During the late 17th and early 18th centuries Persian painting was passing through a difficult stage. Just as in the Mongol period of the 14th century Persian artists were busy absorbing Chinese ideas and conventions, so in our period they were struggling to accommodate themselves to the artistic canons of Europe. We cannot blame them, however deplorable the tendency may seem; increasing contact with Europe made such a development inevitable. It was, indeed, going on simultaneously all over the East, and leaving its mark on various Asian schools of painting. In the hermit empire of Japan European scientific books and engravings of all kinds were eagerly sought and smuggled in through the Dutch traders in the face of official disapproval. By the end of the 18th century they were being regurgitated in Japanese popular form, and landscape prints attempting European perspective and atmospheric effects were designed by Toyoharu, Hokuju, and others. In China the same influences flowed into the open port of Canton, where many Chinese painters were busily producing pictures for the western market (a side-line to the tea trade) in which the native style is considerably modified by European ideas of perspective, modelling, and drapery. They vary enormously in quality, and were generally produced in series - court costumes, trades, boats on the Yang-tze, and even tortures - but no educated Chinaman of the time would have regarded them as true paintings. In India, too, the period 1750–1850 was the heyday of “Company Painting”, usually practised under direct English patronage, and devoted to the illustration of local types, castes, religious festivals, fauna, flora, and topography, in a more or less westernized style.

The 20th century has witnessed a dramatic change in the kind and form of entertainment in Iran. This is particularly true of the period since World War II. Some traditional entertainments have disappeared, others have undergone radical transformation, some are dying. New foreign forms have appeared and become popular. The crucial point, however, is that for the majority of the population, especially those living in towns, their major entertainment is no longer connected with the seasonal festivals such as the spring solstice and the autumn harvest, nor with religious holidays. Entertainment has become more a leisure pastime unrelated to calendar determinants. These changes result from rapid urbanization, increased means of communication, and the overall shifts in the socio-economic and political structure.

Festivals from pre-Islamic times and connected with the seasons, like Barnishastan-i Kūsa (the ride of the beardless man), which used to take place on a cold day at the beginning of spring, had already died out by the opening of the century, as had Mīr-i Naurūzī (the Prince of the New Year). ‘Umarkushān, a farce played out in town streets from the 16th century onwards, is now forgotten. Khaima-yi Shab-bāzī, the puppet theatre, with glove-dolls and marionettes, is on the wane, although this tradition has been adapted and used by some contemporary playwrights. Tamāshā: acrobats and conjurers, snake charmers, monkey tamers, and Lūtīs who performed in the public squares and coffee houses are only now rarely seen. Pardadārī is story-chanting with the aid of a huge illustrative painting on a canvas usually measuring 3 × 1½ metres, and held up between poles at both ends.

In the course of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th, the foreign economic impact on Iran was far weaker than on its neighbours: India, Transcaucasia, Turkey, Syria, Egypt and, after 1865, Central Asia. A few figures illustrate the difference. In 1913, Iran's foreign trade (exports and imports) per capita was $10, Turkey's $15, Egypt's $24 and India's $4. Foreign capital investment totalled about $150 million, compared to over $1,000 million each in Egypt and Turkey and nearly $2,000 million in India. There were, to all intents and purposes, no railways in Iran, as against some 3,500 kilometres in Turkey, 4,300 in Egypt and 56,000 in India, and practically no modern factories. It may be added that the foreign social and cultural impact — as indicated, for example, by the number of alien residents, foreign schools, books and newspapers published or films shown — was also much weaker in Iran.

Several factors explain this situation. First, there was Iran's geographic isolation: until the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 it was over 10,000 miles away from Western Europe and 1,500–2,000 miles from the main centres of Russian economic activity; and in the era of sea trade, Iran, unlike its Middle Eastern neighbours, lay off the world's great commercial routes. Secondly there was its physical structure: its inhospitable coast lines, rugged terrain, and the fact that its most fertile and richest provinces are cut off from the open seas by mountain ranges and deserts which, coupled with lack of navigable rivers, inhibited facility of communications.

THE ASCENDANCY OF QAVĀM AL-SALTANA, 1941–7

In Iran, as 1941 ended, the fact that it was an occupied country was more important than the departure of the former ruler and the accession of his twenty-two-year-old son. British and Soviet military units maintained order in the major urban centres and ensured that the communications system contributed to helping the war effort. None of the three allies had any immediate interest in the country itself. Their concern was primarily strategic: to keep the Germans out, ensure the flow of oil, and assist the Soviets with war-materials transported across Iran's mountains and deserts by rail and road. In these circumstances, Iranian politicians found themselves relatively free to pursue their own goals, constrained only by the Allies' preoccupation with internal security. Although public opinion took it for granted that the fate of the country depended once again upon the whims of the British and Russian ambassadors, reviving memories of conditions under the last Qājārs, the reality was rather different. Iran was beginning a decade in which Constitutionalism, accompanied by factional strife, could enjoy free play. The power struggles now being played out were, once again, the politics of élite politicians, landowners or wealthy entrepreneurs for the most part, or their agents; but what was important was that parliament mattered again, as did the office of prime minister. Parties as significant entities did not exist; party slogans and party groupings did. Perhaps a more accurate measure of the resuscitation of political life, febrile though it often appeared to be, was the flowering of a press now comparatively uncensored.

