Azarbaijan and the tribes up to the Constitutional Revolution

After the setback to British prestige of the scandal of the Tobacco Monopoly in 1890–2, Russia steadily increased her domination of the north, where she won important economic concessions while the Iranian government grew heavily indebted to her financially. The British were concerned with the defence of India and with maintaining their power in the Persian Gulf, which became more vital after oil was discovered in commercial quantities in 1908. Russia wanted access to a warm-water port and further outlets for her expanding trade, and felt these could be achieved only by virtual subjugation of much of Iran. Defeat by the Japanese in 1905 and the Tsar's granting of the Duma did little to halt Russian forward policy in Iran. Without consulting Iran, Russia and Britain in 1907 clarified their respective positions in a Convention which carved the country into ‘spheres of influence’: the largest sphere, in the north and northwest, went to Russia, the southeast to Britain, while the southwest and a corridor to the northeast were to be neutral.

As described in Chapter Eleven, during the years of Mohammad 'Ali Mirza's rule as heir apparent (1896–1907) the province of Azarbaijan was in continual disorder and distress, with Russian influence paramount. The Ardabil region was in turmoil. There were repeated grain shortages, due not only to bad harvests and the insecurity of cultivation but also to hoarding and speculation by landowners.

The troubles begin

After the end of the wars, the Russians colonized and settled their new Transcaucasian territories, and dealt with local uprisings. They were not interested in the annexation of Iranian Azarbaijan. They put pressure on the Iranians to settle their frontier tribes, but both sides had much to gain from keeping groups like the Shahsevan nomadic. Iran relied on the nomads' pastoral produce and on their role as frontier guards, while the Russians not only gained considerably themselves from the Shahsevan contribution to the economy of the Moghan settlers, but also were able to put to good political use their tally of the latter's complaints of Shahsevan raiding. The officials and diplomats concerned were well aware of these factors in the situation. Though the Russians pressed for settlement of the nomads, they knew the Iranians would not be keen, and anyway the British agents advised the Iranians against such a policy. So the Iranian officials took half-measures, succeeding only in lining their pockets and further antagonizing the nomads.

According to Radde and Markov, it was in response to Russian complaints concerning Shahsevan raids and disturbances that the Iranian authorities in 1839 created the offices of elbey for the two sections of the Moghan Shahsevan tribes. The only other Iranian move concerning the Shahsevan that I know to have been carried out before 1849 was the visit of Mohammad Shah's brother Bahman Mirza, governor-general of Azarbaijan, to Ardabil, Meshkin and possibly Moghan, in November 1843, when he ‘arranged the frontier’.

In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there have been two distinct sets of tribes called Shahsevan, though there is evidence that the ancestors of most of the tribes in each set co-existed in the Ardabil region in the early eighteenth century. No detailed ethnographic study has been conducted among the Shahsevan tribes of Kharaqan and Khamseh, and I have no personal knowledge of them, but it seems appropriate here to summarize what is known of their origins and traditions.

In Chapters Five and Seven I discussed evidence that Nader Afshar removed Shaqaqi, Inallu Shahsevan and Afshar tribal groups from the Moghan–Ardabil region in 1730. The Shaqaqi returned by the 1750s, though they settled around Sarab to the south of their former home. There is no record that the Inallu or Afshar groups ever came all the way back from Khorasan; rather, evidence indicates that they returned to the Khamseh and Kharaqan regions, where they settled and have remained, and constitute the second of the two major groups of tribes bearing the name Shahsevan.

In these regions, centred approximately on Zanjan, Qazvin and Saveh, there were by the middle of the nineteenth century five tribal groups known as Shahsevan: Inallu, Baghdadi, Qurt-Beyli, Doveiran and Afshar Doveiran. At least three of these groups appear to have been in the Ardabil–Moghan region early in the previous century, along with the ancestors of the Shahsevan tribes there now.

The history of the Shahsevan since the early eighteenth century is fairly well documented, but their origins are obscure. They appear to be a collection of tribal groups brought together in a confederacy some time between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries.

By the twentieth century, they had acquired three rather different versions of their origins.

Anthropology, history and ‘tribes’

In the mid-twentieth century, social scientists of all persuasions expected tribal and ethnic minorities within contemporary nation-states to succumb sooner or later to policies of modernization and national integration, and many were confident that class would replace ethnicity as the major dimension of social identity. Many anthropologists began to regard the study of their traditional subject-matter – tribal peoples – as an antiquarian irrelevance, turning instead to the newly fashionable subdisciplines of urban anthropology and the anthropology of the state.

