The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  In order to fight the Left’s sudden power and influence—a fear soon augmented by the gradual dawning of the Cold War—and to improve his own image in the country, the Shah launched a three-pronged policy. He began donating large sums of money to different public causes. This was, essentially, in lieu of his promise to return the ill-gotten gains he inherited from his father to their rightful owners. In the same spirit, he also undertook a kind of unilateral, individual land reform and sold at discount prices some of the farmlands formerly called “Royal Properties.” The land was distributed amongst the peasants who had long toiled on it, not the land owners from whom the property was initially “purchased.”

  The Shah also tried to give some of his controversial fortune back through publicized acts of philanthropy. The donations varied in their size and intended use. On September 27, 1941, he announced fifteen different donations, ranging from money to build three new medical schools around the country, a homeless shelter in Tehran, and a nursery to funds set aside to support research in science and medicine.25 It has never been clear how many of these promised charitable institutions were in fact ever launched.

  There was also the question of the funds Reza Shah had allegedly stashed away in foreign banks. Relying on the Shah’s repeated declarations, and upon hearing from the British government that they had no specific information on the whereabouts of Reza Shah’s foreign fortune, the Foroughi cabinet eventually issued a terse statement declaring that “we have so far found no evidence that [Reza Shah] had any accounts in foreign banks.”26 In spite of its declaration of ignorance, the British government continued to monitor the new Shah’s financial activities. Their efforts soon bore surprising fruit.

  Only months after the new Shah had come to power, the British government intercepted a telegram from a European bank to an American financial institution and learned that “the shah has one million (repeat one million) dollars in America and that he is now looking for safe investment for this money.”27 Two years later, the Shah opened another private account for himself in Guarantee Trust Company in the United States. Only this time, the sum was being transferred from one of the Shah’s bank accounts in Iran. According to a March 10, 1943, telegram from the U.S. Ambassador to the State Department, “the rials with which the dollars were purchased were part of the more than six hundred millions left by the Shah Reza to present Shah. It would appear that Shah desires to have money abroad for two reasons: . . . to take care of himself and family should he ever have to leave Iran, and because he is being mulcted out of his money through contributions under pressure from charitable and other purposes.”28

  An interesting aspect of this second transfer is the way the Shah went about doing it. Realizing that he must try and keep all such foreign account transactions and transfers away from the public and the media, the Shah successfully convinced the American Embassy to allow him to use their diplomatic pouch for all correspondence about his bank accounts.29 On another occasion, the British Embassy in Tehran reported from what it called a reliable source, “The Shah was buying large quantities of foreign exchange.”30 According to the British Embassy, the Shah’s concern for his foreign assets was “because he foresees popular opposition to his attempt to secure complete control of the army.”31 In later years, as the issue of his wealth in foreign banks continued to remain a sensitive political issue, the question of using America’s diplomatic pouch remained a viable option and a temptation for the Shah.

  Making donations was the first element of the Shah’s three-pronged strategy for consolidating the monarchy. The second was his decision to fight fire with fire. Responding to the sudden creation of hundreds of newspapers around the country, most of them critical of him and his father, he began paying a subsidy to a number of journalists, hoping they would defend him. The British government tried to dissuade the Shah from these efforts, but their advice seems to have had little practical effect. Amongst the most enduring such ties was that with Ali Asghar Amirani, the editor of Khandaniha—Iran’s homegrown version of Reader’s Digest. For the next three decades, Amirani played a complicated role in Iranian journalism—often critical of politicians, always faithful to the Shah.

  In the arena of cultivating ties with journalists, the Shah’s boldest step was his eventual decision to launch a paper whose job would be to present the point of view of the monarchy. As the publisher, he chose a young, talented, French-trained law professor by the name of Mostafa Mesbahzadeh. Before long, the daily paper Keyhan was launched, with the Shah providing a check from his personal account for 200,000 tooman as seed money. Abdolrahman Faramarzi, one of the country’s most esteemed journalists of the time, became the paper’s editor in chief.

