Undergraduate

clerics and religious cohorts of society being confined
to Mashhad. Indeed, through Majd’s depiction one
is offered many examples of primary material, and
those offered concerning the crisis in 1935 are helpful
to the reader. Furthermore, the comparison between
Abrahamian and Majd demonstrates how different
sources and their subsequent use can create different
narratives.
Both historians included a plethora of
sources in each of their monographs, many of which
overlapped. However, Majd relied overtly on American
documentation while Abrahamian preeminently relied
on British commentary. Each historian referenced
pertinent Iranian sources as well. However, despite
similar reference material Majd and Abrahamian, as
well as Keddie and Ghani, have constructed different
legacies of Reza Shah by the manner in which each
author portrayed their evidence. For example,
Abrahamian offered the following quote from a British
diplomat on Mashhad’s consequences: “The Shah, in
destroying the powers of the Mullahs, has forgotten
Napoleon’s adage that the chief purpose of religion
is to prevent the poor from murdering the rich”
(Abrahamian 94). Here a British comment reprimands
the actions of Reza Shah based on the premise that
Shah made a poor political decision as opposed to a
decision which resulted in the death of at least 100 of
his citizens. Thus while Abrahamian affords evidence
which demonstrated criticism of the Shah, it is within
the framework of a growing-pain of a modern leader,
a mistake that can occur. Note the connotation of
“murdering the rich,” which did not occur in the
massacre, yet is considered the real concern for letting
the massacre and opposition ferment. However, an
entirely different perspective is created by Majd’s
evidence via Hornibrook who claimed:
“five hundred regulars were rushed from a
nearby town and it was this body of troops that
later turned the machine guns on the Shrine
and finally dispersed the mob…it resulted in
frightful loss of life…police and soldiers were
numbered among the killed…but for the most
part they were civilians.” (Majd 216, 217)
This portrayal focused on the loss of the life which
was the outcome of machine gun fire on the crowd.
By refraining from a lofty political comparison
Hornibrook’s testimony centered the discussion to the
actual event which is consistent with Majd’s view that
Reza Shah’s reign was mired by devious events. The
construction of divergent narratives, as the preceding
passages demonstrate, is based on the selection and
use of evidence even if scholars share many elements
in their bibliographies and notations.
In conclusion, a comparative analysis of
accounts concerned with two major events of Reza
Shah’s rule demonstrated the nature of disparate
perspectives taken by four historians. Ervand
Abrahamian and Nikki Keddie retained greater
objectivity in their accounts, but their limited
discussion of these events relative to discussions of
Reza Shah’s modernization efforts obscures the Shah’s
complete legacy. Cyrus Ghani had little in the way
of critical evidence of the Shah, and his depiction of
both the 1933-34 concession and the 1935 massacre
leave the reader wanting. Alternatively, Muhammad
Gholi Majd took a polemically anti-Shah stance in
his narrative, exhausting American sources which
challenge the ambivalence of British sources. The
dissemination of Iranian historiography faces several
obstacles. First, Iran’s history of censorship has resulted
in several major purges of critical literature. Second,
Iran’s narrative in the twentieth century involved
numerous vested interests, royal, domestic and foreign,
how these entities portrayed their analysis of realtime
events is layered with their explicit and implicit
agendas and thus can impede comprehensive data.
Third, as Tavakoli-Targhi alluded to, the competition
and combination of the first two obstacles could lead to
a bordered or rigid construction of history (Tavakoli-
Targhi 142), potentially ignoring forces and agents
which would assist in a fluid and comprehensive view
of Iranian history.
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