Worth a read, an extract from
https://iranprism.com/first-try/
The Match
The revolution that built a garden-parliament had begun with sugar.
In December 1905, the price of sugar spiked across Tehran — a convergence of a bad harvest, trade disruption from the Russo-Japanese War, and a cholera epidemic that strangled supply lines. Tehran’s governor, Ala al-Dawla, responded by ordering the bastinado — public foot-whipping — of two respected sugar merchants. One of them was a sayyed, a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad.
That was the match. It united the two most powerful non-state forces in Iran: the mosque and the bazaar. An attack on commerce AND religious dignity simultaneously. The ulama declared the punishment an insult to Islam. The bazaaris declared a general strike. Together, they formed a coalition that no shah could suppress by force alone — because the mosque controlled the narrative and the bazaar controlled the economy.
But the sugar was only the trigger. The fuel had been accumulating for decades.
In 1891, Naser al-Din Shah had sold a monopoly over Iran’s entire tobacco trade to a British company — the Tobacco Régie. Grand Ayatollah Mirza Shirazi issued a fatwa from Samarra declaring tobacco use tantamount to “war against the Hidden Imam.” The boycott that followed was so total it was observed even in the Shah’s own harem — his wives put down their water pipes. The Shah canceled the concession.3 An entire nation had organized against foreign exploitation and won, fourteen years before the constitutional movement began.
The Tobacco Protest proved three things that would become the architecture of 1906: religious authority could mobilize the masses beyond the reach of the state; collective action across class lines could force a monarchy to capitulate; and the fundamental issue — foreign powers extracting Iranian resources while Iranians had no say in their own governance — was a wound that would not heal without structural change.
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