The Modern Middle East (7 page)

Amid the steady decay of a collapsing empire, the war did raise the fortunes of one Ottoman general, a certain Mustafa Kemal, whose strategic genius had spared his forces from defeat in all the military campaigns in which they were involved.
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As the war was drawing to a close in 1918, the Young Turk government in Istanbul went into hiding and Kemal took over the reins of power. For the next three years he fought a series of successful military campaigns against the Armenian republic in the Caucasus, the French in Cilicia, and the Greeks in central Anatolia, as well as Ottoman troops remaining loyal to the sultan. Emerging victorious, he established a Grand National Assembly in the interior city of Ankara in 1921 and promulgated a new, republican constitution the following year. The Turkish republic was proclaimed on October 29, 1923. That same year the independence of Turkey and its present boundaries were recognized by the Treaty of Lausanne. Mustafa Kemal was declared president for life. In the coming decades, Kemal (d. 1938) and his successors methodically set out to dismantle the political, sociocultural, and religious vestiges of Ottoman rule. The era of the Ottomans and everything they stood for—the caliphate, Turko-Islamic tradition, social and cultural conservatism, rule over disparate
millets
(religious communities)—came to a dramatic end, and a new era of Kemalist republicanism began.

To the east of the Ottomans were another important dynasty, the Safavids, and their successors, the Qajars. Though originally from a Turkic tribe based in northwestern Iran, the Safavids differed from the Ottomans in several fundamental ways. To begin with, their reign never extended far beyond the boundaries of modern-day Iran, and even in their territories they often had to rely on semiautonomous tribal chieftains (
uymaqs
) scattered throughout the interior of the country. Equally important were the
different religious characters of the two dynasties and their respective sources of popular legitimacy. By definition, the Ottoman sultans saw themselves as the successors to the Rashidun and, as caliphs, the protectors of the Sunni
umma.
The Safavids, on the other hand, traced their genesis to religious mystics (Sufis) who were militantly Shiʿite.
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In fact, under the Safavids Shiʿism became the state religion of Iran, and the royal court was modeled after that of ancient Persian kings (
shahs
) rather than anything resembling the Ottoman sultanate.

The Safavid conquest of Iran began with Ismail in 1500 (d. 1524). For the next ten years, he consolidated his rule over the country and launched a thorough and at times brutal campaign to convert the majority Sunni population to Shiʿism. The conversion campaign lasted for nearly a century and succeeded in creating a core of Shiʿite coreligionists—eventually up to 90 percent—in much of the central part of the country. It is no accident that today Iran’s Sunni minorities are concentrated among the country’s non-Persian ethnic groups that are scattered along the country’s borders: the Arabs along the southwestern border with Iraq; the Kurds along the western borders with Iraq and Turkey; the Turkmans along the northeastern border with Turkmenistan; and the Baluchis along the southeastern border with Pakistan. The Safavids belonged to the numerically more dominant Twelver (or Imami) branch of Shiʿism, which, as its name implies, believes in the sanctity of twelve imams (leaders of religious communities), the last of whom, the Mahdi, is in occultation and will return at the End of Time. The Safavids’ own knowledge of Shiʿite theology and jurisprudence appears to have been scant, so the conversion process was reported to be quick and rather superficial, in some instances consisting merely of reciting a slogan.
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Within a few decades, during the reign of Shah Abbas (r. 1588–1629), the Safavids reached the zenith of their rule. Abbas moved the capital from the northwestern city of Tabriz to Esfahan, located in central Iran and a safe distance from the Ottomans. There he embarked on a concerted campaign to build a magnificent city with ornate palaces, mosques, a bazaar, and a grand central square.
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For his own and his subjects’ viewing pleasure, he also built a polo grounds and a carnival arena.
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Shiʿite scholars were brought in from Syria, Iraq, and Arabia to help teach and propagate the new religion, and great mosques and religious schools (
madresahs
) were built in the major cities.

