I wish you life and long prosperity,
May God protect you from adversity!
May heaven prosper all you say and do,
May evil glances never injure you.
Whatever purposes you hope to gain
May all your efforts never bring you pain,
May wisdom be your guide, may fortune bless
Iran with prosperous days and happiness.
—THE PERSIAN BOOK OF KINGS
I found myself plunged into a sea of trouble.
—THE SHAH
Fifty-eight years earlier, on the cool autumn afternoon of October 26, 1919, a young woman named Nimtaj went into labor in her family home in Tehran. Her husband, Reza Khan, a ranking brigadier in the Shah of Iran’s elite Cossack regiment, stood smoking in an outside courtyard, anxiously awaiting the outcome. Reza’s first wife, Tajmah, had died in childbirth delivering a girl. For his second marriage, he wed the sturdy Nimtaj, the daughter of his commanding officer. The couple’s first child, a daughter, Shams, was born healthy in 1917, but more than anything, Reza longed for a son. The wait ended when a soldier ran out of the house with the joyous news: “It’s a boy!” The father started inside when the midwife met him at the door. “Wait,” she told him. “There is another child.” Five hours later a twin girl was safely delivered. A clergyman came to the house and intoned a prayer in the ears of each child. Reza Khan held his son up and delivered his own benediction: “O God, I place my son in your care. Keep him in the shelter of your protection.”
Destiny had two very different outcomes in store for the twins. “To say that I was unwanted might be harsh, but not altogether from the truth,” remembered Princess Ashraf Pahlavi. “To be born on the same day as Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, future Crown Prince and then Shah of Iran, I would always feel I could lay no claim to my parents’ special affection.” For the boy, crown and kingdom awaited. The tide of history would propel the humble soldier’s son from a mud brick house to the palace of the shahs, launching him from obscurity to that rare pantheon of statesmen whose decisions change the destinies of nations and alter the course of history.
* * *
PERSIA, HIS FUTURE inheritance, Land of the Lion and the Sun, formed a splendid land bridge between continents, a great salted corridor hemmed in by the Caspian Sea and the Alborz Mountains to the north, stretching almost a thousand miles south to the Zargos Mountains and the warm waters of the Persian Gulf. The Aryan peoples of Central Asia first appeared on the Iranian plateau more than six thousand years ago and lent their name to it. From land as dry as dust and worn as parchment paper, in 550 BC Cyrus II, scion of a dynastic union between two royal houses, the Medes and the Persians, seized power and established the Achaemenid Dynasty. After first securing the high plateau that stretched south from the shores of the Persian Gulf and north to the Caspian Sea, Cyrus ventured forth to conquer Asia Minor, Babylon, Assyria, modern-day Egypt, and Turkey, as well as the seaports of the eastern Mediterranean. Under Cyrus’s rule, said the renowned historian Arnold Toynbee, the great Persian Empire stood alone as the world’s “first sole superpower.” “The establishment of the largest empire in antiquity, one of the most benevolent of any in world history, if any empire is good, is associated with the Persians,” wrote historian Touraj Daryaee. “Its founder, Cyrus the Great, changed the map of the world and brought the Afro-Asiatic world together for the first time in history.”
The conquest of Babylon in 539 BC inspired Cyrus to inscribe in clay a personal pledge to accord “all men the freedom to worship their own gods and ordered that no one had the right to bother them. I ordered that no house be destroyed, that no inhabitant be dispossessed.… I accorded peace and quiet to all men.” Cyrus is remembered today as an empire builder but also as the liberator who ruled with social justice and the rights of the individual in mind. His successor Darius the Great pushed the empire west into Libya, south into the Arabian peninsula, and east as far as the Indus River. Outside Shiraz he built a dazzling new capital at Pasargade, “the camp of the Persians.” The Achaemenid ascendancy collapsed in 330 BC, when Alexander the Great’s legions swept through and the young warrior declared himself King of Persia. His death seven years later, accompanied by the flight of the Macedonians, was followed by the rise of the Parthian Kingdom, which endured for five centuries, and then by the Sasanians, whose mighty empire conquered the Holy Lands of the Levant, including Jerusalem. Though they defended their dominions from frequent Roman incursions, Sasanian defenses were fatally breached in AD 651 by Arab horsemen bearing the green flag of Islam. Ten other dynasties followed until the advent of the “storm from the east,” the brutal Mongol invasion and occupation of Persia in the early years of the thirteenth century, which in turn gave way to Safavid, Zand, Afshar, and finally Qajar (1789–1925) dynastic rule.
The Persians had submitted to their Muslim overlords, and exchanged their Zoroastrian faith for Islam, but Persian nationalists were affronted by the thought of rule at the hands of the Arabs, whom they regarded as their racial and cultural inferiors. Persian contempt revealed itself when Reza Khan was elected King of Iran in 1925 and consciously styled himself with the dynastic name “Pahlavi” to honor the written script favored by the Sasanians. His son Mohammad Reza drew similar inspiration from the glories of Persia’s pre-Islamic heritage by refusing to even discuss the centuries of Arab invasion and occupation. The mere thought of rule by the Arabs repulsed him, as he made clear during an interview with the Iranian journalist Amir Taheri in the midseventies. The Shah explained that “as a child he had always refused to read those pages in his history textbook that related to Persia’s defeat at the hands of Arab armies in the seventh century,” and he regarded the invasion of Sasanian Persia as the greatest catastrophe in history. “I simply could not bear the humiliation. I tore those pages out of the book and threw them away. There is no need for us to focus on the negative aspects of our existence.”
