Iran’s constitutional revolution and religious reactions to it

Abstract

Half a century of intellectual debates and efforts to political reforms following Iran’s defeat against Czarist Russian Empire at two series of wars at 1810s and 1820s, led to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906 which put an end to a thousand-year-old despotic monarchical order. However, the success of the revolution and the establishment of Iran’s first legislative Assembly (Majlis) didn’t ended controversy between advocates of traditional order and widespread front of supporters of modernism which was begun decades earlier. New ruling system with its modern institutions could not satisfy opponents of modernism and supporters of traditional monarchy. From decades before Constitutional revolution, introduction of modern concepts had created rifts in the content of traditional ones but so far as these modern concepts hadn’t turned to parts of socio-political realities of the country and hadn’t unsettled traditional order, controversy between advocates and opponents of modernism couldn’t transform into an all-out and pervasive conflict. It was then that traditionalists realized the depth of dangers modern concepts can present against traditional political order.