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

The Role of the Baha'is in the Constitutional Revolution
The second point to be examined in this article is the reason that the Baha'is, despite the fact that they were so much aligned with the aims and ideology of the constitutionalists, are reported to have played only a small role in the Revolution itself? Indeed, why did they become considered by many of the constitutionalists as their enemies and thus become considered by both sides (the constitutionalists and anti-constitutionalists) as their enemies?

During the early stages of the Constitutional Revolution, the Baha'i leader ‘Abdu'l-Baha encouraged the Baha'is to support the constitutional movement, although his instructions to the Baha'is were to refrain from participating in public disorder and opposing Mozaffar al-Din Shah, this being in accordance with the Baha'i teaching that religion should be a source of order and unity in the world: ‘Let not the means of order be made the cause of confusion and the instrument of union an occasion for discord.'⁵⁷

Apart from Haji Shaykh al-Ra'is who was a member of the leading group of reformers and the above-mentioned Haj Aqa Muhammad ‘Alaqihband, a prominent merchant, a number of other Baha'is were closely involved in the reform and constitutionalist movement. Haji ‘Abdul-Husayn, known as Haj Navvab, who was one of the notables of Ardekan and a Baha'i, came to Tehran after the anti-Baha'i pogrom in Yazd in 1903 and became a supporter of the constitutionalist cause.⁵⁸ Four of the prominent owners or editors of reformist newspapers were also Baha'is: Sayyid Farajullah Kashani, a Baha'i who took over as proprietor of the Surayya newspaper in Egypt in 1900 and transferred it to Tehran in 1903 and to Kashan in about 1910;⁵⁹ Muhammad ‘Ali Hidayat founded the Bisharat newspaper in Mashhad in 1906; Sayyid Ahmad Khavari Kashani (who had the titles Lisan ul-Islam and Fakhr ul-Va‘izin), the owner of the Mizan newspaper in Tehran;⁶⁰ and from an earlier period Mirza Mahmud Khan (d. 1313/1895), the proprietor of the Farhang newspaper of Isfahan (published 1879–1890, although at first under a different proprietor).⁶¹ Tayirih Khanum, in a later period, wrote articles in the Iran-i Naw newspaper advocating women's rights.⁶² With a few exceptions,⁶³ most of the Baha'is around Iran were also supporters of the constitution. In Sari, for example, the head and most of the founders of the Anjuman Haqiqat, an association which was formed to support the constitution and established a modern school in the town, were Baha'is and so was at least one of the leading consititutionalists in Barfurush.⁶⁴

In this early stage the Baha'is stood universally identified in the minds of the general population as supporters or even the instigators of the Constitutional Revolution. The French Baha'i, Hippolyte Dreyfus, who was in Tehran in the summer of 1906 at the time of the bast in the British Legation, writes:

Some, looking at the altogether progressive tendency of this distinctively peaceful revolution, have not hesitated for an instant in seeing the hand of the Baha'is at work. I recall, last July, in Tehran, while the people had ensconced themselves in the English Legation in order to lean more heavily on the goodwill of the shah's ministers, having heard some merchants (among those, it is understood who had not followed the movement and who lamented the losses inflicted on their businesses by the closure of the bazaars) say that the faithful Muslims had nothing to do with this movement, and that the Baha'is alone must bear the responsibility for all the disorders and for the troubles cast into the affairs of the country.⁶⁵
It was not only Western Baha'is who thought this, moreover. Editorials in the French magazine, Revue du Monde Musulmane, credited the Baha'is with a leading role and referred to articles in British newspapers confirming this.⁶⁶ The British-Indian writer Bernard Temple, who was in Iran for a year during the Revolution, went even further and credited the Baha'i teachings with being the inspiration and motivating force behind the constitutional movement.⁶⁷

Up to the signing of the Constitution by the ailing Muzaffar al-Din Shah on 30 December 1906, the disparate leadership of the constitutional movement remained more or less united and had ranged almost the whole of the people of Iran behind it. With the death of Muzaffar al-Din Shah on 8 January 1907 and the accession to the throne of Muhammad ‘Ali Shah, the leadership of the constitutional movement rapidly fell apart. The main factions emerging included those who wished to press forward with further democratic reforms, those seeking to reverse some of the gains made and strengthen the power of shah, and the conservative clerics led by Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri who wanted to see the Constitution subordinated to Islamic (i.e. clerical) control.

