by Abbas Milani
In Egypt the new Ambassador found a way of endearing himself and his wife to members of the Egyptian royal family. Once assured of King Farouk’s friendship, he finally raised the idea of a wedding that would join the royal families of Iran and Egypt. By then, Reza Shah had settled on Fawzia as the more suitable of the two Egyptian princesses. In the meantime, as Reza Shah and his Prime Minister were fast at work in finding a suitable wife for the future king, the Crown Prince was himself, by his own admission, altogether unaware of these efforts. He learned about them only when they bore fruit.
Once apprised of the good news that King Farouk had agreed to at least begin talks on an Egypto-Iranian union, Reza Shah was overjoyed. He picked a committee that was to go to Egypt and, following a long tradition in Islamic societies, ask for the hand of Princess Fawzia for Iran’s Crown Prince.
Fawzia was the oldest of King Farouk’s four sisters; she was seventeen at the time the marriage was first proposed. She had lived “her young life within the walled palaces and gardens of Cairo and Alexandria, Abdin, Kubbeh and Montaza.” In 1938 these palaces were the playgrounds of her family. Four decades later, some of the same palaces would be the last refuge for the pariah Shah. Fawzia was once described as a “supremely naïve, over-protected, cellophane-wrapped, gift packaged little girl” living in “bucolic surroundings, mobbed by adoring servants, aunts, ladies in waiting.”31
Before long, Jam received a telegram from Egypt. Though bedridden and burning with a high fever, he immediately set out for the Court, where he told Reza Shah that Farouk had agreed to the royal matrimony, predicated on his sister’s approval. At the same time, he had consulted with religious authorities to ensure that the marriage did not represent any insurmountable theological obstacle. She was, after all, a Sunni princess set to marry a prince of a Shiite nation. Assured of approval of the clerics, the only remaining obstacle was the approval of the princess and, before long, she too consented.
The committee left for Egypt, taking with them a letter from Reza Shah to King Farouk and a large collection of fine gifts—“diamond necklace, diamond broach, diamond earrings”32—but the Egyptians were far from impressed. In fact, they made a point of taking the Iranian delegation to the royal family’s many palaces and “their Thousand and One Night splendor, their hundreds of bedrooms, with golden fawcets and golden beds,”33 to show their wealth to the Iranian delegation. Still, before long, agreements were reached for a wedding, and on May 26, 1938, the Iranian and Egyptian courts simultaneously issued a communiqué announcing the engagement of Iran’s Crown Prince to Princess Fawzia. A tutor was assigned to teach the future queen of Iran the Persian language. When she finally settled in Iran, she was something of a polyglot—speaking Arabic and French fluently and Persian competently, but with a hint of an accent. To bypass the constitutional requirement that only a son born to a native Iranian could come to the throne, a parliamentary bill was hurriedly passed declaring her Iranian-born. In describing why his father had chosen Fawzia, the Shah felt that his father had two goals: he wanted someone from “a good family,” and he wanted “to connect the [Pahlavi] family to another royal family.”34
An understandable undertone of bitterness is evident in the Shah’s description of the process leading to his marriage. “I don’t think anyone will criticize me,” he wrote, “if I say that a king must have as much freedom about his private life as a simple peasant.”35 He suggested that in every civilized society, “family relations are considered part of the private domain, and free from outside interference, and all I wanted was the same right for myself.”36 He makes these critical comments a few paragraphs away from the lines where he describes, with prescribed joy, his first marriage. Before being told that he must go to Egypt and meet his future wife, he had never even seen a picture of her.
The Crown Prince learned of his engagement to Princess Fawzia on the same day that his nation was informed. In March 1939, the Crown Prince set out for Egypt to meet and marry his future wife and officially celebrate their wedding. From Tehran, he flew to Beirut, where he arrived on March 1, 1939, and immediately boarded the royal yacht Mahroussa—one of Khediv Ismail’s extravagant mementos of modernity, “finished in late Victorian splendor.” In 1939, the Mahroussa carried the Iranian Crown Prince to Egypt; less than a quarter century later, King Farouk would use the same yacht to leave his country after a coup toppled his increasingly corrupt and sclerotic regime.