The Pahlavi Dynasty emerged from the convulsive unrest that gripped Persia at the turn of the twentieth century. Persians frustrated with poverty and feudalism protested the ruling Qajar Dynasty, whose kings had allowed European powers to seize control of the economy and nibble chunks of territory. Corruption, misrule, and a struggling economy provided the bases for insurrection. Matters came to a head in 1905, when a coalition of scholars, clergy, and merchants united and rose in revolt. After months of unrest, on August 5, 1906, Mozaffar al-Din Shah agreed to surrender his autocratic privileges and accept a constitution that restricted royal prerogatives, established an elected parliament on the basis of limited suffrage, and a bill of rights to enshrine basic freedoms. The Constitutional Revolution proved a turning point in Iranian history and also marked a profound change in the status of the country’s religious establishment. The majority of the Muslim clergy known as the ulama supported the liberal reformers and were rewarded with the right to inspect parliamentary legislation to make sure it conformed to Sharia, or Islamic law. However, a minority of hard-line religious theocrats rejected the Constitution as a heresy imported from the West. Though their numbers were small, these clerics never reconciled themselves to the notion of separation between church and state.
Far from bringing stability and security, the Constitutional Revolution opened the floodgates to two decades of unrest that brought Persia to the brink of collapse and dismemberment. In 1907 royalists and constitutionalists fought a civil war that drew in Great Britain and Russia, and the two dominant imperial powers in Southwest and Central Asia established cordons of influence in the north and south of the Persian kingdom, with London aggressively asserting its right to monopolize the exploration and production of newly discovered petroleum reserves in its sphere of influence. Over the next half century, successive British governments controlled Persian oil production through their majority shareholding in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, ensuring that the old kingdom became a playground for great-power intrigue. During the 1914–1918 Great War Persia was invaded, fought over, and occupied by the armies of four foreign powers, who turned vast swaths of the countryside into a wasteland of contagious disease, famine, and tribal insurrection. By the time Brigadier General Reza Khan, the illiterate, courageous, and forceful commander of the elite Cossack Hamadan regiment, marched on the capital in February 1921 and overwhelmed the army garrison, Persians offered no real resistance and even welcomed the promise of a firm hand. Reza Khan saw his first task as reforming the army and pacifying the provinces. The civilian government he installed in Tehran set about with mixed success modernizing Persian government and society with European ideas and technology. Ahmad Shah was allowed to keep his throne, though few doubted that the days of the Qajar Dynasty were numbered.
Change came too slowly for Reza Khan’s liking, and in 1923 he made himself prime minister, though he aspired to become the first president of a Persian republic. In neighboring Turkey his idol Kemal Ataturk had seized power, declared a secular republic, and smashed the power of his country’s religious establishment. Reza Khan faced stiffer resistance in Persia, a country with more than two thousand years of monarchical heritage. The ulama still regarded the Shah as Custodian of the Shia faith and associated republics with the anticlericalism of Turkey and also France. Where they did find common cause with republicans was on the need to force the Qajars from power. In 1925 the ulama supported a parliamentary vote to replace the Qajar dynasty with a new royal house headed by Reza Khan, and the following spring the newly styled Reza Shah Pahlavi held his coronation and formally ascended the Peacock Throne. The new king surprised and dismayed the ulama when he made it clear that he meant to rule as well as reign and that to modernize Iran he intended to challenge the powers of the religious establishment. For now at least, the democratic spirit of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution remained a dream deferred and a promise unfulfilled.
* * *
FROM THE TIME Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was proclaimed Crown Prince of Persia in an elaborate coronation ceremony in April 1926, the boy who would be king was closely scrutinized for his potential as a future monarch. The early signs were not promising. With his jet black hair, sad eyes, and small physique, the new heir struck courtiers as a rather doleful little boy and serious beyond his years. Sickly and prone to stomach upsets and illness, Mohammad Reza “was gentle, reserved, and almost painfully shy, while I was volatile, quick-tempered, and sometimes rebellious,” recalled his sister Ashraf. “He was somewhat frail and vulnerable to childhood disease, while I was robust and healthy, in spite of my small frame.” Their father joked that Ashraf “must have gotten all the good health.” Tough and scrappy, Ashraf saw the world as it really was, as a series of struggles and hardships to be overcome, whereas her shy twin was a dreamer and idealist who saw things as he wished them to be.
Their father, Reza Shah, was a famously taciturn, dominant personality with an explosive temper to match. His son remembered him as “a straightforward kind of man [who] didn’t talk much, and sometimes could be very blunt, you know.” That was polite understatement. Reza Shah tore the epaulettes off the uniforms of senior army officers and did not hesitate to strike officials in front of their subordinates. In her memoir, Princess Ashraf recalled that her father’s “physical presence to us as children was so intimidating, the sound of his voice so terrifying, that even years later as a grown woman I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of him.” Her twin’s second wife, Soraya Esfandiary, described the spell the old man cast over his adult children from the grave. “Despite all the independence which their status as princesses and sisters of the king conferred upon them, [Ashraf and Shams] remained profoundly marked by their childhoods,” she wrote. “Over them, as over Mohammad Reza and his brother Ali Reza, brooded the shadow of their father, that colonel of the cossacks who had risen from the ranks, uneducated and brutal, and could with a mere look terrorize his soldiers and those closest to him. Reza Shah, the man who still made them feel afraid.”
Later in life, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi protested that his father had in fact showered him with affection. “I was never afraid of my father,” he once told a family friend. “There was nothing that I asked him for that he said no to.” Those who saw them together attested to the fatherly rapport with his heir. Mohammad Reza was “his father’s love—the light of his eye, as the Persian saying goes,” confirmed the Shah’s biographer. Before bedtime, the boy would climb on his father’s back and ride him like a horse, tapping him with a stick to go faster. Only when a servant knocked at the door would they leap to their feet and resume the formalities. “Oh! yes,” the Shah agreed. “You may hesitate to believe me, but he was kind and tenderhearted; his sternness and coldness would melt into love and affection as soon as he was with the family, or with me, his crown prince.” Father and son even devised a secret code to communicate in front of the other children and courtiers. Reza Shah instructed his other children to address their brother as “Your Highness,” making it clear that from now on he was different from them in every way. The other children were jealous of their intimacies.