Up to this point, it is certainly incorrect to say that the Baha'is played a negligible role in the Constitutional Revolution. In about February 1907, however, ‘Abdu'l-Baha issued strict instructions for the Baha'is to withdraw from involvement in the political process.⁶⁸ He gives a number of reasons for his decision in letters that he wrote at about this time. In one place he states that, although he hopes that the Constitution be firmly established in Iran, since that is clear from the text of Baha'u'llah's Kitab Aqdas, he ordered the Baha'is to withdraw from involvement for their own protection, since the Azalis were making accusations to the shah that the Baha'is supported the Constitution. If ‘Abdu'l-Baha were then to also encourage this support for the Constitution, it would cause the shah to fall upon the Baha'is and massacre them. Since the Azalis had also told the constitutionalists that the Baha'is were supporting the shah, the Baha'is could expect no help from the constitutionalists either.⁶⁹ Second, he is said to have felt that the reform movement was being held back by the continuing accusations that it was in fact a smokescreen for the advancement of ‘Babism’ (i.e. the Baha'i Faith) and that the withdrawal of the Baha'is would assist the reform movement.⁷⁰ Third, ‘Abdu'l-Baha had repeatedly warned against factionalism and disunity. In particular he urged the shah and the constitutionalists, through messages that he sent to both sides through intermediaries, to reconcile their differences and to act together in the interests of the nation, otherwise the country's prosperity would suffer and there was even a danger of invasion by foreign powers.⁷¹ Since he was attempting to play a mediatory role, ‘Abdu'l-Baha may well have felt that this would be impeded if the Baha'is were openly supporting one side.

In late 1908, after Muhammad ‘Ali Shah's coup d'état, ‘Abdu'l-Baha wrote to several statesmen in Iran and, through intermediaries, to the shah himself. He called for the shah and the people to be reconciled and united and urged the restoration of the Constitution.⁷²

There was another brief period, after the overthrow of Muhammad ‘Ali Shah and the restoration of the Constitution, when ‘Abdu'l-Baha contemplated involving the Baha'is again in the political process. In a letter written to an Iranian Baha'i, ‘Azizullah Varqa, at this time, ‘Abdul-Baha instructs the Baha'is to strive to get some of the leading Baha'is (the Hands of the Cause) into parliament, although it is not clear whether this means to try to get them elected as regular members or to try to have the Baha'i Faith recognised as a religious minority with its own seats in parliament as the other religious minorities had.⁷³ ‘Abdu'l-Baha's encouragement of the Baha'is to participate in the political process may appear surprising when he had forbidden involvement just over two years earlier, but the situation was very different. Engagement in the political process two years before would have involved the Baha'is taking sides in the increasingly bitter and divided political arena.⁷⁴ Now with the overthrow of Muhammad ‘Ali Shah, there was a possibility of the Baha'is creating unity around a platform of progressive social reform. Several of the leaders of the Constitutional Revolution at this stage were well informed about and sympathetic to the Baha'i teachings, including, for example, the leaders of the two main columns of forces that converged on Tehran in 1909: Sardar As‘ad, the Bakhtiyari leader, had taken on a Baha'i, Mirza Habibullah Shirazi, as tutor to his children and as collaborator in translating books from French into Persian;⁷⁵ Muhammad Vali Khan Tunukabuni Nasr al-Saltanih (Sipahsalar-i A‘zam) was considered a Baha'i both by the Baha'is and the population when he was governor in Rasht in 1899–1903 and in Tabriz in 1913.⁷⁶ Both of these men met with ‘Abdu'l-Baha in Paris.⁷⁷ Despite these promising elements, this initiative of ‘Abdu'l-Baha to have the Baha'is play a constructive role in Iranian politics and society was not to be. The conservative clerics succeeded in having a new electoral law passed in July 1909 which had articles in it specifically to prevent the Baha'is from membership in the parliament.⁷⁸

Thus the lack of significant Baha'i involvement in the later stages of the Constitutional Revolution stemmed from a number of factors both internal (‘Abdu'l-Baha's initial prohibition on taking part in public disorder or disruption and his later ban on all political involvement) and external (the opposition of the clerics; their influence on the wording of the various bills that were passed such that the Baha'is were in effect barred from recognition as a minority and were unable to take part in the political process; and the creation of an antagonistic atmosphere by the Azalis).

