Resignation of Mostowfi ol-Mamalek

On 24 December 1915 the prime minister of Persia, Mostowfi ol-Mamalek, resigned. He had headed the government since August, when he took office for the third time, and for four months had tried to keep the country out of the war, manoeuvring between the Entente and Germany. Persian lists of governments end his term on 3 Dey 1294 in the Iranian calendar, that is precisely 24 December. Some works give the following day, 25 December, because that is how the appointment of his successor is sometimes dated. At the moment of his resignation the policy he had pursued already lay in ruins.

A government without a parliament

The events of November proved decisive. When General Nikolai Baratov’s troops came up to Qazvin and a rumour spread in Tehran that the Russians would enter the capital, Mostowfi advised the deputies and the Shah to leave the city. Several dozen deputies, mainly Democrats, and with them journalists and part of the gendarmerie, left for Qom. The Persians called this exodus the mohajerat, or “emigration”. On 15 November the envoys of the Central Powers followed them, but Ahmad Shah, at the urging of the representatives of Russia and Britain, stayed in the capital.

The prime minister was then caught in a trap. He chose to remain with the Shah, but his natural base, the nationalists and Democrats, was in Qom. Mostowfi tried to persuade the deputies to return, and when this failed, the Majlis, the Persian parliament, ceased to sit for lack of a quorum. The third parliament effectively ended without being formally closed, and the next Majlis met only in 1921. In Qom the emigrants set up a Committee of National Defence and, with German and Turkish help, raised their own forces. The government in Tehran thus lost control of a large part of the country.

Confidence lost on both sides

Russia and Britain did not trust the prime minister, because they knew of his earlier secret negotiations with Germany. Mostowfi had then proposed that Persia would enter the war on the side of the Central Powers if Germany guaranteed its independence, granted a loan and sent officers. Berlin did not accept these terms, but in the eyes of the Entente envoys the prime minister remained suspect. The British minister, Charles Marling, had long backed the pro-British Prince Abdol-Hossein Mirza Farmanfarma, minister of the interior in Mostowfi’s cabinet, who in November had helped to keep the Shah in the capital.

In December matters were already being decided by Russian bayonets. Baratov’s units routed Persian gendarmes and volunteers at the Sultan Bulagh pass and took Hamadan on 14 December, and on 20 December entered Qom without a fight. The emigrants withdrew further south and west, to Kashan and towards Kermanshah. The policy of neutrality in which Mostowfi had sought a way out lost its footing: the Persian opponents of the Entente were in exile, and the capital was within reach of Russian troops. The prime minister, who wanted to be neither a Russian nor a German tool, stepped down. According to the Encyclopaedia Iranica, his successor, largely under British pressure, was none other than Farmanfarma.

His resignation did not end Mostowfi’s career. He was regarded as one of the most honest and popular politicians in the country and headed the government three more times: in 1917, in 1923 and in 1926–1927. He died in 1932.