The Iranian Constitutional Revolution and the Clerical Leadership of Khurasani

By Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution was the twentieth century’s first such political movement in the Middle East. It represented a landmark in Iranian history because of the unlikely support it received from Shi‘ite clerics who historically viewed Western concepts with suspicion, some claiming constitutionalism to be anti-Islamic. Leading the support was Muhammad Kazim Khurasani, the renowned Shi‘ite jurist who conceived of a supporting role for the clergy in a modern Iranian political system.

Drawing on extensive analysis of religious texts, fatwas, and articles written by Khurasani an other pro- and anti-constitutionalists, Farzaneh provides a comprehensive and illuminating interpretation of Khurasani’s religious pragmatism. Despite some opposition from his peers, Khurasani used a form of jurisprudential reasoning when creating shari‘a that was based on human intellect to justify his support of not only the Iranian parliament but also the political powers of clerics. He had a reputation across the Shi‘ite community as a masterful religious scholar, a skillful teacher, and a committed humanitarian who heeded the people’s socioeconomic and political grievances and took action to address them. Khurasani’s push for progressive reforms helped to inaugurate a new era of clerical involvement in constitutionalism in the Middle East.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 2015
• ISBN: 9780815653110

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For Maryam and Maya

Born in Iran, Mateo Mohammad Farzaneh migrated to Southern California in 1984. After receiving a PhD from the University of California Santa Barbara, he joined the faculty of history at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago, where he now teaches the history of the Middle East and Islamic civilization. He has published articles on history of Iran, Iraq, and the role of Shi‘i jurisprudence and ideology in politics.

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Chronology

Introduction

PART ONE

The Iranian State and Religion

1. Tribal Fighters Become Shahs

2. Apprehensive Modernization and the Birth of Iranian Intellectualism

3. Unhappy Merchants and the Revolution for Law

4. Shi‘ism and Key Institutions of Leadership

5. Shi‘ite Iran and the State

PART TWO

Khurasani and Constitutionalism

6. Akhund Khurasani: His Life and Works

7. An Islamic Jurist’s Thought, Politics, and Practice

8. Religious Justification and Khurasani’s Perception of Constitutionalism

9. Ijtihad and Politics

PART THREE

A House Divided

10. Shaykh Fazlullah versus Akhund Khurasani

11. Fundamental Differences between Nuri and Khurasani

Conclusion

Appendix A. List of articles presented at Khurasani’s centennial conference in 2011

Appendix B. Article 27 (asl-i 27) of the supplement to the constitution signed by Muhammad Ali Shah on October 7, 1907

Appendix C. Articles 71 and 72 (asl-i 71 va 72) of the supplement to the constitution signed by Muhammad Ali Shah on October 7, 1907

Notes

Glossary

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Following page 235

1. Akhund Khurasani

2. Khurasani in classroom

3. Akhund Khurasani

4. Akhund Khurasani and Shaykh Mazandarani

5. Ayatullah Bihbahani and Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri

6. Ayatullah Tabataba’i

7. Pro-constitutionalist ulama

8. Khurasani, Tehrani, and Mazandarani

9. Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri

10. Shaykh Fazlullah Nuri’s execution

Maps

1. The Middle East in the nineteenth century

2. Iran and Iraq in western Asia today

Acknowledgments

The Iranian Revolution in 1979 and the ensuing Iran-Iraq conflict between 1980 and 1988 were the main influences on this book. Many individuals, institutions, and organizations have played an essential role in its completion.

To begin, I would like to thank professors Jochen Burgtorf, Touraj Daryaee, Cora Granata, and William Haddad at California State University Fullerton, where I first started studying history between 2000 and 2004.

I am also grateful to all my professors and advisers at the University of California Santa Barbara, where I spent six wonderful years earning my doctorate between 2004 and 2010. I especially want to thank Nancy Gallagher, Lisa Hajjar, Stephen Humphreys, Dwight Reynolds, and Paul Spickard for patiently listening to my abstract ideas and helping to bring them to some sort of understandable ground. Thanks for all the hours of passionate teaching and intellectual discussions. Just as important, you made it possible for me to financially sustain myself and to have a happy life in Santa Barbara.

I am indebted to Professor Ali Gheissari at University of San Diego, who was instrumental in critiquing the dissertation on which this monograph is based. Thank you! I also would like to thank Professor Mohsen Kadivar, who took time to help me better understand Khurasani and the complex world of Islamic jurisprudence.

Several institutions helped to fund my education and I owe them my deepest gratitude. The US Department of Education Title VI Program provided me with several Foreign Language Area Studies (FLAS) grants, which allowed me to study Arabic initially at UCSB and then at the American University in Cairo. The American Institute of Iranian Studies 2007 fellowship partially funded a productive six-month research trip to Iran.

