ABSTRACT
According to the history books, Iran has undergone three ‘revolutions’ during the present century. Yet, if we take the term ‘revolution’ in its traditional sense as implying the violent overthrow of a despotic and reactionary regime by a spontaneous popular uprising, followed by the charting of a new and progressive course for society, then none of them fit the pattern. The first, the ‘Constitutional Revolution’ of 1906, carried out by a small heterogeneous group of merchants, religious leaders, intellectuals and tribal chiefs, aimed at no more than bringing an already weak and declining monarchy under the control of an elected parliament. Its only achievement was an acceleration of the country’s drift into chaos and disorder, a drift halted only by the coup d’etat of Reza Khan in 1921.
