The Iranian Constitutional Revolution

Between 1905 and 1911 Persia passed through the Constitutional Revolution, a popular movement against the autocracy of the Qajar shahs and against the foreign concessions and debts through which European powers had gained a grip on the country. An unusual coalition drove it: the merchants of the bazaar, reformist intellectuals, and a large part of the Shia clergy, who lent the movement decisive weight, though other clerics opposed it. Through mass protests, strikes that closed the bazaars, and the taking of sanctuary in mosques and foreign legations, the movement forced the shah in 1906 to grant a constitution and to convene Persia's first elected national assembly, the Majlis, which set about writing laws and curbing royal power. The revolution was a landmark, one of the first constitutional movements in the Muslim world and a precursor of the constitutional and national struggles that would follow across the region, and it bound together, uneasily, the ideas of representative government and of a politics rooted in Islam. Its gains were fragile: the shah and his Russian backers bombarded the Majlis in 1908, civil conflict followed, and the constitutional order was repeatedly suspended in the decades after, but the idea of a constitution and a parliament had entered Persian political life for good. This scene depicts the constitutional movement in Tehran around 1906, the crowds of merchants and clergy with their petitions, the lion-and-sun banners, the new assembly building by the bazaar, beneath the Alborz.