British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 39, Issue 3, (2012), pages 328-346

British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies, Volume 39, Issue 3, (2012), pages 328-346

DOI: 10.1080/13530194.2012.726920

Published online: 23 Nov 2012

This article was originally published with errors. This version has been corrected. Please see Erratum (http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13530194.2013.828530).


The Constitutional Movement and the Baha'is of Iran:

The Creation of an ‘Enemy Within’
Moojan Momen^
Abstract

This article looks at the role of the Baha'is in the Constitutional Revolution of Iran, 1906–1911. It propounds three major theses. First, that when the royalists and anti-constitutionalist clerics accused the Constitutionalists of being “Babis”, it was the Baha'i community that they were referring to rather than the Azali Babis. Second, that the Baha'is had a complex relationship with the Constitutionalist Movement, sometimes supporting it and sometimes abstaining from involvement in politics, but that in any case, the impact of the Baha'is on the reformers and on the Revolution has been underestimated by most writers. Third, that, despite their closeness in terms of ideas about social reform, the enmity of the Azalis and clerics caused the Baha'is to be excluded from the reform legislation resulting from the Constitutional Revolution and effectively to be excluded from Iranian society. It resulted in the creation of an “enemy within”. Some of the consequences of this both for the Baha'is and for Iran are discussed.

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  Who Were ‘the Babis’?
  
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  The Azali Babi Role in the Constitutional Revolution
  
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  The Role of the Baha'is in the Emergence of.the Constitutional Revolution
  
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  The Role of the Baha'is in the Constitutional Revolution
  
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  The Creation of an ‘Enemy Within’
  
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  The Results of the Constitutional Revolution
  

This article looks at the role of the Baha'is in the Constitutional Revolution of Iran, 1906–1911. It propounds three major theses. First, that when the royalists and anti-constitutionalist clerics accused the Constitutionalists of being “Babis”, it was the Baha'i community that they were referring to rather than the Azali Babis. Second, that the Baha'is had a complex relationship with the Constitutionalist Movement, sometimes supporting it and sometimes abstaining from involvement in politics, but that in any case, the impact of the Baha'is on the reformers and on the Revolution has been underestimated by most writers. Third, that, despite their closeness in terms of ideas about social reform, the enmity of the Azalis and clerics caused the Baha'is to be excluded from the reform legislation resulting from the Constitutional Revolution and effectively to be excluded from Iranian society. It resulted in the creation of an “enemy within”. Some of the consequences of this both for the Baha'is and for Iran are discussed.

Several books have appeared in recent years on the Constitutional Revolution in Iran.¹ One area that has been largely neglected in these studies, however, is the role of the Baha'i community. Janet Afary has noted the role of two Baha'is, Shaykh al-Ra'is (c.1848–1918) and Tayirih Khanum (c.1872–1911), in the discourse in this period on constitutionalism and the modernisation of Iran.² Mangol Bayat, while paying particular attention to the large role played by the Azali Babis in the Constitutional Revolution itself, says very little about the Baha'is, apart from noting Shaykh al-Ra'is's role.³ Most writers, including Martin and Bayat, content themselves with saying that the Baha'is played a ‘quietist’ or ‘apolitical’ role in the Revolution.⁴ A few have gone further and perpetuated the idea that the Baha'is supported Muhammad Ali Shah and the anti-constitutionalists.⁵⁵ Authors from Iran have either remained silent on the Baha'is or, perhaps mindful of their positions and careers, have repeated unproved conspiracy theories and forged evidence.⁶

Who Were ‘the Babis’?
In the years of the Constitutional Revolution itself, the constitutionalists were routinely identified as ‘Babis’ by their opponents. During the late nineteenth century, an image of the Babis as heretics and disrupters of social stability had been created and an atmosphere of fear and suspicion towards them generated. It was very convenient for the Shah and the royalist forces that the reformers could be easily identified in the public mind with the ‘Babis’ and thus the negative image of the latter could be transferred to the former. Clerics who were allied to the court, such as Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri (1843–1909), assisted the court by providing the arguments and rhetoric for this identification and he and others, such as Sayyid ‘Ali Yazdi, regularly attacked the ‘Babis’ in their sermons against the Constitution.⁷ Nuri accused the ‘Babis’ of being the principal villains in the origination and promulgation of the Constitution in pamphlets (lavāyih) distributed from printing presses under his control.⁸ Outside Tehran, also, anti-constitutionalist ‘ulama’ attacked the Baha'i community as well as accusing the secular constitutionalists of being ‘Babis’.⁹⁹

