Ain od-Dowleh again prime minister of Persia

On 19 November 1917 Prince Abdol-Majid Mirza, known by his title Ain od-Dowleh, became prime minister of Persia for the third time. This is how Persian lists of governments date the start of his tenure: 28 Aban 1296 in the Iranian calendar. He replaced Ala al-Saltaneh, whose cabinet, according to the same lists, ended its work two days later, on 30 Aban, that is 21 November. The Encyclopaedia Iranica dates the appointment generally to the month of Safar 1336 in the Islamic calendar, which began in mid-November. The British chronology of the war records the change of government only under 24 November.

Shah Ahmad for the second time entrusted the government to a man from a bygone era. Ain od-Dowleh, a grandson of Fath-Ali Shah of the Qajar dynasty, was 72 years old. In 1904–1906 he had been the all-powerful prime minister of Mozaffar ad-Din Shah, and his harsh rule had pushed the country towards the Constitutional Revolution. In the spring of 1915 he had already once headed a wartime government, which fell after a little over two months. His predecessor, the nearly eighty-year-old diplomat Ala al-Saltaneh, had taken office in June, but because of age and illness achieved little. According to the British chronology he remained foreign minister in the new cabinet.

The new prime minister took over a country in a grave situation. Persia was formally neutral, but since 1914 its western and northern provinces had been a battlefield for Russian, Turkish and British troops. In 1917 a famine was beginning, which historians link to bad harvests, requisitions by foreign armies and the collapse of trade. The news of the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd, in turn, heralded the end of the Russian presence in the country. General Baratov’s corps, which had been fighting in western Persia since 1915, was disintegrating more and more. Some of its soldiers wanted only to go home, and one of its detachments, about a thousand men under Lieutenant-Colonel Lazar Bicherakhov, cut off from the main force and without food, came temporarily under the orders of the British command in Mesopotamia that autumn.

Ain od-Dowleh failed to build a lasting majority. The Encyclopaedia Iranica writes that his government lacked British support, was opposed by the Tehran Democrats, and that deputies from Azerbaijan criticised his ministers. The cabinet lasted less than two months. In January 1918 Mostowfi ol-Mamalek became prime minister again.