The Shah once remarked that his mother, Nimtaj, styled Taj ol-Moluk or “Crown of Kings,” was “a very dictatorial woman.” Taj ol-Moluk lavished attention on her second son, Ali Reza, whom she believed had a more forceful character than his older brother. “In his early days as Shah, Mohammad Reza was not esteemed by his own family,” read a U.S. intelligence report from the seventies. “The Queen Mother appeared to hold her eldest son in contempt. She was frequently reported to be intriguing against him and promoting Ali as a more worthy successor, and on one occasion she remarked it was a pity Ashraf was not the Shah.” She bullied and schemed against her daughters-in-law, too. Soraya Esfandiary, who bore the brunt of Taj ol-Moluk’s machinations, once described her as a “woman of the harem” who “liked to intrigue, to receive political personalities, the wives of officers, courtiers. She questioned them, made them talk, gave her opinion on everything.”
The King and Queen intimidated each other. Taj ol-Moluk freely admitted to drinking brandy to get through her wedding night, and her husband was known to flee at the sight of her entering a room. Reza Shah was a brave man indeed when he decided to exercise his marital rights to the full letter of religious law, which allowed Muslim men to take up to four living wives. Shortly after his second son, Ali Reza, was born in 1922, Reza Shah married Turan, who swiftly delivered him a third son, Gholam Reza. After divorcing Turan, in 1924 the King wed the much younger Esmat, who became his favorite wife and went on to provide him with five children of her own. Taj ol-Moluk bitterly fought these arrangements and made life difficult for her rivals. “Although polygamy was commonly practiced, and although women were expected to accept this condition, my mother was very angry,” recalled Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, who like her diminutive mother had a very quick temper. “For a long time she refused to see my father. In the face of this unheard challenge to his authority, the Shah would literally hide when he saw my mother coming.” Husband and wife eventually agreed to live separate lives, though Taj ol-Moluk retained the title of Queen-Empress and made sure that her two sons remained the sole legitimate heirs to the throne.
Reza Shah worried that his oldest son, doted on by the women in his family, would grow up a weakling. “No, I was not considered strong at all,” the Shah later admitted, “but father steeled me by forcing me to become a keen sportsman.” When he was six years old the little prince was removed from his mother’s care, placed in his own household under strict supervision, and enrolled in a special military school so he could receive a “manly education.” He was separately tended by Madame Arfa, a French governess. The Shah’s admiration for Madame Arfa suggested that she was the only adult figure in his early life to provide him with anything approaching unconditional affection and emotional warmth. She enthralled her young charge with romantic tales of the lives of the great emperors and empresses and kings and queens of Europe, men and women such as France’s Napoleon and Russia’s Catherine the Great, who wielded absolute power to improve the lives of their people. Unbeknownst to Reza Shah, Madame Arfa introduced his young son to “the virtues of democracy springing from the ideas of the French Revolution.” She taught the Crown Prince that “to become truly civilized, Iranians needed to change themselves culturally; they needed a French Revolution of sorts led by a shah steeped in things modern.”
In his memoir, the Shah paid fulsome tribute to Madame Arfa. “To her I owe the advantage of being able to speak and read French as if it were my own language; and beyond this, she opened my mind to the spirit of Western culture.” It was Madame Arfa who planted in the impressionable young boy’s mind the intoxicating notion that a king could rule as well as reign and be a revolutionary as well as a democrat.
* * *
IN THE 1920S the land he was destined to rule nudged the southern border of the newly established Soviet Union for more than a thousand miles, skirting the shoreline of the Caspian Sea, plentiful in sturgeon, whose fine caviar graced tables around the world. The spongy storm clouds that sailed down from southern Russia were squeezed dry trying to clear the mountainous rock face of the Alborz Mountains range, ensuring that Persia’s northern coast remained perpetually drenched while the kingdom’s interior was almost always parched. “Water is the chief concern of the Persian peasant,” an American traveler wrote in the early twentieth century. “Wherever he can find the flow of a mountain stream or build a crude canal from a well or spring, a small portion of the desert becomes a paradise and he prospers. Certain of these regions are said to be among the most fertile in the world, producing in abundance not only the finest of wheat and barley, but grapes, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, figs and melons which are unsurpassed among the fruits of the Temperate Zone.”
The sweeping view from the top of the Alborz ridge was of a “magnificent plateau which seems to stretch to eternity,” a visitor to Persia once said. Eighteen thousand feet below, clinging to its mountainous hemline, Tehran basked in the sun like a smug cat whose muddy brick tail extended to the edge of the great salt desert. To the east, beyond Yazd with its lyrical skyline of wind chimneys, travelers entered “the great lifeless desert, shaped like a huge hour-glass, 900 miles in length, from the foothills of the Alborz range, in the north, almost to the Indian Ocean, in the south, and ranging in width from 300 to 100 miles.” The sprawling Dasht-e Kavir desert held tight its mysteries and miracles. Mighty dust storms roared through like locomotives. Locals in Sistan Province dreaded the annual Wind of One-Hundred-Twenty Days, when broiling gales lashed the region from June to September, and locals still spoke of the time a shepherd and his flock of sheep were dug out alive after a week buried under a sand drift. “Some sections in their utter bleakness resembled landscapes on the moon,” was how one American described Dasht-e Kavir in 1950. “At wide intervals walled adobe villages, with green fields and slender poplar trees, or an upthrust of jagged, rocky hills broke the monotony.… A haze wrapped the horizon in mystery. Eastward, seemingly limitless, stretched the great salt desert, shimmering in the heat. To the west, gaunt rock hills, pastel-shaped, made a grotesque skyline. A caravan of camels plodded by carrion birds glided above a burro’s carcass.”