It therefore became part of the rhetoric of the royalist forces to label all of the constitutionalists ‘Babis’. In the first stages of the Revolution in December 1905, when the reformers tried to gain a foothold in the Shah Mosque, Sayyid Abul-Qasim the Imam-Jum‘ih of Tehran shouted down Sayyid Jamal Va‘iz as he was preaching, accusing him of being a ‘Babi’ and causing the reformers to withdraw to refuge in the shrine of Shah ‘Abdul-‘Azim.¹⁰ In June 1906, to put pressure on the reformers, the government arrested several of them, accused them of being ‘Babis’ and exiled them to Kalat.¹¹ When Shu‘a‘ al-Saltanih, acting for the reactionary Prime Minister ‘Ayn al-Dawlih, wanted to sow division among the constitutionalist ‘ulama’ who had taken refuge at Qumm, he accused them of having fallen victim to a Babi-inspired plot.¹² In Tabriz in 1906–1908, the ‘ulama’, wishing to discredit the constitutionalist association (anjuman) there, accused it of being a Babi agency and all constitutionalists of being 'Babis'.¹³ And then when Tabriz was besieged, the Royalist forces were told by their commanders that the constitutionalists of Tabriz were all ‘Babis’:

One prisoner was taken, and from him confirmation was received of the rumour that the Royalist officers had circulated amongst their men the disgusting calumny that the inhabitants of Tabriz had all turned Babis—i.e., heretics to Islam,—so that fighting against them might be looked on as a religious duty. After the victory this unfortunate was hustled into the presence of Sattar Khan [the Constitutionalist leader] … The prisoner, in the centre of the circle gyrated on his axis, salamming abjectly to each of his captors and babbling, ‘I too am a Babi, gentlemen; I too am a Babi.'¹⁴

Later, when Muhammad Ali Shah staged his coup against the Constitution in June 1908, he stated that his aim was to wage war against the ‘Babis’ and he later refused to negotiate with the Tabriz constitutionalists until the ‘Babis and ruffians’ had been punished.¹⁵ So strong was this identification of the constitutionalists with the Babis at all levels of society that when the two eminent clerics who supported the Revolution in Tehran—Bihbihani and Tabataba'i—were being exiled to Iraq, the people along the route would malign them saying: ‘Cursed be the Babis.'¹⁶

Thus, the first questions to be asked are: what did it mean when the anti-constitutionalist figures attacked the constitutionalists as ‘Babis’? With whom were they identifying the constitutionalists in these attacks? These questions will be examined by looking at the two main groups who were at this time both being described by the generality of Iranians as ‘Babis’: the Azali Babis and the Baha'is.

The Azali Babi Role in the Constitutional Revolution

When the Baha'i religion emerged from the Babi movement in the 1860s under the leadership of Baha'u'llah, there were a small number (probably less than 5 per cent) who rejected him and continued to follow the Babi leader Mirza Yahya Azal, thus becoming known as the Azalis. Despite their small numbers in absolute terms, they formed a large proportion of the leading figures in the reform and constitutionalist movement as it grew in the late 1890s and early 1900s. Indeed, as Bayat has described, it can be said that it was the Azalis who were the main engines driving forward the Constitutional Revolution. They created the coalition of masthead figures who had the credibility to lead the Revolution (see below), formed the anjumans (associations) that organised the movement, published the shabnamihs (propaganda leaflets distributed at night) and newspapers that created the agenda for it and provided the oratory that generated the public support for it. ¹⁷ Given this important role played by the Azalis movement, it may be imagined that it was the Azalis to whom reference was being made when the constitutionalists were described as ‘Babis’.

