Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi

Shah of Iran (r. 1941-1979)

• Born: October 26, 1919
• Birthplace: Tehran, Iran
• Died: July 27, 1980
• Place of death: Cairo, Egypt

Mohammad Reza ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979. His reign coincided with major changes in the social and economic life of Iran, although his despotic rule, sustained by brutal repression, and the corruption that accompanied his modernizing program contributed directly to the Islamic Revolution of 1979.

Early Life

Mohammad Reza (REH-za) was the eldest son of the preceding ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi , and was born when the latter, then known as Reza Khan, was a colonel in the Cossack Brigade of the last ruler of the Qājār Dynasty . In 1921, Reza Khan participated in a coup d’état aimed at introducing much-needed reforms and reducing foreign (especially British) influence in the country’s internal affairs. In 1925, he had himself proclaimed shah, taking the dynastic name of Pahlavi. As heir-apparent, Mohammad Reza underwent strict training under the eagle eyes of his harsh and overbearing father. Although Reza Shah himself had no experience of the world outside Iran, he sent his heir abroad to complete his education.

In 1936, Mohammad Reza was summoned home to enter the Military Academy in Tehran and to continue his apprenticeship as his father’s heir. It was also arranged that he should marry Princess Fawzia, the sister of King Farouk I of Egypt. They were married in 1939, and a daughter, Shahnaz, was born in 1940; but Fawzia returned to Egypt in 1947, and there was a divorce in the following year. In 1951, Mohammad Reza married Soraya Esfandiari, daughter of one of the Bakhtiyari Khans and a German woman. The couple were said to be very much in love, but no heir was produced and Soraya had to compete for her husband’s affections against Mohammad Reza’s relatives and courtiers in a court riddled with intrigue and backbiting. A divorce was announced in 1958. In 1959, Mohammad Reza married a commoner, Farah Diba, who presented him with two sons and two daughters.

Life’s Work

Reza Shah shared with his countrymen deep-seated suspicions of both Great Britain and Russia, and during the course of the 1930’s he had leaned increasingly in the direction of the Third Reich, which sedulously wooed him and flattered his vanity. At the outset of World War II, therefore, the British and the Russians demanded an end to Iran’s German connection. Unwilling to comply, Reza Shah was compelled to abdicate and was taken into enforced exile in South Africa, where he died in 1944.

Initially, the British contemplated restoring the former Qājār Dynasty, but in the end, the Allies decided that Mohammad Reza would do as well as any other puppet. He was, therefore, permitted to succeed to the throne, although for the duration of the war the real rulers of the country were the British and Soviet ambassadors. As soon as the war was over, the occupying British troops were withdrawn, but the Soviet Union showed an obvious unwillingness to withdraw Red Army units stationed in the northwest of the country. The prime minister, Ahmad Qavam, one of the ablest Iranian statesmen of the twentieth century, maneuvered the Soviet government into recalling its forces, but he was then compelled to call on the Iranian army to reintegrate the dissident provinces by a show of force (undertaken with excessive brutality), which inevitably brought the shah, as supreme commander, to the fore. The so-called liberation of Azerbaijan (August, 1949) greatly boosted the public image of both the shah and the army. Shortly afterward, Qavam was forced to resign the premiership under pressure from the hostile Majlis (the Iranian parliament, established by the constitution of 1906).

Mohammad Reza had always hated and feared Qavam, and it was with undisguised pleasure that he now saw him leave the political stage. Henceforth, he would begin to participate more actively in politics. He appointed General Ali Razmara as prime minister (June, 1950-February, 1951), but the latter almost immediately became embroiled in controversy over the status of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, regarded by virtually all Iranians as a symbol of quasi-colonial domination. When the new premier was assassinated by a religious fanatic, his opponents openly rejoiced. Nevertheless, there were those who whispered that the order for his death had emanated from somewhere within the palace.

Following Razmara’s assassination, the issue of oil nationalization came to dominate both Iran’s internal politics and its international relations, leading to the emergence to prominence of Mohammad Mossadegh and to his stormy premiership (March, 1951-August, 1953). Despite his antecedents as a descendant of the former Qājār Dynasty and as an old-style landowner and bureaucrat, Mossadegh was an object of intense popular adulation, especially among the more politically sophisticated people of Tehran who shared his animus against both the Pahlavi Dynasty and the British. For a short while, it seemed that Mossadegh would become the charismatic leader of a new, forward-looking, and progressive Iran; as he proceeded, in the face of hostile world opinion, with the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, his authority and influence grew accordingly. The British reacted by persuading the U.S. government (at the height of the Cold War) that Mossadegh was becoming dependent on the support of the communist-led Tuda Party, itself seen as the cat’s-paw of the Soviet Union. Mohammad Reza had long sensed the threat to the monarchy posed by Mossadegh’s popularity, and so he and a palace clique, together with a number of senior generals, entered into a conspiracy, masterminded by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which led to Mossadegh’s ouster, despite the fact that he was the country’s duly constituted prime minister. Mossadegh was put on trial, imprisoned, and later exiled to one of his estates, where he died in 1967.

