A World Born through the Chamber of a Revolver: Revolutionary Violence, Culture, and Modernity in Iran, 1906-1911

This essay is part of an extensive ongoing study of political and sociocultural function, modes, expectations, and consequences of political violence during the Iranian constitutional revolution of 1906–11. In addition to manifold rationales undergirding both revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence, the study in progress explores the range of participants, contemporary representations, legitimation/delegitimation, celebration/vilification, commemoration, the broad spectrum of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary subjectivities and intersubjectivities, and other heterogeneous political and extra-political manifestations and ramifications of political violence during the period.

Despite abundant references to armed struggle and other forms of political violence in the contentious historiography of the Iranian constitutional revolution, scholars of the revolution have not examined the multifaceted contemporary and long-term social and cultural corporeal and other nuanced influences, reception, effects, and consequences of political violence. Given the broad scope of this topic, this essay provides only a tentative overview of some political, social, and cultural contours, manifestations, and underpinnings of revolutionary violence during the period; hence, it offers no more than a cursory and fragmentary inventory of select themes and examples, with only passing references to counterrevolutionary violence. As indicated by the classification of various modalities of political violence in the remainder of the essay, and given the underlying intersubjective agency and the general intercontextuality of revolutionary violence, ultimately this mode of violence cannot be treated in isolation from counterrevolutionary violence.

In this essay, in addition to forces of autocracy, the term counterrevolutionary embraces all groups opposed to the implementation of "constitutional" government, including those clerical and religious factions opposed to constitutionalism and in favor of existing or expanded enforcement of (athna' ashari) Shi'i interpretations of Islamic Sharia laws and criteria for political consultation—many among them not entirely satisfied with the extant autocracy. However, it should be noted that not everyone in "pro-Sharia" anticonstitutional camps, or among royalists, was ultimately averse to varying forms of nativism or nationalism in opposition to imperialism, even if their hostility to constitutionalism and tacit or explicit cooperation with the autocratic faction expedited the Russian-backed royalist coup d'état of 1908 and the final Russian-provoked termination of Iran's constitutional experiment in late 1911.¹

However, this is not to say all "revolutionary" forces were entirely content with the articles enshrined in the constitution of 1906 or the subsequent modifications amended to the 1909 constitutional laws. There were groups that clearly wished for more inclusive or exclusionary arrangements in both constitutional documents. But, what these revolutionary groups had in common for much of the period from 1906 to 1911—despite intensified, internecine intraconstitutionalist hostilities after 1909—was their underlying joint conviction of the necessity and indispensability of a constitutional form of government for "national" survival and progress.

Forms of revolutionary and counterrevolutionary violence during the Iranian constitutional revolution ranged from organized armed conflicts to mob assaults, psychological intimidation, bastinado and other forms of physical torture and infliction of pain, public mortification, executions, incarceration/confinement, targeted assassinations, taking hostages for ransom or for hostage/prisoner exchange and political negotiations, mutilation, defilement and disfigurement of corpses, sieges and other forms of restriction of geographic movement, dietary deprivation and food blockades, forced or voluntary exile, and destruction of property—with a given individual at times directly perpetuating or enduring a combination of these violent acts. All of these forms of violence resulted in a variety of psychological repercussions for individuals or groups, both victims and perpetrators—only minimally documented in the available primary and secondary sources—as well as for other groups in the population, even if they were spared the direct physical ordeals of political violence. Despite differing rationales and modes of conducting political violence, all of the above forms of violence were deployed by individuals and groups in both revolutionary and...