Introduction

cotton, opium, and carpets were exported to Europe. But the silk industry was destroyed when one European firm imported diseased silk worms; the international price of silver, which made up Iranian currency, fell dramatically;
and during the 1850s, European economic influence intensified in Iran, as the powers began to demand concessions for particular activities. To improve communications between England and India during the late 1850s, the British got the concessions for all telegraph lines in Iran. In 1847, the British subject Baron Julius de Reuter (1816--99) gained exclusive rights to railway and streetcar construction in Iran, all mineral extraction, all new irrigation works, a national bank, and various industrial projects. This concession had been promoted by Prime Minister Mirza Hosain Khan, who was in favor of reform but probably thought that the shahs were so incompetent that it was better to allow the British to modernize the country. He had miscalculated; a group of concerned officials and ulema, led by the shah’s wife, protested vociferously against the Reuter concession and Mirza Khan was forced to resign. Nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, both Britain and Russia had won heavy economic concessions in Iran which, in some areas, amounted to political control. Merchants who could see the benefits of modernization, but understandably feared this growth of foreign influence, began to campaign against the regime.
They were supported by the ulema, who were in a far stronger position than the ulema of Egypt. The Usuli victory at the end of the eighteenth century had given the mujtahids a powerful weapon, since, in principle, even the shah was bound by their rulings. They were not cowed and marginalized by the Qajars, who needed their support. The ulema had a secure financial base and were centered in the holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala in Ottoman Iraq, beyond the reach of the Qajars.
In Iran, the royal capital of Tehran was quite distinct from the Shii shrine city of Qum. There was thus an effective separation of religion and politics. Unlike Muhammad All, the Qajar shahs had no modern army and no central bureaucracy capable of enforcing their will on the ulema in such matters as education, law, and the administration of religiously endowed land and properties (awqaf), which remained the preserve of the ulema. In the early years of the nineteenth century, however, the clergy, faithful to Shii tradition, kept out of politics.
When Sheikh Murtada Ansari became in effect the first mujtahid to be recognized as the sole and supreme “model for emulation” (marja-e taqlid), the deputy-in-chief of the Hidden Imam, he was preferred to another, more learned candidate who had on his own admission become “involved with the affairs of the people,” acting as a legal adviser in commercial and personal matters to the merchants and pilgrims to the shrines. The implication was that the supreme judge of the faithful should be a scholar, not a man of affairs.
But as the Europeans gained more commercial power in Iran, the merchants and artisans turned increasingly for advice to the ulema. The clergy and the merchants and artisans of the bazaar, popularly known as the ba-^aaris, were natural allies; they frequently came from the same families, and shared the same religious ideals. During the second half of the nineteenth century, the ulema gave the merchants intellectual backing for their objections to foreign penetration: Iran, they argued, would no longer be an Islamic country if the shahs continued to give so much power to the infidels.
The shahs tried to counter these objections by appealing to the popular religion of the masses, especially by associating themselves with the mourning ceremonies for Husain. They had their own raw da-khans, who recited the epic accounts of the Kerbala tragedy every day; they built a royal stage in Tehran for the performance of the annual passion play (taziyeh) commemorating Husain’s death, which took place on five consecutive nights during the sacred month of Muharram in the great court of the royal palace.
The battle between Husain and Yazid was enacted, the deaths of the Imam and his sons depicted, and, on the night of the fast-day of Ashura, the anniversary of the Kerbala disaster, there was a grand procession, in which effigies of the martyrs (complete with life size representations of their shrines and whole choirs of children) were carried through the streets, while the common people followed, beating their breasts.
Throughout Muharram, all the mosques were festooned in black drapery, and in the public squares, booths were erected for the raw da-khans, who chanted the dirge mournfully and loudly. By this date, there were a number of celebrated ra.wd.a-khans in the country who competed with one another for preeminence.
