The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  The Persians had submitted to their Muslim overlords, and exchanged their Zoroastrian faith for Islam, but Persian nationalists were affronted by the thought of rule at the hands of the Arabs, whom they regarded as their racial and cultural inferiors. Persian contempt revealed itself when Reza Khan was elected King of Iran in 1925 and consciously styled himself with the dynastic name “Pahlavi” to honor the written script favored by the Sasanians. His son Mohammad Reza drew similar inspiration from the glories of Persia’s pre-Islamic heritage by refusing to even discuss the centuries of Arab invasion and occupation. The mere thought of rule by the Arabs repulsed him, as he made clear during an interview with the Iranian journalist Amir Taheri in the midseventies. The Shah explained that “as a child he had always refused to read those pages in his history textbook that related to Persia’s defeat at the hands of Arab armies in the seventh century,” and he regarded the invasion of Sasanian Persia as the greatest catastrophe in history. “I simply could not bear the humiliation. I tore those pages out of the book and threw them away. There is no need for us to focus on the negative aspects of our existence.”

  The Pahlavi Dynasty emerged from the convulsive unrest that gripped Persia at the turn of the twentieth century. Persians frustrated with poverty and feudalism protested the ruling Qajar Dynasty, whose kings had allowed European powers to seize control of the economy and nibble chunks of territory. Corruption, misrule, and a struggling economy provided the bases for insurrection. Matters came to a head in 1905, when a coalition of scholars, clergy, and merchants united and rose in revolt. After months of unrest, on August 5, 1906, Mozaffar al-Din Shah agreed to surrender his autocratic privileges and accept a constitution that restricted royal prerogatives, established an elected parliament on the basis of limited suffrage, and a bill of rights to enshrine basic freedoms. The Constitutional Revolution proved a turning point in Iranian history and also marked a profound change in the status of the country’s religious establishment. The majority of the Muslim clergy known as the ulama supported the liberal reformers and were rewarded with the right to inspect parliamentary legislation to make sure it conformed to Sharia, or Islamic law. However, a minority of hard-line religious theocrats rejected the Constitution as a heresy imported from the West. Though their numbers were small, these clerics never reconciled themselves to the notion of separation between church and state.

  Far from bringing stability and security, the Constitutional Revolution opened the floodgates to two decades of unrest that brought Persia to the brink of collapse and dismemberment. In 1907 royalists and constitutionalists fought a civil war that drew in Great Britain and Russia, and the two dominant imperial powers in Southwest and Central Asia established cordons of influence in the north and south of the Persian kingdom, with London aggressively asserting its right to monopolize the exploration and production of newly discovered petroleum reserves in its sphere of influence. Over the next half century, successive British governments controlled Persian oil production through their majority shareholding in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, ensuring that the old kingdom became a playground for great-power intrigue. During the 1914–1918 Great War Persia was invaded, fought over, and occupied by the armies of four foreign powers, who turned vast swaths of the countryside into a wasteland of contagious disease, famine, and tribal insurrection. By the time Brigadier General Reza Khan, the illiterate, courageous, and forceful commander of the elite Cossack Hamadan regiment, marched on the capital in February 1921 and overwhelmed the army garrison, Persians offered no real resistance and even welcomed the promise of a firm hand. Reza Khan saw his first task as reforming the army and pacifying the provinces. The civilian government he installed in Tehran set about with mixed success modernizing Persian government and society with European ideas and technology. Ahmad Shah was allowed to keep his throne, though few doubted that the days of the Qajar Dynasty were numbered.

  Change came too slowly for Reza Khan’s liking, and in 1923 he made himself prime minister, though he aspired to become the first president of a Persian republic. In neighboring Turkey his idol Kemal Ataturk had seized power, declared a secular republic, and smashed the power of his country’s religious establishment. Reza Khan faced stiffer resistance in Persia, a country with more than two thousand years of monarchical heritage. The ulama still regarded the Shah as Custodian of the Shia faith and associated republics with the anticlericalism of Turkey and also France. Where they did find common cause with republicans was on the need to force the Qajars from power. In 1925 the ulama supported a parliamentary vote to replace the Qajar dynasty with a new royal house headed by Reza Khan, and the following spring the newly styled Reza Shah Pahlavi held his coronation and formally ascended the Peacock Throne. The new king surprised and dismayed the ulama when he made it clear that he meant to rule as well as reign and that to modernize Iran he intended to challenge the powers of the religious establishment. For now at least, the democratic spirit of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution remained a dream deferred and a promise unfulfilled.

