Persian Constitutional Revolution

In the summer of 1906, a wave of strikes, sit-ins and protests across Iran forced the Qajar shah, Mozaffar ad-Din, to accept a constitution. In July and early August between 12,000 and 14,000 merchants, clerics and ordinary people took refuge in the grounds of the British legation in Tehran, using a traditional right of sanctuary to demand a house of justice. On August 5 the shah agreed to an elected national assembly, the Majlis, which opened in October, and he signed the first constitution in December 1906. For the first time Iran's monarch had to share power with an elected body.¹³

The roots were domestic and foreign. Iranians resented the shahs' habit of selling concessions to foreign firms, such as the tobacco monopoly granted to a British company in 1890, and the heavy debt to Russia and Britain. The Russo-Japanese War and the Russian Revolution of 1905 showed that an Asian power could beat a European empire and that an autocrat could be made to grant a parliament. Merchants of the bazaar, reformist clerics and newspapers in Tabriz and Tehran pushed the movement forward.¹³

The new order was soon challenged. Mozaffar ad-Din died in January 1907, and his son Mohammad Ali Shah set out to reverse the changes. In June 1908 he used Russian-led Cossacks to shell the Majlis building and shut it down. Constitutionalists from Tabriz and the Bakhtiari tribes took Tehran in 1909 and deposed him, but in 1911 Russia's ultimatum led to the closing of the Majlis again, and Britain and Russia split the country into zones of influence in the 1907 agreement. The revolution failed to secure stable democracy, yet the idea of a written constitution and elected assembly remained a permanent part of Iranian politics.³⁴