Abbas Amanat

It's a revolution that did not particularly have much violence in it, contrary to many other revolutions.

It did not have a centralized leadership per se.

That's why actually I'm getting, I mean, besides the practices, I'm getting a lot of requests for interviews to compare what's happening now with the revolution of 1906, 1909.

Are there any echoes?

Yes, yes, there are.

There are.

Because that was a movement that started without...

without a centralized leadership, but actually various voices that emerged among the merchants or the businessmen in the economic community, among the representatives who came to the first parliament, the press, the new generation of the privileged aristocracy,

who were educated and believed in the constitutional values, all of these voices emerged at the same time.

And somehow they managed to coexist in the first and the second parliaments that were created between 1906 and 1910 or 1911.

But they all faced huge problems in the sense that Iran was in a dire economic situation.

This is before the days of the discovery of oil, which actually coincides.

There are two important coincidences.

One is that the oil was discovered in the South in 1909 during the course of the constitutional revolution.

The second is that in 1907,

the two great powers of the time, the Russian Empire and the British Empire, who always honored Iran as being a buffer state between them because they didn't want to get too close to one another.

basically came to an agreement facing the fear of the rise of the German Empire.

So this is the period of Entente, as you might know in European history, whereby the French, the British, and the Russians all create a...

that ultimately leads to the First World War against Germany.

A lot of money, but not all of it in the hands of the Iranians.