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  FROM THE TIME Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was proclaimed Crown Prince of Persia in an elaborate coronation ceremony in April 1926, the boy who would be king was closely scrutinized for his potential as a future monarch. The early signs were not promising. With his jet black hair, sad eyes, and small physique, the new heir struck courtiers as a rather doleful little boy and serious beyond his years. Sickly and prone to stomach upsets and illness, Mohammad Reza “was gentle, reserved, and almost painfully shy, while I was volatile, quick-tempered, and sometimes rebellious,” recalled his sister Ashraf. “He was somewhat frail and vulnerable to childhood disease, while I was robust and healthy, in spite of my small frame.” Their father joked that Ashraf “must have gotten all the good health.” Tough and scrappy, Ashraf saw the world as it really was, as a series of struggles and hardships to be overcome, whereas her shy twin was a dreamer and idealist who saw things as he wished them to be.

  Their father, Reza Shah, was a famously taciturn, dominant personality with an explosive temper to match. His son remembered him as “a straightforward kind of man [who] didn’t talk much, and sometimes could be very blunt, you know.” That was polite understatement. Reza Shah tore the epaulettes off the uniforms of senior army officers and did not hesitate to strike officials in front of their subordinates. In her memoir, Princess Ashraf recalled that her father’s “physical presence to us as children was so intimidating, the sound of his voice so terrifying, that even years later as a grown woman I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t afraid of him.” Her twin’s second wife, Soraya Esfandiary, described the spell the old man cast over his adult children from the grave. “Despite all the independence which their status as princesses and sisters of the king conferred upon them, [Ashraf and Shams] remained profoundly marked by their childhoods,” she wrote. “Over them, as over Mohammad Reza and his brother Ali Reza, brooded the shadow of their father, that colonel of the cossacks who had risen from the ranks, uneducated and brutal, and could with a mere look terrorize his soldiers and those closest to him. Reza Shah, the man who still made them feel afraid.”

  Later in life, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi protested that his father had in fact showered him with affection. “I was never afraid of my father,” he once told a family friend. “There was nothing that I asked him for that he said no to.” Those who saw them together attested to the fatherly rapport with his heir. Mohammad Reza was “his father’s love—the light of his eye, as the Persian saying goes,” confirmed the Shah’s biographer. Before bedtime, the boy would climb on his father’s back and ride him like a horse, tapping him with a stick to go faster. Only when a servant knocked at the door would they leap to their feet and resume the formalities. “Oh! yes,” the Shah agreed. “You may hesitate to believe me, but he was kind and tenderhearted; his sternness and coldness would melt into love and affection as soon as he was with the family, or with me, his crown prince.” Father and son even devised a secret code to communicate
in front of the other children and courtiers. Reza Shah instructed his other children to address their brother as “Your Highness,” making it clear that from now on he was different from them in every way. The other children were jealous of their intimacies.

  The Shah once remarked that his mother, Nimtaj, styled Taj ol-Moluk or “Crown of Kings,” was “a very dictatorial woman.” Taj ol-Moluk lavished attention on her second son, Ali Reza, whom she believed had a more forceful character than his older brother. “In his early days as Shah, Mohammad Reza was not esteemed by his own family,” read a U.S. intelligence report from the seventies. “The Queen Mother appeared to hold her eldest son in contempt. She was frequently reported to be intriguing against him and promoting Ali as a more worthy successor, and on one occasion she remarked it was a pity Ashraf was not the Shah.” She bullied and schemed against her daughters-in-law, too. Soraya Esfandiary, who bore the brunt of Taj ol-Moluk’s machinations, once described her as a “woman of the harem” who “liked to intrigue, to receive political personalities, the wives of officers, courtiers. She questioned them, made them talk, gave her opinion on everything.”

