Women were at the forefronts of revolutionary movements that swept the Middle East at the turn of the twentieth century, just as they were in the first decade of the twenty-first century. Yet, unlike their counterparts in the contemporary period, who have quickly captured the attention of both media and scholars, the early female revolutionaries in the region have been ignored for a long time despite the large number of scholarly works on the movements they participated in. Even though women’s involvements in the Iranian Constitutional Revolution (1906-1911) and the Egyptian Revolution of 1919 have recently been the subject of a few studies, they have been analysed almost exclusively within the context of the society they operated in. On the other hand, women’s contributions to the 1908 Revolution in the Ottoman Empire have yet to be thoroughly examined. This paper discusses women’s political activism in Ottoman Turkey and Qajar Iran in the early twentieth century from a comparative perspective, focusing on the ways in which women in these two societies contributed both to revolutionary politics and revolutionary discourse. Based mostly on primary sources in Ottoman Turkish, Persian, and English, such as women’s periodicals, daily newspapers, biographies, memoirs, and parliamentary records, it provides an analysis of the various roles women played in shaping, enforcing, and resisting the radical transformation caused by the constitutional revolutions in Ottoman and Qajar Empires. This study demonstrates that women in Turkey and Iran became active participants in the construction of a new political regime, a new social order, and their own roles in the early twentieth century through new venues such printed media, associations, and street politics as well as new opportunities for education and employment. Analysing how ordinary women in two “traditional” Muslim empires transforming into “modern” nation-states caused change from the bottom up and forged a more explicit political identity, this paper not only sheds new light on the role of women in Turkish and Iranian history as agents of political and social change, but also helps us to better understand the dynamics and the nature of the constitutional movements in Turkey and Iran.

In late Qajar Iran, surveillance of the frontiers was driven by deep-seated anxieties over British, Ottoman and Russian encroachments on Iranian sovereignty and the yearning to finalize Iran’s territorial framework. Iran’s invasion during WWI gave rise to a particularly virulent strain of anti-colonial nationalism. In the aftermath of the war, the ongoing British presence in the south, particularly in the Persian Gulf, emerged as a focal point for protest and a constant reminder of Iran’s weakness and humiliating capitulations to Europeans. The rise of Reza Khan in 1921 (later Reza Shah Pahlavi, 1925-1941), was accompanied by the revival of territorial claims in the Persian Gulf, a sharp rejection of Britain's claim to protect Arab shaykhs on both sides of the Gulf, and a demand to revise the Iran-Iraq boundary. In the late Qajar period, Iran’s chief source of information about people and events on the Arabian Peninsula was its network of k?rgoz?rs (foreign ministry agents) that were stationed in Abadan, Bushehr, Lingah and Bandar Abbas. The office of the k?rgoz?r was abolished in 1928 along with the capitulations regime, and the responsibility for intelligence gathering shifted to Iranian diplomats in Baghdad, Karbala, Basra, Karachi, Cairo, and the Hijaz as well as European capitals. These officials, eager to participate in the struggle to liberate Iran from foreign domination, gathered knowledge about the British and their tribal protégés and sent detailed reports, country studies and policy recommendations to their superiors in Tehran. Their sources included transnational merchants in the Gulf, frontier populations and Arabic newspapers. Their representations of tribal rulers and tribal societies in Arabia were refracted through cultural animosities, experiences with colonial pressures and unresolved territorial questions. Using archival documents, this paper will examine politics on the Arabian Peninsula from an Iranian point of view, including the Saudi-Rashidi war (1903-1907); the 1922 palace coup in Abu Dhabi; the Ikhwan revolt and the unification of Saudi Arabia (1927-1932); Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Said’s scheme for Gulf Arab unification (1930-1932); and the 1938 majlis movements in Kuwait and Dubai. Official country surveys and intelligence reports, and the responses they elicited from Tehran, afford a unique window into the history and practice of surveillance in late Qajar and early Pahlavi Iran as well as Iranian perceptions of state formation on the Arabian Peninsula, tribal politics in the Gulf shaykhdoms and Oman, and Britain’s role in the region.