While in Iran, Hesamuddin Ashena and Nader Motallebi Kashani helped significantly in making the bureaucratic less cumbersome and I was fortunate to have their assistance. I would also like to thank the friendly staff at the Iranian Library of Parliament (Kitab-khanih-yi Majlis) for responding to my archival requests promptly.

Northeastern Illinois University’s history department deserves thanks for being so accommodating and providing me with a collegial environment while I wrote this book between 2010 and 2013. I am especially indebted to Patrick B. Miller for being meticulous about every detail of my employment in order for me to be happy and content on campus. Patrick, along with Zachary Sayre Schiffman, Charles Steinwedel, and Francesca Morgan, took the time to read parts of this manuscript and I am forever indebted to them.

I would like to thank Provost Richard Helldobler, Dr. Wamucii Njogu, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Dr. Michael Tuck, the chair of the history department, who all generously supported this project. Stephen Cavendish’s suggestions on the final draft of this book were very helpful in completing it on time; thank you, Steve! I thank the Northeastern Illinois University graduate teaching assistant Nicholas Kunkel for patiently drafting the maps exclusively for this book.

Most important, I thank Maryam S. Sobhani for filling our home with love, laughter, and a supporting atmosphere that are the main ingredients of a meaningful life. My dearest Maryam, you spent hours alone while I was busy writing and were there to greet me with a smile every time I took a break. That meant the world to me. I don’t know how to thank you.

I took two courses with Francisco Marmolejo, an American history professor at Irvine Valley College in California, when I first became interested in history in summer 2000. Frank awed me with the way he taught history and made it relevant to my life. It was in his class that I first thought being a historian was the coolest thing in the world. Thank you, Frank, for the inspiration.

My parents, Azam and Abbas Farzaneh, departed much earlier than they should have, but I’m sure they are looking down and smiling. Their memory leads me.

If I have left out any individual or institution to whom I owe thanks, it is unintentional. I bear sole and full responsibility for any errors in this book.

Chronology

Maps

Map 1. The Middle East in the nineteenth century. Nicholas Kunkel, cartographer, Northeastern Illinois University, 2014.

Map 2. Iran and Iraq in western Asia today. Nicholas Kunkel, cartographer, Northeastern Illinois University, 2014.

Introduction

On December 24, 1911, Iran’s National Consultative Assembly (Majlis-i Shura-yi Milli) was forced to close for the second time. Since its inception five years earlier, this parliamentary body—Iran’s first democratic institution—had been continuously threatened and had experienced one crisis after another, including a lethal attack by a Russian Cossack brigade in 1908 that left a score of its elected members killed and injured. Just before its second suspension, the parliament devoted almost the entire first page of its daily newspaper, Majlis (Assembly), to the sudden death of Akhund Mullah Muhammad Kazim Khurasani (1255–1329 HQ/1839–1911) (see figure 1). The Islamic world, humanity, and Iranians [are] filled with sadness, the article claimed, because they had lost their only true supporter.¹ Khurasani was eulogized as having been the only hope for the poor and oppressed, and as having served Iranians as an important and influential father figure. The Majlis article lamented his death by claiming that Iran’s wish for a spring of hope had been dashed and that the pain of such a loss was so severe that even the blind could see the grief and the deaf could hear the cries and lamentations of Iranians. It rightly concluded that Khurasani’s passing marked the end of an era.

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911 represented a landmark in Persian, and even Middle Eastern, history, notably because of the unlikely support it received from Shi‘ite ulama (clerics), and in particular Khurasani. Foremost among the clerics whose education and ideology derived from diverse intellectual sources, Khurasani included Shi‘ite doctrines, values, and institutions in his bid to advance constitutionalism (mashrutiyyat) as the best form of government for Iran. In so doing, he shaped a substantial role for political Westernization–an engagement between Iran and the West that is evident even to this day.

The career of Mullah Muhammad Kazim Khurasani illuminates the important but insufficiently explored role that some of the Shi‘ite ulama played in the success of the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (inqilab-i mashrutih). Living and teaching in Najaf, Iraq, Khurasani led a section of the Shi‘ite establishment that helped the Revolution achieve its goal of founding the parliament, which in turn drafted Iran’s first constitution (qanun-i asasi). During its first and second sessions, Khurasani’s leadership was instrumental in protecting the Iranian parliament from its enemies by providing it with his unequivocal support.

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, the twentieth century’s first such political movement in the Middle East, engendered great expectations on the part of its participants—the reformist-minded intellectuals. In 1906, when Muzaffar al-Din Shah agreed to sign the constitutional decree (Farman-i Mashrutih), Iranian reformists thought of constitutionalism as a cure for their country’s political ailments. As one scholar rightly calls it, this was a revolution for law² because it aimed to create a society in Iran that was guided by written laws that placed conditions on monarchical rule and curbs on the arbitrary and absolute powers of the Shah, and made all individuals accountable for their actions. It aimed to reform a government that was infested with corrupt, inept, and despotic officials who primarily pursued their own interests over those of the people they had sworn to serve.