The shah began to assume a greater direction over the day-to-day running of the government. By 1960, underlying discontent with the regime for its failure to address fundamental social and economic concerns was being openly aired, despite the ever-increasing ruthlessness of the secret police. To head off opposition, Mohammad Reza ordered the creation of two political parties, one to head the government and the other to serve as a loyal opposition; while each vied with the other in fulsome flattery of the ruler, the elections of 1960 were so blatantly rigged and the public outcry so vociferous that even the shah was forced to denounce them. Under pressure from the administration of John F. Kennedy, which wanted a program of liberalization and reform for Iran, Mohammed Reza appointed as prime minister in May, 1961, a former Iranian ambassador to Washington, Ali Amini. An economist by training, Amini had experience in government going back to the time of Qavam.

Like Qavam and Mossadegh, Amini was a statesman of vision whose premiership offered the last chance for prerevolutionary Iran to evolve along the lines of a liberal parliamentary democracy, but his period in office (1961-1962) proved tragically brief. He prepared a far-reaching program of reforms, and it was under him and his able minister of agriculture, Hasan Arsanjani, that the government promulgated its first land reform decree of January, 1962, the opening phase of a program of land redistribution later co-opted by the shah in a relentless propaganda campaign in which he was represented as the emancipator of the peasantry. Amini could never overcome the liability that he lacked the nationwide support that Mossadegh had undoubtedly enjoyed, and he suffered from the additional disadvantage that Mohammad Reza disliked and mistrusted him. The two were bound to part company, sooner or later. The break, when it came, was over military expenditure. Amini the economist knew that the military budget was excessive when the country was in the middle of a grave fiscal crisis, but, to the shah, the army was sacrosanct. Amini resigned in July, 1962.

Between 1962 and 1977, Mohammad Reza’s rule became increasingly despotic: His will was law, his policies were not to be questioned, and any form of opposition or criticism was regarded as treason, to be stamped out without mercy by the secret police. Isolated from reality by his obsequious entourage and flattered and cajoled by Western leaders, who regarded Iran as an island of stability in the turbulent Middle East, he grew megalomanic in his ambition and his delusions of grandeur.

After Amini, no prime minister possessed the moral courage or the independence to challenge the shah’s will. Asadollah Alam (prime minister from 1962 to 1964) was a close confidant and a born courtier, who in 1963 presided over the savage repression of opposition to the shah’s so-called White Revolution. His successor, HasanՙAlī Mansur, was assassinated in January, 1965. Mansur was followed by Amir Abbas Hoveyda, a technocrat who was to hold the premiership longer than any other Iranian prime minister of the twentieth century (January, 1965-July, 1977). Dismissed in response to mounting criticism of the government and imprisoned for alleged corrupt practices, he was still incarcerated when the revolutionaries seized power in 1979 and duly had him executed.

Amid increasing repression, Mohammad Reza had celebrated in 1971 what was styled “Five Thousand Years of Iranian Monarchy” in tawdry ceremonies at Persepolis. Even then, some otherwise friendly foreign journalists had commented unfavorably on the obvious signs of Napoleonic delusions of grandeur. Thereafter, with Iran replacing Great Britain as “policeman” of the Persian Gulf, with the Richard Nixon administration agreeing to provide Iran with unlimited military hardware (short of nuclear weapons), and with the steep rise in the world price of oil, the shah engaged in an incredible buying spree, especially of the latest weaponry was boasting that by the year 2000, Iran would be a world class power, economically and militarily second to none save the superpowers. In reality, by the late 1970’s Iran was suffering from an overheated economy, staggering inflation, massive social dislocation, the breakdown of public services, a monstrous military budget out of all proportion to the country’s needs, and mounting fury against the regime and its foreign supporters, especially the Americans, who were in large measure blamed for these developments, since most Iranians since the overthrow of Mossadegh in 1953 regarded their ruler as an American puppet.

As successive governments between 1977 and 1979 lost control of the situation, Mohammad Reza found that, since he had killed, imprisoned, or driven into exile his liberal or democratic critics, leadership of the opposition had passed to the implacably hostile Muslim clergy, and especially to the charismatic figure of Ayatollah Khomeini. By the end of 1978, the shah’s government had, quite literally, disintegrated, and on January 16, 1979, he fled the country, never to return. He died in Egypt on July 27, 1980, an exile like his father.