Scholars have recently reexamined the history of the photography of Iran since the late 1970s thanks to the enormous efforts of the curator of the Golestan Palace’s, Badri Atabay and the indexification of the archival photographs. Since then, a variety of topics dealing with content within the frames of the photographs has been published. However, scholars have attempted less to read the outside of the frames and the context in which the early Iranian photographs were captured and circulated. This paper examines the Naseri period (1848-1896) during which time the palace extensively employed photography during a time that commercial photographers were also motivated to take pictures for their interests. I claim that the Shah wanted to import modern technology, which included photography as well, into Iran to modernize absolutist rule. However, what I conclude is that the commercial interests and private businesses benefitted disproportionately from the introduction of such technologies in comparison to the royal court beginning by the 1870s. More specifically, commercial photographers became superior at using photography to present images of an autonomous Iranian society than was the court. This was potentially destabilizing for the regime, since it was both "objectively" threatened by rebellions and also recognized that it needed to visually present itself in a compelling way to maintain its power in this new age of photography and Western tools of modernity more broadly. In this study, I take this clash and context into account to assess these photographs from the Golestan archive properly that serves for the development of photography in Iran. More specifically, I draw on novel archival research in the photographs of the Golestan Palace Archive to explore how the palace started to exercise the Daguerreotype to propagate the traditional ruling power with the aim of engendering fear and creating splendor among the subjects. Scholars tend to analyze the photographs of the period as the representation of the majestic image of the dynasty. However, this study moves debates further by employing the messages and the functions of the photographs through examination of the needs of the palace. I argue that most of the photographs of the Naseri period captured after the 1870s were the visible version of the palace's tactics in order to stand against the flow advancing from commercial photographers in visualizing the rebellions against the state.

Mirza Hassan Tabrizi (later, Roshdiyeh) (1860-1944) was a Qajar-era Iranian intellectual, constitutional activist, and educational reformer. In English and Persian-language scholarship alike, the story of his new schools remains at the margins. My paper brings his educational activities to the center of investigation. Specifically, I take up a close reading of his previously unexamined diaries about his Ottoman travels, which were made available to me from a private family archive. Roshdiyeh had travelled to the Ottoman territories to learn about new “primary” educational models he had read about in Iranian newspapers. I argue, in context of secondary sources on Islamic, Ottoman, and Qajar education, that Roshdiyeh had a mixed perception on Ottoman pedagogy; he was disappointed with the schools of Istanbul and Cairo, but had found sound pedagogy at a French-instituted school in Beirut. There, he discovered and experimented with a new, phonetic method for teaching the Arabic alphabet, which, in contrast to the mak?tib of Tabriz, proved to generate efficient and effective literacy once he returned to teach in Iran. This paper presentation is part of a larger dissertation chapter on the life and activities of Mirza Hassan Roshdiyeh in context of modern Iranian intellectual history. I draw connections to my dissertation project in the course of my presentation.

Labor, Intimacy and Power: The Servant Class of Gulistan Harem in Late Qajar Iran explores the social, spatial and cultural dimensions of the women’s quarter of Nasir al-Din Shah’s court, variously referred to as his harem or andarun, through looking at the laboring classes within it. While this period is generally understood to coincide with the emergence of modernity in Iran, the maintenance of a large-scale royal harem is often associated with a traditional and outdated Islamic convention. As such, the expansion of the Gulistan harem in the second half of the 19th century, concurrently with greater contact between the Qajar empire and Western modernity, presents us with an interesting paradox. This paper will focus specifically on the differing classes of maids, servants, and slaves that resided and worked within the royal palace. These specific classes of residents reveal a great deal about interregional and transnational networks and the various forms of migration within them during the period. For its time, the cultural and ethnic heterogeneity within the Gulistan harem, which was in large part the result of the presence of various laboring bodies, was quite unique, housing an estimated 700 to 2000 residents from across the empire and far beyond. Located within the ever-expanding Gulistan Palace, and in the heart of the Qajar capital, the harem was physically and socially structured around a set of extremely rigid hierarchies, which were often undermined by various affective bonds, developed through relations of proximity and cunning negotiations. As such, many of these individuals were significant figures in the royal court and wielded various forms of power within the complex court system. While there are many visual and textual traces of this class of constituents, it is only recently that they have emerged as a subject within Qajar historiography.