The main centers of urban life hovered at the desert edge, each a reflection of Persia’s dazzling cultural and ethnic diversity. The capital, Tehran, had always been a rough town. Laid waste by the Afghans in 1723, Tehran was a mere cluster of three thousand mud and brick hovels when the Qajar Dynasty appointed it the new Imperial seat. This made strategic sense—the village occupied the gateway to the heights of the Alborz, which overlooked the plateau—but Tehran lacked the elegant artistry and sophistication of the former capital, Isfahan, and most visitors regarded the locals as uncouth and too focused on turning a profit. About seventy-five miles to Tehran’s south sat Qom, where the ayatollahs, the country’s religious leaders, resided and where important religious schools known as the hawza were located. The second major center of clerical power was Mashad, to the northeast, nestled against the border with Afghanistan. Each year pilgrims trekked to Mashad to pay their respects at the stupendous Holy Shrine of Imam Reza, resting place of the Prophet Mohammad’s eighth disciple. Isfahan, always elegant, dominated the central provinces, and tourists from around the world admired the Shah Abbas Mosque, one of the finest examples of Islamic architecture in the world, which opened out onto the splendid Naghsh-e Jahan Square, where Persian monarchs watched polo matches from a high pavilion, and also the picturesque “Bridge of Thirty-Three Arches,” which spanned the Zayande River. Dominating the southwest was the city of Shiraz, “an oasis situated on a high plateau ringed by barren hills. It is a city of gardens and has never been known as a center of trade and industry. Its fame is due to its poets, its gardens, its wine, and its almost mythical position in the Iranian mind.” Persia’s greatest poets, Hafez and Saadi, wrote of the Shirazi love of songbirds, sweet wine, and scent of rose.
The southern provinces were Iran’s economic lifeline. In the breadbasket province of Khuzestan, which straddled the Iraqi border, the port city of Abadan boasted the world’s largest oil refinery. Running along the southern coastline were the Zagros Mountains, rocky sentinels overlooking the Persian Gulf, where mighty tankers crept through the Strait of Hormuz, only twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest tip, on their way to market. In the sixties the Shah poured more than $1 billion into Persian Gulf oil facilities and at a stroke trebled Iran’s oil production and established the foundations for the country’s spectacular economic takeoff. The Persian Gulf was Iran’s “jugular vein,” and he brushed aside foreign critics who accused him of harboring territorial ambitions. When an American journalist asked the Shah whether “Iran’s entry into the Persian Gulf would affect the country’s relations with the Arabs and Israelis,” he offered a stiff retort: “We are in the Persian Gulf. What we are demanding is what has always belonged to our country throughout history.”
The Shah’s people embodied the contradictions of life along the highway of history. They retained a distinct identity that set them apart from their neighbors and reflected their unique passage through space and time. Life on the high plateau was a constant game of survival, with ever-changing rules. Persians had endured centuries of foreign occupation by absorbing the ways of their overlords to the point where the Greeks, Arabs, and Mongols mirrored them back in return. They were Persians first but also Arabs, Baluchis, Armenians, Kurds, and Turks. More than 90 percent were Muslim, but they shared the land with Jewish, Christian, Baha’i, and Zoroastrian minorities. Renowned for their hospitality, artistry, and individualism, the Persians were also inveterate grumblers, too easily slighted and with a capacity to exaggerate and embellish. For a people who prided themselves on their knowledge of science, philosophy, and literature, Persians saw their world as one shaped by elaborate conspiracies that allowed them to shift the blame for their own mistakes and misfortunes onto the shoulders of others. These ultimate survivors were adept at showing different faces to outsiders but also to their own rulers, whom they had a habit of raising up and turning out with bewildering speed—an old saying had it that the people did not often turn, but when they did, it was usually fatal. Persians thrived in adversity only to slacken in good times, so that even when their borders stoved in under relentless pressure from the Russians, Turks, and British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Persian art, culture, and literature flourished under the Safavid and Qajar Dynasties.
Western visitors regarded the Persians as a brilliant and inscrutable people. The American journalist Frances Fitzgerald traveled to Iran in 1974 and wrote a penetrating account of life under the second Pahlavi king. “Iran is a country of walls and mirrors,” she wrote. “Walls surround the villages as they surround every house in Tehran, dividing the public and private lives, creating distances where they do not exist. Behind walls that are mud-brown and anonymous, the rich conceal their fountains and gardens from the desert … the great families of Iran have covered the insides of their houses with murals and faceted mirrors so that each room is a visual maze of light and reflections of the real and painted figures. Turn the thought around and the mirrors are a complete defense system, turning away the truth. In Iran, nothing is exactly what it seems. A foreigner finds uncertainty behind arrogance, sadness behind euphoria. But ambiguity may be the only principle of nature in Iran.”
* * *
AS A YOUNG boy, and unlike his father, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza never questioned the central tenets of his faith. Palace housemaids kept the young prince and his brothers and sisters entertained by spinning embellished tales about the tragic lives of the Prophet Mohammad’s disciples, the imams. These stories of miracles and revelations took on a deeply personal meaning when the little prince almost perished of typhoid at age six. While the boy drifted into and out of consciousness, his mother walked back and forth across the room, holding a Quran over his head and praying for his recovery. When he came around he startled his parents and doctors by informing them that he had been visited in his dreams by Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad. He attributed his survival to Ali’s divine intervention. Two more episodes followed, each more intense than the last. After the Crown Prince fell from a horse and struck his head on a rock by the roadside, he told his adult companions that his fall was stopped by a saint who cushioned his head to prevent it from splitting open on the jagged edge.
