The Fall of Heaven

by Andrew Scott Cooper

  Western visitors regarded the Persians as a brilliant and inscrutable people. The American journalist Frances Fitzgerald traveled to Iran in 1974 and wrote a penetrating account of life under the second Pahlavi king. “Iran is a country of walls and mirrors,” she wrote. “Walls surround the villages as they surround every house in Tehran, dividing the public and private lives, creating distances where they do not exist. Behind walls that are mud-brown and anonymous, the rich conceal their fountains and gardens from the desert … the great families of Iran have covered the insides of their houses with murals and faceted mirrors so that each room is a visual maze of light and reflections of the real and painted figures. Turn the thought around and the mirrors are a complete defense system, turning away the truth. In Iran, nothing is exactly what it seems. A foreigner finds uncertainty behind arrogance, sadness behind euphoria. But ambiguity may be the only principle of nature in Iran.”

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  AS A YOUNG boy, and unlike his father, Crown Prince Mohammad Reza never questioned the central tenets of his faith. Palace housemaids kept the young prince and his brothers and sisters entertained by spinning embellished tales about the tragic lives of the Prophet Mohammad’s disciples, the imams. These stories of miracles and revelations took on a deeply personal meaning when the little prince almost perished of typhoid at age six. While the boy drifted into and out of consciousness, his mother walked back and forth across the room, holding a Quran over his head and praying for his recovery. When he came around he startled his parents and doctors by informing them that he had been visited in his dreams by Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet Mohammad. He attributed his survival to Ali’s divine intervention. Two more episodes followed, each more intense than the last. After the Crown Prince fell from a horse and struck his head on a rock by the roadside, he told his adult companions that his fall was stopped by a saint who cushioned his head to prevent it from splitting open on the jagged edge.

  The third experience was the most revealing, for it went to the very heart of Islam’s Shia faith. One day the Crown Prince was walking along a street when he claimed to see “a man with a halo around his head—much as in some of the great paintings, by Western masters, of Jesus. As we passed one another, I knew him at once. He was the imam or descendant of Mohammad who, according to our faith, disappeared but is expected to come again to save the world.” This time the young prince kept his vision to himself. Reza Shah had named his sons after the imams and he visited the main holy shrines, but he ruled as an autocrat and did not much care for the divine right of kings. He knew all too well that the sword and not God had brought him to power and placed his family on Persia’s Peacock Throne. The Shah regarded his heir’s mystical nature as yet another sign of inherent weakness. But the Crown Prince was convinced that his early trials had marked him as a messenger of justice and an instrument of God’s will.

  Persians were Muslim by conquest if not by choice. In the year AD 610 Mohammad was a forty-year-old trader living in Mecca in the western Arabian peninsula when he experienced the visions and revelations that led him to believe he had been marked as God’s messenger on earth. He never claimed to be a divine being and saw in his new religion, Islam, which meant “submission before Allah (God),” fellowship with Judaism and Christianity. His revelations were later transcribed to form the basis of Islam’s holy book, the Quran, and the faith he brought to the people was based on the five central pillars of belief, prayer, charity, fasting, and pilgrimage. Within a decade of Mohammad’s death in AD 632, Arab armies raided Persia’s Sasanian Empire and swept across the length and breadth of the Middle East. By the ninth century, the Islamists ruled over an empire the equal of Rome in terms of size and accomplishment.

  Mohammad’s death led to a power struggle when his immediate heirs disagreed over who should inherit the mantle of the Prophet and lead the faithful. Two rival camps formed. The majority Muslim party called themselves “Sunni” and followed the rule of the caliphs. But a partisan minority, the “Shia,” bitterly contested their claim and argued that Mohammad’s rightful heir was Ali, the Prophet’s beloved son-in-law. Both groups fought two inconclusive civil wars to settle the matter until Ali’s ascendance to the caliphate ended in his assassination. Ali’s son and heir, Husayn, fought on, but he, too, was eventually betrayed, hunted down, and beheaded at the Battle of Karbala in AD 680. This outrage made permanent the split between Shia and Sunni and led to two rival lines of succession. Each of the Shia “imams” or claimants fell victim to assassination until the twelfth, a child, disappeared from view completely, apparently having been spirited away to save the Shia line of succession from extinction. The disappearance or “occultation” of the Twelfth or “Hidden Imam” meant that the Shia believed they were condemned to await his return, which would augur the end of days, bringing an end to the injustices visited upon them. Until then, they must accept their bitter lot and not struggle against the vagaries of misfortune and fate. The schism within Islam took on ethnic, political, and nationalist dimensions in AD 1501, when the Safavid Dynasty took power in Persia, seized the Peacock Throne, and declared Shiism the official religion of their new empire. From that moment on the kings of Persia assumed the title of Shia Islam’s “Custodian of the Faith.”

