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Revisiting the History of the Iranian Constitutional Movement (1905-1911): A New Look at the Role of the Gilani mujahidin and the Qafqaziyan in the Constitutional Revolution.
Abstract
Historiography of the Iranian Constitutional Movement has established Tehran and Tabriz as the major centers of the revolution and scholarly works written on the subject have focused heavily on the study of these two centers. Yet, it was neither Tehran nor Tabriz, but rather the uprising in Gilan that led the constitutional revolution to the victory. Thus, the study of this stage of the revolution, the paper argues, is essential to deconstructing and better understanding the revolution, as it will address questions such as how the revolutionary movement in the state of isolation and nearly complete suppression managed nevertheless to regain momentum and achieve victory; why the movement in Gilan succeeded while the two larger movements in Tabriz and Tehran were failing; and, what factors and conditions determined successes and failures of the revolution at its various stages. The lack of focus on the Gilan resistance is, partly, a result of the few accounts on the Gilan events found in the commonly used primary sources, especially when compared to the volume of accounts available on the developments in Tehran and Tabriz. Even those few sources that focus on the Gilan uprising are of a rather narrow focus addressing almost exclusively the groups their authors represented in the revolution with no sufficient material for the study of the broader domestic and international context of the Gilan uprising1. To the author of this paper, a particularly interesting aspect of the international, namely the Caucasian involvement in the revolution is a number of primary sources left by the Transcaucasian participants of the revolution in Gilan. Still to be published in any commonly known language these sources remain unutilized and mostly unknown to the broad scholarly community. These sources focus specifically on the Gilan uprising and cast new light on the entire spectrum of internal and external factors and conditions that surrounded the emergence and development of the Gilan uprising and determined its outcome. The Gilan movement exhibited its own peculiar characteristics different from those of the movements elsewhere in Iran, and perhaps, the paper argues, these differences were the very factors that determined Gilan's success. The above mentioned sources shed new light on those characteristics. 1.The Caucasian connections of the Iranian constitutionalists have been recognized by the contemporaries as well as modern scholars as 'lifeblood of the resistance'( Janet Afary, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution, Columbia University Press, NY, 1996: 222)
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
All Middle East
Caucasus
Iran
Islamic World
Sub Area
None