Introduction
A Revolutionary Land

Iran has rarely been out of the news, but rarely in it for positive reasons. Indeed, for much of the history of the Islamic Republic, Iran's relationship with the outside world has been beset by a series of crises, not least the 'Islamic' revolution of 1979 itself - perhaps the first televised revolution in history - which painted a brutal and bloody picture of the unfolding developments. The US Embassy hostage crisis, which was broadcast nightly on US television, ensured that developments in Iran were seared into an increasingly unforgiving American mind.

Since then, each decade has been marked by a particular crisis: the war against Iraq shaped much of the 1980s, followed by the confrontation over the Rushdie fatwa which coloured relations over the 1990s, and then in the aftermath of 9/11 the seemingly insoluble crisis over Iran's nuclear programme. These crises have in many ways defined the way in which the West has seen Iran, and have also served to cloud our perspective and disguise the domestic political drivers that have shaped the country.

Nothing shows this better than the general surprise at the latest turn of events in September 2022 following the death in custody of Mahsa Jina Amini, at the hands of the Morality Police. The subsequent uprising, led by women, in pursuit of basic rights, can only be understood and appreciated in the context of the general deterioration of State-society relations in the Islamic Republic over the last two decades.

But, more strikingly, the recent protests echo and reflect the drive towards constitutionalism and fundamental rights which has been at the heart of Iranian political history for more than a century, beginning with the launch of Iran's first revolution, the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. Largely overshadowed by the Islamic Revolution in 1979, this earlier revolution has arguably had a much more profound impact on political ideas and activism; it is a lode stone and reference point for all students of Iranian politics.

The importance of a constitution and the rule of law, a means to regulate relations between State and society within an Iranian framework, continues to energize politics in Iran to this day, and however much governing elites seek to suppress or eradicate these ideas, they stubbornly resurface with each generation.

It is, as such, important for the reader to appreciate just how ingrained and embedded these ideas are, how they have been integrated into the fabric of Iranian politics over the last two centuries and why, as a result, they are not going away. Many of the themes that have shaped Iranian history and politics to this day have been long in gestation and took form in the years leading to and including the Constitutional Revolution. These years provide the template on which all other matters rest, giving shape to the ideas and tensions which occupy Iranians to this day.

The dominating theme has been how to contend with the challenge posed by the West, and modernity in general. How, to put it in simple terms, could Iran be returned to the Great Power status that many Iranians felt was her birth right.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Iran - or Persia in the Western vernacular - identified as an empire: not just any empire, but the oldest and most esteemed of all empires, which had perhaps seen better days but whose history suggested that better days would return. Even in the twilight of the Safavid Empire (1501-1722) when its imperial pretensions were real, as the Huguenot Sir John Chardin noted caustically, they continued to enjoy grandiose notions of their imperial authority.1

By the turn of the nineteenth century, even with the further retreat of borders, that imperial mentality remained stubborn and immovable. Tradition - and imperial mythology - told Iranians that not only was their dominion the oldest in the world, but it was moreover the centre of the universe and the best of earthly territories. Indeed, the founder of the new Qajar dynasty (1797-1925) had 'acquiesced' to the royal diadem as long as his new subjects accepted his determination to restore Iran to its rightful greatness.

Identified as a 'crossroads of civilization', Iran occupied a plateau in south-west Asia on the 'silk road' connecting the West with China. Bounded by the Caspian Sea to the north and the Persian Gulf to the south, the much-diminished imperium was still by the nineteenth century a large country possessed of diverse climes, shielded on two sides by two extensive mountain ranges - the Zagros to the west and the Alborz to the north - the arid climate of its core contrasting with the lush forests of the Caspian seaboard. To the south-west, the plateau descended into the Mesopotamian plain where the Shatt al-Arab waterway - the confluence of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers - demarcated the border with the Ottoman Empire (and latterly Iraq).

Even before oil, gas and other minerals were discovered in substantial quantities in the twentieth century, European statesmen were acutely aware of the geopolitical significance of the area. In Lord Curzon's memorable, if somewhat romanticized, view: 'Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia - to many these names breathe only a sense of utter remoteness or a memory of strange vicissitudes and of moribund romance. To me, I confess, they are the pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the dominion of the world.'2

The Challenge of the West

The arrival of the Europeans in the shape of both the Russian and British Empires quickly served notice that an imperial resurgence would not automatically follow, as night followed day. Instead, the European challenge was of an altogether different nature. They may be curious about the 'Persians', aware about them from the religious and classical texts, and they might have been seduced by the cultural richness they encountered, but they were driven by new ideas of civilization and progress and were more than sufficiently confident to deal with the ancient empire of the Persians.

More to the point, as the Russians were to show in two devastating wars (1804-13 and 1826-8), this new Europe had found a way to wage war that the Iranians found difficult to contend with. It was not so much that the Iranians were lacking in bravery, but there were new systems of warfare being deployed that only modern states, with better forms of administration, could sustain.

Iranian reformers of the nineteenth century soon realized that this was not a matter of tinkering at the edges. Modern armies could not be procured and sustained with the old methods; new approaches would be required in both politics and economy. But how best to start the process of 'modernization'? Could one catalyse change through economic reform or was it better to grasp the nettle through political reform?

British observers were in little doubt about the nature of the problem faced by the Iranians. Drawing on their own experience over the previous two centuries, they argued, with considerable force, that the problem faced by Iranians was neither sociological nor, as some would later argue, biological, but political. This could be rectified by applying discipline, expanding education and enforcing the rule of law.

The idea that Iran's ills could be addressed through the application of different - better - methods was enthusiastically endorsed by Iranian reformers, who drank copiously from the well of Enlightenment Whiggism, digesting the wonders of British industrialization and progress, and pondering on the secrets of liberty. British ideas were especially pervasive in the post-Napoleonic period, when the ideas of the French Revolution, never far from the surface as far as state building was concerned, were nevertheless considered inappropriate for a country that sought to retain its religion and monarchy, albeit under different management.

The Challenge of Reform

The debate on how reform should be managed, however, remained and tended to oscillate between those who emphasized political or economic-led reform and those who preferred some combination of both. In the first decades of the nineteenth century, Iranian statesmen had focused on the reform of the army but accepted that a more fundamental reform of the State and its administration would be required. How this might be achieved in the face of stubborn resistance from what may be loosely described as the 'forces of reaction' - principally the monarch - was another matter, where indolence and inertia appeared to rule the day.

As Mohammad Shah lay dying in 1848, his minister consoled him by noting that he left a stable country devoid of the sort of revolution then gripping much of Europe. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Venality and corruption had infected the body politic, money was perennially short and, to make matters worse, the country faced a religious insurrection known as the Babi Revolt, after Ali Mohammad Shirazi - known as the Bab (the gate) - proclaimed himself the Mahdi, the twelfth Imam of the Shias, returned at the end of time to inaugurate a new era.

Iran had been a Shia Muslim state since the Safavids imposed the minority branch of Islam on their subjects from the sixteenth century. It helped to distinguish the Safavids from their Ottoman rivals, but it also provided for other...