  The Shia clergy occupied a special role in Persian society, one that set them still farther apart from their Sunni brethren. The ulama saw themselves as the people’s conscience and “the vehicle for expressing public opinion whenever other means of expression are not existent or insufficient.” In practice this meant that the clergy saw their role less as molding public opinion than reflecting it, though the subtlety was sometimes lost during bouts of social and political unrest. On occasions when the people demanded change from a resistant crown the ulama responded by mobilizing the mosques to bring crowds out into the streets. “A fine system of mutual checks and balances has always existed between the clergy and the public at large,” wrote one Iranian commentator in 1978. “While no individual would dare do anything glaringly contradictory to religious ethics, no religious leader could adopt a position that was not approved by at least a section of public opinion. The public controls the clergy by financing it and obeying its edicts while it is in turn controlled by the clergy pronouncements and positions. The Shiite mosque is a widespread and loosely organized institution [that] become[s] effective only when and where the community of believers wants to use it. Otherwise, it is kept as a community reserve, a potential capable of effective use whenever the need arises.”

  Yet Persian attitudes toward Islam, like most everything else, were hardly uniform and at times oddly ambivalent. Public observance and interest in religion waxed and waned according to “the social and political conditions of the society at any given time.” The generations worshipped with a different fervor, with parents possibly more observant than their children and vice versa. The Persians were not known for being overly zealous or judgmental in their interpretation of the holy book. There was, too, their cynical use of taqiya, an old religious custom that justified lying if believers ever felt threatened for following the Shia line. Though taqiya was supposed to be reserved only for life-threatening situations, mullahs and laymen were quick to exploit this moral loophole for personal use and gain. And though Islam technically forbade alcohol and imposed strict constraints on personal conduct, the Persian appetite for wine, women, and song continued more or less unabated through the centuries. Even while Persians claimed to respect their local mullah or priest, many reserved for him the same cynical contempt for authority they showed their kings. Pious and respectful to his face, behind the mullah’s back they gossiped about his women, snickered at his burgeoning waistline, and traded barbed jokes that compared their hapless fate to that of a donkey. “Don’t let the mullah ride you,” the old Persian saying went, “because once he gets on he’ll never get off.”

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  AT AGE TWELVE the young Pahlavi prince boarded a Russian cruiser at the Caspian port of Enzali and
set sail for Europe and boarding school in Switzerland. Reza Shah wanted his heir to have a thoroughly modern and Western outlook on life. He allowed his son to take along two companions. The first, Mehrpur Teymurtash, was the son of the minister of court, but it was his second and favored playmate, Hossein Fardust, the son of a noncommissioned officer, who would later play a role in the fall of the dynasty. There was no question that young Fardust should leave his parents for five years to accompany the prince to Europe. The boy already spent five days each week at the palace, where the lonely prince smothered him with affection and treated him almost like a doll to be taken wherever he went. Princess Ashraf later recalled that Reza Shah “did not particularly like Fardust and wondered why his son was so fond of him.” Fardust would often run away “and we did not know where he had gone. My brother would then be unhappy and send for him. He liked him very much.”

  The shy, entitled prince was firmly put in his place by his classmates at Le Rosey, the prestigious boarding school that sat on the shores of Lake Geneva. An American boarder, Frederick Jacobi Jr., later wrote a revealing account in the New Yorker of the day the young prince’s yellow Hispano-Suiza pulled up. “His entourage consisted of a chauffeur and footman, both in Park Avenue–type uniforms; a valet, who was unmistakable; and a spectacularly handsome, silver-haired gentleman who carried himself straighter than any other man I had ever seen, and who I subsequently learned was a Persian diplomat of high rank.” As the new boy walked past the curious crowd that had gathered on the steps he “swept us all with a stare that he must have intended as regal. His efforts were lost on us, however.” Later in the day, the prince saw young Frederick Jacobi sitting with his friend Charlie Childs on a small bench. When the boys refused to stand up or otherwise acknowledge the royal presence, the prince “flew at Charlie Childs, seized him by the throat,” which prompted Charlie to box him around the ears and pin him to the ground. “It was all over very quickly because Pahlavi soon lay still and grunted for mercy. His black hair dank and falling over his eyes, his face scratched and bleeding, his shirt torn, he slowly got to his feet. His next move surprised me as well. He smiled, shook Charlie’s hand a couple of times, and patted him on the back.”

  The fracas in the school yard showed the prince of Persia as a boy who had thrown the first punch and then sued for peace rather than fight his corner—he wanted to be liked more than respected, a pattern that reasserted itself throughout his life in a series of showdowns with older and more assertive personalities. Gradually, however, the prince won over his classmates, and his election to captain of the soccer team gave him his first real taste of leadership and a sort of popular democracy in action. Still, he was prevented from taking part in many normal student activities by his overzealous Iranian minders. They impressed on the teenager the importance of the farr and the lessons of traditional Persian kingship. Lonely and homesick, the boy found consolation in faith and prayer. “I was determined that when later I came to the throne, my conduct would always be guided by a true religious sense,” he recalled. He prayed five times a day and decided that one of his first reforms as king would be to institute a “public complaints” box so that he could stay in touch with his people’s wishes. Suffering lay at the heart of Shiism, and his suffering as a child convinced the prince that he had a mission to fulfill in his lifetime. To the dismay of his father, while he was abroad, the Crown Prince became not only more devout in his religious beliefs but also more socially liberal.

