by Abbas Milani
But of Reza Shah’s reforms, the one that most directly affected his son’s political future was the plan to secularize the Iranian polity and limit the influence of the Shiite clergy. The clergy’s main source of economic power and social status had until then been their control over the judiciary and the education system. A third source of their income had been their role as executors of vast religious endowments (vagf). Reza Shah disenfranchised the clergy by depriving them of the revenues they historically received from the vagf and from running both the judiciary and the education system. The start of a modern university and the establishment of a secular law school were serious blows to the power of the clergy. Limiting their roles in these areas meant a radical curtailment of the clergy’s ideological, economic, and political power. The policy left a lingering sense of betrayal in at least some of the clergy. Ironically, while the Shah changed this aspect of his father’s policy and attempted a rapprochement with the clergy, he ended up paying the price for the clergy’s seething anger.
Reza Shah’s confrontation with the clergy reached its zenith in mid July 1935, in the city of Meshed, where the shrine of Shiism’s eighth Imam, Reza,* is located. A few weeks before the confrontation, Reza Shah had ordered a ban on traditional forms of Shiite mourning—particularly self-flagellation and self-mutilation, in which mourners beat their backs with chains, or their foreheads with machetes. Also banned were t’aziye, a traditional form of Shiite passion play that mourns the martyrdom of Shiism’s third Imam, Hussein, in the Battle of Karbala. To Reza Shah and his cultural advisors, t’aziye was nothing but an emblem of reactionary tradition.
The 1935 ban did not take place in a social vacuum: this was an era when similar ideas were being advocated by many Iranian thinkers and secular intellectuals. Even a large number of Shiite writers and theologians had also begun promoting a new form of Shiism—rational in vision; bereft of superstitions, tokens, amulets, and self-mutilation; and free from the grim cult of grief as a sign of piety and guarantor of salvation. Moreover, in a pattern that echoed one of the demands of the Protestant Reformation in Europe, these Shiite reformers also wanted a faith free from the domination of the traditional clergy.
One young reformist named Ali Akbar Hakamizadeh launched a journal called Homayoun in January 1935 and published ten issues. Each one had exactly thirty-two pages and, aside from iconoclastic articles on Shiism, contained articles on hygiene and at least one “entertainment” piece. Hakamizadeh also published a book in 1934 called Asrare Hezar-Saleh, or Thousand-Year-Old Mysteries, in which he advocated a Shiism without the obscurantism of the clergy, and a polity guided by the rule of law and reason.9
It was a measure of the power of these reformist ideas, and of Hakamizadeh’s book, that Ayatollah Khomeini’s first published book was an angry polemic against them. He called the proponents of these ideas “infidels” and “corrupters of the earth”—a concept that came back into bloody vogue in the days and months after the Islamic Revolution of 1979—and asked for their execution.10 Ayatollah Khomeini not only defended the rituals of mourning, but argued that the rituals and the tears of the pious and, most important of all, the presence and power of Shiite clergy, are in fact the true pillars of Shiism and the key to its survival.11 In the sixties and seventies, when ideas critical of the clergy were once again in vogue, it was Ayatollah Khomeini more than anyone else who rose to suppress these ideas and defend the role of the clergy in preserving his “beloved Islam.”