It would, no doubt, be the result of selective hindsight to regard the first eight decades of the 20th century as the ineluctable prelude to the Islamic Revolution of 1978–9. The cultural and political orientation of Iranian society was placed repeatedly in question as the Pahlavī family sought to transform the monarchy into a modern, authoritarian state, and secularist, leftist and nationalist forces emerged on the political scene. For several decades, moreover, most of the leading ‘ulamā made no effort to exert a decisive influence outside the relatively narrow confines of the religious institution. Nonetheless, the tenacity of religion as a major force throughout the modern history of Iran is remarkable and unmistakable, and we may legitimately discern in a whole series of Islamic personages, institutions and movements the antecedents that made possible – although by no means inevitable – the great transformations ushered in by the revolution of 1978–9.

The preponderant rôle played by ‘ulamā in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, especially in its earlier phases, is well known. The alliance concluded in November 1905 by two leading mujtahids of Tehran, Sayyid ‘Abd-Allāh Bihbahānī and Sayyid Muhammad Tabātabā'ī, to bring about the overthrow of ‘Ain al-Daula, prime minister of the day, is often considered the starting point of the revolution. The revolution had been preceded, moreover, by almost a century of sporadic conflict between leading ‘ulamā and successive Qājār rulers. Following on the tobacco boycott of 1891–2, ‘ulamā-led protests against loans taken from foreign powers and the consequent alienation of the Iranian economy became increasingly frequent in the opening years of the 20th century.

ARCHITECTURE

Introduction

“At a distance, Tehran, built in great part of the mud on which it stands, is only distinguished from the surrounding plain by the green trees of its many gardens; but as the traveller gets nearer he will see the outline of the castellated city wall and the tiled domes and minarets of mosques. He will enter the town by a grandiose gateway adorned with glazed bricks in patterns, the prevailing tones being blue and yellow relieved with black and white, the whole giving a touch of splendour to its squalid surroundings. These gateways are twelve in number; some are adorned with the exploits of Rustum, the Hercules and knight-errant of Persia, and others depict the Persian soldier of today”. This picture of Tehran, as drawn by Ella Sykes in 1894, is an appropriately evocative introduction to the architecture of the period since it is the buildings which give the city its unfamiliar exotic appearance. Her account is one of the more sympathetic of the many written in tones ranging from wonder, disparagement and sarcasm to sober assessment by the Europeans who visited Tehran since it became Iran's capital in 1786. Most 19th-century Persian cities of any size presented a similar architectural pattern. City sites tended to have a long history of occupation. A harsh terrain and climate severely limited areas of settlement; communication difficulties in a large country made it essential that a city was sited in a good strategic position, preferably on a trade route; proximity to a water supply was vital near foothills whose water-tables would feed qanāts.

THE POWER STRUGGLE IN POST-NĀDIR IRAN

Scarcely any of the great conquerors of history can have destroyed his life's work quite so completely as Nādir Shāh did in the months before his death. His unreasonable exactions and barbarous suppression of the ensuing provincial revolts spread disaffection to every corner of his realms, and finally brought his own nephew, ‘Alī Qulī Khān, at the head of a rebel army, to the borders of Khurāsān itself. His short-sighted favouritism towards his new Afghan and Uzbek contingents, over his long-suffering Iranian officers and men, split his own army irreparably and was the immediate cause of his assassination.

The morning after this event (11 Jumādā II 1160/1 July 1747 New Style), his heterogeneous army, encamped at Khabūshān, rapidly disintegrated. The detested Afghans fought their way clear under Ahmad Khan Abdālī, who, as Ahmad Shāh Durrānī, later seized the eastern half of Nādir's domains; their compatriots in the Mashhad garrison were prudently allowed to retire by the governor and Superintendent (mutavallī) of the shrine, Mīr Sayyid Muhammad, who from now on was to play an important rôle in the troubled politics of the former capital. The bulk of the Iranian contingents, notably the Bakhtiyārī under ‘Alī Mardān Khān, struggled back to Mashhad, and initially gave their support to ‘Alī Qulī Khān who, with many promises and much largesse, was enthroned as ‘Adil Shāh a few weeks later.

But the new ruler soon disappointed many of his early adherents; he lacked his uncle's imperious magnetism to pull together the surviving elements of a sprawling and exhausted empire.