The third experience was the most revealing, for it went to the very heart of Islam’s Shia faith. One day the Crown Prince was walking along a street when he claimed to see “a man with a halo around his head—much as in some of the great paintings, by Western masters, of Jesus. As we passed one another, I knew him at once. He was the imam or descendant of Mohammad who, according to our faith, disappeared but is expected to come again to save the world.” This time the young prince kept his vision to himself. Reza Shah had named his sons after the imams and he visited the main holy shrines, but he ruled as an autocrat and did not much care for the divine right of kings. He knew all too well that the sword and not God had brought him to power and placed his family on Persia’s Peacock Throne. The Shah regarded his heir’s mystical nature as yet another sign of inherent weakness. But the Crown Prince was convinced that his early trials had marked him as a messenger of justice and an instrument of God’s will.
Persians were Muslim by conquest if not by choice. In the year AD 610 Mohammad was a forty-year-old trader living in Mecca in the western Arabian peninsula when he experienced the visions and revelations that led him to believe he had been marked as God’s messenger on earth. He never claimed to be a divine being and saw in his new religion, Islam, which meant “submission before Allah (God),” fellowship with Judaism and Christianity. His revelations were later transcribed to form the basis of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, and the faith he brought to the people was based on the five central pillars of belief, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage. Within a decade of Mohammad’s death in AD 632, Arab armies raided Persia’s Sasanian Empire and swept across the length and breadth of the Middle East. By the ninth century, the Islamists ruled over an empire the equal of Rome in terms of size and accomplishment.
Mohammad’s death led to a power struggle when his immediate heirs disagreed over who should inherit the mantle of the Prophet and lead the faithful. Two rival camps formed. The majority Muslim party called themselves “Sunni” and followed the rule of the caliphs. But a partisan minority, the “Shia,” bitterly contested their claim and argued that Mohammad’s rightful heir was Ali, the Prophet’s beloved son-in-law. Both groups fought two inconclusive civil wars to settle the matter until Ali’s ascendance to the caliphate ended in his assassination. Ali’s son and heir, Husayn, fought on, but he, too, was eventually betrayed, hunted down, and beheaded at the Battle of Karbala in AD 680. This outrage made permanent the split between Shia and Sunni and led to two rival lines of succession. Each of the Shia “imams” or claimants fell victim to assassination until the twelfth, a child, disappeared from view completely, apparently having been spirited away to save the Shia line of succession from extinction. The disappearance or “occultation” of the Twelfth or “Hidden Imam” meant that the Shia believed they were condemned to await his return, which would augur the end of days, bringing an end to the injustices visited upon them. Until then, they must accept their bitter lot and not struggle against the vagaries of misfortune and fate. The schism within Islam took on ethnic, political, and nationalist dimensions in AD 1501, when the Safavid Dynasty took power in Persia, seized the Peacock Throne, and declared Shiism the official religion of their new empire. From that moment on the kings of Persia assumed the title of Shia Islam’s “Custodian of the Faith.”
The Shia clergy occupied a special role in Persian society, one that set them still farther apart from their Sunni brethren. The ulama saw themselves as the people’s conscience and “the vehicle for expressing public opinion whenever other means of expression are not existent or insufficient.” In practice this meant that the clergy saw their role less as molding public opinion than reflecting it, though the subtlety was sometimes lost during bouts of social and political unrest. On occasions when the people demanded change from a resistant crown the ulama responded by mobilizing the mosques to bring crowds out into the streets. “A fine system of mutual checks and balances has always existed between the clergy and the public at large,” wrote one Iranian commentator in 1978. “While no individual would dare do anything glaringly contradictory to religious ethics, no religious leader could adopt a position that was not approved by at least a section of public opinion. The public controls the clergy by financing it and obeying its edicts while it is in turn controlled by the clergy pronouncements and positions. The Shiite mosque is a widespread and loosely organized institution [that] become[s] effective only when and where the community of believers wants to use it. Otherwise, it is kept as a community reserve, a potential capable of effective use whenever the need arises.”
Yet Persian attitudes toward Islam, like most everything else, were hardly uniform and at times oddly ambivalent. Public observance and interest in religion waxed and waned according to “the social and political conditions of the society at any given time.” The generations worshipped with a different fervor, with parents possibly more observant than their children and vice versa. The Persians were not known for being overly zealous or judgmental in their interpretation of the holy book. There was, too, their cynical use of taqiya, an old religious custom that justified lying if believers ever felt threatened for following the Shia line. Though taqiya was supposed to be reserved only for life-threatening situations, mullahs and laymen were quick to exploit this moral loophole for personal use and gain. And though Islam technically forbade alcohol and imposed strict constraints on personal conduct, the Persian appetite for wine, women, and song continued more or less unabated through the centuries. Even while Persians claimed to respect their local mullah or priest, many reserved for him the same cynical contempt for authority they showed their kings. Pious and respectful to his face, behind the mullah’s back they gossiped about his women, snickered at his burgeoning waistline, and traded barbed jokes that compared their hapless fate to that of a donkey. “Don’t let the mullah ride you,” the old Persian saying went, “because once he gets on he’ll never get off.”
* * *
AT AGE TWELVE the young Pahlavi prince boarded a Russian cruiser at the Caspian port of Enzali and set sail for Europe and boarding school in Switzerland. Reza Shah wanted his heir to have a thoroughly modern and Western outlook on life. He allowed his son to take along two companions. The first, Mehrpur Teymurtash, was the son of the minister of court, but it was his second and favored playmate, Hossein Fardust, the son of a noncommissioned officer, who would later play a role in the fall of the dynasty. There was no question that young Fardust should leave his parents for five years to accompany the prince to Europe. The boy already spent five days each week at the palace, where the lonely prince smothered him with affection and treated him almost like a doll to be taken wherever he went. Princess Ashraf later recalled that Reza Shah “did not particularly like Fardust and wondered why his son was so fond of him.” Fardust would often run away “and we did not know where he had gone. My brother would then be unhappy and send for him. He liked him very much.”