These mourning rites became a major Iranian institution under the Qajars. Besides linking the monarchy with Husain and K-erbala, and thus helping to legitimate Qajar rule, they also served as a safety valve, giving the masses an outlet for their frustration and discontent. The people were not passive spectators; throughout the recitations and performances, they made their presence felt. As a French visitor noted, “the whole auditory responds to them with tears and deep sighs.” Throughout the battle scenes, the spectators sobbed and wept, striking their breasts with tears streaming down their cheeks. While the actors expressed their horror and sorrow through the text, it was--and remains--the task of the audience to provide the explicit and violent expressions of grief, completing an essential part of the drama.
They were at one and the same time symbolically on the plains of Kerbala and in their own world, weeping for their own tragedies and pain. To this day, the American scholar William Beeman explains, the audience are taught to weep for their sins and their own troubles, and to remind themselves of Husain’s even greater suffering. They could thus identify with the Kerbala story, bringing it, by means of these dramatic rituals, into the present, and thus giving the historical tragedy the timeless quality of myth. The flagellants represented the people of Kufa who had abandoned Husain and, therefore, chastised themselves, but they also stood for all Muslims who failed to help the Imams create a just society. Shiis weep for Husain and give him a symbolic funeral, because he did not get one in real life and his ideals were never implemented. To this day, Iranians say that during Muharram, they also recall the sufferings of their friends and relatives. But these personal memories lead them to an emotional apprehension of the problem of evil:
why do the good suffer and the wicked seem to prevail? As they moan, slap their foreheads, and weep uncontrollably, the participants arouse in themselves that yearning for justice which is at the heart of Shii piety. The dirges and passion plays remind them each year of the persistent evil in the world and reaffirm their belief in the final triumph of goodness.
This popular faith was clearly very different from the legalistic, rationalistic Shiism of the mujtahids. It also had an obvious revolutionary potential.
It could--and would--be easily used to point to evils in society and to a perceived likeness between the current ruler and Yazid. During the Qajar period, as under the Safavids, however, this rebellious motif was restrained and the emphasis was still on the suffering of Husain, which was seen as a vicarious sacrifice for the sins of the people. During the nineteenth century, it was not through the taziyeh that the people rebelled; instead, many expressed their discontent in two popular messianic movements. The first of these was led by Hajj Muhammad Karim Khan Kirmani (1810-71), a Qajar prince and a cousin and stepson of Fath All Shah, whose father was the governor of the turbulent province of Kirman.
There, Karim Khan became involved with the Shaikhi sect, a radical mystical movement founded by Shaykh Ahmad al-Ahsai (1753--1826) of Kerbala. He had been deeply influenced by the mysticism of Mulla Sadra and the School of Isfahan, which the Usuli mullahs had tried to suppress. Ahsai and his disciple, Sayyid Kazim Rashti (1759-1843), taught that each of the prophets and imams had perfectly reflected the divine will; their lives and example were gradually drawing the whole of humanity toward a state of perfection. The Hidden Imam was not in hiding in this world; he had been translated to the world of pure archetypes (alam al-mithal), whence, through his earthly representatives, who knew how to penetrate this mystical realm, he continued to guide human beings to the point when they would no longer need the laws of the Shariah; they would internalize God’s will and apprehend it directly, instead of following a set of external rules.
This, of course, was anathema to the mujtahids. Ahsai taught that there always existed in the world a “Perfect Shiah,” a group of rare, infallible human beings who were able to get in touch with the Hidden Imam through the intuitive disciplines of contemplation.
The implication was that the faith of the mujtahids was incomplete, legalistic, and literalistic. It was certainly inferior to the mystical insights of Ahsai and his disciples.
The Shaykhi school, as it was called, was very popular in Iraq and Azerbaijan, but it remained a philosophy, an idea rather than a concrete political program. It was Karim Khan, who became the Shaykhi leader after the death of Rashti, who turned it into a rebellion against the mujtahids. He publicly denounced their narrow legalism, their unimaginative literalism, and their lack of interest in new ideas. Muslims must not imagine that their sole duty was taqlid, the emulation of a jurist. Anybody was capable of interpreting the scriptures. The mujtahids were simply doling out old truths, when the world needed something entirely new. Humanity was constantly changing and evolving, so that each prophet superseded the last. In each generation, the Perfect Shiah unveiled more and more of the esoteric meaning of the Koran and the Shariah, drawing out their hidden depths in an ongoing revelation. The faithful must listen to these mystical teachers, who were appointed by the Imam and whose power had been usurped by the mujtahids.
