The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  As soon as the Cossacks entered the city, the pusillanimous Ahmad Shah sent for the British Ambassador and asked his opinion “regarding the line which he should follow. He was nervous.” The Ambassador was, in his words, “able to reassure [the King] regarding the intentions of the leaders of the movement . . . and advised him to put himself in communication with them, ascertain their wishes, and grant whatever they might ask.”27 His Majesty of course followed the “advice” of the British, and the next day called Seyyed Zia to the Court and “entrusted him with the task of forming a government. . . . Seyyed at first proposed to the king that the title of dictator should be given to him, but His Majesty demurred on the ground that this would constitute a humiliation to the person and dignity of the Sovereign.”28 Seyyed was named prime minister.

  From their first encounter, it was clear that Seyyed Zia, with his “revolutionary” disregard for the courtesies of the Court, and Ahmad Shah, the timid king, who had nothing other than these courtesies left of his power, despised one another. The brewing tension between the weak monarch and the taunting Seyyed created just enough space for Reza Khan to establish an increasingly prominent place in the complicated but crumbling labyrinth of Qajar power.

  Within hours of taking power, Seyyed Zia and his ally, Reza Khan, arrested some 400 of the country’s “grandees.” For the British Embassy this was one of the “embarrassing features” of the coup. Many of those imprisoned were, according to the embassy, “prominent Persians universally known as friends of [the British].”29

  The purpose of the arrests was, according to Seyyed Zia, simply to fill the empty state coffers. “In spite of the emptiness of the treasury,” Seyyed told the British Embassy, “there is plenty of money in the country,” and he knew “where to look for it.”30 Those arrested, he said, owed thousands of tooman to the government in back taxes and levies. The British Embassy agreed with Seyyed and confessed that, in its opinion, “the arrested princes owe large sums to the Government on various accounts.”31

  But beneath the revolutionary rhetoric and aggressive actions of the new cabinet, there was a more sinister purpose, and it had to do with the infamous 1919 Agreement. The cabinet, according to its master architects, Seyyed Zia and Reza Khan, came not to bury the 1919 Agreement but to revive it. Seyyed’s proposed strategy was cold and calculating in its goals and cunningly Machiavellian in its proposed method for manipulating public opinion. He advised the British Embassy that he would verbally and publicly denounce the infamous 1919 Agreement, since, again in his words, “Without such denunciation new government can not get to work.” At the same time, the cabinet took steps, quietly and without public notice, to introduce, as the Agreement had stipulated, British advisors in key positions in the government and the military.32 In order to camouflage the role of British “advisors,” Seyyed Zia confided to Herman Norman, the British ambassador, “public announcements will be made that Persian Government proposes to bring in advisers from ‘different’ European states . . . the idea is to . . . throw dust in the eyes of Bolsheviks and native malcontents, while placing two essential administrations in British hands.”33 In short, as the Foreign Office succinctly declared, the new cabinet wanted “to scrap the Agreement but to carry out its vital provisions.”34 Despite these realities, in his memoir Mission for My Country, the Shah claimed that his “father and his government at the same time denounced the Anglo-Iranian treaty of 1919.”35

  While there is no record of Reza Khan’s views on some of these crucial discussions, there are clear indications that he was at least in agreement with the overall contour of Seyyed’s deals with the British. Furthermore, once Seyyed Zia fell, Reza Khan reassured the British Embassy that he would continue the policies of his fallen ally.36 A report from the embassy indicates that Reza Khan gave “oral assurances of his readiness to co-operate with [them], to accept British control of the Ministry of Finance and Ministry of War and to retain British officers in the north as instructors.”37 At the same time, in discussions with the Ambassador, Reza Khan “expressed goodwill towards Great Britain and said that no foreigners had any reason to fear the presence of his men at Tehran.” In fact, in the course of this discussion Reza Khan made it clear that his Cossacks, as well as the “leaders of the movement,” were, more than anything, worried about Bolshevik advances in Iran. They feared that in the absence of a strong government, the expected departure of British forces would bring about a victory for the Bolsheviks.38