  The King and Queen intimidated each other. Taj ol-Moluk freely admitted to drinking brandy to get through her wedding night, and her husband was known to flee at the sight of her entering a room. Reza Shah was a brave man indeed when he decided to exercise his marital rights to the full letter of religious law, which allowed Muslim men to take up to four living wives. Shortly after his second son, Ali Reza, was born in 1922, Reza Shah married Turan, who swiftly delivered him a third son, Gholam Reza. After divorcing Turan, in 1924 the King wed the much younger Esmat, who became his favorite wife and went on to provide him with five children of her own. Taj ol-Moluk bitterly fought these arrangements and made life difficult for her rivals. “Although polygamy was commonly practiced, and although women were expected to accept this condition, my mother was very angry,” recalled Princess Ashraf Pahlavi, who like her diminutive mother had a very quick temper. “For a long time she refused to see my father. In the face of this unheard challenge to his authority, the Shah would literally hide when he saw my mother coming.” Husband and wife eventually agreed to live separate lives, though Taj ol-Moluk retained the title of Queen-Empress and made sure that her two sons remained the sole legitimate heirs to the throne.

  Reza Shah worried that his oldest son, doted on by the women in his family, would grow up a weakling. “No, I was not considered strong at all,” the Shah later admitted, “but father steeled me by forcing me to become a keen sportsman.” When he was six years old the little prince was removed from his mother’s care, placed in his own household under strict supervision, and enrolled in a special military school so he could receive a “manly education.” He was separately tended by Madame Arfa, a French governess. The Shah’s admiration for Madame Arfa suggested that she was the only adult figure in his early life to provide him with anything approaching unconditional affection and emotional warmth. She enthralled her young charge with romantic tales of the lives of the great emperors and empresses and kings and queens of Europe, men and women such as France’s Napoleon and Russia’s Catherine the Great, who wielded absolute power to improve the lives of their people. Unbeknownst to Reza Shah, Madame Arfa introduced his young son to “the virtues of democracy springing from the ideas of the French Revolution.” She taught the Crown Prince that “to become truly civilized, Iranians needed to change themselves culturally; they needed a French Revolution of sorts led by a shah steeped in things modern.”

  In his memoir, the Shah paid fulsome tribute to Madame Arfa. “To her I owe the advantage of being able to speak and read French as if it were my own language; and beyond this, she opened my mind to the spirit of Western culture.” It was Madame Arfa who planted in the impressionable young boy’s mind the intoxicating notion that a king could rule as well as reign and be a revolutionary as well as a democrat.

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  IN THE 1920S the land he was destined to rule nudged the southern border of the newly established Soviet Union for more than a thousand miles, skirting the shoreline of the Caspian Sea, plentiful in sturgeon, whose fine caviar graced tables around the world. The spongy storm clouds that sailed down from southern Russia were squeezed dry trying to clear the mountainous rock face of the Alborz Mountains range, ensuring that Persia’s northern coast remained perpetually drenched while the kingdom’s interior was almost always parched. “Water is the chief concern of the Persian peasant,” an American traveler wrote in the early twentieth century. “Wherever he can find the flow of a mountain stream or build a crude canal from a well or spring, a small portion of the desert becomes a paradise and he prospers. Certain of these regions are said to be among the most fertile in the world, producing in abundance not only the finest of wheat and barley, but grapes, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, figs and melons which are unsurpassed among the fruits of the Temperate Zone.”

  The sweeping view from the top of the Alborz ridge was of a “magnificent plateau which seems to stretch to eternity,” a visitor to Persia once said. Eighteen thousand feet below, clinging to its mountainous hemline, Tehran basked in the sun like a smug cat whose muddy brick tail extended to the edge of the great salt desert. To the east, beyond Yazd with its lyrical skyline of wind chimneys, travelers entered “the great lifeless desert, shaped like a huge hour-glass, 900 miles in length, from the foothills of the Alborz range, in the north, almost to the Indian Ocean, in the south, and ranging in width from 300 to 100 miles.” The sprawling Dasht-e Kavir desert held tight its mysteries and miracles. Mighty dust storms roared through like locomotives. Locals in Sistan Province dreaded the annual Wind of One-Hundred-Twenty Days, when broiling gales lashed the region from June to September, and locals still spoke of the time a shepherd and his flock of sheep were dug out alive after a week buried under a sand drift. “Some sections in their utter bleakness resembled landscapes on the moon,” was how one American described Dasht-e Kavir in 1950. “At wide intervals walled adobe villages, with green fields and slender poplar trees, or an upthrust of jagged, rocky hills broke the monotony.… A haze wrapped the horizon in mystery. Eastward, seemingly limitless, stretched the great salt desert, shimmering in the heat. To the west, gaunt rock hills, pastel-shaped, made a grotesque skyline. A caravan of camels plodded by carrion birds glided above a burro’s carcass.”

