This paper examines the relationship between daily urban conflicts and the role of municipal government during the Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911). Most scholarship on the history of petitioning in late Qajar Iran has fixated on petitions to either the king or the parliament (majlis) as the source of redress. On the other hand, studies of subaltern populations during the Constitutional Revolution have usually focused on their political mobilization and their collective representation in revolutionary discourses. This overtly political emphasis of the constitutional period has impeded a more careful study of the everyday experiences of non-elites during the revolution. Less has been said on how urban populations, especially guildsmen, small merchants, women, and the marginalized poor, petitioned the municipal government to resolve disputes, seek redress for perceived injustices, and ask for material support in times of economic distress. Ordinary Iranians in urban centers often understood the function of provincial and municipal councils (anjumans) as associations responsible for addressing petitions rather than as forums for implementing modernizing reforms. This popular understanding of the constitutional order as new forum for redress instead of a radically new form of government was evident in the initial demand by protesters in Tehran for a “house of justice” (‘idalatkhanah) that would more effectively respond to petitions. As a result, the proceedings of municipal and provincial councils—and even the Iranian parliament itself—are rich sources for the study of everyday life during the Constitutional Revolution. Using petitions, letters to the editor, and the proceedings of municipal and provincial anjumans in Tehran, Tabriz, and Isfahan, this paper examines the everyday social and economic concerns of ordinary people and the mechanisms for local redress in urban centers. Local and provincial anjumans were faced with petitions regarding conflicts between guilds, complaints about the collection of taxes, concerns over the lack of safety and security, and the high prices and scarcity of staple goods such as bread and wheat. Petitioners included coffeehouse owners, shopkeepers, butchers, bakers, urban guildsmen, the destitute, and even the urban police seeking their wages. This paper argues that the popular engagement with constitutionalism often took the form of petitions to municipal and provincial anjumans. Ordinary urban dwellers viewed these anjumans as alternative sources of power to the king and local and provincial governors capable of redistributing economic resources, adjudicating disputes between guilds, providing relief from excessive taxes, and providing economic relief to the poor and the marginalized.

Zeinab Pasha was a leading woman revolutionary fighter (mojahid) in the early 20th century, with prior record of participation in public social and political protests dating back to the late 19th century. During the Iranian civil war of 1908-1909, she organized a group of armed women mojahids in the city of Tabriz against the Qajar autocracy. Her participation in street protests and, later on, also in armed conflicts presents us with an historical example that is in stark contrast to the established assumption of separate gendered spheres and such social practices as gender segregation in crowded public spaces during the Qajar and early Pahlavi periods. In this presentation, I will examine how political upheavals in Tabriz during the Iranian Constitutional Revolution led to transformations in socially accepted gendered agency that, in turn, transformed gender norms and practices in urban public spaces and spheres. For instance, the first girls’ school was established in the city. I will also discuss the specific neighborhoods and the social class background of the women participating in public political activities in Tabriz. I will discuss urban factors contributing to their ability to engage in public social and political action, and the ways in which these women negotiated their way around the existing gender norms vis-à-vis the male political actors in the city and contributed to open new spaces for women in education, health caring and more to complicate the national historiography of the revolutions. My main primary sources for this study will include Karim Taher Zadeh’s eyewitness account of events Azarbaijan’s revolt in the Iranian constitutional revolution. Other account is our sisters and daughter by Ahmad Kasravi. Also, unpublished documents in the Edward Granville Browne collection at the Cambridge University Library, like letters and the constitutionalist newspapers published in the city at the time, such as Anjuman will be taken into account.

In 1910, while Azerbaijan was under Russian occupation, a new French Catholic church was being built in Tabriz. How this happened was the question that foreign diplomats and Iranian authorities were asking. The church belonged to the Congregation of the Mission (Lazarites). The new building surprised everyone, because according to the Qajar Shahs’ orders, the Christians in Iran were not allowed to construct new churches or any other buildings for institutional activities. They were only allowed to repair and restore the existing ones. For the same reason, each Christian group in Iran claimed the ownership of both big and small churches in different cities and towns. Azerbaijan was a meeting point of different competing Christian groups; Iranian Armenians, Chaldeans, Assyrians, Nestorians and Orthodox, as well as Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox missionaries from Britain, France, America and Russia. This new church was built, not in a lesser known village, but in Tabriz, this big key city. The church was not small by any means; rather it was 8 meters high, with a thirty-meter tower and a capacity of 500 people. It is actually the biggest church in Iran. The church was built right under the nose of American Presbyterians and British Anglicans, not to mention the Iranian authorities. The building was ready to use in 1912. This paper seeks to establish the place of this incident in the urban history of Tabriz, under Russian occupation. To do so, it will first discuss the wider geopolitical context of the city in 1906-1912, during the constitutional movements. Using an array of sources, French, Persian and English –from diplomatic and Lazarites’ archives - it will next narrate the procedure of this church’s construction in this crucial context of the city. These are correspondences and reports from the missionaries, French Consuls, British diplomats, Iranian governors and ministers about the story, the problems, frictions or satisfactions, from the time these Catholics tried to buy the land up until the time the church was completed. The main conclusion of this paper is that the presence of the Russian army – whom the Lazarites called their “real alliance” - in Tabriz, on one hand worried the Iranian authorities and prevented them from understanding what was going on, and on the other hand, supplied the “power” the Lazarites needed to build this church.

This paper addresses the politics of public spaces of the city as sites of staging and negotiating a modern Persian identity. It suggests that in the 20th century Tehran, not only the modern appearance and order of the newly constructed boulevards and regulated facades of the brand-new public and administrative buildings were subjects of modernization, but also urban spaces of the city were seen as an opportunity for invention, projection and adjustment of collective memory, and public identity. This paper, particularly, focuses on the memorialization of the legendary Persian poet, Ferdowsi, as an iconic national hero in Ferdowsi Square of Tehran, as a venue of negotiation for establishing a fixed memory of the poet. It demonstrates the process of placing and replacing different statues, supported and financed by institutions inside and outside Iran, as each strove to stabilize the public memory that suited its interest. Proposed during the Ferdowsi millinery celebrations, the first statue installed in the Ferdowsi square was financed and commissioned by the Zoroastrian Parsee community of India. Like their other projects in Tehran, the process of creation, transportation and inauguration of the monument was an apparent attempt to revive Iran’s pre-Islamic memory for Zoroastrian diaspora community, as well as Iranian citizens. As the politics of representation has undergone theoretical transformation under the second Pahlavi, the statue was moved to another spot. During the next few years two other statues were installed in the square, all through elaborate ceremonies and public presence, aiming at “invention of tradition”. However the third statue was to remain there and develop into the most well-known symbolic image of Ferdowsi. Using archival documents, contemporary newspaper articles, and oral history, the paper highlights the debates and conflicts surrounding the iconographic, spatial and performative rhetoric embedded in the presentation of three different statues that were placed in the square from 1945 to 1969. It demonstrates the importance of public spaces of the city for the ruling elites of the Pahlavi regime, not only as sites of producing and polishing collective memory, but also as domains of practicing citizenship and modern national identity , specially for the new urban middle classes which were emerging in line of the new state policies.