  A few weeks after the check for the seed money was paid, the Shah was given the equivalent of 200,000 tooman worth of stock in the company set up to publish Keyhan. The Shah did not keep the stock for himself but made a gift of them to Hussein Fardust—who claims he never cashed the shares but instead kept them in his basement as a relic.32

  The Shah also felt that some of the attacks in the Iranian media were instigated by foreign powers. In some cases, he tried to solve the problem by directly negotiating with representatives of the country allegedly responsible for the attack. For example, after Seyyed Zia returned home from twenty-two years of exile and launched a paper that immediately began to criticize the Shah for the breach of the constitution and attacked Reza Shah for stashing away millions in his bank accounts, the Shah sent his Court minister, Hussein Ala, to meet with British Embassy officials. The Shah, Ala told the British Embassy, “should be immune from attacks.” The embassy’s response was as interesting as the Shah’s gesture. Instead of repeating the standard line about not interfering in Iran’s domestic affairs, this time they told Ala that the attacks were payback for the fact that the “Shah had breached” his truce with Seyyed Zia. In fact, the embassy had come to believe that Mossadeq (at the time a member of Majlis and, in a few years, prime minister) was “one of [the Shah’s] men,” and thus implied that attacks by Seyyed Zia on the Shah were “payback” for his alleged alliance with Mossadeq.33

  The third and most important component of the Shah’s three-pronged strategy for consolidating power, and the one that marked the sharpest departure from the policies of Reza Shah, was his attempt to reconcile with the clergy. The Shah and his father shared nearly every element of their respective paradigms of authoritarian modernization. They both believed in the indispensable necessity of an authoritarian monarch (in place of a king who reigned—not ruled—according to the letter of the Iranian constitution). They both afforded a key, if not decisive, role to the state in not only jump-starting the economy on its march to progress, but making investments in key industries and controlling the economy (in place of free markets and the force of market mechanism). They were both willing to use the coercive power of the state to replace market mechanisms, even control prices, and fight inflation. The Shah and his father both believed that key sectors of the economy must remain a monopoly of the state. Neither was averse to the idea of expropriating trailblazing investors in the interest of achieving such monopoly—or of eliminating the possibility of the emergence of an entrepreneurial class rich and powerful enough to challenge the king’s claims to absolute power. They both valued industrialization and believed that having a steel mill was the ultimate economic and symbolic measure of modernity. They both believed in using agriculture to facilitate industrial development. They both wanted a more educated working class, a larger and better trained technocratic class, a larger middle class. They both believed women should be fully enfranchised members of Iranian society. They both saw Iran’s future tied to the West and were committed to fighting Communism. They both saw urbanization as a key to progress, and they believed in the urgency of a modernized infrastructure. They were both fierce advocates of cultural and aesthetic modernity, so long as it did not tread in political waters. For both, Iran’s imperial grandeur in its pre-Islamic days was the e
ssential ingredient of a new national cultural identity for the country. And they both considered a strong military, under their own direct control, a necessary element for the success of their modernization project and for the maintenance of the country’s security and of their own hold on power. In this sense, the Shah’s desire for a large military was even stronger than his father’s. The craving is particularly remarkable when we remember that the young Shah had seen, with great sadness and surprise, how quickly his father’s much-vaunted military all but disappeared overnight.

  But father and son differed—and differed drastically—in their views on the role and place of religion and of the clergy in their paradigms. Reza Shah, acting in a spirit much like that of Atatürk in Turkey, moved aggressively to limit the role and number of the clergy in Iran. From the time he took over in 1925 to the time he left the country in 1941, though the population had more than doubled, the number of mosques had been reduced by half—turning some to schools, cinemas, and, in one case, an opera house. Before then, the idea of converting a mosque, even one in a state of derelict disrepair, to some other use had been nothing short of sacrilege. An expression in the Persian vernacular captures the essence of this convention: to compare someone to the door of a mosque is to imply sardonically that, in spite of their uselessness, they are irremovable from the position they hold. Reza Shah changed all of that and put many old mosques to modern use. The reduction in the total number of the clergy in the country was even greater. He also moved to deprive the clergy not just of their revenues from running the judicial system, but of their lucrative guardianship of vagf—religious endowments that covered such institutions as mosques, seminaries, and hospitals and that had been considered a crucial element in the backwardness of traditional Islamic economies.