Karim Khan was convinced that this progressive revelation was about to be completed. Human nature would shortly achieve perfection. He was clearly responding to the changes that the Europeans were bringing to Iran.
Karim Khan was no democrat; like all premodern philosophers, he was an elitist and an absolutist; impatient with the differences of opinion among the mujtahids, he intended to impose his own vision on the people. Nevertheless, he was one of the first Iranian clerics to acquaint himself with the new ideas of Europe. Where the orthodox ulema simply opposed the commercial encroachments of the British and Russians, Karim Khan was prescient enough to be more concerned about the new science and secularism of the West. In his spare time, he studied astronomy, optics, chemistry, and linguistics, and prided himself on his knowledge of science. During the is^os and 1860s, when very few Iranians had firsthand knowledge of Europe, Karim Khan already realized that Western culture posed a grave threat to Iranian civilization. This was a period of transition, and he could see that new solutions must be found to meet this unprecedented challenge. Hence his evolutionary theology, which allowed for the possibility of something fresh, and his intuitive expectation of imminent, radical change.
The Shaykhi movement was, however, rooted in the old world, with its elitist vision of knowledge. Feeling the impact of the industrialized West, it was also defensive. Karim Khan was bitterly opposed to the new Dar al-Funun, the first free high school in Tehran, founded by the reforming minister Amir Kabir. Staffed mainly by Europeans, it taught, with the aid of interpreters, natural science, higher mathematics, foreign languages, and the art of modern warfare. Karim Khan saw the school as part of a plot to extend European influence and destroy Islam. Soon the ulema would be silenced, he argued, Muslim children would be educated in Christian schools, and Iranians would become fake Europeans. He could see the dangers of alienation and anomie that lay ahead, and in the face of increasing European encroachment, his stance was rejectionist and separatist. His mystical ideology can be seen as an attempt to open the minds of Iranians to a wholly new solution, but, for better or worse, the Western presence in Iran was a fact of life and no reform movement that was unable to accommodate it could succeed.
There were rumors that Karim Khan was about to establish his own religious government; he was summoned to court and kept under surveillance for eighteen months. During the is^os and 1860s, he gradually retired from public life, kept his opinions to himself, and died, defeated and embittered, on his estate.
The second messianic movement of the period was also rooted in the conservative spirit, but it was also open to some of the new Western values.
Its founder, Sayyid All Muhammad (1819--50), had been involved in the Shaykhi movement in Najaf and Kerbala, but in 1844 he declared that he was the “gate” (bob) to the divine which the ulema declared to have been closed at the time of the Occultation of the Hidden Imam. He attracted ulema, notables, and wealthy merchants in Isfahan, Tehran, and Khurasan into his movement. In Kerbala, his brilliant woman disciple Qurrat al-Ain (1814-52) drew huge crowds; his chief male disciples, Mulla Sadiq (known as Muqaddas) and Mirza Muhammad All Barfurushi, who was given the title of Quddus (d. 1849), preached what was virtually a new religion: the Bab’s name was now mentioned in the call to prayer, and worshippers were instructed to pray facing the direction of his house in Shiraz. When the Bab made the hajj pilgrimage to Mecca that year, he stood beside the Kabah and declared that he was the incarnation of the Hidden Imam. Fifteen months later, like Joseph Smith, the Bab produced a newly inspired scripture, the Bayan. All the old holy books had been abrogated. He was the Perfect Man of the age, embodying in his person all the great prophets of the past.
Humanity was now approaching perfection and the old faiths would no longer suffice. Like the Book of Mormon, the Bayan called for a new and more just social order, and endorsed the bourgeois values of modernity:
it placed a high value on productive work, called for free trade, the reduction of taxes, guarantees for personal property, and an improvement in the position of women. Above all, the Bab had imbibed the nineteenth-century belief that this was the only world we had.