Many of the early constitutionalists were secularly educated in Iran and abroad. Some of them introduced European constitutionalism to Iran after they noticed its great potential for creating an efficient political system and a progressive society. These early constitutionalists built on the work of previous nineteenth-century reformers who examined their society and concluded that it was backward when compared with the more competent Western nations that had long enjoyed constitutional systems. Such early nineteenth-century reformists as Abbas Mirza and Amir Kabir saw the lack of modernization, and the absence of new ways of thinking about their country’s problems, as the main reasons why it had fallen on hard times. The early to mid-nineteenth-century reformers viewed modernization in terms of reforms in the army and the introduction of secular education. They thought a modern military system could keep the enemy out of the protected realms (mamalik-i mahrusih), meaning Iran, which was gradually shrinking in the face of Russian advances. Likewise, an educational system based on the European model would allow students to learn foreign languages and study engineering, chemistry, and medicine. The ideas of these social and technological reformers laid the groundwork for later political reformers who regarded constitutionalism as a way of addressing arbitrary rule and despotism (istibdad), which had led to lawlessness. However, the notions of administrative reform and modernization were generally controversial.

For the constitutionalists to create a society based on law, they needed to initiate revolutionary reforms that would push aside age-old traditions of justice and seize the administration of customary laws (‘urf) and religious laws (shari‘a) from the hands of the Shah and the clergy, respectively. This would be a formidable task and perhaps prove impossible for the constitutionalists unless they could convince the Shah and high-ranking ulama of the benefits of constitutionalism: how it promised to serve Iranians of all social strata, including the monarchy, the merchants, the disenfranchised, and those who were voiceless in the affairs of the state. Although tribal politics, the arbitrary rule of the monarchy, and religious indoctrination had collectively contributed to Iran’s backward conditions, some elements within these very tribal, state, and religious institutions actually noticed the need for a more efficient government and supported the establishment of Iran’s parliament and the fundamental law, or constitution, in 1906. Ironically, competing elements within these same institutions sought to fight constitutionalism to the bitter end because they perceived it as contrary to their traditions, political interests, and God.

If the remarkable events of the years between 1906 and 1911 center on secular Iranian modernists, whose vision of constitutional reform derived from Western traditions and political projects, it is nevertheless important to underscore that they owed its tentative success substantially to the support of enlightened clerics—Khurasani foremost among them. This book will examine how and why Akhund Khurasani led a faction of Iranian clerics to enable the modernists to establish constitutionalism in Iran. This is not to say that Khurasani or any member of his group invented constitutionalism or that they introduced it as a remedy for Iran’s inefficient political process. That was certainly not the case; Shi‘ite clerics were not the pioneers who introduced mashrutiyyat to Iranians, rather, secular Iranian modernists should be credited with doing so. Despite the fact that the burgeoning movement already existed before Khurasani and his supporters joined it, it would have been seriously challenged, if not entirely destroyed, without the support of the religious establishment.

Several factors explain the alliance of secular constitutionalists and Shi‘ite support of the constitutional movement, and why Khurasani threw his support behind it. He was a pragmatic leader who appreciated modern, secular concepts, placing them within an Islamic framework that the members of his own establishment and those whom they led (the general public) would generally understand and approve. This pragmatism benefited from the dominance of the intellectual school of jurisprudence (fiqhi usuli), which provided him with an opportunity to think critically about the intersection of religious and sociopolitical matters and with fewer traditional preconceptions. As a leading cleric, he was also aided by the fact that mosques served as centers for disseminating information, by means of which he could reach the less privileged members of society. Just as secular progressive Persian-language newspapers, such as Habl al-Matin, informed the literate population about the sociopolitical and economic causes and solutions for stagnation and backwardness, Khurasani’s status convinced many mosque leaders to provide a platform for his designees to speak about the same issues to less educated Iranians. The telegraph system, which the British built in Iran and Iraq, was another very practical boon for Khurasani. It allowed him to stay informed about the developments in various cities across Iran and enabled him to respond to inquiries much faster.

But the most important factor in Khurasani’s successful leadership was that he took his role as the Source of Emulation (marja‘-i taqlid) seriously and piously, since everything he did was to serve God (fi sabil Allah). If he thought defending the constitutionalists improved Iranian lives over the long term and eliminated the injustices that they had endured thus far, then he was certain that God would also have approved of his actions. Therefore, he had no doubt of the religious validity of his support for the constitutionalists. Collectively, these factors, which will be discussed in detail, explain Khurasani’s desire to help Iranians reach their objective to limit the absolute and arbitrary powers of the monarchy and to hold everyone accountable to the law.