  The Shah, on the other hand, saw the clergy—the inconvenience of their radical minority notwithstanding—as an indispensable ally against Communists, and his new paradigm was evident from his first days on the Peacock Throne. His faith, and his belief that he was indeed God’s “anointed,” added a sense of personal poignancy to this political paradigm. A few years after ascending the throne, he claimed that “Islamic tenets are humanity’s source of salvation. Following these rules in my time, and in any other will bring common welfare and comfort.”34 To realize his dream of using the clergy against his enemies, the Shah took two important steps. He helped to drastically increase the number of mosques in the country, and he made peace with the mullahs. During his tenure, the number of mosques increased to more than 55,000 (some say 75,000). The number of religious schools also witnessed a sharp rise, going from 154 to 214 in 1960. The rise in the second half of the Shah’s rule was even greater.35

  On June 3, 1943, Ayatollah Hussein Gomi, virtually exiled by Reza Shah eight years earlier, returned home to a hero’s welcome. Even before returning, he had let it be known amongst religious circles that he was returning home at the direct invitation of the Shah. He was not lying. The Shah had sent a special envoy—Zeyanl-Abedin Rahnama, a writer of renown and a critic of Reza Shah who was known for his extensive contacts amongst the clergy—to Iraq and entrusted him with the task of bringing back Ayatollah Gomi. Ironically, the British Embassy was one of the few voices warning the Shah against bringing back the powerful ayatollah. But the Shah was undeterred. By then, he had come to conclude that mullahs are “all royalists at heart.”36 They knew that Islam could not survive in Iran without the monarchy. The monarchy, the Shah often said, is the only reliable bulwark standing in the way of Iran’s becoming a secular or a Communist society, and the mullahs, he believed, knew this. What the Shah failed to realize is that some mullahs might well have believed all of this, but might also have had dreams of power themselves.

  Ayatollah Gomi was afforded a hero’s welcome by both the government and the people. The police in Tehran reported that some hundred thousand people had gathered near Gomi’s temporary residence to welcome him.37 The only public protest against the treatment afforded the returning Ayatollah came from Ahmad Kasravi, the eminent historian, social critic, and a sometime prophet of his own new “Behdini” doctrine—the Good Faith Religion. Kasravi had also written a daring critique of Shiism.38

  In those days, in the seminary in the city of Qom, a new, young rabble-rousing cleric named Navvab Safavi had emerged, talking the fiery language of revolution and espousing the view that Muslims must take up arms in defense of their faith, in silencing heretics, and in creating an Islamic state. The more traditional ayatollahs, particularly Ayatollah Boroujerdi, who was rapidly emerging as the preeminent leader of Shiites in the world, disdained Safavi and ordered other mullahs to stay clear of him and his brand of radical Islam. Ayatollah Khomeini took exception to this command and began to cultivate close ties with Safavi, who went on to create the Feda’yan-e Islam (Martyrs of Islam)—easily the most successful terrorist organization in modern Iran.

  The group’s first target would be Kasravi, who was brutally mutilated in March 1946 as he was being deposed on a pending lawsuit in the Ministry of Justice. Safavi had himself earlier tried but failed to assassinate Kasravi. The Shah would hear of this group’s existence only after they had committed their first murder. There was no independent intelligence organization at the time. Special units in the military and police performed the functions of an intelligence agency, but their work was focused on fighting Communism. Before long, the Feda’yan-e Islam would focus its wrath on the Shah and his ministers. It was in this context that Ayatollah Gomi returned home in triumph.

