Nuri's camp insisted on religious oversight for the Majles in the form of a ‘clerical senate'. He was concerned that the powers of laymen and secular laws should not overshadow those of the sharia (Islamic law) and the clergy. The conflict over the nature of rights, and the legal status of religion, defined ideological debates within Iran for the rest of the century. But the variety of positions described as Islamist (or religiously correct) indicate that Islam is not the problem, but obscurantist interpretations with a claim to tradition.
Other leading clerics propounded Islam as a doctrine of democracy and rationalism. God, sharia, and popular sovereignty found an uneasy reconciliation in the Majles and, in the early 1920s, the clergy led the defense of the parliamentary order against the military strongman Reza Pahlavi. Although he eventually expelled the Qajars and founded his own dynasty, Reza Shah retained the 1906 constitution, which was only abrogated decades later, along with the monarchy, by the revolutionary cleric Khomeini.
Both Iranians and foreign observers like to trace the origins of Khomeini's Islamic revolution to the coup that toppled Musaddiq's democratically-elected nationalist government in 1953. The CIA's role in that seminal event has been spun into a tale of American Cold War folly and strategic miscalculation, with the massive blowback of Islamist revolutions and terrorism across the region. In reality, Musaddiq's downfall was the result of a domestic political crisis, a failed attempt to make the constitutional order work again. His policies alienated royalists and radicals alike, and left him with too few allies to defend himself.
Iran's 1979 revolution was not so much a reaction against foreign and American influence, as the result of the class and cultural conflicts unleashed in 1906. Khomeini described himself as the ideological grandchild of Nuri, and the Islamic Republic he founded drew its initial support from broad swathes of the lower and merchant classes, many of whom believed it would reconcile their social conservatism with the principles of accountable government.
Perversely, America can only serve its strategic interests in the region by overcoming its obsession with ‘strategic interests': if it is to engage intelligently with regional actors, America must pay more attention to the long-term historical forces at work in Iran and its region. Only then can America appreciate the power of resistance politics in a country like Iran that has often equated the struggle for rights with the struggle for independence from foreign domination.
The Constitutional Revolution was an act of the Iranian people accomplished against great odds, and at a time when neighbouring Russia, a much more advanced and powerful country, failed to accept a similar liberal order, driving that empire towards the violence and extremism of the Bolshevik revolution.
Today, the anniversary of the constitution's signing is largely ignored both within and outside of Iran, but its legacy lingers. Iranians would do well to commemorate it, and so remind themselves and others that they do not need lessons in democracy, but respect for a century-old struggle for justice that began in 1906.
