A movement between 1905 and 1911 that forced Iran's Qajar shah to grant a written constitution and an elected parliament, the Majles, drawing together merchants, reformist clergy, and Western-influenced intellectuals. It was among the first such constitutional movements in the Middle East and Asia. Royal counter-attack, foreign intervention, and a Russian ultimatum crushed the parliament by 1911, but it left a durable language of law and representation, and a still-contested debate about the role of clergy in Iranian politics that reached forward to 1979.
In the summer of 1906, thousands of merchants, shopkeepers, and clerics walked into the gardens of the British legation outside Tehran and refused to leave. This was a bast, an old Iranian practice of taking sanctuary, but the demand was new. They wanted a written law to bind the shah, and an elected house to make it. Within months they had both. Iran had joined the small early wave of constitutional states in Asia and the Middle East. Within five years a king's cannon, a foreign army, and a great-power ultimatum had broken the parliament, yet the idea it planted never fully died.