Prior to his sudden death on Dhul Hajjah 20, 1329 HQ/December 12, 1911, Khurasani had organized a caravan of seminary students (tullab) and clerics of various ranks in Iraq to travel to Iran to wage a jihad against the invading Russian army in the northern provinces. The Iranian monarch had asked the czarist army for assistance in defeating Iranian constitutionalism by closing parliament. At the time of his death, the seventy-two-year-old Khurasani had become the leader of the pro-constitutionalist ulama but he had already taken an active role in supporting reforms in Iran years before the Revolution unfolded. Aside from his political activism, he had built a reputation across the Shi‘ite world as a masterful religious scholar, a skillful teacher, a committed humanitarian, and a Source of Emulation who heeded the people’s socioeconomic and political grievances and took actual steps to address them. As a jurisprudent (faqih), Khurasani held the highest academic position in the holy city of Najaf, the center of Shi‘ite learning and spirituality during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution. By the beginning of the Revolution, he had written the ultimate text on Twelver Shi‘ite jurisprudence, Kifayat al-Usul (Sufficiency of Principles). It discussed various aspects of jurisprudence (fiqh) and innovatively explained complicated juridical procedures; fiqh’s many doctrines ultimately helped jurists practice ijtihad (independent reasoning) and provided religiously guided assistance to the public. Since its first publication in 1903, Kifayat al-Usul has remained standard reading for all Shi‘ite seminary students and jurists-in-training. This work, combined with Khurasani’s position as the Twelver Shi‘ite’s highest Source of Emulation, helps explains his enormous influence over clerics and the people.

When the Russian incursion began in 1911, those clerics who had set out to fight them justified their involvement in Iranian political affairs by referring to their divinely mandated responsibility to maintain the mamalik-i mahrusih. As briefly mentioned above, in jurisprudential affairs Khurasani followed the intellectual school of usulism. Because usuli fiqh accepted human intellect (‘aql) as one additional source of forming divine law (shari‘a), in addition to the Qur’an, the Hadith, and consensus (ijma‘), it also provided Khurasani with more freedom to deem what acts could be constituted permissible and what could be constituted forbidden under shari‘a.

The idea of an intellectual approach to making shari‘a or issuing legal opinions in the process of ijtihad had been discussed much earlier than constitutionalism or general reforms in the nineteenth century. Since the late eighteenth century, a group of Shi‘ite jurists had argued for, and succeeded in adding, intellect as the fourth jurisprudential source, which enabled them to make laws and issue legal opinions based on what they believed society needed. However, after the birth of the usuli school of fiqh, its opponent, akhbarism, the school that rejected the idea that human intellect should play a key role in independent reasoning, was never totally eliminated.

The eventual success of usulism over akhbarism coincided with the beginnings of the struggle of secular Iranians against monarchical tyranny in the mid-1800s.³ While studying jurisprudence under the master of the usuli school in Najaf, Shaykh Murtiza Ansari (Dhul-Hajjah 18, 1214–Jumadi II 18, 1281 HQ/May 13, 1800–November 18, 1864), Khurasani was exposed to intricate ideas concerning the political involvement of clerics and he learned how to gently straddle the fine line that divided the religious world of jurists from the secular politics and mundane affairs of the state. Khurasani was convinced that, as a marja‘ (short for marja‘-i taqlid, or Source of Emulation), he could not separate a forward-looking or reformed and modern civil society from his interpretation and practice of Islamic jurisprudence and its most important process, ijtihad. In other words, what he perceived as usulism’s practical application of jurisprudence and Shi‘ite doctrines afforded him the freedom to participate in, and lead, an important group of pro-constitutionalist ulama during the Constitutional Revolution.

The Iranian Constitutional Revolution triumphed from 1906 to 1911. Many secular intellectuals such as Mirza Malkam Khan (1833–1908) had been influenced by works of Western thinkers such as John Locke and Voltaire prior to the success of the Revolution and within the reform movement that preceded it. Through his newspaper, Qanun, Mirza Malkam Khan argued for a political system wherein written secular laws at the heart of the government could fight arbitrary rule and create a system of secular checks and balances that disposed of despotism and injustices against Iranians. But he failed to convince the masses of the crucial need for such a system because the less educated among the populace failed to readily understand his arguments. When the ulama whom Khurasani led, including Thiqat al-Islam of Tabriz (Rajab 1277–Muharram 1330 HQ/1861–1911), offered a religious perspective to defend the secular movement for democracy, they were successful in promoting the ideas of Mirza Malkam and his like-minded colleagues to the people. Thus, the Revolution owed a significant part of its success to the support of progressive-thinking members of the Shi‘ite clerical establishment. Khurasani in particular supported inqilab-i mashrutih,