  The main centers of urban life hovered at the desert edge, each a reflection of Persia’s dazzling cultural and ethnic diversity. The capital, Tehran, had always been a rough town. Laid waste by the Afghans in 1723, Tehran was a mere cluster of three thousand mud and brick hovels when the Qajar Dynasty appointed it the new Imperial seat. This made strategic sense—the village occupied the gateway to the heights of the Alborz, which overlooked the plateau—but Tehran lacked the elegant artistry and sophistication of the former capital, Isfahan, and most visitors regarded the locals as uncouth and too focused on turning a profit. About seventy-five miles to Tehran’s south sat Qom, where the ayatollahs, the country’s religious leaders, resided and where important religious schools known as the hawza were located. The second major center of clerical power was Mashad, to the northeast, nestled against the border with Afghanistan. Each year pilgrims trekked to Mashad to pay their respects at the stupendous Holy Shrine of Imam Reza, resting place of the Prophet Mohammad’s eighth disciple. Isfahan, always elegant, dominated the central provinces, and tourists from around the world admired the Shah Abbas Mosque, one of the finest examples of Islamic architecture in the world, which opened out onto the splendid Naghsh-e Jahan Square, where Persian monarchs watched polo matches from a high pavilion, and also the picturesque “Bridge of Thirty-Three Arches,” which spanned the Zayande River. Dominating the southwest was the city of Shiraz, “an oasis situated on a high plateau ringed by barren hills. It is a city of gardens and has never been known as a center of trade and industry. Its fame is due to its poets, its gardens, its wine, and its almost mythical position in the Iranian
mind.” Persia’s greatest poets, Hafez and Saadi, wrote of the Shirazi love of songbirds, sweet wine, and scent of rose.

  The southern provinces were Iran’s economic lifeline. In the breadbasket province of Khuzestan, which straddled the Iraqi border, the port city of Abadan boasted the world’s largest oil refinery. Running along the southern coastline were the Zagros Mountains, rocky sentinels overlooking the Persian Gulf, where mighty tankers crept through the Strait of Hormuz, only twenty-one miles wide at its narrowest tip, on their way to market. In the sixties the Shah poured more than $1 billion into Persian Gulf oil facilities and at a stroke trebled Iran’s oil production and established the foundations for the country’s spectacular economic takeoff. The Persian Gulf was Iran’s “jugular vein,” and he brushed aside foreign critics who accused him of harboring territorial ambitions. When an American journalist asked the Shah whether “Iran’s entry into the Persian Gulf would affect the country’s relations with the Arabs and Israelis,” he offered a stiff retort: “We are in the Persian Gulf. What we are demanding is what has always belonged to our country throughout history.”

  The Shah’s people embodied the contradictions of life along the highway of history. They retained a distinct identity that set them apart from their neighbors and reflected their unique passage through space and time. Life on the high plateau was a constant game of survival, with ever-changing rules. Persians had endured centuries of foreign occupation by absorbing the ways of their overlords to the point where the Greeks, Arabs, and Mongols mirrored them back in return. They were Persians first but also Arabs, Baluchis, Armenians, Kurds, and Turks. More than 90 percent were Muslim, but they shared the land with Jewish, Christian, Baha’i, and Zoroastrian minorities. Renowned for their hospitality, artistry, and individualism, the Persians were also inveterate grumblers, too easily slighted and with a capacity to exaggerate and embellish. For a people who prided themselves on their knowledge of science, philosophy, and literature, Persians saw their world as one shaped by elaborate conspiracies that allowed them to shift the blame for their own mistakes and misfortunes onto the shoulders of others. These ultimate survivors were adept at showing different faces to outsiders but also to their own rulers, whom they had a habit of raising up and turning out with bewildering speed—an old saying had it that the people did not often turn, but when they did, it was usually fatal. Persians thrived in adversity only to slacken in good times, so that even when their borders stoved in under relentless pressure from the Russians, Turks, and British in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Persian art, culture, and literature flourished under the Safavid and Qajar Dynasties.