Introduction

Abstract

The original demand of the political movement, which culminated in the 1906 Iranian Constitutional Revolution, was for a “house of justice” (‘edalatkhaneh). In the discourse of late nineteenth-century Iranian reformers, a house of justice meant a system of state courts that would function on the basis of law, not on the arbitrary whim of the monarch or the prince-governors of Iran’s far-flung provinces. In the prologue to the revolution, however, the demand for a house of justice was used in different ways: in appeals to popular sentiment—which played on traditional notions of justice—and, as the constitutionalist movement neared culmination, to mean an assembly in which “all classes of the people will participate and attend to the needs of the people,” or “the shah and the beggar will be equal within the confines of the law.”¹ Once a constitution was granted, conflicting notions of the meaning of a house of justice came rapidly to the fore, especially over the state judiciary and its relationships—on the one hand, to the law of Islam, and on the other, to the judicial prerogatives of the Shi‘i clergy. The quest for judicial reform became so mired in these differences that as often as not the newly created parliament felt obliged to avoid discussion of it. Soon the need to defend constitutional government against absolutist reaction and national sovereignty against continual threats of imperialist intervention became an overwhelming preoccupation. Yet the crafting of a new judicial power remained a central goal for Iranian constitutionalists, and as absolutism collapsed after 1909 and the practices of the old Qajar state lost their institutional moorings, it emerged as an instrumental as well as normative imperative.