The shy, entitled prince was firmly put in his place by his classmates at Le Rosey, the prestigious boarding school that sat on the shores of Lake Geneva. An American boarder, Frederick Jacobi Jr., later wrote a revealing account in the New Yorker of the day the young prince’s yellow Hispano-Suiza pulled up. “His entourage consisted of a chauffeur and footman, both in Park Avenue–type uniforms; a valet, who was unmistakable; and a spectacularly handsome, silver-haired gentleman who carried himself straighter than any other man I had ever seen, and who I subsequently learned was a Persian diplomat of high rank.” As the new boy walked past the curious crowd that had gathered on the steps he “swept us all with a stare that he must have intended as regal. His efforts were lost on us, however.” Later in the day, the prince saw young Frederick Jacobi sitting with his friend Charlie Childs on a small bench. When the boys refused to stand up or otherwise acknowledge the royal presence, the prince “flew at Charlie Childs, seized him by the throat,” which prompted Charlie to box him around the ears and pin him to the ground. “It was all over very quickly because Pahlavi soon lay still and grunted for mercy. His black hair dank and falling over his eyes, his face scratched and bleeding, his shirt torn, he slowly got to his feet. His next move surprised me as well. He smiled, shook Charlie’s hand a couple of times, and patted him on the back.”
The fracas in the school yard showed the prince of Persia as a boy who had thrown the first punch and then sued for peace rather than fight his corner—he wanted to be liked more than respected, a pattern that reasserted itself throughout his life in a series of showdowns with older and more assertive personalities. Gradually, however, the prince won over his classmates, and his election to captain of the soccer team gave him his first real taste of leadership and a sort of popular democracy in action. Still, he was prevented from taking part in many normal student activities by his overzealous Iranian minders. They impressed on the teenager the importance of the farr and the lessons of traditional Persian kingship. Lonely and homesick, the boy found consolation in faith and prayer. “I was determined that when later I came to the throne, my conduct would always be guided by a true religious sense,” he recalled. He prayed five times a day and decided that one of his first reforms as king would be to institute a “public complaints” box so that he could stay in touch with his people’s wishes. Suffering lay at the heart of Shiism, and his suffering as a child convinced the prince that he had a mission to fulfill in his lifetime. To the dismay of his father, while he was abroad, the Crown Prince became not only more devout in his religious beliefs but also more socially liberal.
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WITH HIS SON away at school, Reza Shah set Persia firmly on the road to modernity.
The Shah nursed the ambitions of Peter the Great, Imperial Russia’s great modernizer, but he was more personally inspired by France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, another junior army officer who rose through the ranks to seize a crown and forge a new civilization. Reza Shah was determined to lay the foundations for a modern state and erase past humiliations. “The hallmark of the era was to be state-building,” wrote an Iranian scholar who compared Iran’s Pahlavi Dynasty to England’s Tudors and Austria’s Hapsburgs. “Reza Shah came to power in a country where the government had little presence outside the capital. He left it with an extensive state structure—the first in Iran’s two thousand years.” He persuaded Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company to increase the share of profits it paid the state in taxes and used the money to build dams, railways, ports, libraries, factories, schools, universities, and hospitals. Bank Melli was established as Iran’s new national bank, the metric system of measurement was introduced, and the Muslim lunar calendar was swapped for the solar calendar. Vaccination programs eliminated disease. Hundreds of young students were sent abroad on full scholarships to the United States and Europe to train in science, technology, education, and medicine. They returned to take their place as the next generation of reformers. In 1935 the first Pahlavi king renamed Persia “Iran” to make it clear there was no going back to the old ways.
Though the ulama had made Reza Shah’s accession to the throne possible, the King was determined to follow the example of Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, who agreed that religion and modernity could not coexist. He closed seminaries, desegregated public places, and changed labor laws to allow women to enter the workforce. He ordered Iranians to don Western garb and forbade women from wearing the flowing black outer garment called the chador. These measures eventually sparked resistance and riots in 1935 in the holy city of Mashad that were put down with force. Faced with severe repression and a loss of status, most Shia clerics chose to withdraw from public life, while others left Iran for permanent exile in neighboring Iraq, another majority Shia society. Reza Shah also reduced Iran’s parliament, the Majles, to a rubber stamp, expecting it to bow to his wishes, and hundreds of political dissidents who deplored authoritarian rule were harassed, imprisoned, and exiled.
The schoolboy prince followed events back home with great interest. No single issue gripped his imagination more than the emancipation of women. In a letter dated February 1, 1936, addressed to “my unique and highly esteemed father,” the prince replied to Reza Shah’s decision to confer on women the same rights as men. “This is a truly massive revelation,” the Crown Prince wrote to his father. “The primary care and nurture of every offspring, initiated by its mother’s devotion, is pivotal to their upbringing, memories and morals, and my patriotic and progressive noble father, has perpetually been well aware of this fact.” Also,
Hence, women’s acquirement of science and arts through education is the key for any nation’s progress and advancement. Because achieving such goals would be futile while shrouded by social deprivation, I therefore hope that such fatherly attention and enactments for the benefit of the noble women of our dear Iran will pave the way for the prosperity and well-being of this unfortunate section of our society.
The cruiser that brought the Crown Prince home docked on May 11, 1936, at the renamed port of Pahlavi in the renamed Kingdom of Iran. The Pahlavi family stood assembled on the wharf with Reza Shah “standing alone, watching, calmly it seemed, as the boat approached from a distance.” The return of the son after five long years away was an emotional moment that the proud father did not wish to share with anyone, but when the prince walked toward him he appeared briefly not to recognize the once sickly boy, now a handsome young man. Father and son shook hands, exchanged a hug, and walked to where the Queen and the princesses, waiting on the quay, wore stylish European dresses and hats rather than the traditional ill-fitting black chador. Princess Ashraf noticed how “happy and healthy, stronger and more fit” her brother appeared. He was filled with excitement about his future responsibilities. “My brother told me how impressed he had been by the democratic attitudes he had seen at the school, by the fact that all the boys, whether they were sons of businessmen or noblemen or kings, were equals within the school community. He talked about how he had come to realize for the first time how much economic and social disparity there was among the people of Iran.”
