Memories of a Bygone Age: Qajar Persia and Imperial Russia 1853-1902

By Prince Arfa

Set against the backdrop of Iran’s struggle against the rising powers of Russia and Britain, the memoirs of Mirza Riza Khan Arfa’-ed-Dowleh—otherwise known as Prince Arfa (1853–1902)—are packed with picaresque adventures as the prince tells the story of his rise from humble provincial beginnings to the heights of the Iranian state. With this translation, his incredible story is brought to life for the first time in English.

Prince Arfa writes with arresting wit about the deadly intrigues of the Qajar court. Lamentingly, but resolutely, he chronicles the decline of Iran from a once great empire to an almost bankrupt, lawless state, in which social unrest is channelled and exploited by the clergy. He describes the complex interactions between Iran and Europe, including an account of Naser-od-Din Shah’s profligate visits to Britain and France; the splendor and eccentricities of the doomed Tsar Nicholas II’s court; the Tsar’s omen-laden coronation; and his own favor with the Tsarina, who would grant him concessions on matters of vital importance to his country. The result is a memoir of extraordinary political intrigue.
 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gingko
• Release date: Nov 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781909942875

Book preview

Chapter 1

My Childhood in Tabriz

The future Prince Arfaʿ, known in his youth simply as Aqa Reza, was born in Tabriz, probably in 1853, the son of a local cloth merchant who had emigrated from Erivan following the Russian conquest of the Caucasus. Tabriz, situated at the intersection of major trade routes and the capital of the early Safavid Shahs from 1502 until 1548, was and remains the main town in Azerbaijan, Iran’s richest, Turkic-speaking province. The Afghan invasions of the 1720s, Nader Shah’s brief, expensive period of military glory, followed by further internecine struggles for power and the severe earthquake of 1780 meant that by 1800 the town was largely in ruins, and its population is thought to have declined to some 30,000 people. By 1842, however, improving political security under the early Qajars and a construction programme under the prince-governorship of ‘Abbas Mirza (1801–33) led to increasing trade, greater prosperity and a doubling of the population. Nevertheless, recent humiliation at the hands of the rising imperial powers, Russia and Britain, and the proximity of the new frontier with the Russian Empire provided tangible evidence of Iran’s diminished status. Furthermore, competition from cheaper Russian and English goods, and from the 1830s the arrival of foreign consuls and traders in Tabriz led to a feeling that not only Iran’s territorial integrity but its traditional Muslim way of life was under threat, a recurring theme in these memoirs. Outbreaks of cholera, earthquakes, famine and floods were the backdrop to the author’s childhood.

Nevertheless, the author’s early memoirs give an intimate picture of a happy and protected childhood: the influence of a devout mother and father; a traditional Islamic education which was to have led to studies in Najaf and a career as a cleric; a narrow escape from accidental childhood death, which he ascribed to special protection from an all-seeing God who had from an early age destined him for great things; a beating from his teacher, which taught him a valuable lesson; and a great flood, probably in 1872, which ruined his father, led him to be detained by his father’s creditors, and ultimately led to his dispatch to Istanbul as an apprentice to a merchant, his first step on the path to fame and fortune. All this is described with a sympathy and warmth for the closeness of the Tabriz merchant community and its support networks in times of difficulty.

I was born in Tabriz into a Tabriz merchant’s family. Our father’s name was Haji Sheikh Hassan, who had emigrated there from Erivan. Our house was in the Andarun-e-Shotorban, which was known as the Erivan district.¹ My mother was called Kolsom Khanom, the daughter of Aqa Safar of Tabriz.

My mother would relate to everybody until the end of her life that she had borne five sons and five daughters and she had breast-fed them all. She was a very religious woman and the only thing her father had taught her was to read the Qurʾan from cover to cover. She had also learnt by heart most of the short suras of the Qurʾan and used to copy out parts of it in naskh² script. She used to say that the nine out of the ten children whom she had breast-fed would cling very tightly with both hands to her bosom whenever one of her friends who also happened to have a baby would visit, for fear lest the other baby would grab away her breast. However, she swore on oath that when this happened to me, her son Reza, I would release her breast and would offer it to the other baby with both hands.

I remember, however, one winter, when I was about four or five, the weather was very cold and it was snowing. I was lying under the korsi³ beautifully warm, when someone knocked on the door. It was a beggar, who cried out: ‘I have been hungry all night. Give me a piece of bread!’ My mother took a piece of bread and gave it to me to give to him. I objected and replied that it was snowing and the weather was too cold for me to get out from under the korsi and cross the courtyard to give the beggar the bread. Why didn’t she ask the maid to go? My mother angrily replied that she knew perfectly well that the maid could do this but she wanted me to give the bread, so that God would reward me. She forced me to get up and give the bread to the beggar.

In the afternoon it stopped snowing and the sun came out. Haji Samad Marandi, a respected local merchant, also had a house in our neighbourhood. His children sometimes came to our house to play in the snow and sometimes I would go to their house. On that day, however, it was my turn to go there. We threw snowballs at each other for a time. Then we rested our backs against a south-facing wall, trying to warm ourselves and unfreeze our hands. We were enjoying the sunlight and the whiteness of the snow, when through the open door of the courtyard we saw the neighbour’s cock, a very strong and vicious bird, suddenly attack the owner’s cock. As we all started to chase the cock out of the door, the wall on which we had been leaning caved in. All the children’s mothers rushed out and began kissing their children and praising God for saving us from sudden catastrophe. When I went home I told my mother what had happened, and she said: ‘Praise God that you got up this morning from under the warm korsi and went out into the cold to give the beggar bread with your own hands! Always remember this event!’ now, I had a cousin called Jaʿfar, whose father was Haji Karim, a wealthier man than my father. Haji Karim was a man of property in Tabriz, for he owned a bakery, a shop selling cooked rice, and he was also sole proprietor of a public bathhouse and of two large gardens outside the town in the Sheshgilan region⁴. His son Jaʿfar would always boast about his father’s wealth. One day when we were about five or six, Jaʿfar came to our house. As it was winter, we both sat under the korsi and were chatting about all sorts of things. Since I didn’t take part in games played by my cousins, they called me ‘Reza the Pretentious’. Jaʿfar said to me: ‘really, reza, I always feel very sorry for you.’ I asked why. He said: ‘If my uncle dies and the mojtahed⁵ makes off with his money, you will die of hunger with this pretentious attitude. I am not proud, so if the same thing were to happen to me, I could earn my living by being a waiter in a tea-house, or an apprentice to a cloth-merchant. If those two fail, I shall take a begging bowl and a drum and become a dervish⁶ and I will never starve.’ I replied that I would neither become a waiter in a tea-house nor a cloth-merchant’s apprentice nor a dervish but, I would become a great man like ʿAbdollah, our chief district headman, and then I would have servants and give orders to people. He laughed and said: ‘That is what I mean, you pay no attention to us, and you already give yourself airs and graces.’

Many years after this conversation, I was summoned to Jolfa⁷ from my post as counsellor at the embassy in St Petersburg and joined the late Naser-od-Din Shah’s entourage on his third journey to Europe. When we reached Iranian Jolfa on our way back, the Shah ordered me to accompany him to Tehran. on our arrival in Tabriz, however, I was given leave by the Shah to visit my family, so the next day, all my father’s neighbours and friends came to call on me. The door was open, and through the window I suddenly saw a dervish carrying a begging bowl in one hand and in the other a drum, reciting poetry in praise of the Commander of the Faithful⁸ (Peace be upon him!), in a very melodious voice. I was told that he was my cousin Jaʿfar. I was extremely surprised and asked the dervish to come up to where I was sitting. He came and sat down, and I asked him how he had fallen into this mode of life. He replied that after I had left, his father had died without leaving a will. Haji Mirza Baqer, the mojtahed, had appointed his son, a molla⁹ who was himself on the brink of becoming a mojtahed, to administer the estate. The latter gathered in the whole estate but since Jaʿfar’s father had had two wives and children from both, the administrator had caused everyone to quarrel over the division of the assets. Every asset that the administrator had, out of a sense of justice, wished to assign to his side of the family, had gone in lawyers’ fees during the legal process. ‘So now, as you see,’ he said, ‘I have no alternative. I have become a dervish and I spend my days singing praises to the Prophet outside tea-houses. I live off the odd coin that people give me.’ I felt very sorry for him and I helped him as much as I could at that time, though I could not help remembering the conversation we had had as boys under the korsi. A Turkish proverb my mother was fond of quoting in came to mind: ‘everybody builds his house by his own efforts.’

There was a doctor in our district, called Mirza Jaʿfar, who had a daughter called Molla Sara. When I was six years old, my mother took me to Molla Sara’s school, where she gave lessons to local children of both sexes until they reached the age of eight. The school consisted of a cellar, fortunately a dry one, eight steps below ground level, with a reed mat as its only furnishing. Parents had to send a small cushion for each of their children to sit on. Children were taught the Qurʾan and some religious law. Sometimes Molla Sara would send me with messages to her father. Often he wouldn’t ask me why I had come but would keep me waiting. As I waited, I watched the villagers who came to be cured of their various ailments and who were sitting in front of him. The doctor had various bottles of differing sizes, most of them full of herbal medicines, together with a small weighing machine in front of him. He would take the pulse of his patient and reflect for a while. Then he would take out a long rosary, shut his eyes, seek divine help by fingering his rosary and say in a loud voice: ‘o God, do you think this person ought to be cured? Shall I give folous¹⁰ to this servant of God?’ If the rosary gave a positive answer, he would weigh out an amount of folous, administer it, and receive his fee. If the answer was negative on folous, he took an augury to see whether he should administer other herbal remedies and continued doing so until the verdict of his rosary was positive. After saying goodbye to his patient, he would deign to notice me and then I would be able to return to school.

The doctor, Mirza Jaʿfar, came from Zonuz.¹¹ In the autumn his gardeners would send him some grapes, pears, apples and quinces from his various gardens for the winter. He had some rooms opposite his house in which he hung his grapes and stored the rest of his fruit on sawdust in niches to prevent it from going bad. One day he and his daughter were invited to lunch by friends in another area of town, so they had asked a substitute teacher, who was only two years older than us, to supervise us. We were about twenty-five pupils, boys and girls. The sun was shining and we were all playing outside in the courtyard. Suddenly a neighbour’s daughter called Hajer had an idea. She called out: ‘Children, have you seen how much fruit they have stored there? come, let us find a way for one of us to get in and hand out fruit for all of us! It’s not fair that so much fruit should be stored there and that we should pine for it from