These expectations and trends have been confounded towards the end of the century by the persistence or creative revival of ethnic minority identities in virtually all countries of the world, and by increasing academic and popular perception of violent inter-community conflicts as ethnic in nature. Sociologists, political scientists, historians, geographers and others have shown renewed interest in the study of ethnic and tribal minorities of the ‘Fourth World’ – no longer the sole preserve of anthropologists. There has been a particular convergence between anthropologists and historians; the former ‘do history’, adding depth to their accounts of social and cultural change by scouring archives and chronicles, while the latter, not content with the often meagre ‘facts’ about tribal peoples to be established from such sources, enrich their interpretations with ethnographic, theoretical and comparative insights from anthropology.

The Khanates of Azarbaijan after Nader Shah

Nader Shah's empire disintegrated under the conflicts of his successors: for two years his surviving close relatives strove against each other for control, before succumbing to the efforts of leaders of various other tribes. Azarbaijan was for some years occupied by one of Nader's Afghan generals, Azad Khan Ghilji, who contended with 'Ali Mardan Bakhtiari at Esfahan, Karim Khan Zand at Shiraz, and Mohammad Hasan Khan Qajar in Gorgan.

While Karim Khan Zand won over the Bakhtiari tribes and defeated the Afghans in southern Iran, Mohammad Hasan Khan, chief of the Qoyunlu branch of the Qajars, gained control of Gorgan, beat off the Afghans in the northeast, and in 1756 headed for Azarbaijan against Azad Khan. The Qajar now had with him the Safavid scion Esma'il III, and with good reason hoped for support from the chiefs of eastern Azarbaijan, such as Panah Khan Javanshir of Qara-Bagh, Kazem Khan of Qara-Dagh, Hosein ʿAli Khan of Qobbeh, and the Shahsevan tribes. But he was made to feel less than welcome in Azarbaijan. As he passed through Talesh on the way to Moghan in early 1757, he was attacked by Qara Khan of Lankaran and suffered heavy losses. In Moghan he waited more than a month but, of the expected allies, only Kazem of Qara-Dagh appeared.

Reza Shah and the tribes

Reza Khan assumed the premiership in 1923 and became Reza Shah Pahlavi in early 1926, bringing the Qajar dynasty to an end. His aversion to the tribes in Iran is notorious, and he is widely thought to have broken the back of the tribal system. In his programme for unifying Iran and creating a modern, independent, secular, Persian-speaking country, he saw in the nomad tribes symbols of much that he was trying to replace: alien cultures and languages, allegiance to hereditary chiefs, a ‘primitive’ way of life, and a mobility that made them inaccessible to administration and the rule of law. He was also concerned by the extent to which the tribes had been subject to manipulation by foreign powers. Judging the organization and leadership of the tribes a continuing political danger, and their nomadism as anachronistic in a modern state, he eventually determined on the revolutionary step of destroying the tribal system altogether.

Reza Shah's tribal policy had two main aspects, and was implemented in two distinct phases: a campaign of pacification and disarmament, carried out mostly before he became Shah, and a programme of nomad settlement enforced during his last decade. The pacification campaign, often quoted as a successful example of his strong-arm approach, is well documented, but there is little detailed record of the enforced settlement, which by contrast has received considerable – largely justified – notoriety as a brutal and catastrophic failure.

Background: Azarbaijan and the early Safavids

The Safavid Shahs who ruled Iran between 1501 and 1722 descended from Sheikh Safi ad-Din of Ardabil (1252–1334). Sheikh Safi and his immediate successors were renowned as holy ascetic Sufis. Their own origins were obscure: probably of Kurdish or Iranian extraction, they later claimed descent from the Prophet. They acquired a widespread following at first among the local Iranian population, and later among the Turkic tribespeople who had been advancing from Central Asia into Azarbaijan and Anatolia from the eleventh Century onwards.

Ghuzz/Oghuz Turkish tribes came into Khorasan under the Saljuqs in late Ghaznavid times (around 1000 AD) and soon expanded to the west and south, large numbers concentrating in Azarbaijan. The Saljuq conquest meant a victory for the Sunni religion and the eventual adoption of the Turki language by the indigenous Iranian population of Azarbaijan. In the late twelfth century, while the Turks moved forward into Asia Minor, Azarbaijan was ruled by the Atabey Eldigüz and his successors. In the 1220s the Mongols swept into northwestern Iran; from Hülegü Khan's advent in 1256, the Il-Khanids and their Jalayerid successors dominated Azarbaijan for 130 years, finding there the best pastures for their animals. Timur (Tamerlane) conquered Azarbaijan in 1386 and brought large numbers of Turks back from Asia Minor to Azarbaijan; others he sent further east, to Khorasan.

Ardabil and Moghan under Russian and Ottoman occupation

In Chapter Two, I related Krusinski's account of the failure of the ‘Shahsevan’ to respond to Tahmasp Mirza's appeal from Qazvin in 1722, arguing that this was probably not an appeal such as those issued by Soltan Mohammad and Shah 'Abbas some 150 years earlier, but rather a general appeal to a provincial militia of former Qizilbash chiefs and their followers.

If the Shahsevan of Ardabil and Moghan were included in this appeal, and we may assume they were, it is not surprising if they were unwilling to leave their homeland. The previous year, in response to Shi'i maltreatment of the Sunnis in Shamakhi, just to the north of Moghan, Sunni Lazgi tribesmen from Daghestan had raided that city, and had sought and obtained protection from the Ottomans, who appointed a Governor there. During the raids, Russian property in Shamakhi had suffered, thus providing Peter the Great – nominally Shah Soltan Hosein's ally, and freed that year from his military involvements with Sweden – with a pretext for sending an expedition into Iranian territory. So, late in the summer of 1722, at the very time when Tahmasp's appeals from Qazvin would have been arriving, the tribes in Moghan and Ardabil must have been more than apprehensive for themselves and their own lands, menaced by both Ottoman supporters in Shamakhi and the great Russian army which was steadily making its way down the west coast of the Caspian.

The social order in Iran, like many other Middle Eastern countries, was marked until well into the twentieth century by a tension between the central government and powerful, semi-independent chiefs of nomadic tribes. At the same time, the rulers themselves were either of tribal origins or dependent on tribal support – the Pahlavis (1925–79) were the first for nearly a millennium to be neither. Under the Pahlavi Shahs the major tribal chiefs were systematically stripped of their economic and political influence, but tribal loyalties and forms of social organization survived in many parts of the country, and indeed have continued relevance in the Islamic Republic.

In recent decades, the tribes of Iran have attracted the attention of both anthropologists and historians. Several book-length ethnographies and histories of individual tribal groups have been published, as have some broader historical and theoretical analyses of the tribe–state relation.

The present work, the fruit of both extensive documentary research and intensive fieldwork, attempts a synthesis of anthropological and historical approaches. It tells the story of one of the great tribal confederacies, the Shahsevan of Azarbaijan. The confederacy had ceased to exist by the middle of the twentieth century, and the changes that have now occurred are probably irreversible, but many thousands of Iranians still claim or acknowledge their identity as Shahsevan, many of them continue a pastoral way of life, and the component tribal groups persist.

Azarbaijan at the end of the nineteenth century

Generally, at this time, Iran enjoyed increased security, particularly in the tribal areas and on the frontiers. Economic production increased and in most parts the peasants' lot improved.

Azarbaijan and Shahsevan country seem to have been an exception to this trend. Contemporary reports agree that the peasantry of Azarbaijan suffered under an increasingly decadent and corrupt administration, paralysed by the influence of Russia, which practically controlled the nominations and activities of the most important officials. Lesser officials, from local district governors to tax collectors, acquired their appointments from their immediate superiors, and as there was some competition for offices these were usually auctioned. Agricultural settlements in the southern part of the Shahsevan region, that is the districts of Meshkin, Arshaq, Velkij and Ardabil, were the private property either of wealthy townsmen (officials, merchants and clergy from Ardabil and Tabriz), or of the chiefs of the tribes settled there, particularly in parts of Ardabil district distant from the town. These landowners (molkdar) collected a share of the village produce. In addition the government usually farmed the taxes of villages or whole areas as tiyul assignments to individuals, either as pensions for official or other services, or for a cash payment. Often the landowner also held the tiyul, while in the few villages left as Crown land (khaleseh) the tiyul-holder (tiyuldar) collected both the taxes and the government share of the crop. In other cases the landowner and the tiyuldar were in competition.

Organization of the early Shahsevan

In the foregoing chapters, we have sought and examined evidence for the first appearance in their present habitat of the ancestors of the Shahsevan tribes of Moghan, and the first formation there of a recognizable tribal confederacy. The prey has been elusive, and the narrative has been at times dry, dense and complex. The materials have inevitably been of a dynastic and political nature, to do with administration, campaigns and rebellions. With the establishment of the confederacy in the region, finally, in the second half of the eighteenth century, we may attempt, in the absence as yet of any definite information, to imagine the social and economic circumstances of the Shahsevan peoples at the time. First we should summarize the political history we have traced.

Among the tribal names of groups and individuals reported in the Moghan-Ardabil region by the first quarter of the eighteenth century were the following:

• Tekelu/Takleh, Dulqadir/Delaqarda, Afshar, Shamlu (including Inallu, Ajirli, Beydili) are reported in or near Moghan. All these are names of former Qizilbash Turkoman confederacies, with known or suspected descendants among nineteenth-century Shahsevan. The original confederacies were all large and complex, with sections in many parts of Iran by this time. The sections in Moghan may have arrived with Esmaʿil Safavi as early as 1500, but they may not have come until long after 1600.