But Reza Shah’s most contentious orders had to do with how men and women appeared in public. In Iran, as in other countries, sartorial changes are often one of the earliest signs and most sensitive barometers of social change and of the transition from tradition to modernity. The first controversial order banned the traditional headgear worn by most Persian men, requiring everyone to wear instead a new “modern” hat, invariably called a Pahlavi hat. The clergy, pining for a confrontation with Reza Shah, and anticipating more pressure from him in the future, challenged the order. Some ayatollahs issued fatwas (religious decrees) against the new hats, and against the emerging fashion of neckties, arguing that these represented surrogate crosses.12 On July 17, 1935, protestors in the city of Meshed took to the streets and then, chased by the police, took refuge in Imam Reza’s shrine. For many centuries, mosques and shrines had been considered sanctuaries, safe havens free from the reach of the government. Reza Shah defied the tradition, ordering the army to attack the demonstrators. Scores of protesters were killed. Casualty figures ranged from sixty to several thousand.†
Ayatollah Hussein Gomi, then one of Iran’s top Shiite clerics, left Meshed in protest. He had been, to that point, a supporter of Reza Shah, publicly declaring that Iran’s glories were all due to Reza Shah.13 He came to Tehran, hoping to visit with Reza Shah and register his strong protest over the shrine episode, but to his dismay, Reza Shah refused a meeting. As a gesture of protest, the Ayatollah left the country, but his voluntary exile lasted only six years. No sooner had Reza Shah abdicated than his son, in a major reversal of policy and attitude, invited the Ayatollah back to Iran in 1941. His return was to have far-reaching ramifications for Iran and for the new Shah.
On January 7, 1936 Reza Shah issued another order, this one even more controversial, decreeing that Iranian women would henceforth only be allowed in public shorn of their traditional veils. From the time of the Constitutional Revolution (1905–1907), a number of autonomous women’s group had appeared throughout the country. The Bolshevik Revolution, too, had a profound influence on Iranian women. Beginning in 1926, a number of women, many of them living in Tehran, had begun to test the limits of their freedom by appearing in public wearing only a hat rather than the traditional veil.14 The government and the police implicitly protected these women from the wrath of the more pious citizens. In 1934, a conference was held to celebrate the life and work of the poet Ferdowsi in the city of Tous, not far from the city of Meshed, long a Shiite stronghold. In the course of the conference, a few women appeared without a veil, and the clergy, though angry, chose to do nothing.15
Despite these early hints of change, Reza Shah’s order created something of a shock amongst the more traditional sectors of Iranian society. Even today, more than half a century after that decision, many secular Iranians, as well as advocates of women’s rights, have rejected Reza Shah’s order as an act of brazen despotism. He dictated by royal fiat, they say, and overlooked the fact that social transformations can only come through a gradual, endogenous process of change. The clergy once again spared no effort to fight the new decree. By then, Reza Shah had such a strong grip on power that religious forces could do little but accept defeat. They would bide their time, and only when Reza Shah was off the throne would they resume their effort to turn back the clock and bring back the veil, or at least the right of Muslim women to wear it in public.
Reza Shah believed that his strong-arm tactics were the indispensable tools for fostering modernity and fighting stubborn forces of tradition. But this tempting dialectic of despotism and development turned out to be a vicious circle—self-generating and self-fulfilling in the short run, and self-negating and self-destructive in the long run. He needed an iron hand, Reza Shah claimed, if he was to make changes in an otherwise ossified social structure. The more changes he made in that structure, the more convinced he became that his iron hand had been the panacea.
In 1936, when the teenage Mohammad Reza returned from his European sojourn, he remained simply a passive and docile observer of his father’s iron hand and the changes it forced not just on the body politic, but on his life and that of other members of the royal family. Less than a month after his return home, his twin sister, Princess Ashraf, asked him, in desperation, to intercede on her behalf and convince Reza Shah to change his mind about the marriages he had planned for her and for her older sister, Princess Shams. Among the royal family, the only person who dared challenge the decisions of Reza Shah was the Queen Mother. It was a source of great amuse
ment in the royal family that the man whose gaze brought terror to the hearts of ministers and military men went into hiding when he saw the Queen Mother coming. All through her life, her relationship with her estranged husband, Reza Shah, and his fear of her, as well as his mode and manner of intimacy with her, was a favorite subject of joking banter between her and Mohammad Reza Shah.16 “How did you fall in love?” the Shah asked his octogenarian mother at a Court dinner in April 1976. “How often did you sleep together?” A giggling Queen Mother answered that “most of the time we spent together, we were not on speaking terms,” but she clearly enjoyed the light banter. In 1936, however, she was not willing to come to her daughters’ aid. Neither was the Crown Prince.
