al-majus

I know it’s a strange political moment to be sharing what is essentially a princess story, but it’s the next chapter in a book written some twenty years ago, and seeing as I’m sharing tales from the family hearth, at this particular junction in the story and as part of the historical record, I’m afraid it must be told.

So who were the Qajars? 

The Qajars were one of the old Turkoman tribes of the Qizilbash confederacy who held significant power in Iran since the early Safavid era. Their dynasty was officially founded in 1794 by Aqa Mohammad Khan, and the family stayed in power until 1925, when they were finally deposed and replaced with the Pahlavis. Many of them continued to hold high offices during the Pahlavi era, and one of them, the famed Mohammad Mossadeq, served as Iran’s first democratically elected prime minister in the 1950s. (His premiership ended in 1953 in a joint CIA-MI6 military coup because he made the grave mistake of nationalising the country’s oil, but that is a story for another time.)

As far as I understand it, the Qajars no longer pose any significant threat to anyone (except that they might eat everything at your table if you invite them over), and I see their dynasty as somewhat of a cultural relic at this point. Images of Qajar women in paisley tutus and ballerina slippers, pretzeled into various acrobatic poses, and mustachioed shahs dripping in diamonds and pearls, assuming the same pompous geste d’ aab-duq-khiar are printed on t-shirts and teapots and used in collage art all over the internet. The paintings and photography from that era are popular both within Iran and outside the country, because visually and artistically, the Qajars were quite splendid. Morally, they were deeply corrupt; politically, an absolute disaster.

The material damage the dynasty caused through their mismanagement of the country, including horrifying colonial concessions, cannot be overemphasised, and I’m sure some distant big shot cousin is still thriving somewhere in the rarified atmosphere, hoarding his generational wealth and wiggling his moustache at the rest of us, pomegranate cocktail in hand.

My mother’s family, I am happy to say, does not fall under this category. Her father (below on the left) was a second son, terrible at business, and blissfully bankrupt by the time my mother was of age (I write about this at some length a little later in the book). The perspective that this rapid decline afforded me was something that struck me as rather unique, even at a young age. There were so many different voices in just one family: the deeply religious, conservative side with their chadors that left only one eye out for the world to see; the liberal, secular side with their cherry lipstick and old Hollywood hairdos; the passionate young leftists who were tortured or disappeared for their convictions; and the royalists who are so old now they think the Pahlavi pretender is personally FaceTiming them whenever he speaks on social media; the wealthy, the poor, the ones who continued to thrive under every new political system, and the ones who fell off the old money tree. They’re all there for the picking, and I only hope I can relay some of their stories to you with responsibility and honesty, and perhaps, if I can manage it, the soft, silvery fairytale quality required of a good dastango.

written by Alaleh Mohajerani

first published on Substack on June 9th, 2026