The concealment of their beliefs, their wearing of clerical garb, their assertions of upholding Islam, their constant manipulation and switching of roles has led historians such as Bayat to classify the Azalis as freethinkers and atheists who cynically used religion as it suited them.¹⁸ There is certainly evidence for this in their actions. But given that they concealed their real opinions, it is impossible to know what their true motivations were. The Baha'i historian of the constitutional movement, Haj Aqa Muhammad ‘Alaqihband, says that the Azali involvement in the Constitutional Revolution was duplicitous in that their real aim was to completely overthrow the Qajar monarchy and place Azal himself on the throne of Iran.¹⁹ Evidence for ‘Alaqihband's assertion comes from the Azali book Hasht Bihisht which prophesies that the Qajar dynasty would be overthrown and a descendant of Azal placed upon the throne²⁰ and from the statement of one Azali, Sayyid Jamal ad-Din Va‘iz, to another, Nazim al-Islam, regarding their cynical use of the religiosity of the people to achieve their purpose: ‘our goal must be attained through such actions and such people and such designs; any sacred cause had to be achieved through profane means.'²¹

The Azali enmity towards the Baha'is stemmed from their belief that Baha'u'llah had usurped the position of their leader Azal. There was a long history of Azalis attacking the Baha'is either overtly or covertly. Thus, for example, the two major Azali figures of the previous generation, Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi and Mirza Aqa Khan Kirmani, who had collaborated with Sayyid Jamal al-Din Asadabadi (‘Afghani’) in the production of the leading reformist newspaper Akhtar from Istanbul, had together produced an Azali anti-Baha'i polemic, the Hasht Bihisht.²² One must also ask the question that if the involvement of the Azalis in the reform movement was purely political and had no other aim, why were they so inimical to the Baha'is (as described below), who were potentially their allies in the reform of Iran? Even years later when the Azali leader Yahya Dawlatabadi was writing his memoirs, he could not resist implicating the Baha'is in conspiracy theories that he must have known were false.²³ In all, while it must be conceded that many of those identified as Azalis during the Constitutional Revolution probably had no religious convictions that drove their activities, they nevertheless retained a profound hatred for the Baha'is and acted against them whenever they could.

The Role of the Baha'is in the Emergence of Constitutionalism
During the 1890s and 1900s, as the pressure for reform was building in the country and the constitutional movement was getting under way, it was not just from Europe that the reformists were getting their inspiration and ideas. There was a native source for these ideas that was, at this time, being discussed widely. As will be demonstrated shortly, the Baha'i teachings were gaining widespread interest and most of the ideas later to be part of the agenda of the constitutionalist reformers were already present in these teachings. Both Baha'u'llah and ‘Abdu'l-Baha were among the first of those writing in Persian to call for social reform and democracy. Thus, at a time in the 1870s–1890s when much of Europe was subject to authoritarian regimes and most Iranian secular reformers like Malkam Khan were only suggesting that the shah should rule with the help of an appointed consultative council,²⁴ Baha'u'llah writing in the Kitab Aqdas (completed 1873) looks forward to the ‘reins of power’ in Tehran falling ‘into the hands of the people'²⁵ and, writing in 1891, urges elected parliaments along the lines of Britain's,²⁶ while ‘Abdu'l-Baha in his seminal work of 1875, Kitab-i Asrar-i Ghaybiyyih li Asbab a1-Madaniyyih (translated as The Secret of Divine Civilization), is advocating that the representatives on these councils and consultative assemblies should be elected by the people.²⁷ Also in this work, ‘Abdu'l-Baha was calling for the extension throughout the country of education, which should be according to modern curricula, including arts and sciences, a uniform code of law, equality before the law, security of property, ridding the government bureaucracy of corruption and a systematisation of the chaotic court procedures in Iran. Writing in 1886, ‘Abdu'l-Baha states that the government should ensure the individual's freedom of conscience (āzādigī-yi vujdān).²⁸ During the 1880s, Baha'u'llah was also writing of such issues as the importance of studying the modern arts and sciences, the necessity of raising the social role of women, the need for universal education (especially for girls and especially in the arts and modern sciences), the importance of justice and the need to devote particular attention to agriculture. Many of these issues did not appear in the writings of most of the secular reformers until later.