The storied boat carried the groom-to-be to Alexandria with two Egyptian cruisers escorting and Egyptian planes flying over as it neared its destination. There the Iranian wedding party boarded the royal train for Cairo, where there was a gala to celebrate the engagement at the Abdin Palace. At eleven o’clock on the morning of March 15, the official wedding ceremonies were conducted. While the Crown Prince was in Egypt, the semi-official daily paper Al-Ahram carried a picture of him and his bride on the front page virtually every day. Those were also the days when the Second World War was beginning, and every happy piece of news about the wedding was invariably accompanied, on the same page, with a report of some ominous development in Europe. In the meantime, the Crown Prince visited a number of historic places—some like Al-Azhar University, considered the oldest university in the world, and some like the pyramids, considered one of the wonders of the world. The contrast between the splendor of the Egyptian royal family with their corpulent but melancholy king, their fez-hatted ministers, their liveried servants, and a forlorn Iranian Crown Prince, often in a simple military uniform, heralded a marriage marred from its inception by widely differing sensibilities and aesthetic values.
On November 2, 1939, the royal couple returned to Iran, where they were afforded a welcome befitting the grandeur they had seen in Egypt. Many parties celebrated the wedding, this time in Iranian style. The streets of Tehran were dotted with elaborately decorated arches and banners, welcoming the royal couple back to Iran. The Crown Prince and his bride settled in a palace that was surely, in comparison with the princess’s Egyptian places of abode, meager. But their biggest problems were not rooted in magnitudes of architectural grandeur. The constant intrusions of some of the Shah’s siblings and his domineering mother, stories of the newly married groom’s philandering, and finally the ever-nearer menace of war combined to make the newlyweds’ life increasingly fraught with tension.
That season, in Tehran’s otherwise anemic social scene, the most coveted sign of power and “connection” was an invitation to the Iranian wedding ceremony. There was a big celebration arranged in the Amjadiye stadium, with a capacity of 25,000; tickets to the event were reserved for those in the highest echelons of power. Tehran was abuzz with talk of the European glamour of the future queen and the petty jealousies already evident among the Crown Prince’s siblings. Fawzia was the new maven of fashion.
The stadium wedding was long on manly sports and short on arts and dances. It began with the playing of the two countries’ national anthems, followed by synchronized acrobatics by students—always a favorite of authoritarian societies who use this synchronicity as a metaphor for social efficiency and harmony. It was followed by traditional Iranian calisthenics (bastani) with half-naked men of heavy muscular build playing with dumbbells, followed by fencing, football, a bevy of Boy Scouts exhibiting tropes and tricks they had mastered, and finally a recessional, singing the national anthems of the two countries.
Dinner was a more formal affair—in everything from the attire to the menu. “Caviar from the Caspian sea,” followed by “Consommé Royal” and a variety of fish, fowl, and lamb. Fruit and jelly were served for dessert. Princess Fawzia’s large entourage were all present, and by all accounts, she looked as glamorous as her elegant reputation demanded.
Not long after his marriage, the Crown Prince had his adenoids successfully removed. Just before the operation, Tehran was ripe with rumors of the arrest of about twelve officers, charged with espionage on behalf of the Soviet Union.37 Others talked of a plot to kill the King. So worried was
the government about regicide that “no films [were] ever passed by the censors which contain[ed] scenes of an assassination plot against a crowned head.”38 In this atmosphere of intrigue the Crown Prince insisted on the surgeons removing their face masks, lest there be someone with mischief on his mind.
A few weeks after the wedding, in 1940, Tehran had its first “scientifically conducted” census. At the beginning of the 1940s, the population of the city was 531,246—more than double the estimated population at the time of the foundation of the Pahlavi dynasty.
