Persian Constitutional Revolution
Tobacco protest

The tobacco protest of 1891–1892 was "the first mass nationwide popular movement in Iran", and described as a "dress rehearsal for the...Constitutional Revolution", formed from an anti-imperialist and antimonarchist coalition of "clerics, mercantile interests, and dissident intellectuals".

In March 1890, Naser al-Din Shah granted a concession to an Englishman, Baron Paul Julius Reuter, for a 50-year monopoly over the distribution and exportation of tobacco in exchange for £25,000 to the Shah personally and £15,000 a year to the state. Iranians cultivated a variety of tobacco "much prized in foreign markets" that was not grown elsewhere, and the arrangement threatened the job security of a significant portion of the Iranian population – hundreds of thousands of workers in agriculture and the bazaars.

This led to unprecedented nationwide protest erupting first among the bazaari, and then the ulama. In December 1891, the most important religious authority in Iran, marja' -e taqlid Mirza Hasan Shirazi, issued a fatwa declaring the use of tobacco to be tantamount to war against the Hidden Imam, using the strongest possible language to oppose the Régie (tobacco monopoly). Bazaars shut down, and Iranians stopped smoking tobacco, Despite the popularity of tobacco – which Iranians were said to be less likely to forego than bread – the religious ban was so successful that it was said that women in the shah's harem quit smoking.

The protest demonstrated to the Iranians "for the first time that it was possible to win out against the Shah and foreign interests… there is a direct line from the coalition which participated in the tobacco movement… culminating in the Constitutional Revolution" and arguably the Iranian Revolution as well, according to Historian Nikki Keddie.
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