Unlike most of the Iranian reformers, and indeed many Middle Eastern modernisers, ‘Abdu'l-Baha does not encourage Iranians to model themselves on Europe. He does not see the future of Iran as being best served by a slavish adoption and mimicry of European attitudes and modes of government. While allowing that European science and social administration have certain lessons for the Middle East, he strongly criticises Europe in some respects. He condemns European society as being essentially a superficial materialistic culture that is morally bankrupt. He is very emphatic that what is needed is not an overlay of European ideas and models onto the contemporary Iranian society, but rather a moral and spiritual regeneration of Iran which will then become a suitable substrate for concepts of constitutionalism and social reform.²⁹

Perhaps even more important than priority in bringing these matters into public debate in Iran was the fact that the Baha'is were introducing ideas in a native and culturally more sympathetic manner than the secular reformers. As Guity Nashat has commented in relation to the earlier generation of secular reformers, while the ideas they introduced and even the words they used were not intelligible to most Iranians, the writings of Baha'u'llah and ‘Abdu'l-Baha were built up and developed from existing native concepts and vocabulary, resulting in a discourse that was more familiar, better understood and hence more easily accepted.³⁰

There is, moreover, much evidence that Baha'u'llah and ‘Abdu'l-Baha's writings and views were well known to the leading Iranian secular reformers. It has been suggested that Sayyid Jamal al-Din Asadabadi (‘al-Afghani’) was in contact with Baha'u'llah in Baghdad in the 1850s.³¹ Certainly he was very familiar with the movement and provided the information on this subject that went into Butrus al-Bustani's Arabic Encyclopaedia.³² He appears to have wanted to remain in contact with the Baha'i leaders in ‘Akka since he sent them copies of his newspaper, ‘Urwat al-Wuthqa, from Paris in the 1880s.³³ It would appear from Asadabadi's writings that he felt some antipathy towards the Baha'is, whom he saw as potentially breaking up the unity of the Islamic world, therefore his continued contacts may well have been because he found the ideas emanating from this source useful to him in formulating his own views.³⁴ The evidence for Mirza Malkam Khan's close association with the Baha'is is much stronger. Malkam Khan was exiled from Iran to Baghdad in 1861 and came into contact with Baha'u'llah there³⁵ before his further exile in April 1862 to Istanbul. Both at this time and earlier in Tehran, Malkam Khan had had such close contact with the Babis that when Ernest Renan met him in Istanbul in June 1865, Malkam Khan represented himself as being knowledgeable about Babis and so we find Renan in 1866 encouraging Malkam Khan to write on the subject.³⁶ The reformist Prime Minister Mirza Husayn Khan Mushir al-Dawlih Sipahsalar (1827–1881, Prime Minister 1871–1873), while he was the Iranian Minister at the Sublime Porte, had been instrumental in bringing about the various stages of Baha'u'llah's exile from Baghdad to Istanbul, to Edirne and finally to ‘Akka, and he had used all his influence to restrict the activities of the Baha'is. But it is reported that in 1870, after reading the petitions addressed to Baha'u'llah that had been confiscated when Baha'u'llah's courier was arrested in Aleppo, he altered his attitude and, from that time on, he is reported to have been sympathetic.³⁷ Certainly there were no persecutions of the Baha'is during the time he was Prime Minister. One of his close relatives, Mirza Muhammad ‘Ali Kadkhuda Qazvini, was a Baha'i³⁸ and this may have been one way in which information about the Baha'is reached Mushir al-Dawlih, but it may also have come from Malkam Khan with whom he was closely associated both in Istanbul and Tehran.