As the motorcade pulled away from port Pahlavi to rise over the Alborz Mountains headed for Tehran, the Crown Prince felt he had arrived in “a different country. I recognized nothing.” Iran’s Caspian Sea coastline, previously so wretched, now appeared “as an Iranian version of the south of France.” Dodge motorcars hummed along the seaboard and there were “huge new hotels pushing their heads into the air.” A decade earlier, travel to Tehran had taken days and involved bribes, opium, brigands, and donkey rides. Now drivers swept over “the superb Chalus road, which ascends in incredible twists and turns up and through the amber Alborz Mountains.” Motorists experienced the thrill of driving above the cloud line. Once shabby post houses had been transformed into “elaborate wayside hotels.” The bigger surprise lay down in the foothills, where the royal motorcade was greeted by tens of thousands of cheering spectators lining the streets, tossing flowers and bouquets into the prince’s open car. “My father had razed Tehran’s old walls,” he recalled. “Streets were paved and asphalted. The city had begun to take on the look and style of a European capital. I saw it all at first as if in a dream.”
The Crown Prince enrolled as a cadet in the Military College of Tehran, a new institution modeled after the elite French academy of St. Cyr, and for the next two years attended maneuvers and studied military strategy and tactics. After graduating as a second lieutenant he was appointed to the post of army inspector. Reza Shah also began tutoring his son in the role and responsibilities of kingship, and together they traveled to Iran’s different regions to meet with provincial officials. The Crown Prince noticed how the dignitaries they met along the way were “so much in awe that ‘discussion’ with [Reza Shah] had none of the give-and-take the word implies.” He worried about his father’s isolation. He saw that Iranian officials were too intimidated to bring problems to his father’s attention and that this left him dangerously isolated from public opinion. Gradually, courtiers who feared Reza Shah learned they could approach his son with their problems, and the prince adopted the role of emissary and mediator. Reza Shah patiently listened to his son’s suggestions and rarely opposed his recommendations. There was a practical side to this: the old king wanted to test his presumptive successor’s judgment. “I advanced my views and made hints and suggestions, but discussion in any usual sense was out of the question,” recalled the Shah. “Nevertheless, I, as a young man, of only some nineteen years of age, frequently spoke my mind to the Shah; and the amazing thing was how willing he was to listen to me, and how seldom he rejected my proposals.”
As heir to the throne, the Crown Prince exhibited all the zeal of a youthful reformer, even daring to raise with his father the sensitive issue of the Pahlavi family’s extensive real estate holdings along the Caspian seaboard. Critics accused Reza Shah of confiscating or purchasing at artificially low prices more than three million acres of prime land. The father, his son remembered, patiently explained that “he concentrated buying along our country’s frontier primarily for national security reasons. Although he had in mind a better life for the peasants, he knew it would take time and that national security had to come first.” The Crown Prince listened to this explanation and accepted it without comment, though his subsequent behavior suggested he did not believe a word of it. He showed an interest in the cases of prominent political prisoners jailed for dissent and urged his father to release those who claimed unfair conviction. The Shah explained that emptying Iran’s prisons would not solve Iran’s problems and that showing compassion to one’s enemies was a form of weakness. How might it look if men arrested on his orders were later released by his son?
The Shah specifically cautioned his son not to intervene on behalf of Iran’s most celebrated political prisoner, an aristocrat related by marriage to the deposed Qajars. Mohammad Mossadeq had opposed the establishment of the Pahlavi Dynasty in 1925, warned Reza Shah against dictatorship, and championed the 1906 Constitution. Mossadeq’s children pleaded with the Crown Prince for mercy, explaining that their father’s age and infirm health meant he was not expected to survive the harsh prison conditions. In 1940 Reza Shah agreed to release the old man from his confinement but warned in starkly prophetic terms that it was a decision his son would live to regret.
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IN HIS SIXTIETH year, Reza Shah turned his attention to the Imperial succession. He had entertained thoughts of abdication for some time though without spelling out an exact time line for relinquishing power. At first he considered retiring in the late forties but already by the spring of 1941 one of his most trusted advisers was holding preliminary discussions with the Crown Prince to start planning for an orderly transfer. Reza Shah was starting to lose physical strength and may have had a sense of his own impending mortality.
As an upstart dynasty the Pahlavis were faced with a shortage of legitimate candidates to succeed to the throne. Under the Constitution only Crown Prince Mohammad Reza and his full-blood brother, Prince Ali Reza, were eligible to reign. Their half brothers, the children of Reza Shah’s other wives, had Qajar blood and were therefore deemed unsuitable. The need for the Crown Prince to produce an heir was pressing. Reza Shah was unsentimental on the subject of marriage. He had already married off his daughters Shams and Ashraf to handpicked suitors, though their joint betrothal turned into a soap opera when Shams decided she preferred her younger sister’s beau, Fereydoun Djam, the son of the prime minister and a handsome young army officer, over her own intended. Her father ordered his daughters to exchange fiancés, and Ashraf was married off to Ali Qavam, a man she loathed. “So I was married,” she wrote, “in a traditional double ceremony with Shams, complete with white Lanvin wedding dress, though black would have been more suitable for my mood.”