But while Reza Shah and his Crown Prince were busy with wedding plans, Nazi Germany was expanding its European war into global mayhem. The government of Iran declared its neutrality, something Iran had underscored many times before. But threatening clouds were clearly on the horizon, and Reza Shah and his son both knew it. Though some embassies reported at the time that after his marriage “the Crown Prince appears to have somewhat lost the full confidence” of his father,39 every indication is, in fact, that with every passing day, Reza Shah involved his designated successor more and more in matters of state. At the same time, in a meeting with members of the parliament, Reza Shah ominously stated that, though they were relying on the “correct policy of neutrality . . . this is not enough. We must prepare for harder days. This meeting is primarily for me to register my dismay at the work of the government. They keep telling us, ‘Your Majesty’s mind can rest assured,’ but when we look at how things actually are, we realize that we can be anything but assured.”40
* Of the twelve Imams revered by the version of Shiism dominant in Iran—Esna Asha’ri, or Twelvers—only one, Reza, is buried in Iran. His sister is buried in the city of Qom. But the Iranian landscape is also strewn with an estimated hundred thousand imamzadeh, big and small shrines, all claiming to be the burial site of some descendent of an Imam. Though it is all but impossible to substantiate these claims of divinity, the shrines invariably satisfy the devotional needs of the truly devout
† A common error of many historical narratives of the period is the assumption that the big Meshed confrontation was over the issue of women’s headgear
Chapter 6
CROWN OF THORNS
Or that I could forget what I have been,
Or not remember what I must be now!
Shakespeare, Richard II, 3.3.139–140
As the dogs of war were unleashed in Europe, the West became increasingly concerned about Iran. Hitler had his eye on the land of the Aryans. In the words of the American Ambassador to Tehran at the time, Reza Shah began to feel like “a helpless pawn upon the slippery chess board of power politics.”1 And anything that changed Reza Shah’s fate affected the political fortunes of the Crown Prince.
For both the Nazis and the Allies, Iran held the key to wartime victory. Long before hostilities actually reached Iran, both camps launched a new charm offensive to endear themselves to Reza Shah. Germany began ingratiating itself with Reza Shah by offering him, amongst other things, the steel mill he obsessively coveted. In 1936, the Hitler cabinet decreed that “Iranians were exempted from the restrictions of the Nuremberg Racial laws as pure-blooded Aryans.”2 This cynical propaganda ploy in 1936 became in 1941 a helpful tool for the government of Reza Shah and his son, Mohammad Reza Shah, to save Iranian Jews from the murderous Nazi machine. When the “Final Solution” began to turn the anti-Semitic Nuremberg Laws into a license for genocide, Iran used, amongst other things, the 1936 decree to save Iranian Jews from the ovens of Auschwitz. Thousands of European Jews who received Persian passports were also saved.3
It was in conjunction with this appeasing law that Reza Shah decided to change the way the countries of the West referred to Iran. For over 2,500 years, those who have lived in Iran have called themselves Irani, or Iranian. But when Greeks and Iranians were entangled in a long bloody war more than 2,000 years ago, the Greek historian Herodotus chose to call the foes not Irani, but Persians—after Pers (or Pars), a province of Iran where Persepolis, the imposing capital of the Iranian empire, was located at the time. From that time on, Westerners continued to use “Persian” to refer to Iranians, and by the early twentieth century, the name conjured everything the Romantics loved about the country—from the poetry of Omar Khayam and the beauty of Persian carpets to the delicacies of caviar and the beauty of the Persian feline.