The close of the First World War found Iran in a state of near anarchy. Despite its proclaimed neutrality, it had been invaded and fought over by the troops of the various belligerents, the eventual outcome being occupation by British and Russian forces. In some provinces the war had caused serious dislocation of economic life. Agricultural production had fallen, the presence of the occupying forces had created acute shortages of basic commodities, while bad harvests over extensive areas of the country, coupled with manipulation of the grain markets by speculators, had resulted in devastating famines. Such scanty prestige as the government of Ahmad Shāh had possessed in 1914 had been further eroded by 1918. Ahmād Shāh had succeeded his detested father, Muhammad ‘Al' Shāh, in 1909 at the age of twelve, but he was hardly more than a cipher. Over vast tracts of the country tribal chieftains or great landlords, such as the Shaukat al-Mulk of Bīrjand and Qā'in, exercised a seigneurial authority with little regard for the Tehran government. Since 1906, Iran had been a constitutional monarchy, with an elected Majlis, or parliament, and a cabinet appointed by the Shah but responsible to the country's chosen representatives, although the language of the original Constitutional Law relating to the subject was ambiguous. The deputies of the Majlis constituted, for the most part, fairly obvious “interest groups”: landowners, tribal leaders, the ‘ulamā, and in the case of the larger urban centres, the bāzār.

The Qājār land system was inherited from the Safavids and goes back through the Īlkhāns and Saljūqs to the early centuries of Islam. The earlier systems had resulted from the historical incidents of conquest and had been moulded by local custom and the theory of the sharī'a. This was also to some extent true of the Qājār system, but though there was a correspondence between it and the earlier systems there was not necessarily identity between them. Although abuses similar to those found in Western European feudalism, such as the existence of private armies and the subjection of the peasantry, were associated with the Qājār land system, and although there was a close connection between the revenue assessment and the levy of troops, it was not, in the technical sense, a feudal system, and nor had it developed out of a feudal system. It is to be seen not only in relation to the idea of property but also against the background of demographic movements and economic change.

The urban life and extensive commerce which had developed under the Safavids had been severely damaged by the disorders which had followed the fall of that dynasty. Agriculture suffered from the general recession of the eighteenth century and was probably also adversely affected by the depopulation which occurred in some parts of the country at the time of the Afghan invasion and in the latter years of Nādir Shāh. The nineteenth century witnessed a reversal of these trends, but the revival was not uniform throughout the country or throughout the century. Lack of communications continued to impede the movement of goods and to accentuate regional isolation.

The basis for the relationships between the Iranian and Ottoman empires in modern times was the Treaty of Qasr-i Shīrīn (17 May 1639). It ended the war which had gone on between the two for over a century and it established the boundaries which were to survive with little change into modern times. The salient division of the Middle East was preserved: the Tigris–Euphrates basin and eastern Anatolia remained under the Ottoman Sultan while the Caucasus remained in Iranian hands, later to fall to Russia. The Ottomans thus failed to achieve their long-standing objectives in the Caucasus and Āzarbāījān, but Mesopotamia and the route to the Persian Gulf were definitely restored to them, with the removal of the principal foreign stimulus to revolt in Anatolia, thus greatly simplifying the efforts of subsequent Ottoman reformers to revive the empire from within and so save it from foreign attack. During the next century the treaty was observed by both sides, but less out of genuine friendship than as a consequence of internal weakness, preoccupation with reform, and foreign aggression.

The spark for renewal of the conflict came, strangely enough, from these modern reforms introduced into the Ottoman Empire during the “Tulip Period” (1718–30) under the leadership of Sultan Ahmad III (1703–30) and his Grand Vizier, Damad Ibrahim Pasha. The financial burdens of modernization, when combined with popular hostility towards the European modes and frivolities then fashionable in the palaces of the Sultan and among members of the ruling class, so threatened the Establishment that the Grand Vizier was enticed into an attack on Iran, in the hope that advantage might be taken of the internal disintegration during the reign of the last Safavid, Shāh Sultān Husain (1694–1722), to replenish the Ottoman treasury and lessen the burden of taxation on the Sultan's subjects without diminishing the Sultan's pleasures.

THE EMERGENCE OF THE QĀJĀRS

The preceding chapter described the unsuccessful attempt by a small tribal confederation in south-west Iran, led by the Zands, to establish control over the other tribal groupings on the Iranian plateau. Its failure was due to the limited number of fighting men whom the Zands and their confederates could muster for sustained campaigning; the family rivalries and divisions of the ruling house after Karīm Khān Zand's death in 1193/1779; the superior military resources of the Qājārs; and not least, the single-minded ambition of their ultimate nemesis, Āghā Muhammad Khān Qājār. In this chapter, his career will be placed within the context of the rise of the Qājārs, one of the original components of the Safavids' Qizilbāsh confederacy. For Āghā Muhammad Khān's bid for overall kingship, the disturbed condition of late 18th-century Iran proved particularly favourable.