  A few days after settling back into his native city of Meshed, Ayatollah Gomi wrote a note to the Governor of the province, demanding action on the issues he claimed he had raised with the Shah. Before long, he sent another note, this time to Prime Minister Ali Soheili, and surprisingly haughty in tone, raising the same issues. Finally, on August 20, 1943, the Ayatollah received a letter from the Prime Minister, informing him that all of his demands would be met. Ayatollah Gomi had demanded the abolition of the law banning women from appearing in public wearing scarves and veils. As the Prime Minister’s letter makes clear, women would henceforth be allowed to appear in public anyway they chose.

  The Ayatollah’s second demand was a reversal of Reza Shah’s policy of putting religious endowments (vagf) under government control. The management of these properties, according to the Prime Minister’s letter, was to be returned to those stipulated in the endowment letter—in most cases the clergy. In agreeing to the Ayatollah’s third demand, the government decided to make classes on Islamic theology and ethics a mandatory part of the curriculum in Iranian schools. The clergy were put in charge of determining the content of these classes. Ayatollah Gomi also demanded the closing of coeducational schools around the country that had arisen toward the end of the Reza Shah period.39 Every one of the Ayatollah’s major demands was, on the order of the Shah, accepted by the government and became policy.

  The clergy, always in tune with the political pulse of society, realized that a new era had begun and that Reza Shah’s policy of weakening them had ended. When in 1945 Ayatollah Boroujerdi was hospitalized in Tehran, the Shah made a point of making a much-publicized visit to his bedside. The visit symbolized the Shah’s new policy. Caught in a fierce battle for control with powerful prime ministers and a rising tide of Communist activism, the Shah in those days went so far as to advocate the clergy’s active participation in politics. The clergy, he said, shoulder a great responsibility in ensuring that the state does not at any time veer off the path of tending to the needs of the people. He lived to rue the day he uttered those words. But in those days, ambitious prime ministers like Qavam-al Saltaneh (Ahmad Qavam) were a more pressing threat.

  The Shah first encountered the problem in 1942, when, much to his surprise and in spite of his resistance, he was forced to name Qavam prime minister. Only a few months earlier, the British and Soviet governments had both been adamantly opposed to a Qavam appointment; now they were both his chief proponents. Both
had considered Qavam a Nazi sympathizer. British support for Qavam was particularly startling in that, according to their own sources, he had not only participated in planning a coup attempt with Nazi Germany but had later met with Ali Akbari, a special Nazi envoy sent to Iran, to coordinate further pro-Nazi activities, including seizing power when Nazi troops arrived near Iran’s borders.40 But somehow, in 1942, Qavam had overcome British and Soviet objections and became their favorite candidate for the post of prime minister.

  The fact that the United States was also in favor of Qavam’s appointment at the time was not surprising. After all, it was Qavam who, during his first tenure as prime minister in the early 1920s, had tried to get American oil companies, particularly Standard and Sinclair, interested in Iranian oil. Now, somehow, Qavam had also convinced the Soviets and the British that he was the man of the hour. All three governments afforded his cabinet their full support.

  Qavam had first become prime minister in 1922, when the Shah was three years old, and his ambitions clearly went far beyond ensuring that the office of the prime minister was afforded all the power the constitution mandated. The Shah believed that Qavam wanted to replace him as the head of state and, in retrospect, there is considerable archival evidence to suggest that his fears were not altogether baseless. In fact, Qavam’s grandiosity and ambitions had been evident as early as 1918, when he was just a governor in the province of Khorasan. In those days, during official national ceremonies, unless the King was himself present, units of the army and police were expected to march past a portrait of the monarch. However, Qavam often put his own picture in place of the monarch’s. As prime minister, too, he used every occasion to show his preeminence over the King and embarrass the young Shah. He would sometimes mischievously ignore protocol and show up “late” to ceremonies, thus arriving after the Shah. On other occasions, when he and the Shah walked side by side, Qavam would, again contrary to protocol, walk a step or two ahead of the Shah. During much of his first decade on the throne, the young Shah used all of his power to block Qavam’s appointment as prime minister. When he failed, as he did on three occasions, he worked behind the scenes to cripple Qavam’s cabinets and bring about their demise.