The Creation of an ‘Enemy Within’
This exclusion of the Baha'is from the political process then led on to a further development which was the creation of an atmosphere of fear, suspicion and hatred towards the Baha'is; the creation of an ‘enemy within’. It is not difficult to see how this situation arose. Several of the major groups who had come to power or had increased their power as a result of the Constitutional Revolution had great enmity towards the Baha'is—in particular the Azalis and the Shi‘i clerics.

The result of the intimate involvement of the Azalis with the constitutionalist movement was that they managed to create in the minds of the reformers an antipathy towards the Baha'is. The Azalis asserted to the constitutionalists that the Baha'is were in fact against the Constitution and loyal to the shah.⁷⁹ Both Sayyid Hasan Kashani, editor of the Habl al-Matin, an Azali,⁸⁰ and Taqizadih, who was so closely allied to the Azalis that he was thought by some to be an Azali,⁸¹ made this accusation. Evidence of the spread of this accusation against the Baha'is through the ranks of the constitutionalists comes from E.G. Browne, who heard it expressed in 1908 by Muhammad Nasir Khan Zahir al-Sultan, a cousin of Muhammad ‘Ali Shah, who was an active constitutionalist and who presumably heard this from his Azali colleagues.⁸² It was probably also Azalis who were responsible for the production of forged letters from ‘Abdu'l-Baha expressing support for the shah which were spread about in 1910. When in 1910 the Baha'i scholar Fazil Mazandarani was sent by ‘Abdu'l-Baha to initiate a dialogue with the reformist cleric Ayatullah Khurasani, he was confronted with such a forgery while he was being interrogated in Iraq.⁸³ As pointed out in the opening of this article, this view gained sufficient currency that one finds it repeated even in scholarly works of recent times.

As a result of this Azali activity, a negative atmosphere was created against the Baha'is. Thus we find the anomalous position of strong supporters of the Constitution and of social reform, who in other circumstances were calling for free speech and human rights, voicing highly illiberal sentiments against the Baha'is. Sattar Khan, the leader of the Tabriz constitutionalists, for example, called for the implementation of the fatwa of the ‘ulama’ calling for a general massacre of the Baha'is.⁸⁴ The leader of the constitutionalist forces in Fars, Sayyid ‘Abdul-Husayn Lari, issued orders for a general massacre of the Baha'is in 1909 and his lieutenant Shaykh Zakariya Kuhistani proceeded to carry this out in Nayriz, killing some 18 Baha'is and causing others to die of starvation and the cold when they were driven out of the town.⁸⁵

The second major group among the constitutionalists who were enemies of the Baha'is were the Shi‘i clerics. While the Azalis were the driving force of the constitutional movement, they were intelligent enough to realise that they could never by themselves get the masses of the people aroused and demonstrating in the streets so as to force the Qajar monarchy into making concessions. They therefore brought into alliance with themselves an unlikely hotchpotch of leading personalities to be the figureheads of the movement—people who were well known to the masses and who could be expected to bring with them either a considerable personal following or wealth with which to fuel the demonstrations. In particular, when the Azalis saw the potential of the Shi‘i clerics in mustering popular support in the episode of the Tobacco Regie in 1891–1892, they realised the potential of the Shi‘i clerics for garnering mass support. (‘Abdu'l-Baha had drawn exactly the opposite conclusion from the episode of the Tobacco Regie and had, at that time, written his Treatise on Politics, Risalih-yi Siyasiyyih, warning against involving the clerics in politics and reminding Iranians that each time this had happened in their history, the result had been disastrous for Iran—for example in the Russo-Persian wars in the early nineteenth century.)