  The new cabinet of Seyyed Zia and Reza Khan—often referred to by its opponents as “The Black Cabinet”—set out to change the fabric of social life in Iran. Soon after his forces took control of Tehran, Reza Khan issued two important declarations. The first made it clear that his Cossacks were loyal to Ahmad Shah and had come to establish law and order. The second began with his now famous self-assertive phrase, “I order.” He went on to set out the nine principles of the new government. They included, “all the residents of the city of Tehran must keep quiet. . . . The state of siege is established . . . all newspapers and prints will be stopped . . . public meetings in the houses and in different places are stopped . . . all shops where wines and spirits are sold, as well as theaters, cinemas and clubs, where gambling goes on, must be closed.”39

  In all of this, Reza Khan acted as a pragmatist, while Seyyed Zia never tired of reminding anyone who cared to listen that he considered himself a revolutionary; his two political heroes were, he often said, Lenin and Mussolini.40 His program included such far-reaching measures as “formation of an army . . . eventual abolition of the capitulations [granting foreigners immunity from prosecution]. . . . Legislation for the readjustment of relations between landlords and peasants.” At the same time, he tried to implement a truly impressive number of changes in the capital itself—from ordering new rules of hygiene for stores that dealt with foodstuffs to an attempt to bring light to city streets. He talked of land reform, making him one of the early champions of the idea in modern Iran. He talked of making education available to every Iranian.41 Many of these measures would, in later years, become pillars of Mohammad Reza Shah’s reform programs.

  Seyyed and his ally Reza Khan often declared that fighting Communism and aborting a Bolshevik revolution in Iran was their chief purpose and the foundation of their ideology. At the same time, Seyyed became a relentless advocate of the necessity of a rapprochement between Iran and its new Soviet neighbor, leading to the 1921 agreement between Iran and the Soviet Union. The agreement ended open hostilities between the two countries, but its infamous article five stipulated that if Iran were ever used as a staging area for anti-Soviet aggression, the Soviets would have the right to enter Iran and address the threat.

  From the outset, there was something amiss in Seyyed Zia’s attempt to don the mantle of a dictator. It soon became clear that nearly all actual power was in the hands of Reza Khan, and every new sign of Seyyed’s weakness further emboldened the increasing ranks of his enemies. One of his most embittered foes was the King himself. Seyyed’s attitude, defiant, filled with self-importance, and unabashed in the use of the rhetorical devices of revolution, was evident in his treatment of the King, as well as in his first pronouncement as the head of the coup cabinet. In a long, meandering text, he wrote of how “fate has designed me to take in hand the destinies of my people in this dangerous crisis and to save it from the abyss, to the edge of which will-less and unworthy governments have brought it.” He attacked the “few hundred nobles, who hold the reins of power by inheritance . . . [and who] sucked, leechlike, the blood of the people.”42

  Seyyed had always been defiantly oblivious to the Court’s solemnities and the rules of etiquette for a royal audience. More than once, he had walked into an audience with the King casually dressed, with a cigarette dangling from his lips. He had flouted protocol by sitting down before he was granted permission by His Majesty. In reprisal, Ahmad Shah had ordered all chairs removed from his office. In their next meeting, Seyyed found an even better way to insu
lt the King he despised. He sat on the windowsill throughout the audience. Ahmad Shah was incensed and practically threw the Prime Minister out of the office; before long he joined forces with Seyyed’s many enemies and arranged for his dismissal.

  Reza Khan was only too happy to abide by the King’s wishes.43 The British did everything in their power to keep Seyyed in power and, in the words of the Ambassador, tried unsuccessfully to “dissuade the conspirators from this disastrous intrigue.”44 But their efforts failed. They failed, they said, because Reza Khan, “since the withdrawal of our troops . . . no longer fears us” and had convinced Ahmad Shah that Seyyed might try to kill him.

  With the help and complicity of Reza Khan, Seyyed was dismissed; only as the result of the British efforts on his behalf was he allowed to leave Iran safely. In fact, as Seyyed was making his way out of the country, his enemies still tried to have him arrested and returned for trial. Once again the British Embassy came to rescue their “friend,” and received guarantees that he would be allowed safe passage through Iran. Reza Khan, happy to be rid of his ambitious partner, told him to take any sum he wanted from the treasury. Seyyed took 25,000 tooman—by no measure a large sum—and left Iran in May 1921.45

  The British, however, were not happy with Reza Khan. They described him as “an ignorant, but astute peasant” who had promised to cooperate with the embassy, but who was “not to be trusted and is anyhow so politically inexperienced that his regime offers little prospect of stability.”46 The British, in their own way, mourned Seyyed’s departure. They wrote of him as a “paragon of all the virtues,” as a man “having been born altogether a century too soon.”47 For the next four decades, every time Iran faced a political crisis, the British sought the solution by pushing for the return of Seyyed Zia as prime minister. More than once, the only obstacle to Seyyed’s return to the center of power was Mohammad Reza Shah’s obdurate opposition.

  As the country was undergoing these radical changes, and as Reza Khan’s political power was increasing almost daily, his son Mohammad Reza’s life began to change as well. His early family life was anything but peaceful. His parents had been, for all practical purposes, separated at the time of his birth and were on the verge of divorce. He lived with his domineering and deeply devout mother and his sisters. The mother’s religion was one of amulets and sacrificial lambs, of evil eyes and ominous dreams, of prayers and offerings of penance to the Lord. Mohammad Reza’s own religiosity—his firm belief that he was in communion with the divine, that the heavens protected him, that omnipotent God had entrusted him with the arduous task of leading the ship of state, his firm conviction that “a supernatural force” guided him in his kingship—can, in no small measure, be attributed to his mother’s habits of heart and mind.

  His father, on the other hand, was decidedly averse to all such beliefs. He dismissed them as superstitions and “womanly” preoccupation. But he was an absentee father, too often away in those early years of his son’s life. He was, furthermore, a soldier and a peasant by temperament, disinclined towards demonstrative shows of affection toward his children, even to his favorite son, Mohammad Reza. Such signs of affection, he thought, were effeminate and begot irresolution and an effeminate disposition in those who received them. When the young Mohammad Reza most needed his father, the man was busy with wars and with politics.

  Mohammad Reza’s early years were also important for his later life from a different perspective. He was born a soldier’s son, but he grew up to become a king. His formative experiences as a boy did not ready him for the kind of life that was “thrust upon him” by history. Kings are born not “to sue, but to command.”48 Mohammad Reza was born to sue, and his temperament, as well as his early boyhood, ill-prepared him to command.

  Furthermore, many of his father’s friends first met Mohammad Reza as a shy young boy, exhibiting due deference to his elders; when, two decades later, he became king, the same politicians were expected to show him the reverence due to a king. Some in this group found the transition hard, if not impossible, to manage. Acquired or “borrowed” majesty, as Shakespeare wisely wrote, is a hard thing to achieve. Moreover, the mundane details of everyday life can have a corrosive power on the supposed haloed majesty of monarchs. Traditional monarchies spare sovereigns and their subjects these agonies by suffusing the life of royalty from birth in a mist of majesty and mystery. Future kings often live in the lush isolation of “forbidden cities,” and while such estrangement and isolation might well dampen their abilities to cope with reality, it affords them the requisite aura of mystery. Modernity is, as Machiavelli was the first to note, the age when inherited legitimacy is no longer viable, and princes must engineer and maintain their own legitimacy. While traditional monarchies thrived on the idea of divine legitimacy, and thus required pious and docile subjects, modernity begets and demands instead a knowledgeable citizenry. Monarchies thus seem incompatible with modernity and the age of paparazzi; they find it hard to survive in the world of investigative journalists, inquisitive scholars, archives, and cameras that capture the life of royalty in its every mundane detail and leave little to the imagination. Monarchies require a certain degree of opacity, and modernity is an age of transparency.

  Some of those who had seen the young Mohammad Reza as a small boy of three or four, and thus had seen him when he was altogether bereft of the aura of majesty and of the pomp and ceremony that power later afforded him, found it hard to take him seriously as a king. One of these men was amongst the handful of politicians who openly challenged Reza Khan’s claim to the throne in 1925 and later defied his son when he ascended the throne.

