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Iran's Great Reformer of the Nineteenth Century: An Analysis of Amīr Kabīr's Reforms

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2022

John H. Lorentz
John H. Lorentz*
Affiliation:
Portland State University
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Extract

One of the more pervasive implicit assumptions about Amīr Kabīr in both Persian and Western sources is that he was an innovator who wished to transform Iranian society. Not unrepresentative of such an assumption are comments like the following: “If Amīr Kabīr had not been killed at the hands of Nāṣir al-Dīn Shāh's executioners, how much he would have entangled the fate of Iran in a significant transformation.” In the same vein there is a tendency to view Amīr Kabīr as a visionary of political freedom. This tendency is perhaps most evident in two rather popularized Persian accounts of his life and career, that of Hāshimī Rafsanjānī and that of Ḥusayn Makkī. But with the advantage of hindsight, many less exaggerated accounts, also, attribute more to the intentions of Amīr Kabīr than can perhaps stand up under scrutiny. It is not uncommon, as Algar points out, for Amīr Kabīr to be reckoned among the precursors of the Constitutional Revolution.

Type
Administrative Developments in Qajar Iran
Information
Iranian Studies , Volume 4 , Issue 2-3: Administrative Developments in Qajar Iran , Spring Summer 1971 , pp. 85 - 103
Copyright
Copyright © Association For Iranian Studies, Inc 1971

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Footnotes

An earlier version of this article was presented at a panel on “Administrative Developments in Qajar Iran,” cosponsored by The Society for Iranian Studies and the Middle East Studies Association, held in Denver, Colorado, November, 1971.

References

Notes

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13. Ibid., p. 388.

14. Ibid., pp. 385-86.

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18. Ibid.

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32. It seems to this writer that a number of interesting and important questions in regards to the Bābī movement have been left virtually untouched. The theological aspects have received a good deal of attention, but social and economic causes have been treated in depth only by M. S. Ivanov in his Russian language work entitled, The Bābī Risings in Iran, 1848-52, and his analysis is marred by a Marxist bias. But equally surprising is the curious lack of any anthropological-sociological approaches to the Bābī movement. I would suggest that a fruitful avenue of approach might be to view it as a nativistic or messianic movement. Nikki Keddie draws some suggestive comparisons with the radical messianic movement, the Tapings in China, in her article, “Religion and Irreligion in Early Iranian Nationalism,” Comparative Studies in Society and History, Vol. IV (1962), pp. 265-295Google Scholar, but she does not penetrate the subject to any great degree.

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34. Ibid., pp. 134-35.

35. Ibid., pp. 133-135.

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41. Ibid., p. 37.

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