Karim Khan Zand

PREFACE

Karim Khan Zand was a minor chieftain of a hither to obscure pastoral tribe who came to rule most of Iran with his capital at Shiraz, and founded a short-lived dynasty during the latter part of the eighteenth century (1751–94). His claims to fame are not the spectacular battles and ruthless executions that distinguish his predecessors and successors in power; rather they are a practical common sense, unselfish humility, and unbiased humanity in the service of his subjects. His reputation in Iran is that of a good man who became and remained a good monarch, restoring a much-needed measure of peace, prosperity, and justice after half a century of tyranny and chaos. He is remembered fondly as The Vakil, conventionally translated as Regent. Certainly he rejected the title of king (thus preserving his memory even in the Islamic Republic, where the very word shah is anathema) – but the true meaning of vakil as used by Karim Khan is far from conventional, as we shall see (chapter 8).

The Zand period was one of transition, when Iran was poised to enter the modern era – to be redefined, geographically and economically, by direct and regular contact with the European powers as they cast their imperial and commercial nets around the globe, and to seek a new balance at home between the competing cults of the Shah and the Shi’a. It is usually the Qajars, Iran’s penultimate dynasty, who are credited with ushering the country into the modern era (see Keddie, Qajar Iran and the Rise of Reza Khan 1796–1925). In fact, many of the conditions indispensable to Iran’s very survival after the disintegration of Nader Shah’s empire, let alone its recovery and reintegration, had already been restored under the Vakil – sufficiently, at least, to survive the brief but bloody interregnum of his immediate Zand successors and their war with Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar. These conditions included administrative continuity, religious unity, and diplomatic and commercial ties with powerful neighbors (Ottoman Turkey and British India).

The historical events described here are mostly condensed from contemporary sources: Persian chronicles, reports of British, French, Dutch, Russian, and other visitors to the Zand realms, and memoirs of Iranian and Armenian residents and emigrants. Under the headings First-Person Testimony will be found summaries and quotations from the narratives of individuals who experienced some of the events or situations mentioned in that chapter. The sources cited and the main secondary literature are listed in the Bibliography.

The transcription of Persian (and Turkish and Arabic) names has been kept as simple and consistent as possible (though some Arabic references in the Bibliography may exhibit different conventions from names in the text). Familiar personal titles (shah, khan, sheikh, sultan) and place names (Shiraz, Isfahan) are spelled as is usual in English – unless they form part of a name, such as Sheykh-Ali Khan (who is a khan, but is not a sheikh), or Mohammad Mehdi Esfahani, a poet who hails from Isfahan. For less familiar names and terms, it may be noted that in the names of two of Karim Khan’s most tenacious opponents, Azad Khan and Agha Mohammad Khan, both the "a’s (as well as that in Khan) are long, i.e. pronounced like the vowel in pause. For the consonants, g is always hard as in give and get; q represents a k pronounced farther back on the palate; kh is the throaty scrape heard in German orWelsh Bach, and gh approximates a voiced gargle (Parisian r). The sequence th, however, is simply t followed by h: Fath-Ali is pronounced as if it were Fat-hali.

It remains to acknowledge the encouragement I have received over the years, from descendants of the Zand tribe themselves (and a descendant of Azad Khan Afghan), to give wider currency to the history of Karim Khan and the Zands. Scattered throughout Iran and abroad after the victory of the Qajars, theirs is an illustrious legacy that should not be forgotten. If the present volume helps to preserve it for them and their children, and to interest a broader audience, it will have fulfilled its purpose.

Map of Iran under Zand rule

Contemporary Portrait of Karim Khan Zand.

IRAN AND THE WORLD IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

The eighteenth century was a momentous period in Europe and America, an era of imperial ambitions and territorial expansion, of cultural efflorescence and scientific achievement. It introduced worldwide wars, dissent without martyrdom, political and economic revolutions, the beginning of the end of slavery. The principal engine of change in most of these fields was the law. Newly divorced from all but the most abstract symbolism of an origin in heaven, it secured the total interdependence of society, and in its universal application (celebrated or excoriated in the novel, another novelty of the age) regulated the march of a new concept of progress.

