The Reason of Absence of the Intellectual Flows in the Tobacco Protest

The tobacco Protest can be considered as the first Iranian awakening movement. This movement took place in an age when Islamic Iran suffered from severe weakness and disorderly through tyranny and colonialism. Although the various social groups participated in this movement, the intellectual movement and those who studied in Europe played a negligible role, despite the reform discourse that has always been claimed. Studying the reason of this absence is the purpose of this paper. It seems that, their misunderstanding and inaccurate analysis of the condition of Iran during this period was the main reason of this absence. The misunderstanding of this movement from the three main involved parties of this movement (i.e. the people and their political culture; tyranny and Qajar monarchy, colonialism and its influence) has prevented them to play their role in this movement, which can be considered as "the mother of the contemporary movements of Iran". Actually, they could play an important role in this movement along with the other people, by relying on the people's awakening and taking benefit from the cultural-political capacities instead of humiliating the religious-political culture of people and regarding the beliefs as a superstition, by recognition of the nature of tyrannical government in Iran and holding a real reform view rather than an anti-tyranny view affected by the west, and also by distrusting the colonists and the foreign countries instead of trusting their honesty and being happy with their presence in Iran.