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| Tehran - Shimran gate c 1800 |
Iran at the beginning of the nineteenth century was asleep.
The world around it was beginning to change rapidly but it was largely unaware
of this. In Europe, the Industrial Revolution was starting to transform life in
all its aspects: food, clothes, housing, work, transport, the city landscape,
the environment -- nothing was spared its effects. Politically the age of the
colonialist expansion into India and Africa was just beginning and even China
and Japan were eventually unable to resist foreign penetration. Intellectually,
the effects of the Age of Enlightenment were removing religion from the central
position that it had always occupied and replacing it with science as the
guarantor of truth.
But just as the world was being roused into a flurry of activity,
Iran was settling into a comfortable repose after a turbulent eighteenth
century which had seen the two-hundred year Safavid dynasty overthrown and a
seventy-year period of turmoil.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the Qajar tribe had imposed
its authority over the whole of Iran and settled into a system of government
where every governorship of the provinces and every high government position
was sold off to the highest bidder who would then act as a tax farmer, milking his
position for whatever returns it offered until he was replaced. There was no
law or system of government beyond the will of the king or of the local
governor. They had the power of life and death over their subjects, who could
be killed for even the most trivial reason. Even the state treasury was very
rudimentary with officials being allocated in lieu of salary the taxes of
certain villages, of which they in effect became lords and from which they were
responsible for collecting their salaries as taxes. The nomadic tribes which
were at least a third of the population were virtually independent.
- Moojan
Momen (‘Bahá'u'lláh, a Short Biography’)
