The Assassination of Naser al-Din Shah (1896)

Naser al-Din Shah was shot dead on 1 May 1896 at the shrine of Shah Abdol-Azim at Rey, just south of Tehran, by Mirza Reza Kermani, a former pedlar and follower of the pan-Islamic activist Jamal al-Din Afghani. The killing came days before the shah’s jubilee celebrations, ended a reign of nearly 48 years, and was carried out by a man who said he was striking at injustice, not seeking power.

The man who fired

Mirza Reza was born in Kerman around 1847 and moved to Tehran, where he made a modest living trading in second-hand goods. In the 1880s he fell under the influence of Jamal al-Din Afghani, the itinerant preacher who called on Muslims to unite against European power and against rulers who served it. Afghani had been invited to Iran by the shah, fell out with him, and in 1890 took sanctuary at the very shrine of Shah Abdol-Azim, where he received visitors and attacked the government’s concessions to foreigners. In January 1891 he was dragged out of the shrine and expelled from the country.

Mirza Reza was one of the men arrested in the crackdown that followed. He spent several years in prison, at times in chains alongside other suspected radicals, and later described the torture and confiscation of his property that he suffered. When he was released he travelled to Istanbul in 1895, where Afghani was living under Ottoman protection, and returned to Iran early in 1896.

1 May 1896

The shah was preparing to celebrate the fiftieth lunar year of his reign, and on the Friday before the festivities he rode out to pray at Shah Abdol-Azim, the shrine at Rey where many Qajars were buried. Mirza Reza was waiting inside. As the shah entered the sanctuary, Mirza Reza approached with a petition in his hand, a common sight, and fired a revolver hidden beneath it or under his cloak. The bullet struck the shah in the chest. He died within minutes, or soon after being carried to a side room, depending on the account.

Mirza Reza was seized on the spot. Some in the crowd wanted to kill him, but he was protected so that he could be questioned.

A dead king in a carriage

The chief minister, Amin al-Soltan, acted quickly to prevent panic and a struggle for the throne. According to the best-known account, he had the shah’s body seated upright in the royal carriage and driven back to Tehran as if the shah were only wounded, while he himself sat beside it. Only once the capital was secured and troops were in place was the death announced. The crown prince, Mozaffar al-Din Mirza, was governor at Tabriz; he travelled to Tehran and was crowned in June 1896.

The interrogation

Mirza Reza was questioned at length, and the record of his interrogation was later published. In it he said he had acted alone and from personal and public grievance: the injustice of the government, the poverty of the people, the selling of the country to foreigners, and his own treatment in prison. He spoke of Afghani as his teacher and said Afghani had told him that the shah must be removed, but he denied that there was a wider plot.

At first the government suspected the Babis, whose members had tried to kill the shah in 1852. Mirza Reza rejected this, and investigators turned to Afghani’s circle instead.

Punishment and its reach

Mirza Reza was publicly hanged in Tehran on 12 August 1896. The photographer Antoin Sevruguin recorded the execution, and the image circulated widely.

The Iranian government asked the Ottomans to hand over Afghani. They refused, but they did surrender three of his Iranian associates in Istanbul, the writers Mirza Aqa Khan Kermani and Shaykh Ahmad Ruhi and the official Khabir al-Molk. They were executed in Tabriz in July 1896 under the supervision of the new crown prince, Mohammad Ali Mirza. Afghani himself died in Istanbul of cancer in March 1897.

What the killing meant

The assassination came at the end of a decade of growing protest, from the Tobacco Protest of 1891–1892 onwards. Historians agree that it was the act of one man rather than an organised revolution, and that it did not change the system: the dynasty passed smoothly to Mozaffar al-Din and the same chief minister stayed in office. What it did change was the sense that the shah was untouchable. Mirza Reza’s statements, copied and circulated, expressed in plain words the grievances that the constitutionalists would raise a decade later.

Views of Mirza Reza remain divided. In some Iranian nationalist and revolutionary writing he is a martyr who struck at tyranny; others see him as a disturbed man used by Afghani, or simply as a murderer. Abbas Amanat’s biography of the shah treats the killing as the closing scene of a reign that had resisted every attempt to share power.

The tomb and the shrine today

Naser al-Din Shah was buried at Shah Abdol-Azim, the place where he died. His carved marble tombstone, showing the shah lying in full dress, was later moved and is now displayed at the Golestan Palace in Tehran. The shrine itself, in the historic town of Rey, is described in the site’s article on the historic city of Rey. For the reign as a whole, see Naser al-Din Shah; the next reign is told in Mozaffar al-Din Shah.