Despite the zeal and determination of the dynasty’s founder, Ismail, and the splendor of the royal court and the capital under Shah Abbas, the Safavids were never quite able to consolidate their rule throughout much of the country. Many of the problems revolved around the dynasty’s inability,
and perhaps unwillingness, to develop viable institutions through which its rule could be enforced meaningfully across Iranian territory. Unlike the Ottoman system of rule, Safavid political institutions remained highly underdeveloped and far too dependent on the person of the shah to function effectively. Willem Floor’s description of Safavid government institutions is revealing. “The shah was the sole source of political power,” he writes. “His will was executed through a civil bureaucracy and, if need be, by an army. Both were loyal to the shah rather than to the political system. Hence, political rule, relations, and responsibilities were highly personalized. Put another way, the inner circle (civil, religious, and military) surrounding the shah derived their influence and power from their proximity to the shah. Thus, it was not so much their functions and responsibilities that gave them power but the knowledge for those lower on the social ladder that they held that function for the shah.”
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Before long, the institutional deficiencies inherent in the Safavid system of rule made it exceedingly difficult for the dynasty to counter the strong resistance facing it from various nomadic tribes and from other local rulers. More importantly, the Safavids were challenged in their Shiʿite legitimacy and interpretation by an increasingly independent and vocal class of clerics.
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Significantly weakened, by the late 1600s and early 1700s Safavid rule was being threatened nearly everywhere outside the capital city of Esfahan. According to the historian Ira Lapidus, “The Safavid state remained a court regime in a fluid society in which power was widely dispersed among competing tribal forces. These forces would in the end overthrow the dynasty.”
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The end came in the 1720s. Esfahan was captured in 1722 by one of the
uymaqs,
the Ghalzai Afghans, who then overthrew the dynasty in 1726.

A period of competing, local dynasties followed, none quite capable of achieving meaningful territorial hegemony beyond its immediate areas of control. Nevertheless, one of these competing groups, the Qajars, was able to establish a precarious suzerainty over significant parts of Iran beginning in 1779, giving rise to a dynasty by the same name. Although their hold on power remained tenuous throughout, the Qajars did manage to last until 1925.

The dynasty was established by one of the Qajar tribal chieftains, Agha Muhammad Khan (d. 1797), whose depression is said to have been partly behind his choice as capital of an unremarkable small town named Tehran in 1785. Later Qajar kings—especially Fath Ali Shah (r. 1797–1834) and Naser al-Din Shah (r. 1848–96)—steadily nationalized the dynasty and neutralized many of the competing tribes and local rulers.
⁷⁰
But neither
they nor their successors could effectively counter the rising powers of the Shiʿite
ulama
or the commercial and territorial designs on Iran of the British and the Russians. Two disastrous wars with Russia, in 1804–5 and 1828, resulted in the loss of much of Iran’s territory in the Caucasus to its northern neighbor. Not to be outdone, Britain encouraged British entrepreneurs to acquire monopoly export rights known as “concessions,” and the Iranian government granted major concessions to British interests in 1863 (for telegraph lines), 1872 (for mining), and 1889 (for tobacco).
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Both Britain and Russia also discovered loans—necessary to fund infrequent development projects or the far more costly royal visits to Europe—as a guaranteed way of securing the dependence of the fledgling Qajar state on their respective governments. In 1900, for example, the Iranian government secured a loan of £2,000,000 from Russia so that Muzaffar al-Din Shah (r. 1896–1907) and his entourage could go on an eight-month tour of Europe.
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Before long, the combination of foreign dominance, institutional decay, and royal despotism sparked the Constitutional Revolution.

Iran’s Constitutional Revolution is generally dated from 1905 to 1911. It involved three principal elements in Iranian society: the
ulama,
some of whom were procourt but many of whom favored limitations on the arbitrary powers of the monarch; the merchants, whose opposition was inspired by their organic links with the
ulama
and their resentment toward foreign concessions; and a small cadre of educated intellectuals, who were heartened by the success of the constitutionalists in Istanbul and the European phenomenon of limited, parliamentary monarchy. Also important were local notables (
a
ʿ
yan
), many of whom were closely allied with, and were at times members of, the
ulama
or the merchant classes. Often divided and bitterly fractious, these groups were brought together by the emergence of revolutionary circumstances in the early 1900s, uniting them in the common purpose of a brewing revolutionary movement.
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But their growing demands for a “House of Justice” (Edalat Khaneh) and eventually a parliament (Majles) were met by the recalcitrance of Muzaffar al-Din Shah, who agreed to decree a constitution only on his deathbed. Even then, his successor, Muhammad Ali (r. 1907–9) tried to quell the Majles by bombarding it. When he was forced to abdicate, power passed to the twelve-year-old Ahmad Shah, but by then neither domestic control nor control of the country’s borders was in government hands, the former being controlled by tribal chieftains and the latter by Britain and Russia.