With his usual brusque efficiency, Reza Shah took matters into his own hands and betrothed his son and heir to the lovely Princess Fawzia, sister of King Farouk of Egypt. “With his characteristic forthrightness—perhaps better adapted to engineering projects than to affairs of heart—he staged an investigation,” Mohammad Reza Shah later recalled with dry understatement. His father was eager to strike a pact with Egypt, the greatest of the Arab states, and legitimize the Pahlavi Dynasty as an established royal house. The engaged couple met for the first time just two weeks before their wedding on March 15, 1939, and discovered they had virtually nothing in common. They were marched down the aisle anyway. Spoiled and adored at home, beautiful Fawzia made no effort to hide her resentment at leaving behind cosmopolitan Cairo for the stuffy provincialism of court life in Tehran. She was bored and lonely and found the intrigues of the Pahlavi women tiresome. The Iranian public regarded her as disinterested in their lot, and they were probably right. Fawzia provided a daughter, Shahnaz, in 1940, but her marriage to the Crown Prince was otherwise not a success. “For reasons still obscure to medical science, there were to be no more children,” was his cryptic explanation for the breakdown in marital relations. Rumors flew around town that husband and wife both found solace elsewhere.
Reza Shah’s plan for a well-crafted transfer of power to his son was upended during the Second World War when on August 25, 1941, the combined armies of Great Britain and Soviet Russia invaded Iran on the flimsy pretext of preventing the kingdom’s road and rail links and oil depots from falling into German hands. The real problem was Reza Shah’s policy of neutrality and his refusal to be seen bending to the same foreign powers who earlier in the century had divided the country among them. On the day of the invasion the Imperial Family gathered for lunch. The mood at the table was “so tense and so grim that none of us dared speak,” recalled Princess Ashraf. “What I knew was inevitable has happened,” her father told them. “The Allies have invaded. I think this will be the end for me—the English will see to it.” In a moment of great drama, the Crown Prince handed his sister a gun. “Ashraf, keep this gun with you, and if troops enter Tehran and try to take us, fire a few shots and then take your own life,” he told his sister. “I’ll do the same.” The next day bombers reached the outskirts of Tehran and dropped explosives. The Queen and the princesses sheltered in the palace basement and as soon as the all-clear was sounded packed and fled south to Isfahan.
The Shah and his eldest son stayed behind to rally the generals, but Iran’s army disintegrated under the Allied onslaught. On September 16, 1941, Reza Shah signed the formal instrument of abdication, changed into civilian clothes, and drove to Isfahan to join his wife and daughters. He was told by his British captors that he must leave Iran to spend his days in exile—a fitting end for the former Cossack who came to the throne idolizing Napoleon Bonaparte. Princess Ashraf begged to join her father but he said no. “I would love to have you with me, but your brother needs you more,” her father explained. “I want you to stay with him. I wish you had been a boy, so you could be a brother to him now.” Stripped of his titles, rank, and wealth, Reza Shah boarded a British cruiser bound for his preferred destination of Argentina. Only when the vessel was at sea did the captain inform the deposed monarch that he was actually headed to permanent exile in South Africa. His son later noted the irony—unbeknownst to the British, at the time of their invasion his father had already set his mind on abdication and spending the rest of his life abroad. Mohammad Reza Shah later wrote, “You might say that Reza Shah was exiled by mutual desire and consent.”
The British and Russian ambassadors considered turning out the Pahlavis and replacing them with the more pliable Qajars. Fearful of arousing nationalist opinion, they abandoned the scheme but nonetheless snubbed the Shah’s investiture. In his maiden speech from the throne the new king assured parliament and the people that he would abide by the Constitution and return his father’s estates back to the nation. His speech went down well, but his ministers and the Allied ambassadors were determined to see to it that the second Pahlavi king’s wings were firmly clipped and surrounded him with forceful older personalities determined to reestablish constitutional rule and prevent the emergence of a second autocracy. The proud young monarch felt the sting of humiliation every time he drove in and out of the capital, where he was obliged to present his identification papers to the Russian troops manning the gates. Two years later, when Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill flew to Tehran to discuss their war aims, only Stalin made an effort to treat the twenty-four-year-old King with the respect he felt he deserved as Iran’s head of state. Roosevelt said he would be happy to receive the Shah—at his lodgings in the Russian embassy. The Shah bitterly recalled that “it seemed a curious situation that I had to go to the Russian embassy to see him, while Stalin came to see me.” Slights like this left their mark.
The Shah found himself “plunged into a sea of trouble,” and perhaps his greatest achievement in those fraught early years was simply to survive. The U.S. embassy in Tehran informed the State Department that the young king had “no solid power base and no political machine” but nonetheless thought they saw promise in his idealism and character.
Mohammad Shah is a man of much stronger purpose than is generally realized. He stands almost alone, distrusts most advisers, is honest in his efforts to secure a democratic form of government in Iran. He is not easily influenced and cannot be shaken. Installed as a figurehead during the 1941 crisis, he may yet surprise the factions in his country and the outside powers. He thinks along Western lines, and is inalienably attached to his Iranian army. The military budget is half the national expenditure now. Yet, of course, the army is almost his only backing within Iran.
The young monarch could barely hide his frustration with his lot. “I inherited a crown,” he protested. “Before I put it on, I want to earn it.” He had been on the throne a year when he met with a group of senior politicians to plead his case for far-reaching social and economic reforms. “I told them that we must establish social justice in this country,” he said, drawing on his tutelage in Switzerland and bearing in mind Madame Arfa’s talk of revolutionary kings. “It is not fair that a number of people should be at a loss what to do with their wealth,” he said, “while a number die from hunger.” His ministers dismissed his “revolutionary ideas” as empty talk and the naive ramblings of a young man with too much time on his hands.
The Shah’s brimming youthful idealism was never more fully expressed than during a reception he hosted for the country’s religious leaders in the late forties. In words that would come back to haunt him later in life, he lectured the ulama on their responsibilities as moral guardians of the nation. No ruler of Iran was above the law, he reminded them. “People must not remain silent, or neutral, about the actions of their rulers,” he said in reference to the farr, which sanctioned rebellion in case of injustice. “They must rise up if governments trample their rights or break the laws. It is indeed one of the major responsibilities of the clergy to awaken people and make them aware of their legal rights, and thus not allow rulers and governments to engage in reckless and lawless behavior.”