Amir Kabir was born in 1807 into a lowly household at Hazaveh in the Farahan district, now situated in Markazi Province of Iran. His father, Karbalaʾi Mohammad Qorban, entered the service of Mirza Abu'l-Qasim Farahani Qa'im Maqam of Farahan as cook, and when Mirza Bozorg was appointed chief minister to ʿAbbas Mirza, the crown prince, in Tabriz, Karbalaʾi Qorban accompanied him there, taking his son with him.
Karbalayi Mohammad Qorban, the father of Taqi, was a cook and later a steward in the household of Qa'em Maqam, who later became the chief minister of Mohammad Shah. It is said that when the tutor came to teach the children of Qa'em Maqam, the boy Taqi, in his eagerness to learn, would try to listen from behind the closed door of the private classroom. When Qa'em Maqam heard of this, he allowed the boy to become a regular member of the class. Later Taqi was employed as one of the secretaries, and because of his genius and capacity for work he was given positions of responsibility. He became known as Mirza (secretary) Taqi Khan Farahani (denoting his birthplace).
When the head of a Russian mission to Iran was murdered in 1829, the distraught Fath Ali Shah, fearing war, sent his grandson Khosro Mirza to St. Petersburg. Mirza Taqi Khan went as the prince's secretary and had an opportunity to observe the life and institutions of Russia. Ten years later he accompanied young Naser al-Din, the crown prince, to Russia. At this time Mirza Taqi Khan was the chief secretary and tutor of the prince, with the title of Amir-e Nezam (commander of the army). He impressed the Czar with his knowledge of Russian and arranged to see schools, factories, hospitals, and other establishments in the country.
In 1842 Taqi Khan headed the Persian delegation to the Erzerum conference for the settlement of the Irano-Turkish border dispute. His performance there was so outstanding that the British representative, Robert Curzon, wrote that Mirza Taqi Khan was "beyond all comparison the most interesting person among the commissioners of Turkey, Persia, Russia, and Great Britain who were there assembled at Erzerum. " This was the period of Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire, and the significance of these reforms did not escape the discerning eyes of the young commander.
In 1848, when Naser al-Din became shah of Iran, he chose Mirza Taqi Khan Amir-e Nezam as his chief minister, with the appropriate title of Atabak-e A'zam. Mirza Taqi Khan, however, preferred to use his old and more humble title. The people gradually changed the title to Amir-e Kabir (great commander). He was now in a position to implement the reforms which he must have been planning in his mind for a long time.
This indefatigable worker began at once, and no aspect of the life of the country escaped his scrutiny. Amir-e Kabir built factories, facilitated commerce, established the first modern institution of learning, employed teachers and technicians from Europe, inaugurated a modern postal system, set up a translation bureau and a modern press, founded the first newspaper, reorganized the judicial system, did away with the sale of office, and prevented the clergy from interfering with the affairs of government.
These and many other activities aroused the anger of courtiers, landlords, and clergy, whose sources of income and power were threatened by the reforms. His greatest enemy was his own mother-in-law, the queen mother. In 1851 the Shah very reluctantly dismissed him and sent him to Kashan. A few months later the queen mother tricked her son into signing Amir-e Kabir's death warrant and hurried executioners to Kashan. They found him in the bathhouse and killed him by opening his veins.
Among his Iranian contemporaries Amir Kabir received praise from several poets of the age, notably Sorush and Qaʾani, but his services to Iran remained generally unappreciated in the Qajar period. Modern Iranian historiography has done him more justice, depicting him as one of the few capable and honest statesmen to emerge in the Qajar period and the progenitor of various political and social changes that came about half a century later. Amir Kabir s widely considered to be "Iran's first reformer", a modernizer who was "unjustly struck down" as he attempted to bring "gradual reform" to Iran.
Amir Kabir regarded the followers of Bábism, the predecessor of the Bahá'í Faith, as a threat and repressed them. He suppressed the Babi upheavals of 1848-51 and personally ordered the execution of the Seven Martyrs of Tehran and the execution of The Báb, the movement's founder. 'Abdu'l-Bahá referred to Amir Kabir as the greatest of the religion's oppressors.
With order reestablished in the provinces, Amir Kabir turned to a wide variety of administrative, cultural, and economic reforms that were the major achievement of his brief ministry. His most immediate success was the vaccination of Iranians against smallpox, saving the lives of many thousands if not millions. Faced with an empty treasury on his arrival in Tehran, he first set about balancing the state budget by attempting to increase the sources of revenue and to decrease state expenditure. To aid him in the task, he set up a budgetary committee headed by Mirza Yusof Mostofi-al-mamalek that estimated the deficiency in the budget at one million Iranian toman. Amir Kabir thereupon decided to reduce drastically the salaries of the civil service, often by half, and to eliminate a large number of stipends paid to pensioners who did little or no governmental work. This measure increased his unpopularity with many influential figures and thus contributed to his ultimate disgrace and death.
At the same time he strove to collect overdue taxes from provincial governors and tribal chieftains by dispatching assessors and collectors to every province of the country. The collection of customs duties, previously farmed out to individuals, was now made the direct responsibility of the central government, and the Caspian fisheries, an important source of revenue, were recovered from a Russian monopoly and contracted out to Iranians.
The administration of the royal lands (khalesajat) came under review, and the income derived from them was more closely supervised than before. Yield and productivity, not area, were established as the basis of tax assessment for other lands, and previously dead lands were brought under cultivation. These various measures for the encouragement of agriculture and industry also benefited the treasury by raising the level of national prosperity and hence taxability.
Of particular interest is the care shown by Amir Kabir for the economic development of Khuzestan (then known as ʿArabestan), identified by him as an area of strategic importance, given its location at the head of the Persian Gulf, and also of potential prosperity. He introduced the planting of sugarcane to the province, built the Naseri dam on the river Karkheh and a bridge at Shushtar, and laid plans for the development of Mohammara. He also took steps to promote the planting of American cotton near Tehran and Urmia.
The foreign policy of Amir Kabir was as innovative as his internal policies. He has been credited with pioneering the policy of "negative equilibrium, " (giving concessions to neither Britain nor Russia) that was to later prove influential in Iranian foreign affairs. He thus abrogated the agreement whereby the Russians were to operate a trade center and hospital in Astarabad, and attempted to put an end to the Russian occupation of Ashuradeh, an island in the southeastern corner of the Caspian Sea, as well as the anchorage rights enjoyed by Russian ships in the lagoon of Anzali.
In the south of Iran he made similar efforts to restrict British influence in the Persian Gulf, and denied Britain the right to stop Iranian ships in the Gulf on the pretext of looking for slaves. It is not surprising that he frequently clashed with Dolgorukiy and Sheil, the representatives of Russia and Britain in Tehran. In order to counteract British and Russian influence, he sought to establish relations with powers without direct interests in Iran, notably Austria and the United States. It may finally be noted that he set up a counter-espionage organization that had agents in the Russian and British embassies.