Shiis had traditionally focused on tragedies of the past and on the messianic future. The Bab concentrated on the here-and-now. There would be no Last Judgment, no afterlife. Paradise would be found in this world. Instead of waiting passively for redemption, the Bab told the Shiis of Iran, they must work for a better society on earth and seek to achieve salvation in their own lives.
There are many aspects of the Babi movement that recall the career of Shabbetai Zevi. The Bab aroused the same kind of fascination as Shabbetai.
When he was imprisoned by the authorities, his transfer from one place of detention to another became a triumphal progress, as huge crowds turned out to meet him. His prisons became places of pilgrimage. While he sat in jail, writing virulent letters to Muhammad Shah, the Qajar “usurper,” he was allowed to receive large gatherings of his disciples.
Even after the authorities moved him to the remote fortress of Chihrig, outside Urumiyya, there was not enough room in the hall to receive all his visitors, and crowds of people were forced to stand outside in the street. When he visited the public baths, his devotees bought his bathwater. There was huge excitement when he was finally brought to trial in Tabriz in the summer of 1848. Hordes of people thronged to greet him, so that he entered the courtroom in triumph.
A mass of supporters stood outside during the trial, expecting the Bab to demolish his enemies and inaugurate a new age of justice, productivity, and peace. But, as with Shabbetai, there ensued a shocking anticlimax.
The Bab did not overcome his interrogators. In fact, he appears to have performed very badly. His examiners revealed his deficiency in Arabic, theology, and Falsafah; he had no understanding of the new sciences. How could this man be the Imam, the repository of divine knowledge (ilm}? The court sent the Bab back to prison, gravely underestimating the threat he posed to the regime, for by this time, the Babi movement was no longer simply a call for moral and religious reform; it had become a demand for a new sociopolitical order.
Just as Shabbateanism had appealed to all social classes, the Bab was able to attract the masses with his messianism, the philosophically or esoteric ally inclined with his mystical theology, and the more secularly minded revolutionaries with his social doctrines. As in the earlier Jewish movement, there was an intuitive sense that the old world was passing away and that traditional sanctities would no longer apply. In June 1848, the Babi leaders held a mass meeting in Budasht, Khurasan. The Koran was formally abrogated, and the Shariah was to remain in place only until the Bab was acknowledged by the world. For the time being, the faithful must follow their own consciences and learn to distinguish good from evil by themselves, instead of relying on the ulema. They must feel free to reject the laws of the Shariah if they chose. The charismatic woman preacher Qurrat al-Ain removed her veil as a symbol of the end of female subjection and the end of the old Muslim era. All “impure” objects were henceforth to be regarded as “pure.”
Truth was not a doctrine revealed all at once, in one moment of time.
God’s decrees were gradually revealed to the masses through the elect.
Like Shabbetai himself, the Babis reached toward a new religious pluralism: in the new order, all previously revealed religions would unite as one.
Many of the Babis who attended the meeting at Budasht were appalled by this radical message, and fled in horror. Other devout Muslims attacked the heretics, and the meeting ended in disorder. But the leaders’ work had only just begun. They traveled separately back to Mazanderan, where the Babi leader Mullah Husain Bushrui (d. 1849) gathered two hundred men. He delivered a fiery speech: Babis must sacrifice their worldly possessions and take Imam Husain as their model. Only by martyrdom could they inaugurate the New Day, when the Bab would exalt the downtrodden and enrich the poor. Within a year, the Bab would conquer the world and unify all the religions. Bushrui proved to be a brilliant commander; his little army put the royal troops to flight, so that, we read in the court annals, they ran away “like a herd of sheep escaping from wolves.” The Babis raided, looted, plundered, killed, and burned. The religiously inclined believed that their uprising was more important than the Battle of Kerbala, while the poor, who may have joined the movement for more mundane reasons, were the best partisans of all. For the first time, they felt that they counted, and were treated, if not as equals, as valued coworkers.
