Iran’s orbit in history has always been eccentric— like a comet which rises high in the heavens only to sink below the horizon for long periods. Constancy is not a characteristic Iranian quality, nor is a taste for modernization. Having toppled the Shah, Iran is now off on a new, fiery, frenzied tangent. Gradually, the frenzy will dissolve and the Iranian orbit will respond to the natural laws of political reality; but in the meantime a bit of history might be helpful.
Who remembers that in June 1906, during the Iranian Constitutionalist struggle, some 12,000 Iranian businessmen and religious leaders took sanctuary (they call it “bast”— an ancient Persian tradition) first in a mosque and, when that failed, in the British Legation compound? They were protesting the cruelty of the Kajar Shah’s Grand Vizier and demanding a constitution, which, with British encouragement, the Shah granted just a few days before he died. Soon thereafter, his son threw the new pro-Constitutionalist Grand Vizier into chains, and in June 1908 he called in the Russian Empire’s Cossacks to deal with Parliament when it disapproved a loan he wanted. Not until July 1909 was Teheran liberated from Cossack control by Bakhtiari tribesmen—just in time to forestall the arrival of three thousand Cossack reinforcements, who had landed on the Caspian shore.
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