An Ottoman mission to Tehran: Mehmed Tahir Münif Paşa’s second ambassadorship to Tehran and the re-making of Perso-Ottoman relations (1876-1897)

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Mehmet Tahir Münif Paşa’s second ambassadorship to Iran (1896–1897) in the aftermath of Nasir al-Din Shah Qajar’s assassination in May 1896. It argues that the Shah’s death brought about a turning point in Perso-Ottoman diplomatic relations and that Sultan Abdülhamid’s decision to assign Münif as his representative in Tehran was an affirmation of a new age in Ottoman foreign policy. In what follows, the article will consider Münif’s second mission to Tehran in an attempt to bring greater specificity to Perso-Ottoman relations in the first half of the Hamidian era (1875–1896). It also seeks to explore how the rapprochement between the two states in the mid-1890s had unexpected consequences for Iranian émigrés in the Ottoman Empire, thereby considering how Perso-Ottoman diplomatic history is entangled with the construction and negotiation of the the life trajectories and circumstances of these trans-national actors in the Ottoman Empire.