Coming on to the period immediately before and during the Constitutional Revolution (i.e. 1895–1909), the Baha'is did not just have the above well-established discourse on social reform and constitutionalism but they were instituting these social reforms in their own community, which extended not only throughout the main cities of Iran but also to many rural areas. They were moving away from a system of traditional leadership and towards a system of democratically elected Baha'i councils to administer their affairs. Baha'u'llah had called in 1873 for the establishment of a House of Justice (bayt al-‘adl) in every locality. Various councils were set up by the Iranian Baha'is and it is not clear when these councils first became elected bodies but there are indications that, in 1897, ‘Abdu'l-Baha sent instructions that the Tehran council should become an elected body.³⁹ Baha'i councils were then established in all of the major Baha'i communities of Iran during the first few years of the twentieth century. The Baha'is were also at the forefront of establishing schools run according to modern pedagogic principles and with a modern curriculum. The first such boys' school was established in Tehran in about 1900 and gradually a network of some 80 such schools was established throughout Iran in towns and villages where there were Baha'i communities.⁴⁰ The Baha'is were also at the forefront of promoting the social role of women.⁴¹ Thus in most places where a boys' school was established, a girls' school was also set up. A Committee for the Advancement of Women (Maḥfil-i Taraqqī-yi Nisvān) was established in 1909 and organised classes for women to learn public speaking, general knowledge, knowledge about the Baha'i Faith, and literacy.⁴²

In light of the reforms that the Baha'is were promoting within their own community, an interesting insight into the way that Iranian Muslims thought of the Baha'is at this time is given in a diary entry reporting a conversation in a coffee shop in Tehran in July 1907 at the height of the crisis caused by the attack on the Constitution by Muhammad ‘Ali Shah and Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri:

Today several people were speaking in the coffee shop. One of them Mirza Taqi and some others were saying that Aqa Sayyid Jamal [Va‘iz Isfahani] is preaching from the pulpit saying: ‘why do you go to Karbala thus both wasting your money and [suffering injury from] falling from mules? It all comes to nothing. Come and spend your money on schools; put it in the bank.’ This sort of talk is what the Baha'is say. They say: why do you go on pilgrimage to visit a piece of wood and your wife and children only see the muleteer? Why is it that you are spending perhaps ten or fifteen thousand tumans in holding a celebration of the majlis [parliament]? Why is it that you do not say that you want to strengthen the foundations of the majlis [by building schools etc.]?⁴³
It is also important to realise that the Baha'i Faith was going through a phase of rapid expansion at this time and much of this expansion was among the emerging middle class of educated government officials, merchants (tujjār) and the new modern professional classes that were becoming important (school-teachers, physicians, journalists). There is independent evidence for this rapid expansion. For example, by 1884, the increasing conversions had even begun to affect relatively small communities such as Asadabad in central Iran, from where Mirza Sharif Mustawfi wrote to his uncle Sayyid Jamal al-Din Asadabadi (‘al-Afghani’), urging him to write something against the Baha'is. He writes: ‘In all of the provinces of Iran, a large number of people are now following Mirza Husayn ‘Ali ‘Akkāwī [i.e. Baha'u'llah], such that there is no counting or describing them. They have some books of his such as the Bayan and the Iqan and many others, and night and day they are thinking and speaking of him. He has taken the title Baha'.'⁴⁴ In 1887, the Christian missionary agent Benjamin Badall reported: ‘the religion of Baha increases daily, and one of them said that since our last visit more than four hundred men have become Baabis in Yezd alone, besides those in the surrounding villages.'⁴⁵