Princess Ashraf was nearly seventeen years old when Reza Shah decided that she and her eighteen-year-old sister, Princess Shams, must get married. Unbeknownst to them both, he had asked Prime Minister Mahmoud Jam to prepare a list, accompanied by photos, of young men from prominent Iranian families in the country who were eligible to marry the Shah’s two daughters. In compiling the list Jam also decided to include the name and a picture of his own son, Fereydoon, in those days a lieutenant registered in France’s storied Saint Cyr military academy. In the elaborately embroidered uniform of a French Saint Cyr officer, he cut a dashing figure, and Reza Shah was immediately impressed. He chose him for Princess Ashraf and picked Ali Qavam, the scion of the famous Anglophile family from the city of Shiraz, for Princess Shams. While engaged in this matchmaking frenzy, he also decided that Qavam’s daughter, Taj, should marry Assadollah Alam, the son of the Alam family that had been prominent in the Khorasan province of Iran for several hundred years. The engagements were announced on October 1, 1936. No sooner had Princess Shams laid eyes on Jam than she decided she preferred him over Ali—the man her father had picked as her designated husband. The ever-petulant and spoiled “favorite daughter” who invariably got what she wanted prevailed yet again, and when the official announcement was made, she was set to wed Jam.17 Princess Ashraf had no choice but to resign herself to a forced marriage to Ali Qavam. Before long, Reza Shah decided that the Crown Prince, too, needed to find a wife and future queen.
All of these changes in the Court took place in the context of a world that was also radically changing. The specter of Nazism haunted not just Europe but Asia, Africa, and America. Iran was not spared. Hitler had his eyes on the oil fields of Iran and the Persian Gulf, and he spared no effort in trying to appeal to the people and governments of the area. The fact that his harangues were often targeted against the British and Soviet menace, the two colonial foes of Persia, made the Nazis’ sinister work easier. The appeal of Germany as the supporter of a “Third Way”—neither British nor Russian—preceded the rise of Nazism and first appeared in Iran during the time of the First World War. In the thirties, the Nazi propaganda machine in Iran was well oiled. One of the earliest signs of this Nazi intellectual onslaught was the publication of a magazine called Iran-e Bastan (Ancient Iran).
On January 14, 1933, the first issue of Iran-e Bastan, printed on noticeably expensive glossy paper, appeared in Tehran. There can be no doubt that the launch of the magazine was done with the consent of the Iranian government as, in those days, no paper or magazine could be published in the country without the government’s permission; according to its editors, one of their main sources of revenue was government-sponsored advertisements. In its first issue, Iran-e Bastan declared itself “partisans of the present policy of the Persian empire to uplift Persia to the grandeur of ancient Iran.”18
The first issue featured Reza Shah on its front page, and the second carried a similarly large picture of the Crown Prince—both in full royal regalia. While the first issue gave no overt hint of the magazine’s Nazi sentiments, beginning with the second issue, Iran-e Bastan became increasingly aggressive and unabashed in its defense of Hitler and the Third Reich. In the second issue, for example, there is a picture of Hitler, who is described as “a strong man, of firm ideas” and a leader whose “ideas are followed by millions of people.”19
In later issues, the magazine became even more open in its advocacy of Nazi ideology. It often wrote to glorify the Aryan race and spoke of Iran’s shared common legacy with Germany’s Aryan Reich. After a few months, Iran-e Bastan claimed it had a readership of more than 20,000, and its advocacy of Nazism became more pronounced. In its fourteenth issue, there were four pictures of Hitler: as an infant, “with his father looking at his son in admiration,” Hitler when he is a few months old, Hitler and his dog, and finally Hitler showing affection to German laborers.20 A few weeks later, the front page of the magazine carried an image of the swastika, describing it as “the symbol of Aryans and a banner of their liberation and happiness.”21
Iran-e Bastan regularly discussed National Socialism and its goal of “cleansing the country” of “the material and spiritual influence of foreigners and Jews.”22 The magazine continued to appear well into its second year, when it suddenly folded. The discourse developed by the magazine helped shape the ideology of the Iranian Nazis who became active again in the forties and, in the guise of new parties, advocated proto-Nazi ideologies like extreme nationalism, anti-Semitism, Aryan supremacy, and the cult of a fuehrer (rahbar).
