The Shah

by Abbas Milani

  Even more impressive changes had been made in the number of women in schools. While the percentage of illiteracy amongst women was in 1972 still higher than amongst men, between 1961 and 1972 the number of female students at different educational levels increased 13 percent for primary schools, 30 percent for high schools, 88 percent for technical schools, and 65 percent for institutions of higher education.111 Yet, in spite of these accomplishments, even someone like Lajevardi was by 1975 disgruntled.

  The ultimate measure of a wise ruler, Edmund Burke argued after observing revolutions in France and England, is not just the ability to change society, but also the ability and disposition to preserve those changes—everything else, he said, is “vulgar in conception and perilous in execution.” There is no doubt that from 1965 to 1975, the Shah guided Iran through remarkable changes. Some of them even survived the fall of his regime. Iranian women refused to give up their rights and return to their “sacred motherly duties” just because Khomeini and his cohorts seized power. It is equally true that the totality of those changes, their tempo and texture, as well as the Shah’s style and substance of leadership, ultimately begot the Islamic Revolution of 1979. If, in that decisive decade, the celebration of 2,500 years of monarchy was the most lavish and controversial event organized by the Shah, then what happened during the Shah’s speech at the tomb of Cyrus at Pasargad, billed as the official launch of the ceremonies, was a potent metaphor of what lay ahead. As the Shah began to speak—telling Cyrus that he “could repose in peace for we are awake”—his unusually tremulous voice proved no match for the sandstorm and heavy winds that were suddenly unleashed. If the speech at the Cyrus tomb became the subject of much ridicule, one of the Shah’s most enduring legacies is the Shahyad Monument built to commemorate the 2,500 celebrations—a monument that powerfully captured his aborted vision for Iran.

  * Kaka siah literally means “any black face”; there is a hint of racism in the everyday use of the term

  † It has been suggested that the idea for the tent city’s design came from a sumptuous 1520 summit between England’s Henry VIII and France’s Francis I that was called the Field of the Cloth of Gold because of the extravagance of the costumes and the tents

  Chapter 17

  ARCHITECTURE AND POWER

  This earth shall have a feeling.

  Shakespeare, King Richard II, 3.2.24

  Architecture is the poetry of power. In modern despotic societies, when the aesthetics of politics and the mise-en-scène of marches and meetings become an inexorable part of the calculus of power, this strange synergy of politics and architecture is even more pronounced. Two buildings, one private and the place of his residence, the other public and the symbol of his era, capture the complexities of the Shah’s character and the nature of his power in the last two decades of his rule.

  Architecture has always been part of the lexicon of power in Iran. Kings and clerics used monuments to symbolize, legitimize, or consolidate their political or spiritual power. In pre-Islamic Persia, the palaces of Persepolis, and no less than Taq-e Kasra—the tallest free-standing arch in the world—were designed for the purpose of impressing and intimidating friends and foes, subjects and enemies. With the seventh-century Arab invasion and the advent of Islam, not only did Iran as a unified power begin to dwindle, but the erstwhile imperial grandeur was overshadowed by a new, austere aesthetic sensibility of Islam. The bas-reliefs of Persepolis and the paintings in Sassanian Iran underscored the prevalence of human representational art in ancient Persia. In the Islamic aesthetic regimen, however, with its ban on making an image or statue of a human (such creation, Islam believes, is an usurpation of God’s monopoly on creation), calligraphy and tile-work took the place of the representational arts. The genius of Persian architecture was, more than anywhere, channeled into the construction of mosques and, on a few occasions, palaces.

  Some 700 years after the Arab invasion, Isfahan, a city with an almost 3,000-year history as a human habitat and the first abode of Jews fleeing to Persia from Babylonian captivity, was picked as the new capital of a newly unified, centralized, and invigorated Iran. The city’s majestic Naghsh-e Jahan (map of the world), a large square designed by Shah Abbas, reflected his vision of power. He ruled Iran from 1581 to 1629 and fought against the Muslim Ottoman Turks, allying Iran with Christian Europe. In traditional Iran, the court, the mosque, and the bazaar had been the three pillars of power. The balance of power among the three elements at any one time shaped the nature of authority. If Isfahan captured the self-assurance of Iran during the apex of the Safavid dynasty, and if the design for Naghsh-e Jahan exhibited Shah Abbas’s image of the ideal balance of court, mosque, and bazaar, Tehran became and remained the capital under the next two dynasties. The sleepy village first became a monument to the rise of Agha Mohammad Khan, who founded the new Qajar dynasty in 1781. But the city’s radical transformation to a modern metropolis took place during the Pahlavi era, when it became a metaphor for the modernizing, authoritarian ethos of those fifty-four years.

  As a human habitat, Tehran and its environs are said to be 8,000 years old. Until it became a capital some 200 years ago, it was a half-derelict village caught between marauding tribes. Scholars have traced the etymology of the word “Tehran” to the habit of the medieval inhabitants of this small village who built their homes underground, thus the name of “Tahran,” or literally “Under-grounders.” The village lived in the shadow of its prosperous neighbor, the city of Rey. When Mongolian armies attacked and destroyed that grand and prosperous city in 1220, the troglodytes of Tehran “took refuge in their subterranean homes, and came out only when they felt safe.”1

  During the reign of the Qajar dynasty, new buildings and palaces were constructed in and around Tehran. Amongst them was a new royal summer residence, nestled in the slopes of the picturesque mountains that dominate the city’s northern skyline. Tehran is an anomaly amongst metropolises of the world for its lack of proximity to rivers or seas. Instead, it enjoys the majestic beauty of mountains on its northern borders. The cool breezes on those mountains made their slopes the favorite summer resort for the rich inhabitants of the city. Fath-Ali Shah (r. 1797–1834), whose long reign epitomized the Qajar dynasty’s corrupt anachronism, was the first king to build a house in the cool climes of those mountain slopes. It was near a village called Kardebeh, and it was surrounded by gardens that included some reed, or ney in Persian. Niavaran, or “the place of reeds,” became the name of the more than 130,000-square-yard (eleven-hectare) compound of palaces and office and utility buildings.

  In 1888, Nasir al-Din Shah ordered a new palace built on the compound. It was called Sahebgraniyeh, a derivative of sahebgeran, “Possessor of Good Grace,” one of a long litany of the Qajar king’s grandiose royal titles. His other titles included the “Pivot of the Universe” and “Shadow of God.” Although the Shah’s use of the title “Aryamehr”—“Light of the Aryans”—was derided as grandiose and bombastic by his critics, in comparison to the Qajar king’s quixotic grandiosity, it was decidedly humble. Another telling contrast is the Shah’s use of the Sahebgraniyeh Palace, compared to the way his predecessor had used the place. Though the small palace had itself no more than a dozen rooms, it was surrounded by about fifty small, four-room apartments, each set aside for one of the wives from the lusty Nasir al-Din Shah’s infamously large harem.

  During the early years of the Pahlavi era, the palaces in the Niavaran complex were left unused, becoming all but derelict. In 1938, in anticipation of the Crown Prince’s imminent marriage to Fawzia, the Sahebgraniyeh Palace was renovated for the wedding ceremony. But eventually the ceremonies were held at the Golestan Palace, and Sahebgraniyeh was once again left to the ravages of time. By the late 1950s, as the number of foreign dignitaries visiting Iran increased, the government decided it needed a new guesthouse. The Niavaran complex was chosen as the site, and Aziz Farmanfarmaian was picked to design the building.

  He was one of the early harbinger
s of a crucial new turn in Iranian modernity and its incumbent sense of aesthetics. It was a turn that permeated nearly every facet of the society. Iranian modernist artists, once enamored of the West and dedicated to imitation of the Western masters, began to experiment with a new modernity that was at once local and global, informed by Iranian tradition yet infused with values and visions from around the world. This new modernity affected prose and poetry, where artists like Ebrahim Golestan, Houshang Golshiri, and Mehdi Akhavan-Sales mined the tropes and lexicon of classical Persian literature to fashion modern works of fiction and poetry. In music, Abolhasan Saba fused the classical structures of Persian music (dastgahs) with formative ideas of Western classical music like counterpoint. In architecture and painting, the days of emulating the buildings of Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier or the paintings of Picasso and Pollack gave way to new styles that were at once Persian and Western, traditional and modern.

  The marriage of the Shah to Queen Farah, whose aspirations as a student of architecture were aborted by the offer of marriage to the Shah but who remained an architectural aficionado all her life, helped strengthen the emergence of this new sensibility. She saved some of the country’s most beautiful and bustling old neighborhoods and bazaars from the razing bulldozers of greedy developers and corrupt, ambitious officials. Her one big failure was her inability to save the old neighborhoods around the shrine of the Eighth Imam of Shiism, located in the city of Meshed. In that case, the Shah was convinced by the arguments of the advocates of urban renewal. Some have argued that the decision to raze the traditional markets and neighborhoods around the shrine was intended as a challenge to the power of the clergy whose stronghold included just such bazaars.

  The Queen also helped renovate several beautifully ornate classical buildings that had previously been left derelict. An example was her decision to hire Italian experts to wash off the thin layer of plaster that had been used by prudish men of power in the Qajar period to cover the erotica drawn on the walls and ceiling of Shah Abbas’s bedroom at Aligapu, his palace in Isfahan. Shortly after February 1979, with the victory of the Islamic Revolution, a new form of pious prudery led to the decision to once again cover the erotic fresco with a white layer of plaster.

  Even the design of buildings set aside for tourists reflected this new modern sensibility. The Tehran Hilton, the first foreign luxury hotel in Tehran, was yet another replica of the homogenized designs of the “familiar” Western hotel—long rows of rooms placed in a placid linear grid. On the other hand, the Shah Abbas Hotel, in Isfahan, built just a few years later, modified the traditional Persian designs for a caravansary and turned it into a modern hotel with all the amenities of a luxury hotel but unmistakably Persian. At the Queen’s insistence, the same sensibility shaped the design of the new Niavaran Palace.

  Farmanfarmaian had graduated from France’s most acclaimed school, the École des Beaux-Arts. In Iran, his early buildings were nothing but renditions of the modern style of European or American masters. But beginning with Niavaran, he found a way to combine traditional Persian motifs with the functionalism and individualism of modern architecture.

  In Western modern architecture the house is viewed as a “living machine” designed for the comfort of the individual. In traditional Iran, a complicated set of rules about the private and the public dictate essential elements of design. In that tradition, the inner sanctum was to be protected from the intruding gaze of strangers. Moreover, the most luxurious parts of the house were set aside for guests. Climatic exigencies were another factor dictating the kind of raw material used in traditional buildings. Farmanfarmaian’s goal and achievement was to combine the most functional and graceful elements of Persian and Western styles of architecture and arrive at what he called “a genuine modernity” and a “true connection to the Persian source.”2 His philosophy of architecture and aesthetics, rooted in his populist political disposition and acquired in pre–World War II Socialist France, all worked to make the Niavaran design unusually simple and bereft of grandiosity, yet graceful and efficient, unmistakably Persian and elegantly modern. When the building finally became the royal family’s main residence, the Queen’s own sensibilities shaped the final design of the building and also its uniquely cosmopolitan interior design. At the same time, the big reception hall on the second floor of the Sahebgraniyeh Palace adjacent to the Niavaran Palace became the Shah’s main office, and it too reflected the Shah’s taste and character.

  Before moving to Niavaran, the Shah’s main residence had been the Sa’ad Abad Palace. While living and working at Sa’ad Abad, the Shah held the most important official ceremonies at Golestan Palace, where the Peacock Throne was kept. By the late 1960s, as the city expanded more and more into the cooler northern climes of the slopes of the mountains and the upper and middle classes moved to those slopes, the increasingly congested and soot-covered southern parts of the city and the bazaar were left to the traditional and poor classes. Tehran became the oil El Dorado, millions converged on the city, creating shanty towns and poorer neighborhoods, virtually all located in the southern part of the city. As events in June 5, 1963, had shown, the combination of poverty, religious fervor, and rising expectations, along with the regime’s inattention to the urgent task of socializing new urbanites in the rules of urban living, turned these areas into a political powder keg. By then, the Golestan Palace, near the heart of the bazaar, was hard for the Shah to reach and even harder for his security detail to protect. In the Shah’s last years, it was rarely used.

  In contrast to Golestan, Sa’ad Abad sat on the slopes of Towchal Mountain, overlooking Tehran. The compound with its eighteen palaces and eight ornate and graceful gates had been built by Reza Shah on a property covering a 1.1 million square meters of wooded land. A river flowed through it. Reza Shah had bought the property for 400,000 tooman from a Qajar prince—a small fortune at the time, equal to about $200,000. He ultimately built eighteen palaces for himself, his wives, his children, and his brothers and sisters and their children. In the last years of the Shah’s rule, one of the buildings was also set aside for the use of Farideh Diba, the Queen’s mother. A couple of the palaces in the compound were sold by the Shah’s sisters to the government, one for use as the administrative headquarters of the court ministry, the other as the official residence of the court minister. There were allegations that the government of Hoveyda paid an exaggerated price for these palaces to placate some of the Shah’s siblings and turn them into his allies.3

  For years, the Shah’s residence in Sa’ad Abad was called the White House. It was there, in a separate room on the second floor, that he had set up his elaborate miniature electrical trains—with locomotives, cargo and passenger cars, stations, trees, and houses near the tracks. In the late 1950s, in deference to Soraya’s passion for bowling, the Shah had also ordered a bowling alley built in the basement of the White House. The eighteen buildings of Sa’ad Abad reflected Reza Shah’s taste, simple in design, Persian in motif, and green in their surroundings. By the time the Shah moved to Niavaran, over 400 people worked in the old palace compound. Moving to Niavaran physically separated the Shah from the rest of his family, but the ritual of spending virtually every night with them continued.

  The Shah’s two previous wives—Fawzia, accustomed to the storied opulence of Egyptian royalty, and Soraya, who craved and emulated the lavish living of the international jet set—complained about the paucity of space and the inelegance of Sa’ad Abad, as well as that of the Marble Palace (where the Shah lived soon after his return from Switzerland). Soraya thought the place had “a detestable atmosphere” with “ill-sorted furniture” and “kitchens [that] were ancient.” She lamented the lack of “Parisian decoration,” and in her own words, like Snow White in the cottage of the seven dwarfs, she “tried to remake” it into a more livable and more European home. Now, Queen Farah was keen on making Niavaran in her own image.4

  As it turned out, the palace also became a perfect metaphor for the Shah
’s paradigm of Westernized modernization. The Marble and Golestan palaces had the virtues and the weaknesses of traditional Persian architecture, and they both reflected Reza Shah’s naturalism. In contrast, Niavaran was, in both design and function, eclectically cosmopolitan. A number of Iranian and Western architects, designers, and aesthetes helped the Queen in designing and decorating the palace and collecting an impressive array of masterpieces of modern art and ancient artifacts. These aides and designers included such famous figures as Charles Savigny, Keyvan Khosravani, and Bijan Saffari, and the Queen’s relative Kamran Diba.5 It was a measure of the Shah’s and the Queen’s sensibilities that, although Khosravani and Saffari were openly gay, they nevertheless remained favorite fixtures of the royal family’s entourage. The Shah in particular enjoyed Khosravani’s quick sense of humor and his ability to make fun of courtiers and politicians alike. The food service at the court, he wrote, was “something even worse than the room service in a third rate hotel. I could never get a hot tea there.”6 In a tone of brilliant satire he describes the difficulties of getting a simple meal, or a glass of whiskey with ice, at the royal Court. He also acted as something of a fashion advisor to the Queen, helping her find rare Persian fabrics and designing them into gowns and dresses with Persian motifs. For more than a decade, he was considered the top designer and an aesthetic advisor for the Queen. The Queen’s decision to wear these dresses went a long way in revitalizing the disappearing craft of handwoven fabrics in Iran. Khosravani’s descriptions of the Queen’s habits and proclivities, even her relationship with her small gray Cornish poodle—“a particularly neurotic and noisy dog”7—are brilliant and searing in their honesty. At the same time, Khosravani also offered occasional advice on new developments on the art scene.