That revolt was eventually put down by the government, but 1850 saw new uprisings in Yazd, Nairiz, Tehran, and Zanjan. The Babis created an atmosphere of utter terror. Political dissidents joined the revolt, as did local students. Even women, clad in men’s clothes, fought valiantly. The movement united all those who were dissatisfied with the regime. Mullahs who felt oppressed by the lofty mujtahids, merchants who resented the sale of Iranian resources to foreigners, ba-^aaris, landowners, and impoverished peasants all joined forces with the Babi religious enthusiasts. Shiism had long helped Iranians to cultivate a yearning for social justice, and when the right leader and the right philosophy came along, all kinds of malcontents found it natural to fight under a religious banner.
This time the government was able to quell the insurgents. The Bab was executed on July 9, 1850, the leaders were also put to death, and other suspects rounded up and massacred. Some Babis fled to Ottoman Iraq, and there the movement split in 1863. Some, following Mirza Yahya Nuri Subh-i Azal (1830--1912), the appointed successor of the Bab, remained faithful to the political aims of the rebellion. Later many of these “Azalis” abandoned the old Babi mysticism and became secularists and nationalists. As in the Shabbatean movement, the casting off of taboos, the discarding of old laws, and the taste of rebellion enabled them to break free of religion altogether. Yet again, a messianic movement provided a bridge to a secularist ideology.
Most of the surviving Babis, however, followed Subh-i Azal’s brother, Mirza Husain All Nuri Bahaullah (1817--92), who abjured politics and created the new Bahai religion, which embraced the modern Western ideals of the separation of religion and politics, equal rights, pluralism, and toleration.
The Babi rebellion can be seen as one of the great revolutions of modernity.
It set a pattern in Iran. There would be other occasions in the twentieth century when clerics and laymen, secularists and mystics, believers and atheists, would challenge an oppressive Iranian regime together. The battle for justice, which had become a sacred value for Shiis, would encourage later generations of Iranians to brave the armies of the shah to inaugurate a better order. On at least two occasions, a Shii ideology would enable Iranians to establish modern political institutions in their country. Yet again, the Babi revolution had shown that religion could help people to appropriate the ideals and enthusiasms of modernity, by translating them from an alien secular idiom into a language, mythology, and spirituality that they could understand and make their own. If modernity had proved difficult for the Christians of the West, it was even more problematic for Jews and Muslims.
It required a struggle--in Islamic terms, a jihad, which might sometimes become a holy war. Part two Fundamentalism5. Battle Lines (1870-1900) By the end of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the new society which had finally come to fruition in the West was not quite the universal panacea that some had imagined. The dynamic optimism that had inspired Hegel’s philosophy had given way to perplexing doubt and malaise. On the one hand, Europe was going from strength to strength; there was confidence and an exultant sense of mastery as the industrial revolution brought some of the nation-states more wealth and power than they had ever achieved before. But just as characteristic were the isolation, ennui, and melancholy explored by Charles Baudelaire in Les Flours du Mal (1857), the sickening doubt articulated by Alfred Tennyson in In Memoriam (1850), and the destructive lassitude and discontent of Flaubert’s eponymous heroine in Madame Bovary (1856). People felt obscurely afraid. Henceforth, at the same time as they celebrated the achievements of modern society, men and women would also experience an emptiness, a void, that rendered life meaningless;
many would crave certainty amid the perplexities of modernity;
some would project their fears onto imaginary enemies and dream of universal conspiracy.
We shall find all these elements in the fundamentalist movements that developed in all three of the monotheistic faiths alongside modern culture.
Human beings find it almost impossible to live without a sense that, despite the distressing evidence to the contrary, life has ultimate meaning and value. In the old world, mythology and ritual had helped people to evoke a sense of sacred significance that saved them from the void, in rather the same way as did great works of art. But scientific rationalism, the source of Western power and success, had discredited myth and declared that it alone could lead to truth. Yet reason could not address the ultimate questions;