In this way, the Azalis were able to hook personalities into the reform movement who had no real interest in reform or constitutionalism but were there because they expected some personal gain from their involvement. Indeed, it could be said that none of the masthead figures in the reformist camp, except for Sayyid Muhammad Tabataba'i, were there because they supported the ideas of the Constitution. They were rather there because the Azalis had cajoled and manipulated them into this camp with the promise of being able to advance personal agendas and rid themselves of hated rivals. The mujtahid Sayyid ‘Abdullah Bihbihani, for example, who had supported the shah during the Tobacco Regie and who was said to have neither the enthusiasm for the Constitution of Tabataba'i nor the religious learning of Nuri,⁸⁶ was persuaded to join the reformist camp by playing on his rivalry with Nuri and his hatred of the Prime Minister ‘Ayn al-Dawlih.⁸⁷ Bihbihani was also induced to side with the constitutionalists by the prospect of monetary gain since most of the leading merchants of the capital were supporting the constitutionalists and plying the ‘ulama’ who did likewise with money. One writer was witness to the fact that, prior to the Revolution, all Bihbihani could afford as transport was a single old donkey, while after the Revolution his stables contained a fine coach and 35 horses.⁸⁸ Even the reactionary cleric Nuri was cajoled into supporting the Revolution for just long enough in late 1906 to create a united front to present to the shah and compel him to allow the Constitution. Thus using greed and longstanding rivalries and hatreds, the Azalis levered prominent clerics and statesmen who had no interest in supporting political reform into the reformist camp.⁸⁹ Hence the wry comment of Nazim al-Islam Kirmani: ‘people who used to make a living out of tyranny and despotism are now inclining towards justice and constitutionalism.'⁹⁰

These clerics, however, came in to the reformist camp at a price. They had their own agenda to push forward. One of their main concerns was to halt the advances being made by the Baha'is among their congregations. Kasravi quotes the private letter of one of the anti-constitutionalist clerics Sayyid Muhammad Yazdi to his son-in-law in Najaf, writing of how the Babis had infiltrated the Majlis and were even leaders of it and of what damage this had done to the religion of Islam, with people even being encouraged to read newspapers rather than the Qur'an (he writes that reading newspapers was now a religious obligation and saying prayers and reading the Qur'an were forgotten).⁹¹ As Kasravi points out, we see here that the enmity of the ‘ulama’ towards the Baha'is was not just a formal response to the religious claims of Baha'u'llah, it was the concern of a religious professional about the loss of his prestige, congregation and income, all of which were intimately tied in with the amount of respect and attachment the people had towards the Qur'an and their religious obligations.

Even in the build-up of events leading to the Constitutional Revolution, the Baha'is had paid a heavy price, being subjected to persecutions in many parts of Iran and a genocidal outburst in Yazd in 1903 led by the clerics, as part of the campaign against Amin al-Sultan.⁹² Then, once the Constitution had been granted, Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri took the lead in insisting that any rights and freedoms given in the Constitution and the supplementary laws that accompanied it did not benefit the Baha'is. They were not to be one of the recognised religious minorities and provisions for freedom of belief and freedom of publication were worded in such a way as to exclude the Baha'is from their purview. Having sought the assistance of the ‘ulama’ to gain their Constitution, the reformers were not in a position to refuse these negations of the principles of the Revolution. This weakness of the position of the reformers left Nuri free to issue abusive and vituperative attacks on the Baha'is. The fact that no-one felt able to insist on correcting these lies in public, lest they too be accused of being a ‘Babi’, set a precedent that this type of behaviour was acceptable under the Constitution. Later laws passed after overthrow of Muhammad ‘Ali Shah in 1909 also prevented the Baha'is from becoming members of parliament.

Thus the Baha'is became simultaneously the enemies of the Qajar state, the Shi‘i ‘ulama’ and the secular reformers. The net result of this was described thus by Nazim al-Islam Kirmani, who himself played no small role in these events:

It has become the norm in Iran that whenever it is desired to overthrow someone and remove them from the political scene, they say that he is a Babi. For example as long as the Majlis has power, if anyone says something that is not liked by others, they immediately say: ‘The Babis are the enemies of the Majlis and do not want there to be a Majlis in Iran.’ And if, God forbid, at some time either the Shah or the ‘ulama’ fall out with the Majlis and want to create the conditions for its overthrow, then they would say: ‘The Babis have established this Majlis.’ Similarly when it was the matter of schools, we saw that at first when these schools were being established, the people said: ‘It is the Babis who are establishing these schools.’ However, after Hujjat al-Islam Aqa Sayyid Muhammad Tabataba'i established the Islam School and this became widely known, then suddenly anyone who was saying bad things about these schools was now called a Babi. This is how we Iranians do things and how we eliminate people from the scene.⁹³
By ‘othering’ the Baha'is and making them into an ‘internal enemy’, the Shi‘i ‘ulama’ had neutralised a potential threat and avoided having to confront the Baha'is in open discussion and debate (they had on numerous occasions in the past lost face when in open debate with Baha'i propagandists). This was a continuation of a situation that suited both the Qajar state and the Shi‘i clerics. As Tavakoli-Targhi has commented, instead of engaging with the Baha'is in a dialogue that would have promoted a national democratic public sphere of discourse, the Qajar state together with the Shi‘i clergy opted to try to violently suppress the movement. Moreover they used accusations of ‘Babism’ as a means of repressing other secular demands for modernisation and democracy. The Qajar state and the Shi‘i clergy thus became the architects of the heritage of the repressive and authoritarian political structure that Iran was to experience for the next century.⁹⁴

The Results of the Constitutional Revolution for the Baha'is and for Iran
After the Constitutional Revolution, the Baha'is thus found themselves in a worse situation than before. It is true that the position of the Baha'is drew on an already established scapegoating and ‘othering’ of the Babi community even before the Revolution but the establishment of the Constitution gave a legal basis to this. Before the Revolution, any local cleric or governor could whip up persecution of the Baha'is on a whim or to further their own advantage, but the law was whatever the shah or the governor decided and so the Baha'is were in a position to negotiate and alter their standing. After the Revolution, their social exclusion was now enshrined in an independent code of laws. While the Constitutional Revolution had refashioned the ‘Shi‘i nation’ into the ‘nation of Iran’, the Baha'is were excluded from this refashioned nation.⁹⁵ As Iran became more centralised and the government more bureaucratic during the Pahlavi regime, room for manoeuvre and negotiation became severely limited. Moreover, due to the hostility of the clerical and Azali leadership of the Revolution, an atmosphere of hatred and an assumption that it was acceptable to say whatever one wanted about the Baha'is had been created. The preconditions were thus established during the Constitutional Revolution for the ‘othering’ of Baha'is, for the creation of ‘an enemy within’.

The fact that a large religious minority had been excluded from the Constitution and thus effectively excluded from Iranian society was to act as a poisonous precedent for the next 100 years. Over the succeeding decades, it meant that conspiracy theories could be concocted and published without fear of contradiction, linking the Baha'is as ‘enemies within’ to external powers such as Britain, Russia and later America and Israel. It led to anyone who proposed reform or a campaign against corruption being accused of being a Baha'i and thus being silenced. It made it easier for the government to create other ‘enemies within’ of their opponents and violently suppress them rather than engaging them in debate. Instead of the emergence of a public sphere of discourse in which all could engage openly and honestly, the sphere of national public debate tilted towards one that was imbued with fear, the main protagonists often being demagogues and the agenda much of the time a series of exaggerated conspiracy theories.

Once portrayed as ‘enemies within’, it became acceptable to mistreat and persecute the Baha'is, since they ‘deserved’ it. This is the same pathway that the Nazis trod on their way to unleashing a genocide upon the Jews in Germany and the same pathway that justified Stalin in sending millions of ‘enemies of the state’ to their deaths in Siberia.⁹⁶ This pathway, moreover, justifies the government in taking on authoritarian and totalitarian powers in order to deal with the perceived threat from the ‘enemy within’. It encourages emotive demagoguery instead of sane and rational public debate. This atmosphere even penetrates to the academic world, which feels obligated to concoct the evidence to support attacks upon the ‘enemies within’. One cannot find a single book or article published within Iran in the last 100 years on the subject of the Baha'is that does not repeat baseless accusations and promote fantasy conspiracy theories. Thus, what happened to the Baha'is in the Constitutional Revolution has not only had an adverse effect upon the Baha'is. It has poisoned Iran's national life, its politics and its academy in ways that still require a great deal of research.

 This paper was presented at the conference ‘The Iranian Constitutional Revolution 1906–1911’, Oxford, 30 July–2 August 2006. The author is grateful to Dr Houshang Chehabi, Dr Peter Smith, Sen McGlinn, Ismael Velasco and Peter Terry for their helpful comments on this article.

1 See in particular: Vanessa Martin,