In 1936, at the time of his son’s return from Europe, Reza Shah seemed intractably entrenched in power. The Crown Prince’s return, on May 11, 1936, even more than his departure, was greeted with much fanfare in the state-dominated media. Once again, Reza Shah and the royal family were on hand to greet the returning prince.
While the Shah claimed in his 1961 memoir, Mission for My Country, that he had finished his course of studies at Le Rosey and was awarded his diploma before returning to Iran in 1936, Le Rosey school records dispute his claims. The records state that the Shah did not “graduate in the school, his father took him back to Iran for politic[al] conveniences, where he finished his studies.”23 They describe the Shah as “a very good student, and a great sport-man (football, swimming).”24 Not long after returning to Tehran, the Crown Prince was placed in a class in the Officer’s Academy, where he continued his education. But the real contentious issue between father and son was not whether he had finished high school.
To Reza Shah’s great dismay, the Crown Prince had come back with his newfound friend, Ernest Perron. Aside from their experience in Switzerland, there was much that connected the unlikely friends. Perron was an incorrigible gossipmonger, and he rejoiced in gathering all the gossip and sharing it with his powerful friend.25
Another quality that possibly further endeared Perron to the Shah was his devout Catholicism. The Crown Prince must have felt particularly pressured by Reza Shah’s determined irreligious disposition, and Perron offered him the solace and company of a man of religious fervor. In fact, the Shah claims that during his Switzerland journey, after a short respite, he returned to his faith and religion, and “started to recite the Moslem daily prayers . . . and I said them with real fervor and conviction.”26 These revelations, made public in 1961, when he was on the verge of a major confrontation with the mullahs who opposed him, are as important for what they portend of his policies on religion as they are for the glimpses they offer into his habits and beliefs as a young man in Switzerland, away from the sway of his father and from the demands of his status as a crown prince.
But their shared past and common proclivities could not convince Reza Shah that Perron should be allowed to stay near the Crown Prince. He banished him from the Court, but not from the country. There are reports that on one occasion, when Reza Shah accidentally ran into Perron, he went after him with the military staff he invariably carried.27 To keep Perron in Iran and away from Reza Shah’s sight, he was given a job attending to the gardens of one of the hotels owned by Reza Shah. While Perron bided his time for an occasion to return to the center of power near his friend, Reza Shah chose a wife for his son.
The task of finding the right future queen was, once again, delegated to Prime Minister Ma
hmoud Jam. The Crown Prince himself was not involved in, or even informed of, the process. No stone was to be left unturned, Jam was told, in finding the most suitable candidate. Many Iranian families considered their daughters eligible and worked hard behind the scenes to influence the selection process. Ultimately, royal families of other countries, particularly in the Muslim world, were also scouted. The most eligible candidates were the two sisters of King Farouk of Egypt—Faeze and Fawzia. A new Iranian Ambassador to Egypt was named, and his special mandate was to further inquire into the “character of the bride-to-be” and ascertain the wisdom of a marriage.28
Once in Egypt, the new Ambassador clumsily broached the idea with the Egyptian Prime Minister, who summarily dismissed it. “The marriage of a Sunni Princess to a Shiite Prince,” he declared, “is a recipe for disaster.”29 When told about this rejection, Reza Shah was incensed. He felt the Ambassador had mishandled the situation and he recalled him. A new Ambassador was dispatched to Cairo with the mandate of arranging the betrothal of an Egyptian Princess to the Crown Prince. One of the main qualifications the wife-to-be had to have was being “well-versed in the ways of royalty.”30