So conscious are we today of the seminal nature of our eighteenth-century civilization that we (in Britain and much of the Commonwealth, Europe, and even in anti-traditionalist America) still celebrate some special occasions and respected professions by dressing them up in the knee-breeches, powdered wigs, and three-cornered hats of the 1700s. Whether at Oktoberfest in Bavaria, or in the everyday courtroom attire of judges and advocates in Britain, we pay continuing homage to the graceful zenith of a long transition from feudal autocracy to industrial capitalism, accompanied by the music of Bach and Mozart.

The world to the east of this comfortable image, as seen through the telescopes of the imperial or mercantile servants of such as the Hanoverians, Habsburgs, and Romanoffs, appeared static, mired in a fatalistic traditional structure where splendor and squalor coexisted in age-old equilibrium. Nevertheless, the spirit of scientific inquiry that had animated European intellectuals from the outset of the Enlightenment brought them increasingly into contact – sometimes in collaboration with an imperialistic agenda, but often out of simple curiosity – with eastern countries: two scientific expeditions (from Denmark and Russia) and a lone French botanist explored parts of Iran during the Zand period, and British employees of the East India Company in the Persian Gulf had at least a smattering of Persian language and classical culture from their training in India as, in effect, successors to the Mughals. Such observers often realized that these descendants of more ancient civilizations had their own dynamics, and were responding to developments of their own very active eighteenth century as well as to the reverberations from their Western neighbors.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the Persianate world, with its territory extending from the Caucasus across the Iranian plateau up into Central Asia, through Afghanistan, down into northern and central India. In this subregion of the Islamic area, Persian was, as well as the mother tongue of tens of millions of the settled and nomadic populations, the common language of literature, commerce, politics, and diplomacy. So far, none of the states in this region had faced actual war with a Western power, unlike their neighbors the Ottoman Turks. Before the middle of the century, however, Britain’s East India Company was embroiled with other Indian regional rulers in an undeclared contest of bribery, intimidation, and full-scale military campaigns for political control of the land where it was ostensibly just a business venture; and Russia had briefly invaded Persia’s south Caucasus and Caspian coastal provinces, and was poised for the permanent conquest of Central Asia.

Iran was still known to the West as Persia; not until the 1930s did Reza Shah’s nationalistic government require foreign diplomats to refer to the county officially by its ancient and proper name. Europeans naturally made the connection with the Persian empire of Cyrus and Darius, the province of Pars (Greek Persis, now Fars) where the ruins of Persepolis stood close to the city of Shiraz, and the Persian poetry of masters such as Hafez of Shiraz that was cultivated in Istanbul as well as Isfahan, Bukhara, and Calcutta. Iranian conquerors of the ancient world (the Persian Xerxes, the Parthian Mithridates) were plucked from the pages of Plutarch as vehicles for drama and opera. Similarly, their later counterparts the Turco-Persian warlords whose exploits were reported within the year by East India merchants or Jesuit missionaries found their way into English literature, or French and Italian music. Thus Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587) is the Emir Timur, nicknamed lang the lame (r. 1370–1405) – who also figures in one of Vivaldi’s operas; and a mock-furious little harpsichord piece by Rameau, called la Coulicam (in Pièces de clavecin en concert of 1741), refers to Tahmasb-qoli Khan, the pre-regnal name of Timur’s conscious emulator in empire, Nader Shah Afshar (r. 1736–47).

There is an organic connection between the Safavid, Afsharid, Zand, and early Qajar periods (collectively, c.1500–1800) that defines in broad outline the salient political and socio-cultural characteristics of Iran up until at least the early twentieth century. This is all the more surprising when we see that few of the rulers seem to have given a thought to the advantages of an orderly succession. Shah Abbas Safavi (r. 1587–1629) was a shrewd strategist and economist whose political and commercial innovations promised stability and prosperity under an enlightened despotism; however, his distrust of his sons as potential rivals ensured that they were either eliminated or ill-trained for rulership, which contributed to the downfall of his dynasty. In the crucial two generations of our story (c.1725–80), Nader Shah rose parasitically to power on the back of the fatally wounded Safavid dynasty; he blinded his eldest son and unwittingly trained his dynastic replacement, Karim Khan Zand, who in turn kept as a hostage-guest at court the nemesis of his own line, Agha Mohammad Khan Qajar. Yet the basic institutions and attitudes of Safavid politics and religion at the dynasty’s zenith echo as a leitmotif throughout succeeding administrations. Let us first therefore try to characterize the salient features of early eighteenth-century Iran as a place, a concept, and a society.

