Constitutional Revolution of Iran 1905–1911

Abstract

With the twentieth century two constitutional revolutions entered the Middle East: one in Iran and the other in the Ottoman Empire. Constitutionalism, a completely Western idea, “in principle ran counter to the fiber of political thought in Islam.”1 The concurrent spread of nationalism and Constitutionalism in Iran of the late nineteenth century led to the adoption of a prominent feature of Western culture, that is, Constitutionalism, at least partly in order to defy another feature, which was imperialism. Concurrently then the Constitutional Revolution was both an emulation of and an opposition to the West. This paradoxical pattern of both resentment and respect/emulation has been termed a “true key to the problems of Western impact on the East.”2 Indeed, impact there was, sweeping through the Middle East at the turn of the century.