Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to examine the actual role of the Shi'i ‘Ulama’ in the Tobacco protest of 1891-92 in Iran. The protest was an unprecedented mass movement against the concession of tobacco monopoly granted by the Iranian government of Qajar dynasty to an English company, and the ‘Ulama’ of the Twelver Shi'i Islam played the leading role of the movement.
This paper depends mostly on many kinds of Persian historical materials concerning the Tobacco protest such as telegrams and letters exchanged between the ‘Ulama’ in Iran and the Shi'i holy city of Iraq, and so on. These materials were collected in the book entitled “Tarikh-e Bidari-e Iranian (History of the Awakening of the Iranians)” written by Nazem al-Eslam Kermani, an Iranian Intellectual, who actually participated in the Protest.
In the previous studies about the role of the ‘Ulama’, there has been a tendency to analyze it from the view point of modernism. This paper attempts to clarify it with special consideration on the Religious institution, Marja-e Taqrid (the source of supreme examplar) institution in the Twelver shi'i Islam.