As for the Qājārs' early history, there is a late tradition that they were part of the Turkish Oghuz confederacy, and first entered Iran with other Oghuz tribes in the 11th century. However, neither of the surviving lists of Oghuz tribes, those of Mahmūd Kashgharī and Rashīd al-Dīn, include them, although both mention the Afshārs. Conceivably, they were an element in a larger tribe (the Bayāts have been suggested as the most likely), from which they later broke away. The same late tradition claims an eponymous ancestor for the tribe in Qājār Noyan, the son of a Mongol, Sartuq Noyan, who was supposed to be Atābeg to the Il-Khān Arghūn. Qājār Noyan was also alleged to be an ancestor of Tīmūr.

In the Preface to the first volume of his Tārīkh-i Jarā’ id va Majallāt-i Īrān (“History of the Press and Periodicals in Iran”) Muhammad Sadr Hāshimī considers the proliferation of newspapers and periodicals in Iran during the Constitutional period to be the principal cause of the dearth of book and monograph publication by scholars and creative writers in the four decades that followed. The lack of such publications, which has certainly not been noticeable since the 1960s so far as non-fiction is concerned, and is amply compensated for in post-revolution Iran, was, he says, unprecedented in times before the advent of the newspaper and periodical. In support of his argument he cites one literary scholar, Vahīd Dastgirdī, who, as any student of Persian literature knows, devoted his life to its study, but produced not a single book. He preferred to confine himself to articles in Armaghā (“The Keepsake”), the literary journal he edited for twenty-two years. Hence, according to Sadr Hāshimī, the need to turn to newspapers, weeklies and more infrequent periodicals, in order to read the speculations and conclusions of researchers, as well as writers' expression of their genius. How ephemeral many of these repositories of Iranian literary output in the first forty years of the 20th century were, was proved when their historian and cataloguer began his work. He discovered that of some no trace could be found. There were instances when, after a lapse of several years, not even former editors and publishers could remember anything about their defunct enterprises.

INTRODUCTION

The oil industry has played a notable rôle in the economy of modern Iran, especially as a source of foreign exchange and as a factor in industrial development. Its major production operations have, however, been confined to the province of Khūzistān in the south west of the country and offshore in the Persian Gulf. Moreover, its impact upon and contribution to the domestic economy should not be exaggerated and needs to be related to the context of the whole national economy. As Dr ‘Alī Amīnī, when prime minister in 1961, reminded his countrymen “the economy of our nation is based primarily on agriculture. The majority of our people are engaged in agricultural activities.” As late as 1956 the urban population constituted 30% of the total population whilst that of the rural area was 70%. Twenty years later over half of the population still lived in the countryside. In the mid 1960s the agricultural sector was still providing some 25% of total gross national income.

The most impressive contribution of the oil industry to the national economy has been since the late 1960s, especially 1967–74, when Iran was the leading producer in the Middle East. Production peaked in 1974 at 301.2 million tons, doubling that of 1968 in six years, but declining thereafter by half to 15 8.1 million tons in 1979, a vast rise and fall in a decade (see Appendix 1). Oil revenues helped to accelerate the pace of industrialization, but the fall in national income experienced when oil revenues began to decline in the late 1970s caused a slowdown in industrial activity and precipitated an economic crisis.

Christian social morality and the best state

In the fifty years after its first publication in 1516, Thomas More's Utopia appeared in ten further Latin editions and in French, Dutch, English, German, and Italian translations. Widespread and profound as its influence was, its ambivalance generated both utopian and anti-utopian imitators. In other words, the spread of More's fictional device – the ‘discovery’ of an ideal society – was not always utopian in its political thought and the utopian impulse proper was not necessarily derived in the profoundest sense from the imitation of a model.

The fifteenth-century rediscovery of Plato and Plutarch stimulated the early modern ‘best state’ exercise and encouraged a debate on constitutions which replicated the seed-bed out of which the classical utopia had sprung (Logan 1983; Ferguson 1975, p. 28; Manuel and Manuel 1979, pp. 95–100). But some aspects of civic humanism and of Reformation thought endorsed and broadened the idea of social redemption through individual moral performance, typified for the late middle ages by the Mirror of Princes tradition (Skinner 1978, 1, pp. 126–35). Still others gradually excited a vast outpouring of millennial expectation, especially on the Protestant side of the Reformation divide. These two traditions of discourse about social idealisation – by individual moral effort or by a millennial and literal coup de grace – were quantitatively much more important in early modern Europe than the reemergent utopian mode which existed in dialogue with them. It is helpful, therefore, to distingish utopianism as a form of social idealisation.