The Constitutional Revolution had a mixed legacy for Iran. To begin with, it is unclear whether the participants in the movement to impose constitutional restrictions on the monarchy—the clergy, members of the
intelligentsia, local notables, and bazaar merchants—ever considered themselves “revolutionaries” per se. They neither sought to nor were able to overthrow the existing political order and replace it with a fundamentally different one. Instead, insofar as the movement’s principal actors were concerned, they had embarked on a quest to bring about a government that would be in compliance with traditional notions of justice (ʿ
edalat
) and freedom from tyranny (
zulm
).
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In the long run, they failed. In the process, the movement gave rise to a number of local associations (
anjomans
), especially in Tehran and the northern city of Tabriz. Inspired by and modeled after the communist soviets, the associations were meant to choose local deputies for the Majles and to take an active role in local government. However, they had the unintended consequence of deepening existing factional divisions and greatly contributing to the country’s administrative paralysis. And, as if to add insult to injury, two great powers, Britain and Russia, only found Iran’s chaotic circumstances more conducive to their larger imperial goals and expanded their presence and hold over the country.

Despite its multiple setbacks and negative consequences, the Constitutional Revolution turned out to be one of the most important events in Iranian history. Later generations of Iranians pointed to the “revolutionary” years of 1905–11 as the beginning of a long and protracted struggle to curtail the arbitrary powers of absolutist monarchy. Also, both the constitution (Qanun Asasi, or Basic Law) and the Majles were important political innovations for Iran, their foreign and imported nature notwithstanding. While in the early decades the Majles was politically emasculated and ceased to function as a meaningful parliamentary body, in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the Iranian monarchy was once again weakened, it did make its imprint on Iranian history. Finally, the same set of actors involved in the Constitutional Revolution went on to bring about a different sort of revolution some seven decades later—the Islamic revolution of 1978–79—this time with significant help from the urban middle classes.

In the short run, however, the Constitutional Revolution plunged Iran into chaos. With an ineffectual monarchy and the Majles torn by factional rivalries, the country drifted through the Great War at the mercy of foreign powers. Finally, in 1921, an army officer named Reza and a well-known journalist by the name of Seyyed Zia-alddin Tabatabai launched a military coup, becoming the commander of the army and the prime minister, respectively. Zia was eased out of power in 1923, and Reza deposed the monarchy two years later, thus bringing the Qajar era to an end. Having earlier
adopted the last name Pahlavi, he declared himself shah and established the Pahlavi dynasty.

Habitation patterns, geography, commerce, and prevailing sociocultural norms often directly influence the life of human communities. In relation to the Middle East, great civilizations rose along major riverbanks and died out when they could no longer manage the canals and irrigation works around which their hydraulic states and societies had emerged. Related to this was the importance of cities and the resulting connection of their economic wealth and well-being with the structures and institutions of political power. Vast expanses of desert elsewhere led to the emergence of cities with significant population concentrations alongside remote, small villages and mobile nomadic tribes. Geographic distance, reinforced by a preponderance of mountainous and inaccessible desert areas, made centralized state building more arduous, often resulting in the extremes of either royal despotism or political dysfunction. In either case, political institutions became impermanent, often rising fast and falling hard, isolated from the larger social arena they sought to govern. Society, whether in Iran in the east or in Morocco in the west, went about its own life, largely impervious to the competition of tribes that aspired to become ruling dynasties. Territorial conquests and mass conversions did influence the daily lives of the masses, but the overall level of contact between the people, or their collectivity of “society,” and the various apparatuses of political power, what we today call the “state,” was minimal.