Accounts from this period even speak of the possibility of the Baha'i Faith replacing Islam as the predominant religion of Iran (see statements to this effect by Napier Malcolm, a British missionary in Yazd, 1898–1904;⁴⁶ and reported by Professor E.G. Browne in 1903⁴⁷ and Arthur Hardinge, the British Minister in Tehran 1900–1905⁴⁸). It is not surprising, therefore, that Western estimates of the total number of Baha'is in Iran at this time are very high. Some careful observers estimated as many as 500,000–1 million in 1892⁴⁹ and 3 million Baha'is by the turn of the century (i.e. a third of the estimated total population of 9 million).⁵⁰ This estimate of one-third of the population is also found in the second volume of the Gazetteer of Persia, compiled by the Intelligence Branch of the Indian Government and published in 1905.⁵¹ Although these numbers are, of course, gross overestimates, there can be no doubt that the Baha'i Faith was making great strides among the more educated classes in the cities and it seems likely that these overestimates were the result of European observers, who interacted only with these classes, extrapolating what they observed there to the whole country. Thus we may be safe in concluding from these accounts that, at the very least, the Baha'i teachings were being actively discussed and considered by about one-third of the educated and professional classes in Iran—exactly the same group of people who were also the main supporters and drivers of constitutionalism and the social reform movement. Ideas were filtering through from the Baha'i teachings into the discourse of the reformers.⁵² There is even evidence that the secular reformers, as they planned their campaign to bring about the Constitution, modelled themselves on the Baha'is in terms of strategies that they saw were being successfully used by them.⁵³

It is now appropriate to return to the question of the identity of the group that anti-constitutionalist figures such as Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri had in mind when they accused the constitutionalists of being ‘Babis’. Given the work of Bayat on the important role played by the Azalis in the Constitutional Revolution, it would be tempting to reach the conclusion that it was the Azalis who were intended. It must, however, be borne in mind that the Azalis routinely and continuously practised taqiyya (dissimulation of their real beliefs). Not only did they conceal their beliefs but several of the most important of the Azalis even dressed and passed themselves off as Shi‘i clerics. In their writings they strictly avoided mentioning the Babi religion. It is not at all clear to what extent it was realised by most people that these people were in fact Azalis. Of course, the anti-constitutionalists accused them of being ‘Babis’, but this was a general accusation made against all constitutionalists and therefore has no evidentiary value. One must ask the question: would orthodox clerics such as Bihbihani and Tabataba'i have associated closely with these individuals and allied themselves with their proposals if they had known that they were in fact Babis? It seems unlikely.

On the other hand, in the 1890s and early 1900s, the Baha'i community not only had a discourse on constitutionalism and social reform, but they were also taking practical steps in advancing this discourse by electing their ruling councils, building schools and advancing the social role of women. As we have seen above, possibly as many as one-third of government officials and the educated and professional classes were engaged with the Baha'i community to some degree. This same social group was also the main group behind the drive for constitutionalism and social reform that was just emerging at this time. It seems very likely, then, that one of the main sources of the ideas emerging in the reformers' discourse was the teachings and practices of the Baha'i community.

Fortunately we also have a few instances in which prominent anti-constitutionalist figures clearly identified whether it was in fact the Azalis or the Baha'is that they meant by their attacks on ‘Babis’. There were two episodes that were very similar except for the fact that one occurred in Tehran and the other in Shiraz. Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri ascended a pulpit in front of the crowd assembled in Maydan-i Tupkhanih (Artillery Square) in Tehran in December 1907 and read to the crowd the passage in Baha'u'llah's Kitab Aqdas that addresses Tehran and predicts: ‘Erelong will the state of affairs within thee be changed, and the reins of power fall into the hands of the people.'⁵⁴ He then said that the leader of the ‘Babis’ urged this 40 years ago and now his followers were carrying out his instructions.⁵⁵ Similarly in Shiraz the anti-constitutionalist Qavam al-Mulk summoned the people of the town to the Masjid Naw and read to them the same passage of the Aqdas, asking them whether they really wanted to bring about the constitutional government that Mirza Husayn ‘Ali [Baha'u'llah] had promised his people. Did they not realise that everything they did to promote this matter brought upon them the curse of God and His Messenger?⁵⁶

Therefore, despite the major—one might almost say decisive—role of the Azalis in the Constitutional Revolution, the thesis of this article is that it was, in fact, the Baha'is that the anti-constitutionalist clerics and writers had in mind when they attacked the constitutionalist and social reformers as ‘Babis’. It was being claimed that these reformers were promoting the same concepts and were therefore indistinguishable from the Baha'is.