border with Ottoman Mesopotamia, and evicted from Iran. Although Al-Afghani quarrelled with most of his patrons, it is said he "reserved his strongest hatred for the Shah," whom he accused of weakening Islam by granting concessions to Europeans and squandering the money earned thereby. His agitation against the Shah is thought to have been one of the "fountain-heads" of the successful 1891 protest against the granting a tobacco monopoly to a British company, and the later 1905 Constitutional Revolution. After Iraq, he went to England in 1891 and 1892. He was later invited by a member of Abdulhamid II's court in 1892 to Istanbul. He traveled there with diplomatic immunity from the British Embassy, which raised many eyebrows, but nevertheless was granted a house and salary by the Sultan. Abdulhamid II's aim was to use Al-Afghani for Pan Islamism propagation. While in Istanbul in 1895, Al-Afghani was visited by a Persian ex-prisoner, Mirza Reza Kermani (who had been a servant and disciple of Al-Afghani), and together they planned the assassination of the Shah, Naser-al-Din. They both collaborated with Mirza Malkam Khan, former Qajar envoy to London, in his London-based paper Qanun to attack Qajar rule. Kermani later returned to Iran, and assassinated Naser-al-Din at gunpoint on 1 May 1896, while the Shah was visiting the same shrine Al-Afghani had once taken refuge in. Kermani was executed by public hanging in August 1897, but the Iranian government was not successful in extraditing Al-Afghani from Turkey. Al-Afghani himself died of cancer in the same year. Political and religious views Al-Afghani's ideology has been described as a welding of "traditional" religious antipathy toward non-Muslims "to a modern critique of Western imperialism and an appeal for the unity of Islam", urging the adoption of Western sciences and institutions that might strengthen Islam. According to Muhammad Abduh, Al-Afghani’s main struggle in life was to decrease British domination of eastern nations and to minimize its power over Muslims. Al-Afghani's friend, the British poet and Arabophile Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, considered him a liberal, and in some of his writings he equates the parliamentary system to the shura (consultation) system mentioned in the Qur'an. However, his attitude to constitutional government was ambiguous because he doubted that it was viable in the Islamic world. According to his biographer, he envisioned instead "the overthrow of individual rulers who were lax or subservient to foreigners, and their replacement by strong and