278 DESTINY DISRUPTED
and Auguste Comte, philosophers who theorized that societies evolved
through successively higher stages. Montesquieu categorized and ranked
political systems, declaring that republics were the next higher stage after
monarchies and despotisms. Comte said that as people grew more civilized
they evolved from religious to metaphysical to scientific consciousness.^3
Iranian modernist intellectuals decided their country needed to evolve.
Their discontent focused on the Qajar monarchs, now into their second
century of rule. These kings had pretty much been treating the country
like a private possession. One Qajar after another had been selling off the
national economy bit by bit to foreigners, to fund their own luxuries and
amusements, including expensive excursions to Europe.
Resentment among secular modernists came to a head with the Tobacco
Boycott, the movement so passionately promoted by Jamaluddin-i-Afghan.
As it happens, Jamaluddin also drew the Shi'i clerical establishment into the
Tobacco Boycott, and it was this alliance that forced the shah to back down.
But once the shah nullified the British monopoly on tobacco sales in Iran,
the clerics felt they had won and retired from the field.
The remaining activists held together, however, and crafted new de-
mands. They called for a constitution that would limit the powers of the
king and give the people a voice in running the country. Cheered on from
afar by Jamaluddin {deported to Asia Minor by this time), these secular
modernists began to discuss building a parliamentary democracy. The cler-
ics totally opposed them. A constitution would be un-Islamic, they said,
because Iran already had a constitution: it was called the Shari' a. They de-
rided the idea of democracy, too: only dynastic rule was permitted by
Islam, they declared. By the early years of the twentieth century, the long
struggle in Iran between clerics and crown had turned into a complicated
three-way struggle among clerics, crown, and secular modernist intelli-
gentsia, a struggle in which any two factions might pair up against the
third. In the matter of the constitution, clerics and crown stood united
against the modernists.
But the modernist tide was running high. In 1906, Qajar king Muzaf-
far al-din yielded, finally. He accepted a consitution that limited his pow-
ers severely and allowed a parliament to be formed, the Majlis, as it was
called. The king died a week after the Majlis first convened, and his son
Mohammad Ali Shah took over. It wasn't clear what powers the parliament