IRAN AND ITS PEOPLE

Historians of Europe may date the imagining of the nation state to the nineteenth century, after the establishment of print capitalism and the progressive retro-construction of a national legend – an inductive process. This does not mean that Asian nations must necessarily evolve even later, though the prerequisites (for Europe), such as an exclusive national language or efficient communications, may not be in place. It might be argued that the early evolution in Europe of sophisticated civic government (the city-state in Greece and early Rome, later in Renaissance Italy and Germany) actually tended to retard the attainment of a broader national unity – especially in Italy and Germany – despite the existence of a common written (and printed) language and a broadly integrated culture. Iran, by contrast, never developed a theory and practice of the polis, and had no printing press before the early nineteenth century. It defined itself deductively, and on a large scale. That is, its Zoroastrian mythology and national legend long preceded widespread literacy (its definitive form is the epic Persian poem of Ferdowsi, the Shah-nama or Book of Kings, completed c.1010); and its imagined identity, as a construct of a common literary language, the national legend, and a territorialized religion, was embodied in all three of its great empires (the Achaemenian, the Sasanian, and the Safavid) from ancient times onward.

This sense of national identity was preserved despite the massive replacement of Zoroastrianism by Islam after 650, and through the six-centuries-long hegemony of the Arab caliphate. It began to reassert itself after the Mongol invaders killed the last caliph in 1258. Around 1300, the troops sent from Mongol-ruled (Il-Khanid) Tabriz to fight the Mamluks in Syria were referred to by their Persian chronicler as the Iranians. The ethnolinguistically Turkish tribal leaders (or turkicized religious figures, in the case of the Safavid family) who from the eleventh to the early twentieth century ruled parts of greater Iran (Iran-shahr) appealed by their very names to the Iranian national legend (Key Kobad, Tahmasb) and, after the Safavids, additionally to the national cult of Shi’ism (Abbas, Fath-Ali) – as did their Georgian and Armenian officers (Rostam, Sohrab; Lotf-Ali, Ali-qoli).

A large proportion – perhaps as much as half – of the population comprised nomadic sheep herders, tribally organized, who contributed significantly to the economy, the military, and the political establishment of Iran. Many of the most powerful of these (such as the Afshars and Qajars, mainly in the north) were Turks. They were politically dominant under the Safavids, Nader Shah, and the Qajars, but under Karim Khan the Iranian tribes of the center and south (Lurs, including the Bakhtyari and the Lak tribes such as the Zand, and Kurds) gained the ascendancy. This ethnic difference, whether noted in language, geographical origin, or subculture, was freely acknowledged, but was never a divisive issue; both were mainly Shi’i in religion and Safavi by tradition, and their rivalries, turning on pastures and territory and military-political dominance, were expressed intra-ethnically as much as inter-ethnically.

However, a more narrowly defined Turco-Persian rivalry, or rather professional jealousy, was expressed directly in ethnolinguistic terms throughout the post-Mongol period in Iran. This was the idealized division of prestigious labor between military command-cum-executive power, seen as a prerogative of the Turks, and administrative, diplomatic, and literary-cultural affairs, conceived as proper to the Persians. The conceit was summed up in the phrase Tork-o Tazik, Turk and Tajik. (Tazik or Tajik was a Middle-Persian term meaning Arab, and came to refer to Persian Muslims in contradistinction to Turks; in Safavid writings it was applied indiscriminately to all Persians, but later came to refer specifically to the Persian-speakers of Central Asia as distinct from the Uzbeks.)

This distinction was exemplified in the Turkish prince of the blood, who might compete with his brothers and any other rivals for kingship, and who bore the title mirza "son