  His name was Qavam, and he was a cabinet minister a good ten years before Mohammad Reza was even born. By blood, Qavam was connected to the Qajars, and by temperament, he was insatiably ambitious. In 1921 he was the governor of Khorasan province, but his appetite for power seemed to have no limit. Seyyed ordered him arrested and brought to Tehran. But before he arrived in the capital, Seyyed had fallen, and Qavam was appointed prime minister. Mohammad Reza was but three years old when his father became the war minister in Qavam’s cabinet. Early in his tenure as prime minister, on the occasion of the Persian New Year, Qavam paid a courtesy visit to Reza Khan’s house. As is customary in such visits, the older Qavam sat the three-year-old Mohammad Reza on his lap, whispered sweet nothings in his ears, and gave him a gold coin—an ashrafi—as aydee, or New Year’s gift. Giving cash and coins on such occasions was in those days, when toys and other commodities were a rarity in Iran, nothing usual. Almost exactly twenty years later, the two met again—by this time, that boy had grown into a king and Qavam was granted an audience to be appointed, again, as prime minister. He had spent many of the years in between these two meetings in exile. He had allegedly hired two assassins to kill Reza Khan. No sooner had he walked into the Shah’s office than the wily and ironic Qavam is reported to have said, “Masha-allah [Praise God], Your Majesty has surely grown since I last saw you.”

  But in 1921, Qavam’s rapid fall and rise were the direct result of Seyyed’s hubris. Though real power was in the hands of Reza Khan, Seyyed behaved more and more like a dictator. The ranks of his enemies swelled and his days in office were now numbered. Exactly one hundred days after his appointment as prime minister, Seyyed Zia was, to the relief of his detractors, dismissed from his post. His last meeting with Ahmad Shah, a dedicated foe of Seyyed, took place only days before Seyyed’s dismissal. Not long after leaving Iran in 1921, Seyyed was peddling Persian carpets in the bustling street corners of Weimar Berlin. He then settled in the aristocratic quiet of Montreux in Switzerland. As he later confessed in an interview, in the days and months after leaving Iran, grief and anger sometimes tore asunder his façade of calm. “I would take cold showers,” he said, “and scream in anger at my fate.”

  Back in Tehran, his ex-partner, Reza Khan, was methodically climbing the political ladder. Not long after Seyyed’s dismissal, Reza Khan issued an unusually long declaration, setti
ng out the reasons why he had undertaken the coup, and declaring that henceforth, if any paper or magazine suggested that anyone other than him was the coup’s mastermind, that paper would be banned and the journalist punished.49 At the same time, he began amassing an illicit fortune, a habit that proved to be his Achilles’ heel as a ruler. The British Embassy reported that, on more than one occasion, Reza Khan used the coercive power of his office to purchase land and property in Tehran and other places around the country at a fraction of their real price. In March 1925, for example, the embassy reported that Reza Khan “added to his already extensive estates in Mazandaran by purchasing more land to the value of 800,000 tooman,”50 in those days a considerable fortune.

  Changes in Reza Khan’s fortune meant changes in his son’s life. More money brought more opulence, while more power brought a more constricted life for Mohammad Reza. As the family moved to a bigger house in a more prosperous section of the city, his father insisted on choosing his son’s friends. His closest friend, aside from his twin sister—who, in a desperate attempt to endear herself to her brother, became more and more of a tomboy—was Majid A’lam. He was chosen because his father was a Court physician, and Reza Khan wanted his son mingling only with the children of the elite. But the games they played were those enjoyed by any normal children of the time—hide and seek, cops and robbers, and soccer. More than once, A’lam remembered wistfully, “I had, while playing, pushed or shouted at the future king, or his twin sister.”

  When Reza Khan was the strong man of Iran, the Parliament passed the “Law of Identity and Personal Status.” All titles, military or civilian, inherited or purchased, were to be abolished. Every Iranian male was now asked to choose and register a family name for himself and his family. Hitherto, people had been known by their first names, followed by a nickname reflecting their infirmity, their profession, or their town or village of birth. For his own family name, Reza Khan picked Pahlavi51—the name of the pre-Islamic language of Persia.