Significance

With limited imagination and serious character flaws, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi pursued with vigor his father’s goal of subverting the spirit of the constitution of 1906 in the interests of Pahlavi dynasticism and a twentieth century version of monarchical absolutism, which was, in effect, dictatorship. In achieving this goal, he undoubtedly benefited from the circumstances of the Cold War, which enabled him to convince the United States and its allies that he was indispensable as a stabilizing factor in the Middle East. As in the case of other Western-backed dictators, it was to be his own people, driven to desperation by the excesses of the regime, who would eventually overthrow him.

Coinciding with a peculiarly challenging and volatile period of modern Iranian history, involving wrenching social and economic changes that would have occurred with or without the shah’s leadership, the reign of Mohammad Reza brought great material benefits to the urban-based elite and to sections of the burgeoning middle class, while creating uncertainty, dislocation, and often new forms of economic hardship among those at the lower end of the social ladder. A ruthless foe to genuine democratic institutions and to the free expression of opinion, Mohammad Reza directed his security forces to eliminate all semblances of legitimate oppositional activity, which they did with extraordinary brutality. In consequence, the only effective leadership left to defy the regime came from the ideologically conservative but well-organized and widely respected Muslim clergy. The Islamic Revolution of 1979 was a direct consequence of the shah’s determined elimination of all other forms of opposition during the preceding two decades. In retrospect, Mohammad Reza’s career may be viewed as a monumental failure and a classic object lesson in the limitations of dictatorship.

Bibliography

Abrahamian, Ervand. Iran Between Two Revolutions. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1982. This is an important and in some respects definitive account of the period between the Constitutional Revolution of 1905 and the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The greater part, however, deals with the reign of Mohammad Reza and is especially detailed regarding the years 1946 to 1953 and the politics of the Mossadegh premiership.

Hambly, Gavin R. G. “The Reign of Muhammad Riza Shah.” In The Cambridge History of Iran, edited by Peter Avery and Gavin R. G. Hambly. Vol. 7. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. This narrative account of the period 1941-1979 argues that only under the leadership of the three independently minded and charismatic prime ministers Ahmad Qavam, Mohammad Mossadegh, and Ali Amini was there any hope of Iran evolving along the path envisaged in the constitution of 1906.

Hoveyda, Fereydoun. The Fall of the Shah. Translated by Roger Liddell. New York: Wyndham Books, 1980. Fereydoun Hoveyda was brother to Amir Abbas Hoveyda. Fereydoun was permanent representative of Iran to the United Nations between 1971 and 1979. His assessment of the factors that contributed to the collapse of the shah’s regime is based on an insider’s knowledge and experience.

Katouzian, Homa. The Political Economy of Modern Iran: Despotism and Pseudo-Modernism, 1926-1979. New York: New York University Press, 1981. This constitutes the best detailed account of the shah’s reign available. In this penetrating study, Katouzian shows the shah’s modernization program to have been a facade masking brutal repression and the staggering corruption of a venal elite.

Keddie, Nikki R. Roots of Revolution: An Interpretive History of Modern Iran. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1981. This is an outstanding work of synthesis, an interpretation of recent Iranian history from the beginning of the nineteenth century down to the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Especially useful in the perspective that it provides for the Pahlavi period.

Kinzer, Stephen. All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. Hoboken, N.J.: J. Wiley and Sons, 2003. Recounts the Central Intelligence Agency’s 1953 coup, in which Iranian leader Mohammad Mossadegh was overthrown and replaced with the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Pahlavi, Farah. An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah. Translated from the French by Patricia Clancy. New York: Miramax, 2004. The shah’s third wife recounts the couple’s life together.

Radji, Parviz C. In the Service of the Peacock Throne: The Diaries of the Shah’s Last Ambassador to London. London: Hamish Hamilton, 1983. Parviz Radji was the Iranian ambassador to Great Britain between 1976 and 1979. In his diaries, he conveys with considerable frankness his growing dismay at the crass stupidity and lack of vision that characterized the ancien régime in its last days.

Rafizadeh, Mansur. Witness: From the Shah to the Secret Arms Deal, An Insider’s Account of U.S. Involvement in Iran. New York: William Morrow, 1987. Rafizadeh was a member of the notorious Iranian secret police, in which he rose to be station chief in the United States. From this vantage point, he obtained insights into the working of the Iranian government and the court enjoyed by few other outsiders.

Reeves, Minou. Behind the Peacock Throne. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1986. Reeves was an Iranian woman who, after employment in the foreign service and in Empress Farah’s Organization for the Protection of Children, served in the empress’s private office from 1976 until 1979. Her memoirs provide an insider’s impression of life in the Pahlavi court.