Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran: Constitutionalism, Autocracy, and Legal Reform, 1906-1941.

• Author: Chehabi, H.E.
• Position: Book review

Law, State, and Society in Modern Iran: Constitutionalism, Autocracy, and Legal Reform, 1906-1941

By Hadi Enayat

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013, 256 pages, $100.00, ISBN: 9781137282019.

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Like the neighboring Ottoman Empire, Iran escaped foreign rule in the age of imperialism. Its continued sovereignty notwithstanding, European powers did not treat Iran as an equal. The most visible manifestation of the country's subaltern status in the international society of states were the so-called capitulations, imposed treaties in which Iran (like the Ottoman Empire) exempted the subjects of foreign countries from its own jurisdiction, without securing a similar treatment for its own subjects from the other side. These unequal treaties were justified, in Iran and elsewhere in the non-Western world, by the absence of a rational legal system, because of which a European could not expect to have a fair trial in a local court. For Iran to emancipate itself internationally, therefore, a new legal system had to be created as a necessary precondition for the abolition of the capitulations. But this was far from being the sole impetus for creating a modern legal system. Modernists held Iran's traditional absolute monarchy responsible for the weakness that had allowed foreign powers to impose their will on Iran in the first place.

Establishing the rule of law was thus of paramount importance, and given Iran's independence, reforms were implemented by domestic forces. Hadi Enayat's book is about how this was done in practice, and with what results.

According to conventional wisdom, the creation of Iran's modern legal system dates from the early years of the rule of Reza Shah Pahlavi (r. 1925-41), when Ali-Akbar Davar was Minister of Justice. Enayat's great merit is to show that, while Davar's reforms do indeed merit serious analysis, they had a prehistory going back to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. The years between the overthrow of the absolute monarchy of the Qajar dynasty in 1906 and the establishment of a royal dictatorship under the new Pahlavi dynasty in 1925 are usually regarded as a transitional period in which Iranian politicians bickered while the country was going to pieces under the double impact of domestic centrifugal forces and foreign intervention. Enayat shows that while this is true, it is not the whole truth; in fact, the groundwork for Pahlavi-era was laid precisely in these difficult years by statesmen...