The Mehdi Hashemi Affair

Routledge eBooks, 2022

In July 1884 Nāṣ ir al-Dīn Shāh approved the establishment of councils of representatives of the big merchants (majālis-i wukalā-yi tujjār) in the main commercial centers of Iran. Within three to four months, the tujjār elected their councils in eighteen cities and towns in the country. Th ese councils were to supervise commercial activities in Iran, encourage investments in new projects by big local merchants, and above all limit the involvement and interference of both the provincial governors and the local religious leaders in business matters. Th e establishment of the councils prompted hostility and resistance by both governors and ʿulamāʾ from the very beginning. Events in Tabrīz in November-December 1884 struck a decisive blow to the councils. Th e institution at that town disbanded in late December, and several weeks later most of the other councils followed suit. In light of these developments, the shah, in February or March 1885, nullifi ed his instructions concerning the establishment of the councils. Th is article analyzes the conditions and circumstances that prompted the shah and the tujjār to take a step that was without precedent in nineteenth-century Iran or elsewhere in the Middle East. It also studies in detail the events that brought about the end of a promising and signifi cant development.

International Journal of Middle East Studies, 1991

On 11 November 1851, Nasir al-Din Shah (r. 1848—96), the 20-year-old Qajar ruler of Iran, dismissed from the post of premier his guardian-tutor (atābak) and brother-in-law Mirza Taqi Khan Farahani, Amir(-i) Nizam, better known to posterity as Amir Kabir. He allowed him to continue in the post of commander-in-chief of the army (amārat-i niẓām), however. “Since the office of the grand vizierate in volves too much labor,” the shah wrote to Amir Kabir, “and the burden of such a task was arduous for you. we have relieved you of this duty. You must continue as commander-in-chief with full confidence.”1 Only two months later, on 10 January 1852, Amir Kabir was secretly put to death in the Fin royal garden near Kashan, where he had spent the last days of his exile.

1985

Armies and State-building in the Modern Middle East 2013 I.B. Tauris

like his father, Riza Shah, controlled and dominated but also mortally feared his army and its officers, especially its senior officers. 1 Like both shahs, British and American diplomats in Iran also saw the army as a source of potential political opposition. Especially after the wave of coups d' état which swept through the Arab world from the 1950s, both Muhammad Riza Shah and his Western supporters were vigilant, ever on the alert for the emergence of an Iranian version of the Egyptian Colonel Nasser or the Iraqi Colonel Qasim. Yet this obsession with the danger of a coup, emanating from the higher ranks of the army, colonel and above, turned out to be entirely misplaced. Under both shahs, the majority of the high command remained loyal, their own positions inextricably linked to the fate of the regime, even the most ambitious of Iran's colonels, brigadiers and generals, exemplified by General Ali Razmara, offering only sporadic and contingent opposition. Yet the measures taken to avert any challenge from this quarter rendered the high command of the army impotent in the face of the real threat to the monarchy which emerged in 1977-8. A comment from a US embassy report, that the conscript was of no political importance, summed up this mistaken assessment. 2 In fact, when the crisis came, it was indeed to be the hundreds of thousands of rank-and-file soldiers who, by defecting or simply deserting, were key in determining the outcome of the struggle between the Shah and the revolutionaries, while it was the non-commissioned air force officers, the homafars, who dealt the coup de grâce to the imperial regime. The experience of the Iranian army in the pre-revolutionary and revolutionary periods conformed to the classical revolutionary model. Although

Journal of Persianate Studies, 2014

In the Spring of 1816, the North Indian town of Bareilli witnessed a series of protests following the imposition of a House Tax by the East India Company government. Under the leadership of Mufti 'Iwāz, a local 'ālem associated with reformist Sufi traditions, various Muslim and Hindu communities of Bareilli engaged in collective action which culminated in a violent confrontation. Reading court records against the grain, this paper argues that the protests represented a complex form of negotiation framed within Islamo-Persianate paradigms-including symbols, language, and authority structureswhich continued to define modes of popular political expression in the early colonial period. By focusing on Mufti 'Iwāz, the incident provides rare insights into the practical relationship between Muslim orthodoxy, communal dynamics, and political authority. I argue that with the collapse of Mughal rule, the mufti assumed a role as an intermediary between the people of Bareilli and Company officials derived from precolonial conceptions of moral, popular, and spiritual authority shared by Hindu and Muslim communities.