Mohammad Tabatabaʾi

1841 - 1920

Persian religious scholar; one of the principal leaders of the Constitutional Revolution, 1905 - 1909.

Born in Karbala in 1841 to a family with illustrious scholarly antecedents, Mohammad Tabatabaʾi spent his early childhood in Hamadan in the care of Aqa Sayyed Mehdi, his paternal grandfather, before moving to Tehran, the capital, where his father, Sayyed Sadeq, was firmly established as a leading religious authority. There he studied jurisprudence with his father and other prominent scholars, philosophy with Mirza Abul-Hasan Jelve, and - most significant for his political activity in later years - ethics with Shaykh Hadi Najmabadi, many of whose opinions were regarded as subversively liberal. At the same time, through reading newspapers and closely questioning returning travelers, Tabatabaʾi began taking an interest in the affairs of Europe, which was atypical for the religious scholars of his time.

In 1882, Tabatabaʾi set out from Tehran with the intention of making the pilgrimage to Mecca. He took a circuitous route, traveling via Russia, Anatolia, and Istanbul, meeting new scholars and men of state wherever he alighted, and he arrived in Mecca too late for the pilgrimage. Cholera was raging in the Hijaz, so he left promptly for the area that is now Iraq, where he joined the circle of the great scholar Mirza Hasan Shirazi in Samarra. He spent more than ten years with Shirazi, perfecting his command of Shiʿite jurisprudence and acting as the trusted adviser of his teacher in political matters. It was in this capacity that he was addressed a letter by the celebrated Jamal al-Din Asadabadi (Afghani), then resident in London, calling on him to make greater political use of Shirazi's prestige, which had been inaugurated by the Tobacco Revolt and boycott of 1891.

Despite the oppositional tendencies that Asadabadi correctly perceived in him, Tabatabaʾi's return to Tehran was due to an initiative of Naser al-Din Shah. The monarch wished to create in Tehran a counterweight to Mirza Hasan Ashtiani, a cleric whose prestige had grown considerably in the course of the tobacco boycott, and he accordingly suggested to Shirazi that he should send one of his prominent disciples to Tehran. Shirazi selected Tabatabaʾi, who arrived back in Tehran in the fall of 1893. His father had died almost a decade before, but Tabatabaʾi fell heir to his influence in the Iranian capital with little difficulty. The shah's expectations of Tabatabaʾi were disappointed; not only did he establish cordial relations with Mirza Hasan Ashtiani, but he also emerged as an implacable critic of the corruption and tyranny of the court. Indeed, in 1911 he claimed to have begun working for the cause of constitutional government immediately after his return from Samarra, preaching from the pulpit on the need for establishing a consultative assembly. On another occasion, he stated frankly that he and his colleagues in the clerical class had no direct acquaintance with the concept of constitutionalism, having learned of it from those with experience of Europe. During the decade leading up to the Constitutional Revolution he deepened both his understanding of con stitutional government and his contacts with secular intellectuals working for the same goal.

The beginnings of the revolution may be dated to an alliance concluded by Tabatabaʾi with another leading cleric of Tehran, Sayyed Abdollah Behbahani, on 23 November 1905, initially for the purpose of obtaining the dismissal of Ayn al-Dowleh, the prime minister. Soon thereafter, the two clerics joined a group of bazaar merchants who had taken sanctuary in the Shah Mosque in Tehran to protest government policies. After Tehran's imam jomeh (the highest-ranking paid government-appointed cleric) had the group forcibly evicted from the mosque, Tabatabaʾi and the clerics led a migration of their colleagues and supporters to the shrine of Shah Abd al-Azim, south of Tehran, where they formulated the demand for an adalat-khaneh (house of justice) as a condition of their return. Their demand was formally accepted, and on 12 January 1906 Tabatabaʾi and Behbahani returned to the capital in triumph. Ayn al-Dowleh remained in office, however, and he stalled implementing the royal decree for convening a house of justice. The tensions that persisted between him and the constitutionalists led to a new and more significant migration of Tabatabaʾi, Behbahani, and their associates, this time to Qom, on 15 July 1906. They demanded the dismissal of Ayn al-Dowleh, in addition to the establishment of a consultative assembly. Their demands were accepted, and on 18 August 1906 Tabatabaʾi and Behbahani were able to reenter Tehran. Tabatabaʾi exercised great influence in the majles (assembly) that was convened soon thereafter, attempting to preserve the alliance of personalities and interests that had made possible the introduction of constitutional government. His success was limited, however, and the majles was in a state of chronic dissension when its debates were brought abruptly to an end by the royal coup of 23 June 1908. Tabatabaʾi was arrested and taken in chains to the garrison at Bagh-e Shah. After a spell of imprisonment, he lived in seclusion in Shemiran, north of Tehran, before being banished to Mashhad. He returned to Tehran on 24 August 1909, one month after the restoration of the constitution, but thereafter tired of direct political involvement. He spent the rest of his life in Tehran, with the exception of a journey in 1917 to the shrine cities of Iraq.

Tabatabaʾi stands out above all as the most prominent religious leader of his time to have understood fully and accepted the far-reaching implications of constitutionalism for Iranian society, recognizing, for example, that it required a modernization of the educational system. This broadness of outlook may have been connected to the Freemasons' affiliations he had inherited from his father, which led him also to join the Masonic Lodge Reveil de l'Iran, the first Iranian lodge officially affiliated to the Grand Orient of France.

Bibliography

Browne, Edward. The Persian Revolution of 1905 - 1909. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1910.

Hairi, Abdul-Hadi. Shiʿism and Constitutionalism in Iran. Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1977.

— HAMID ALGAR
UPDATED BY ERIC HOOGLUND