Amir Kabir first assisted his father in performing domestic duties in the household of Mirza Bozorg, who saw signs of unusual talent in the boy and had him study with his own children.

He resisted attempts to exclude Mohammareh (present-day Khorramshahr) from Iranian sovereignty and to make Iran pay compensation for its military incursions into the area of Solaymaniyeh.

Some awareness of these reached Amir Kabir in Erzurum and inspired in him at least one aspect of his policy as chief minister: the elimination of clerical influence upon affairs of state.

Naser-al-din’s confidence in Amir Kabir increased, and shortly after leaving Tabriz, he awarded him the rank of amir-e nezam, with full responsibility for the whole Iranian army.

Toward the end of the reign of Mohammad Shah, Hamza Mirza Heshmat-al-doleh was appointed governor of Khorasan, but he found his authority disputed by Hasan Khan Salar, who, with the help of some local chieftains, had rebelled against the central government (1262/1846).

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.

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.

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.

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.

[6] Mirza Aqa Khan Nuri, Amir Kabir's successor, sought to persuade Naser-al-din Shah to abrogate the whole project, but the Darolfonun, soon became a posthumous monument to its founder.

Amir Kabir made a second indirect contribution to the elaboration of Persian as a modern medium with his foundation of the newspaper Vaqayeʿ-ye Ettefaqiyeh, which survived under different titles until the reign of Mozaffar-al-din Shah.

He also wished to educate its readers in the world’s political and scientific developments; among the items reported in the first year of publication were the struggles of Mazzini against the Habsburg Empire, the drawing up of the Suez Canal project, the invention of the balloon, a census of England, and the doings of cannibals in Borneo.

He sought initially to supersede the sharʿ courts in the capital by sitting in judgment himself on cases brought before him; he abandoned the attempt when he realized that the inadequacy of his juridical knowledge had caused him to pronounce incorrect verdicts.

In Tabriz, prolonged efforts were made to preserve bast at various mosques in the city, and recourse was even had to the alleged miracle of a cow that twice escaped the slaughterhouse by running into the shrine known as Boqʿa-ye Saheb-al-amr.

The immediate instigators of the "miracle" were brought to Tehran, and soon after the emam-e jomʿa and shaykh-al-eslam of Tabriz, who had reduced civil government in the city to virtual impotence, were expelled.

Less capable of fulfillment was Amir Kabir's desire to prohibit the taziyeh, the Shia "passion play" enacted in Moharram, as well as the public self-flagellation that took place during the mourning season.

In Erzurum he had learned how European powers intervened in Ottoman affairs on the pretext of "protecting" the Christian minorities, and there were indications that Britain, Russia, and France hoped for similar benefits from the Assyrians and Armenians of Iran.

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.

[2] The challenging and heterodox nature of the Báb's claims provoked opposition on the part of the Shiʿite establishment, which then led the civil authorities of Qajar Iran to intervene on the side of the clerics.

One famous example of that is when Amir Kabir personally ordered the public beheading of seven prominent Babis of high social rank, (three merchants, two clerics, a leading dervish and a government official) in February 1850 .

[14][15][16] Consequently he was executed by a firing squad in public in Tabriz, the first exection of its kind in Iran, to crush the Babi movement and to display the restored power of the Qajar government under the new minister, Amir Kabir.

[18] By denying the Babis a chance to survive as a viable alternative, the Qajar state reaffirmed the unrivaled status of the clergy as the sole arbiter of religious norms.

His execution was ordered six weeks later after the Queen Mother and his executioner, Ali Khan Farash-bashi, had convinced the King that Amir Kabir would soon be granted protection by the Russians – possibly allowing him to make an attempt to regain control of the government by force.

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 during the Qajar era and the progenitor of various political and social changes that came about half a century later: