A History of Iran

by Michael Axworthy

  Later in the same year Reza Khan moved against the Jangalis in Gilan and quickly overcame them, their Soviet allies having departed under the terms of a new treaty with the Persian government. Their leader, Kuchek Khan, took refuge in the mountains but died in the snow; when his body was found his head was brought to Tehran. After this important early success, Reza Khan’s priorities turned to regularizing state revenue, strengthening the armed forces, and enforcing government control over the whole territory of Persia. This last task meant tough action against tribes like the Bakhtiari and the Lors, and later the Shahsevan in Azerbaijan and the Turkmen in the northeast. He also acted against one of the Arab tribes allied with the British in the southwest, and was again successful. These actions were popular with most Persians because the tribes had so often facilitated foreign interventions. Also there was the ancient, uneasy hostility between tribesmen on the one hand, and the peasants and townspeople on the other.

  The fourth Majles convened in 1921, and Reza Khan was able to keep them broadly supportive of his reform programs by allying with conservative elements. In 1923 he made himself prime minister, and the shah went on what was to prove an extended holiday in Europe. At the end of the year, a fifth Majles convened, later approving a controversial initiative to introduce conscription, after the ulema had been conciliated with an exemption for religious students. In 1924, Reza Khan (inspired by the example of Atatürk’s reforms in Turkey) encouraged a movement to create a republic, and acquired four Rolls-Royce armored cars to help him keep order in Tehran. But he misjudged the mood of the country and had to stage a resignation for a time, abandoning the republican project. In 1925, Reza Khan consolidated his support by visiting Najaf on pilgrimage, temporarily concealing his Westernizing intentions. He also took the name Pahlavi, which resonated with nationalists as the name of the Middle Persian language of pre-Islamic times. The Majles deposed Ahmad Shah and the Qajar dynasty in October, after Ahmad Shah had let it be known that he intended to return to the country. Shortly before the end of the year, a constituent assembly agreed to a changeover from the Qajar to the Pahlavi dynasty, and Reza was crowned shah early in 1926. Ahmad Shah never did return and died in Paris in 1930.

  Reza Khan’s rise to power was facilitated in 1921 by local British commanders for their own reasons, but it is incorrect to see his success as a success for British foreign policy, or him as a British stooge. On the contrary, Ironside supported an action by Reza Khan precisely because he perceived current British policy to have failed. Reza Khan took advantage of Ironside’s willingness to give him his chance, but made no commitment to future pro-British alignment, and there is no indication that Ironside expected or asked for any such guarantees. The coup of 1921 and its aftermath came about as a result of a temporary coincidence of interests.

  As for the people of Iran, it is not entirely correct to see Reza Khan’s success as the outcome of the desire of the people for a strong man on a white horse to overcome political chaos, after a failed democratic experiment. The period 1921–1926 has been compared with the period of regency leading up to Nader Shah’s coronation in 1736, in which he too prepared the way with military successes; but the comparison, though attractive, is not entirely apposite. The Constitutional Revolution had aimed, among other things, at modernization, centralization, strong government, and an end to foreign meddling in the country. Reza Khan became shah in 1925–1926 with the connivance of the Majles, because they judged he would fulfill those purposes, where earlier attempts by others had failed. He largely justified their confidence in him. But his reforming success was achieved at the expense of liberal, representative government. He was to an extent the nemesis of the Constitutional Revolution, but he was also the child of it.32

  7

  THE PAHLAVIS AND THE REVOLUTION OF 1979

  Is it not passing brave to be a king

  And ride in triumph through Persepolis?

  —Christopher Marlowe

  Reza Khan was about forty-two when he became Sardar-e Sepah after the coup in 1921. Although there was much supposition and mythmaking after he became shah, little is known for sure of his origins beyond that he was born in the village of Alasht in the thickly wooded Savad Kuh region of Mazanderan. Some have suggested that his family had Turkic origins, others Pashtun. It seems his father died when he was still an infant, and his mother brought him to Tehran, where he grew up in her brother’s household. Through the uncle’s connections with the Cossack Brigade, the young Reza was able to enlist with them when he was fifteen. He grew up to be tall and tough, with a grim expression and a heavy jaw. Some of the better-educated technocrats that he appointed to fulfill his modernization program found his manner and speech embarrassingly crude, and some sneered at his lack of culture. But none would have done so to his face, and most found his presence daunting.1

  MAN OF ACTION

  Reza Khan’s attitudes and motivations emerge above all from his actions. He came to power not just to be shah or to preside, as the Qajars had done—he disdained their ineffectual style of rule. The Pahlavi monarchy was an odd kind of monarchy, with no real roots in tradition. It was established only after Reza Khan had failed to set up a republic. To him, being shah was a means to an end, not an end in itself. And his underlying purpose was to control the country, to make the country strong, to develop it so that it could be truly independent, to modernize it so that it could deal with the great powers on an equal basis, to have a strong army to resist foreign interventions, and to impose order internally so that, as in other modern countries, the state enjoyed sole control. These aims, and the autocratic methods used to realize them, reflected his military background and the Russian influence he had lived with in the Cossack Brigade. Initially he had to compromise with the Majles, but time would show that he was no friend to free political expression. In addition, he had a model, Kemal Atatürk, who after a successful military career had established himself as the supreme authority in Turkey on secular, nationalist principles, backed by a strong army. With great determination, Atatürk had set about a plan for state-directed industrialization and economic development. Much has been made of Reza Shah’s connections with fascism, but this was the age of dictators, whether fascist, communist, or otherwise. Reza Shah had little need to look further afield than Turkey—not in the 1920s, at least.

  In 1926 Iran was still a country of peasant villages, tribes, and small towns (in that order), with little industry and an overall population of only twelve million people, the overwhelming majority of whom were illiterate. Patterns of trade and the economic life in the bazaars had adapted to the wider world economy; in Tehran and other major cities, there were some of the superficial trappings of modernity—streetlights, motor vehicles, and paving. But in the great expanses beyond, little had changed since the time of Nader Shah.

  Among the transformations imposed by Reza Shah, the first and most central was the expansion of the army. The army was the shah’s highest priority and greatest interest, and most of the other developments he imposed can be explained in terms of the support they gave to the goal of making the army strong, efficient, and modern. The plan for an army of five divisions, with ten thousand men per division, was announced in January 1922, but problems with conscription, finance, and equipment persisted, and the force was still twenty percent understrength in 1926. Despite approval of the conscription law in June 1925, there was great opposition to its implementation, especially among tribal groups. The measure was not properly applied until 1930, and not imposed properly on the tribes until the mid-1930s or later. But by the late 1930s the army stood at more than one hundred thousand men, with reserves theoretically taking potential strength up to four hundred thousand.2

  Despite these figures, the efficiency of the forces (outside Tehran, where the standard of the central division was rather higher) was not impressive. For local actions against the tribes, provincial commanders still recruited tribal contingents on an ad hoc basis, as had been done for centuries. Morale of th
e ordinary conscripts was low. They were not well paid—most of the large sums spent on the army went to buy equipment, including tanks (from the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia), artillery (from Sweden), and aircraft (an air force of 154 airplanes by 1936), as well as rifles and other material. Forty percent of government expenditure went to the army, even in the 1920s. Later it received almost all of the growing income from oil, though the overall proportion of state revenue spent on defense fell as the size of the total budget rose.3 From 1922 to 1927, state finances were organized by another American, Arthur Millspaugh (after negotiations in which the Iranians had tried to get Schuster to return). But although their relationship was initially good, and the American had public approval to a degree no Briton or other foreigner could have expected, the shah eventually grew resentful at the restrictions Millspaugh placed on his military spending. They argued, and Reza Pahlavi declared: “There can’t be two shahs in this country.”4 Millspaugh’s position became impossible, and he resigned in 1927.

  A second major effort by the new regime was in the improvement of transport infrastructure. In 1927 there were an estimated thirty-one hundred miles of roads fit for motor transport, nearly a third of which had been built by foreign troops during the First World War; by 1938 there were some fifteen thousand miles of roads. Whereas in 1925 Iran had only about one hundred fifty miles of railways, by 1938 there were a little more than one thousand. But by that time, the less expensive highway transport was tending to supplant rail.

  Reza Shah invested in industry a similar amount to that invested in railways. This was especially true of industries aimed at substituting domestic production for imports—textiles, tobacco, sugar, and other food and drink products. Over half of the investment came from private capital.5 It was not a huge transformation by comparison with what was being achieved in Turkey—let alone Stalin’s Russia. But it was impressive, nonetheless, especially given the low base point from which Reza Shah had started, and the failures of the past.

  More impressive, and in the long run probably more important, was the expansion of education. Total school attendance went from 55,131 in 1922 to 457,236 in 1938. In 1924 there were 3,300 pupils in secondary schools; by 1940 the number had risen to 28,200. The school system was far from universal, and it neglected almost all the rural population (though there was a small but successful initiative for schools in tribal areas). The system has been criticized for being overly narrow and mechanical, teaching through rote learning and lacking in intellectual stimulation. But this reflected its main purpose: to educate efficient and unimaginative army officers and bureaucrats. Reza Shah did not want to educate a new generation of free thinkers who would oppose his rule and encourage others to do so. But as elsewhere, education proved a slippery thing, and many educated in this way nonetheless went on to dispute Reza Shah’s supremacy in just the way he had sought to avoid. Through the 1930s, a small but significant elite were sent on government-funded scholarships to study at universities abroad (especially in France), and in 1935 the foundation was laid for a university in Tehran. In 1940 there were 411 graduates, and in 1941 the university awarded its first doctorates.6

  From the point at which he became shah, Reza inexorably strengthened his own position and the autocratic nature of his regime. Although he came to power with the agreement of the Majles, opponents like Mohammad Mossadeq (a future prime minister) and Seyyed Hasan Modarres (the leading representative of the ulema in the Majles) had predicted that he would erode the liberal elements of the constitution. Mossadeq held firm to his position and was later imprisoned. But after Reza Shah’s coronation, Modarres and others attempted to make a compromise with him that would leave some space for the Majles, and for constitutional government. Constitutionalists took office as ministers, including, later, Hasan Taqizadeh, who had been prominent in 1906–1911. But few of them had happy careers in office. A series of ministers were sacked, imprisoned, or banished, sometimes for no clear reason other than the shah’s suspicions—or his need to assert his personal authority. Modarres himself did not accept office, but his compromise failed, he was arrested in 1928, sent in custody to Khorasan, and was murdered there at prayer in 1938. Loyal ministers such as Teymurtash, Firuz, and Davar were arrested and murdered in prison or induced to commit suicide. Taqizadeh was fortunate to be sent overseas in semi-banishment instead.

  Writers and poets also suffered, as censorship was tightened and freedom of expression curtailed, strangling the burst of literary output that had emerged in the early decades of the century.

  Sadeq Hedayat was one of the most distinguished writers of the twentieth century in Iran. Born in 1903 in Tehran, he studied in France in the 1920s. As a young man, he became an enthusiast for a romantic Iranian nationalism that laid much of the blame for Iran’s problems on the Arab conquest of the seventh century. His short stories and novellas—Talab-e Amorzesh (Seeking Absolution), Sag-e Velgard (Stray Dog), and his best-known, Buf-e Kur (The Blind Owl)—combined the every day, the fantastic, and the satirical. Hedayat’s work rejected religion, superstition, and Arabic influence in Iranian life (sometimes in unpleasantly vivid terms) but in an innovative, modernist style that through its relentlessly honest observation of everyday life reaches the highest standards of world literature. He translated Kafka, Chekhov, and Sartre into Persian and was also an enthusiast for the poetry of Omar Khayyam. Hedayat committed suicide in Paris in 1951; his works were banned in their entirety by the Ahmadinejad government in 2006.7

  Another literary figure to die in 1951 was Mohammad Taqi Bahar, himself a poet but also the great critic of Persian poetry. Putting forward a theoretical structure for the literary history of Persia, Bahar identified in particular a revival (bazgasht) in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in which poets deliberately rejected the Safavid style in favor of a return to the style of the tenth and eleventh centuries. In Bahar’s own lifetime another new wave of poetic style came in, linked like the innovative prose of Hedayat to the change in attitudes in the period of the Constitutional Revolution. The first great exemplar of this change was Nima Yushij, who lived from 1895 to 1959. Nima wrote in a new way, breaking many of the rules of classical Persian poetic form. He used new vocabulary and new images drawn from direct observation of nature. For many years his freer style of poetry was resisted by the more tradition minded. But later it found acceptance, becoming the model for younger poets—notably Forugh Farrokhzad (1935–1967).8

  Reza Shah visited Atatürk in Turkey in 1934, and the visit symbolized the parallels between the two regimes. The nationalist, modernizing, secularizing, Westernizing features shared by both were obvious. Reza Shah’s education policy supported the founding of girls’ schools, and he banned the veil. He wanted Iran and the Iranians to look Western and modern—men, too, had to wear Western dress, and at one point he decreed that all should wear Western headgear, with the result that the streets were suddenly awash with fedoras and bowler hats.9 As in Turkey, the shah set up a language reform to remove words not of Persian origin, and to replace them with Persian words. Then, in order to differentiate his regime from the decadent style and national humiliations of the Qajar period, in 1935 he ordered that foreign governments should drop the name “Persia” in official communications and use instead the name “Iran”—the ancient name that had always been used by Iranians themselves. In 1927/1928 he ended the capitulations, according to which, since the treaty of Turkmanchai, foreigners had enjoyed extraterritorial privilege in Iran, being free from the jurisdiction of the Iranian authorities.

  But Reza Shah did not pursue the Westernizing agenda as far as Atatürk. For example, despite the language reform, there was no change of alphabet to the Roman script, as was done in Turkey. And although he achieved the removal of some of the worst abuses of foreign interference in Iran, he eventually had to accept the continuation of British exploitation of oil in the south—a deal that brought a poor return (sixteen percent of profits) in proportion to the real value of such an important natio
nal resource. In 1928, the court minister Teymurtash—the shah’s closest adviser at the time—wrote to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, announcing that the terms of the original D’Arcy oil concession had to be renegotiated. The negotiations swung back and forth over the next few years, and in 1932 the shah intervened, unilaterally canceling the concession. The British sent additional ships to the Persian Gulf, and took the case to the International Court of Justice in The Hague. Shortly afterward the shah, frustrated by the failure of the negotiations, sacked Teymurtash, imprisoned him, and in October 1933 had him murdered there. Eventually a deal with Britain was patched up, only modestly increasing the Iranian government’s share of the profits to twenty percent. The duration of the concession was extended to 1993.10

  Atatürk’s Turkey was not subject to any such foreign exploitation. And whereas Atatürk retained his personal popularity to the end, by the end of the 1930s Reza Shah had alienated almost all of the support he had been given when he took power. The ulema had seen much of what they had most feared in the Constitutional Revolution—especially in education and the law—enacted without their being able to prevent it. By the end of the 1930s, their prestigious and lucrative role as judges and notaries had been reformed away. They hated the rulings on Western dress and the veil, and a protest against these developments in 1935 had led to a massacre in the shrine precincts of the Emam Reza at Mashhad: several hundred people were machine-gunned by the shah’s troops, further deepening the regime’s unpopularity.11 The bazaar merchants disliked the state monopolies on various items that the shah had brought in to boost state revenue. Liberals and intellectuals were alienated by the repression, censorship, and the closure of newspapers, let alone the murders in prison of popular politicians. There was even dissent within the army. So when a new war brought a new crisis, Reza Shah had few friends left.12