Constitutionalism in Iran and Its Asian Interdependencies

In the historiography of Iranian constitutionalism and the constitutional revolution (1905–9), the reformist movement is treated as a receptive movement crafted by the ideas originating chiefly from nineteenth-century Western Europe or Russia, with no dependencies on Asia or the Middle East, except for the Ottoman Empire and the Caucasus. In the case of the Ottoman Empire, the study of the cross-border link has been limited to the nonreciprocal impact that the movement for change and reform in the Ottoman Empire had on late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century Iran, with no reference to the possible impact that Iranian constitutionalism might have had on the Young Turk revolution of 1908. In the case of the Transcaspian connections the historiography of Iranian constitutionalism has been usually limited to its reference to a few nonreciprocal links between Iran and the northern frontiers, where mainly the Caucasus was in charge of producing revolutionary literature or dispatching revolutionary agents to the south in order to save the constitution from being slaughtered by Qajar despotism. Frequent references to the publication of periodicals such as the satiric Mulla Nasr al-Din of Baku or to the camaraderie of Caucasian social democrats and their support of the Iranian constitutionalists in restoring the revolution are the most common rhetoric.

In a corresponding fashion, in Soviet historiography the reformist movement of the early twentieth century in the Caucasus and Central Asia was generally treated as an isolated, self-contained movement. This movement was, however, confined within the geographic borders of Baku, Tbilisi, and Bukhara, or at most within the southern region of the czarist empire, Turkistan. Evidently, they were all inspired by the reform movements being practiced during the same period by the Russians or Tatars in different parts of the czarist empire.

What brings constitutionalist historians of Iran to a conclusion comparatively identical to that made by reform movement historians in the former Soviet south is their exclusive approach to the practice of modernity as a European phenomenon rather than a global project. Studies of political modernity are predominantly influenced by the Weberian perception that modernity is assumed as a product of occidental rationality, with a general mandate regarding its applicability irrespective of geography, time, environment, social order, or practice. Such a perception of modernity, which crafted European historicism, "posited historical time as a measure of cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between the West and non-West."¹ Accordingly, non-Western societies were doomed to linger in history's "waiting room" to adopt the European model of modernity. Such historicism, as Dipesh Chakrabarty argues, is "what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as something that become global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it."² The "first-in-Europethen elsewhere" structure of global historical time chiefly manifested itself as Eurocentrism and comes into focus in examining studies of modernity and the process of modernization in non-Western societies.

Apart from the issue of Eurocentrism, the study of the practice and institutionalization of political modernity suffers from other deficiencies, namely, assigning agency to the elite, which may include the secular intelligentsia, colonialists, and various social or political institutions. By doing so, historians, by adopting an essentialist approach, tend to deny the agency of the nonelite and its autonomous consciousness and consequently to dehistoricize the process of social and cultural changes.

In fact, modernization is a global project that was launched almost concurrently with a different pace in different parts of the world. In the political sphere, modernization was juxtaposed with the birth of civil society and the emergence of individualism and individual autonomy, the latter of which was mainly manifested in individuals' political and civil rights. Arguably, the age of modernity began when the basic unit in the structures of a modern society assumed individualistic character. This approach differed fundamentally from the concept on which the agrarian or peasant societies were founded. Consequently, class solidarity, ethnic particularism, and cultural awareness gave way to a higher degree of social mobilization and technological and economic integration. At the...