Before the 18th century relations between Iran and Russia were sporadic. Though some Persian goods found their way to Muscovy while the duchy was still under the Tatar yoke, travel and commerce remained insignificant until the mid 16th century, when the Russian conquest of the khanates of Kazan and Astrakhan opened the Volga route to the Caspian Sea. Soon Moscow became a minor entrepôt for Europe's Persian trade. From the north and the west there flowed into Iran a small stream of furs, cloth, metals, leather, amber, crystal. From Iran came silk, pearls, rugs, embroidered cloth, velvet, rice, fruit, and spices.

Political and diplomatic relations between the two states were less important. After a brief clash of interests in Dāghistān early in the 17th century, the Russians withdrew from the northern Caucasus. The raids on Iran's shores by Sten'ka Razin's cossacks were a large-scale bandit enterprise conducted against the wishes of Russian authorities. Razin's mobs pillaged coastal towns, indiscriminately massacred their inhabitants, raped and abducted women, then disappeared without trace. Occasionally Muscovite envoys would appear in Isfahān or Persian envoys in Moscow, but the contacts they established were of short duration. It was Peter the Great who broke through the barrier of the Caucasus and for the first time confronted Iran with the Russian threat.

Though Peter I was primarily concerned with Europe, “he had from his earliest years taken a lively interest in Asia”. In him, B. H. Sumner has written, “The enthusiasm of the explorer was allied with the gold-dazzled phantasy of the prospector and the merchant.”

In recent times, a significant aspect of Iran's foreign relations has been foreign interference in the country's affairs, with varying Iranian response to this. Three major factors have played a determining role in this: Iran's growing strategic and economic importance as an oil producer in a zone of major power rivalry; the national features of Iran as a predominantly Shī‘ī, but socially heterogeneous society, with no consensus over the appropriate form and functions of government; and the need of the rulers of Iran to ensure the continuation of their rule and to govern Iran effectively in these circumstances. Iran's foreign relations between 1921 and 1979 must be studied in this context. This period covers the rule of the Pahlavī dynasty, begun by Rizā Shāh's accession to the throne in 1925, following his seizure of political power through a coup in 1921, and ended with the overthrow of his son, Muhammad Rizā Shāh, in 1979. The collapse of the Pahlavī dynasty opened the way for its major opponent, Āyatullāh Rūh-Allāh Khumainī, to declare Iran an Islamic Republic and abolish the monarchy.

For historical and analytical purposes, the Pahlavī period is best examined in three parts: Rizā Shāh's rule (1925–1941), Muhammad Rizā Shāh's reign (1941–53) and his rule (1953–1979). During each of these periods, foreign powers subjected Iran to different types of pressure and encroachment, influencing the country's domestic and foreign policies in distinct ways. Under Rizā Shāh, while Anglo-Russian rivalry over Iran was kept in abeyance as the two powers' changing interests dictated, Iran's foreign policy reflected various short-term attempts to maintain this situation and benefit from it in the assertion of Iran's independence.

THE QāJāR POLITICAL SYSTEM

Before discussing the vicissitudes of late Qājār politics, it would be useful to try to understand how 19th century Iranian politics worked. Essentially these workings were only a slight variation on the general pattern of Iranian politics since the 11th century, when large-scale invasions of nomadic Turkish tribes that accompanied the Saljuq incursions, and the spread of the quasi-feudal iqtā‘ system strengthened the regional power of tribal and other military leaders and weakened the strength of central governments. Although there were, between the 11th and 19th centuries, governments of very varied powers, ranging from the strongest of the Saljuq, Mongol and Safavid rulers to periods of complete breakdown of central government, there were certain similarities that characterize the whole of this period. Among these was the status of the numerous nomadic tribes, which ranged from almost total independence to a degree of internal autonomy. Tribes managed not only their own internal affairs, subject generally to tribute and pro-forma confirmation of tribal leaders by the rulers, but also frequently ruled over villagers who inhabited territories in their regions. Beyond this internal autonomy, the tribes constituted the most effective fighting forces in Iran during most of this long period - their mastery of horsemanship and of the latest weapons giving them a decisive advantage over the city population, whom the Shahs generally showed little inclination to train. Every important Iranian dynasty from the Saljuqs to the Qājārs was either tribal in origin or relied on tribal backing in taking power. In the early 19th century, nomadic tribes were estimated to form one third to one half of the Iranian population.

The contemporary social organization of individual tribal groups in Iran has recently been the focus of some detailed studies. Historical studies of the tribes have been few, however, and research into their social history has hardly begun. The available source material for such a social history is mostly written from a distance, by outsiders viewing the tribes with hostility or some other bias. For example, the information on the tribes that can be gleaned from sources such as Persian court chronicles, manuals and local histories, and from European agents' and travellers' reports, largely concerns such matters as taxation, military contingents, disturbances and measures taken to quell them, and inaccurate lists of major tribal groups, numbers and leaders. Economic and social organization are treated superficially if at all, and even for the last two centuries their basic features must be inferred circumstantially or deduced from later, more complete studies.

This chapter gives in the first instance a general survey, based on available source materials, of the distribution of the tribes and their political history as a “problem” for the Iranian government in the 18th and 19th centuries. The second part of the chapter attempts an analysis, on the one hand, of the processes of ecological adaptation and social and economic organization which may be considered to have contributed to the “tribal problem”, and, on the other, of the development of different tribal groups during the period as the product of interaction between these various kinds of processes: ecological, economic, social and political.

The Safavid period marks an obvious watershed in the religious history of Iran in that it witnesses the elevation of Twelver Shi‘ism to the position of state religion and the practical fusion of Iran and Shi‘ism into a single religio-national entity. Although the proximate causes of this process are to be sought in a Türkmen military invasion of Iran from the west and north-west, followed by an influx of Shī‘ī scholars from Arab lands, there can be no doubt that a species of marriage between Shi‘ism and the Iranian national consciousness had been concluded by the close of the Safavid era. The marriage has proved lasting, and its effects irreversible. Yet the precise content of the Shī‘ī-Iranian identity and the forms of expression that were to be assumed by Shi‘ism on Iranian soil were not fully formulated in the Safavid period. Indeed, it was only when the Safavids were driven from the scene in the first quarter of the 18th century that Iranian Shi‘ism became emancipated from all essential dependence on the state, and was able to embark on a process of self-elaboration and internal differentiation that makes of the post-Safavid period one of great interest and richness. The 18th century has been called “by far the blackest period in the history of Islamic Iran”, and the anarchy that prevailed throughout much of the period goes some way to justifying this judgement. The 19th century, too, was one of almost uninterrupted socio-political decline, arrested only by the beginnings of westernizing reform.

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.