Nevertheless, Reza Shah chose to forfeit the name Persia for Iran—evoking not the grandeur of the Persian past but consanguinity with the Aryan myth. It had obviously not reached Reza Shah that the Nazi concept of “Aryan” had little to do with the historic race of Aryans who lived on the Persian plateau.4
While the British and American governments worried about these apparently pro-Nazi gestures, as well as other signs of increased German influence in Iran, they also began mending fences with Reza Shah. When the Pahlavi Court announced the engagement of the Crown Prince to his Egyptian bride, the U.S. Ambassador in Iran wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt suggesting that “in view of the state of our relations with Iran, I believe that the absence of a message from you [will] create an unfavorable impression in Tehran. Inasmuch as it is understood that the relations between the Shah and the Crown Prince are particularly close I believe that the Shah would be especially appreciative of a message on this occasion.”5 Several heads of state, including the President of Poland and the Emperor of Japan, had earlier sent such notes of congratulations. On April 19, 1939, the King and Queen of England had sent the Princess of Albania and the Earl of Athlone as their personal representatives to the wedding. Franklin Roosevelt not only sent the suggested note, but followed it with another letter, this time congratulating Reza Shah “for the important and far-reaching reforms that have been introduced in Iran under Your Majesty’s inspiration and guidance,” and in particular for the completion of the Trans-Iranian Railway.6 The warmth of the two notes was particularly striking in light of the fact that only a couple of years earlier, Reza Shah had suspended Iran’s diplomatic ties to the United States over a minor incident in Washington.
The British were concerned not only about Nazi Germany and its plans for Iran, but also about Soviet designs on the entire region. They anticipated that the inevitable “Soviet expansion would, in the first instance, be directed against Iran and Afghanistan.”7 These anxieties only increased when Stalin and Hitler signed their infamous 1939 Non-Aggression Pact. After the surprising agreement, “the Soviet and German Legations began to work”8 in close collaboration in Iran. In November 1939, a coup attempt masterminded by the Soviets was discovered in Tehran and, according to Soviet archives, “three hundred officers were arrested.”9 Toward the end of the same year, the British Embassy in Tehran learned that seven to twelve officers of the Iranian army had been arrested and accused of espionage on behalf of the USSR.10 In late 1939, Russia coerced Iran into a new “commercial agreement” that forced Iran to use “exclusively Russian oil in the North” of the country and to guarantee Germany transit rights through Iran. Some 300 new “alleged German commercial” travelers came to Iran through the Soviet Union. In this period, the Germans went so far as to promise Iran that, should they win the war, they would return Bahrain—the oil-rich island in the Persian Gulf, claimed by Iran at the time (and for the next quarter of a century) as one of its provinces and controlled by Britain—to Iranian control.
In May 1941, the British Embassy in Iran began developing strategies that it would implement in the case of a “German or Russian occupation of Northern Iran.”11 In August 1941, the British Embassy reported that Germans had been “planning a coup” in Iran.12 Nazis had also found willing allies in leaders of the Qashgai tribes who not only helped hide two of Nazi Germany’s spymasters—Berthold Schulze-Holthus and Franz Mayer—in their midst, but declared themselves ready to help a massive uprising in favor of Germany.13
Another reliable source told the British Embassy about a planned “attempt on the life of [Reza] Shah and the declaration of a republic in August 1941.”14 Documents fro
m Nazi archives confirm some of these reports and show, in detail, the German government’s effort to bring about a coup to end the Pahlavi era. One of the Pahlavi dynasty’s nemeses, Ahmad Qavam, was an accomplice and the designated leader of one such failed coup attempt.15 Other sources suggest General Ayrom as the coup leader.
As a countermeasure to these Nazi and Soviet conspiracies, the British government began to develop two contingency plans. They took steps to create a network of “organizations capable of operating in territory threatened with invasion.” Their job would be to stiffen “the resistance of the national forces and population against Soviet encroachment.”16 According to the British and American embassies, during this period the Nazis too were busy trying to build a pro-Nazi militia network. It was believed that the German Embassy could, through its secret network, place “500 tough and well-armed men in the streets of Tehran within a few hours.”17
The second contingency plan called for the occupation of the oil-rich southern regions of Iran. From the time oil was discovered in Khuzestan and the British landed a contract affording them monopoly rights over it, they had considered Iran’s southern regions as their “sphere of interest.”18 They were interested in the rest of the country only to the extent that it allowed them to keep control of the oil fields. More than once, including the days when Reza Khan organized his coup in 1921, they had entertained plans to simply separate the oil-rich province of Khuzestan from Iran altogether if that was the only way they could keep their hands on the oil fields.