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  WITH HIS SON away at school, Reza Shah set Persia firmly on the road to modernity.

  The Shah nursed the ambitions of Peter the Great, Imperial Russia’s great modernizer, but he was more personally inspired by France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, another junior army officer who rose through the ranks to seize a crown and forge a new civilization. Reza Shah was determined to lay the foundations for a modern state and erase past humiliations. “The hallmark of the era was to be state-building,” wrote an Iranian scholar who compared Iran’s Pahlavi Dynasty to England’s Tudors and Austria’s Hapsburgs. “Reza Shah came to power in a country where the government had little presence outside the capital. He left it with an extensive state structure—the first in Iran’s two thousand years.” He persuaded Britain’s Anglo-Persian Oil Company to increase the share of profits it paid the state in taxes and used the money to build dams, railways, ports, libraries, factories, schools, universities, and hospitals. Bank Melli was established as Iran’s new national bank, the metric system of measurement was introduced, and the Muslim lunar calendar was swapped for the solar calendar. Vaccination programs eliminated disease. Hundreds of young students were sent abroad on full scholarships to the United States and Europe to train in science, technology, education, and medicine. They returned to take their place as the next generation of reformers. In 1935 the first Pahlavi king renamed Persia “Iran” to make it clear there was no going back to the old ways.

  Though the ulama had made Reza Shah’s accession to the throne possible, the King was determined to follow the example of Turkey’s Kemal Ataturk, who agreed that religion and modernity could not coexist. He closed seminaries, desegregated public places, and changed labor laws to allow women to enter the workforce. He ordered Iranians to don Western garb and forbade women from wearing the flowing black outer garment called the chador. These measures eventually sparked resistance and riots in 1935 in the holy city of Mashad that were put down with force. Faced with severe repression and a loss of status, most Shia clerics chose to withdraw from public life, while others left Iran for permanent exile in neighboring Iraq, another majority Shia society. Reza Shah also reduced Iran’s parliament, the Majles, to a rubber stamp, expecting it to bow to his wishes, and hundreds of political dissidents who deplored authoritarian rule were harassed, imprisoned, and exiled.

  The schoolboy prince followed events back home with great interest. No single issue gripped his imagination more than the emancipation of women. In a letter dated February 1, 1936, addressed to “my unique and highly esteemed father,” the prince replied to Reza Shah’s decision to confer on women the same rights as men. “This is a truly massive revelation,” the Crown Prince wrote to his father. “The primary care and nurture of every offspring, initiated by its mother’s devotion, is pivotal to their upbringing, memories and morals, and my patriotic and progressive noble father, has perpetually been well aware of this fact.” Also,

  Hence, women’s acquirement of science and arts through education is the key for any nation’s progress and advancement. Because achieving such goals would be futile while shrouded by social deprivation, I therefore hope that such fatherly attention and enactments for the benefit of the noble women of our dear Iran will pave the way for the prosperity and well-being of this unfortunate section of our society.

  The cruiser that brought the Crown Prince home docked on May 11, 1936, at the renamed port of Pahlavi in the renamed Kingdom of Iran. The Pahlavi family stood assembled on the wharf with Reza Shah “standing alone, watching, calmly it seemed, as the boat approached from a distance.” The return of the son after five long years away was an emotional moment that the proud father did not wish to share with anyone, but when the prince walked toward him he appeared briefly not to recognize the once sickly boy, now a handsome young man. Father and son shook hands, exchanged a hug, and walked to where the Queen and the princesses, waiting on the quay, wore stylish European dresses and hats rather than the traditional ill-fitting black chador. Princess Ashraf noticed how “happy and healthy, stronger and more fit” her brother appeared. He was filled with excitement about his future responsibilities. “My brother told me how impressed he had been by the democratic attitudes he had seen at the school, by the fact that all the boys, whether they were sons of businessmen or noblemen or kings, were equals within the school community. He talked about how he had come to realize for the first time how much economic and social disparity there was among the people of Iran.”

  As the motorcade pulled aw
ay from port Pahlavi to rise over the Alborz Mountains headed for Tehran, the Crown Prince felt he had arrived in “a different country. I recognized nothing.” Iran’s Caspian Sea coastline, previously so wretched, now appeared “as an Iranian version of the south of France.” Dodge motorcars hummed along the seaboard and there were “huge new hotels pushing their heads into the air.” A decade earlier, travel to Tehran had taken days and involved bribes, opium, brigands, and donkey rides. Now drivers swept over “the superb Chalus road, which ascends in incredible twists and turns up and through the amber Alborz Mountains.” Motorists experienced the thrill of driving above the cloud line. Once shabby post houses had been transformed into “elaborate wayside hotels.” The bigger surprise lay down in the foothills, where the royal motorcade was greeted by tens of thousands of cheering spectators lining the streets, tossing flowers and bouquets into the prince’s open car. “My father had razed Tehran’s old walls,” he recalled. “Streets were paved and asphalted. The city had begun to take on the look and style of a European capital. I saw it all at first as if in a dream.”