shaykh Nuri but not Behbehani and Tabatabai.

By accepting in his television recantation the official version of Shaykh Nuri, Kianuri added a personal dimension to the historic crisis: Shaykh Nuri was Kianuri's grandfather. However, Kianuri's father, Shaykh Mahdi, Nuri's eldest son, had been a staunch revolutionary; it was even rumored that Shaykh Mahdi had been a member of the jeering crowd at his father's execution.^[14] These rumors, however, are highly suspect, for their source was an extremely conservative British commentator who not only sided with the tsar and the Qajars but was also eager to prove that most Iranians, especially the constitutional liberals, were devoid

of all humane instincts, including that of family feelings.^[15] Mahdi Malekzadeh, a leading historian and participant in the revolution, dismissed the whole story as pure fabrication.^[16]

In the more populistic interpretation of the Constitutional Revolution, the Islamic Republic claims the real heroes of the revolution to be Ayatollahs Behbehani and Tabatabai and their ally among the armed volunteers Sattar Khan. According to this view, all was well until 1909-10, when the secular radicals of the Democrat party pushed the two grand ayatollahs aside, assassinated Behbehani, and forcefully disarmed the more devout guerrillas. This view incorporates the Constitutional Revolution into a larger picture depicting the whole of modern Iranian history — from the 1891 Tobacco Crisis to the 1979 Islamic Revolution — as a people's anti-imperialist struggle led entirely by the "freedom-loving" clergy.^[17]

Both interpretations distort the Constitutional Revolution by ignoring the contributions of the other social groups: the merchants who sparked off the whole crisis, the bazaar guilds that provided the revolution with its popular base, the intellectuals whose secret societies helped coordinate the movement, the reform-minded aristocrats who weakened the establishment from within, and the Bakhtiyari tribesmen who, together with the Armenian and Georgian volunteers, did much of the decisive fighting.^[18]

The mythology surrounding Shaykh Nuri obscures several awkward facts about him. Shaykh Nuri had been on good terms with the Russians since the turn of the century.^[19] He had refused to support the early bazaar protests against the Europeans in charge of collecting customs dues. He had caused a major scandal in 1905 by endorsing the sale of a cemetery to the Russians for the construction of their bank — the inadvertent exhuming of bodies had triggered street protests.^[20] He had organized an anticonstitutionalist rally in June 1907 after obtaining funds from the same Russian bank.^[21] In breaking with Parliament, Shaykh Nuri become the main court ideologue. He praised the shah as the guardian of Islam, arguing that representative government contradicted Islam and that obedience to the monarchy was a divine

obligation incumbent on all, including the clergy.^[22] What is more, he endangered the lives of the leading constitutionalists by denouncing them as atheists, heretics, apostates, and secret Babis — charges designed to incite the devout to violence. In fact, Shaykh Nuri was finally condemned to death by a fellow ayatollah not so much for supporting the shah as for being responsible for the murder of leading constitutionalists. In describing Shaykh Nuri's execution, school textbooks now cite al-Ahmad's eulogy and add that the presiding judge had sold himself to the West. They also make the preposterous claim that Yeprem Khan — an Armenian with little education and absolutely no legal training — had sat on the high court that had condemned the grand ayatollah to death.^[23]

Khomeini's treatment of Shaykh Nuri and the constitutionalists is somewhat disingenuous. He denounced the constitutionalists for not demanding the abolition of the monarchy but at the same time praised Shaykh Nuri for opposing the same reformers, leaving the impression that Shaykh Nuri opposed kingship.^[24] In actual fact, the constitutionalists had wanted limited monarchy whereas Shaykh Nuri had argued in favor of kingship unfettered by elected assemblies. To claim Shaykh Nuri as the forerunner of the antimonarchical movement is to turn history inside out.

The religious-populist mythology surrounding Tabatabai, Behbehani, and Sattar Khan is equally distorting. Tabatabai not only admired European liberalism but was also a not-so-secret member of the Freemason Lodge in Tehran.^[25] Behbehani had kept silent during the 1891 Tobacco Crisis, and again in 1902 when the British obtained an oil concession — probably because the British had given him some "expense money."

While some hailed Sattar Khan as the savior of Tabriz and the "Garibaldi" of Iran, many fellow revolutionaries saw him as a "drunkard," "brigand," and "plunderer."^[26] The government disarmed Sattar Khan not because he was a radical determined to push the revolution further — as latter-day populists would like to believe — but because it feared, with good reason, that the continued fighting between rival gangs would tax the patience of the public.^[27] Sattar Khan made his last stand not over any principle but over the monetary compensation offered for his weapons.^[28]

Many of his final supporters were Georgians who could not return home and whose employment prospects in Iran were bleak. He himself was affiliated with the conservative Moderate party, which was led by wealthy politicians, even former royalists. This party opposed the Democrats over social issues such as land reform, child labor, progressive income tax, women's education, and equality before the law. Finally, the description of Sattar Khan as the savior of Tabriz and the revolution conveniently overlooks the fact that Bakhtiyaris, Armenians, and Georgians did much of the decisive fighting and that Tabriz was saved from the royalist siege thanks to the timely intervention of the Tsarist army, which Sattar Khan himself welcomed as the only alternative to famine and defeat.^[29]