Search Results
In 1910, parts of Iran were under Russian occupation. In the occupied northwestern city of Tabriz, the French Catholic mission began to build a new church, which today is one of the largest churches in the Middle East. Previous scholarship has not explored the history of this edifice. This article locates the establishment of this church in the urban history of Tabriz. It elucidates the geopolitical context of the city during a period of widespread social turmoil. Using an array of French and Persian archival documents, the paper narrates a story with crucial details about strangers becoming friends and friends collaborating with one another to build an urban construction in the midst of protest, revolution, and war.
This article is about the struggles of a persecuted confessional minority in Qajar Iran. It shows that the massacre of the Bahāʾis in Isfahan in 1903 was representative of the ongoing power struggles in the city. Previous scholarship that has briefly explored these events has relied primarily on a handful of British diplomatic sources. Drawing on unexplored documents in British and Iranian archives, this article provides crucial details about the social dynamics on the ground and stresses the role of key actors involved in this episode in Iranian history. In the process, the article puts together the socio-economic contexts of the events in Isfahan, explains why the Bahāʾis sought foreign protection, and analyzes the attitudes of powerful local actors such as Zell al-Soltān and Āqā Najafi.