The Presbyterian missionary who became a revolutionary in Iran
“Howard Baskerville believed there was no separation of religion and politics,” says Reza Aslan, “that democracy was a divine gift.”
Reza Aslan’s forthcoming book, An American Martyr in Persia, is the first English-language biography of Howard Baskerville, a Presbyterian missionary who died in 1909 after joining the revolutionaries during Iran’s Constitutional Revolution.
What was the political situation in Iran in the years before Howard Baskerville arrived there?
At the dawn of the 20th century, Iran (or Persia, as it was known at the time) was ruled by the Qajar dynasty and had been so for nearly a century. The Qajars essentially unified Iran from a series of disconnected villages and fiefdoms into a true nation—an empire, if you will. They were responsible for enormous advantages in Iranian culture and society, arts and sciences. But by the time of the 20th century, it had become a bloated monarchy with a kleptocratic bureaucracy filled with sycophants and bootlickers and a whole class of professionals whose entire job was to simply feed off the excesses of the monarchy. This created a centralized state, but one that didn’t really have the ability to care for the people in distant provinces like Tabriz.
