Tobacco Protest

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The Tobacco Protest, a Shi'a clerical-led revolt against tobacco concessions granted to the Western imperial power of Great Britain, occurred in Persia (Iran) in 1891. The protest was one of the first times the Iranian religious elite succeeded in forcing the government to retreat from a policy, and was seen as a demonstration that "the Shia ulama were Iran's first line of defense" against colonialism.[1]

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[edit] Overview

In March 1890 Nasir al-Din Shah granted a tobacco concession to a British company, Imperial Tobacco Company. The concession gave the company exclusive rights to produce, sell, and export all of Iran's large tobacco crop in exchange for an annual payment of 15,000 British Pounds and 25% of annual profits. The shah was badly in need of money and had granted many such concessions to European governments before.

The tobacco crop was valuable not only because of the domestic market, but because Iranians cultivated a variety of tobacco "much prized in foreign markets" and not grown elsewhere. Prices were to be mutally agreed upon by the company and the Iranian sellers with disputes settled by compulsory arbitration.[2] At the time the Persian tobacco industry employed over 200,000 people.

Outrage at the concession in Iran "was nearly universal,"[3] and described as "an outburst of religious and national feeling over what seemed to many Persians to be the surrender of their country and its resources into the hands of foreigners and infidels."[4] Mass protests against the concession were held, many of them organized by Shi'a ulama had a strong independent power base to attack the shah's position. By the end of the summer of 1881 there were open protests in Tabriz where mullahs stopped teaching and merchants closed the bazaar.

Earlier that year in January, pan-Islamist activist Sayyed Jamal al-Din al-Afghani was evicted from a sanctuary in the capital Tehran where he had been preaching against the Shah, and dumped across the border into Mesopotamia. He responded by writing a plea to Grand Ayatollah Mirza Shirazi, to "save and defend [the] country" from "this criminal who has offered the provinces of the land of Iran to auction amongst the Great Powers."[5] That December, from his home in Samarra (then part of the Ottoman empire) Shirazi issued a fatwa against the usage of tobacco. In a show of solidarity, Iranian merchants responded by shutting down the main bazaars throughout the country. It is said the women in the shah's harem quit smoking and his servants refused to prepare his water pipe. [6]

By January 1892, when the Shah saw that the British government "was waffling in its support for the Imperial Tobacco Company," he canceled the concesssion. [7] By January 26, Shirazi issued another fatwa repealing the first and permitting tobacco use, "and Iranians began smoking again." The fatwa has been called a "stunning" demonstration of the power of the Marja taqlid,[8] and the protest itself has been cited as one of the issues that led to the Persian Constitutional Revolution.

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[edit] References and notes

  1. ^ Nasr, Vali, The Shia Revival, Norton, (2006), p.117
  2. ^ Mottahedeh, Roy, The Mantle of the Prophet : Religion and Politics in Iran, One World, Oxford, 1985, 2000, p.215
  3. ^ Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet, (1985, 2000), p.215
  4. ^ review in Journal of Economic History, 1968, p.697-698 by J.B. Kelly of Religion and Rebellion in Iran by Nikki R. Keddie
  5. ^ Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet, (1985, 2000), p.216-7
  6. ^ Nasr, Vali, The Shia Revival, Norton, (2006), p.122
  7. ^ Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet, (1985, 2000), p.218
  8. ^ Mottahedeh, The Mantle of the Prophet, (1985, 2000), p.218
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