The Shah and his ministers, determined to build a strong, centralized state on the French model, saw the bazaaris as an impediment to modernity and reform. “The Iranian government, on the other hand, has developed an increasing fascination for economic ‘etatisme’, complete with ‘planning’ laws to protect the consumer and institutions needed to consolidate its domination of the nation economy,” observed Kayhan. “This trend was accelerated as the flow of oil money, together with an equally profuse flow of Western-oriented technocrats, enabled the government to assume the role of Providence itself.” The bazaaris protested when the government asked small businesses to report their total number of employees so that even temporary workers could be paid social security. Iranians were by nature suspicious of central authority and resented clumsy official efforts to impose and collect taxes or interfere in price-fixing. The Ministry of Commerce further angered the business community by accusing shopkeepers and merchants of greed and graft, then hiring zealous students to harass anyone they suspected of overcharging and contributing to inflation. The government’s shock tactics hurt profits and drove many bazaaris into politics for the first time since the early sixties.
The old merchant class worried that the Shah’s economic reforms threatened their power and wealth. The injection of billions of dollars in oil revenues into manufacturing, textiles, petrochemicals, and the auto industry, but especially the introduction of new rules and regulations to introduce modern taxation and banking systems, directly threatened the living standards and profits of the bazaaris, who adhered to the slogan that “government is best that governs least.” As long as the general economy prospered, the merchants held their fire. But the Shah and his ministers miscalculated when they decided to inject most of the country’s oil stimulus back into the domestic economy. They rejected the alternative course of action, which was to temporarily invest oil revenues abroad until a domestic infrastructure was in place to safely absorb and distribute the money. The consequences of the decision to spend everything at once soon became apparent. “The cost of living in Iran—where more than 60 percent of the families have a subsistence level income of $15 a week—is jumping almost daily and is expected to rise soon to 20 percent above what it was last year,” the New York Times reported in October 1974. “Prices for staple foods, textile goods and home appliances have been soaring, in some cases to 100 percent above last year’s levels. A black market has developed to circumvent the Government’s price controls.” Other problems caused by the oil boom included shortages of affordable housing, basic foodstuffs, and skilled labor. While poor Iranians suffered, Tehran’s northern hills became a flashy showcase for the nouveaux riches, whose boorish behavior shocked traditional tastes. “There’s something a little desperate in the air,” observed Newsweek magazine. “The spiraling price of oil has made Tehran a boom town reminiscent of San Francisco in the days of the great Oil Rush. Hordes of bankers, brokers, super-salesmen and carpetbaggers of every description fill the three major hotels to overflowing.… By day a haze of smog drifts skyward against the magnificent backdrop of the Alborz Mountains. By night the city’s restaurants and nightclubs are jammed with expense-account tycoons wolfing down caviar and stuffing wads of money into the bosoms of belly dancers.”
Boom was followed in short order by bust. Iran’s economy was left perilously exposed when Western oil consumers, their economies battered by high oil prices, entered recession and sharply reduced spending on fuel imports. For the Shah, who had personally approved billions in new expenditures, the unexpected dip in oil revenues had immediate political consequences. His main objective until now, observed Newsweek, “was to raise Iran’s standard of living fast enough to prevent his subjects from falling into the temptation of organizing a revolution of their own against him.” Court Minister Alam was beside himself with worry. He understood that the social contract between the Shah and his people was at risk of dissolving: “I genuinely fear that this may be the first vague rumbling of impending revolution.”
The Shah suspected a plot. Three years earlier, he had issued Western oil companies with an ultimatum: surrender production rights or leave the country. The companies had settled for a new deal by which they ceded the right to produce oil in Iran in return for the right to sell Persian crude on the world market. The problem was that the oil companies were not obliged to take to market quantities of oil they couldn’t sell. With global markets glutted, they preferred not to place new orders with the National Iranian Oil Company until consumer demand in the West picked up. The result was that Iran’s national oil company was left with many millions of barrels of unsold oil. The Shah suspected the oil companies were punishing him for his decision to nationalize production and end their lucrative pumping rights.
The Shah’s next two missteps were entirely self-inflicted. In an attempt to distance the crown from his government and stay relevant in a rapidly changing society, in March 1975 he abolished Iran’s two nominal political parties and replaced them with a single party, the Rastakhiz (Resurgence) Party. In theory, the “King’s Party” was supposed to inoculate the throne from the threat of future social unrest, bring the crown closer to the people, and prepare the Iranian nation for a more open, democratic political system. But the Shah utterly failed to communicate that vision to his people, who interpreted the formation of Rastakhiz as a final, brazen attempt to bury their cherished 1906 Constitution. The Shah’s next folly was to approve a proposal to scrap the Islamic Hegira calendar and replace it with the Persian Imperial calendar, which dated back to the coronation of Cyrus the Great in 599 BC. This gesture to mark the Pahlavi Dynasty’s half-century celebrations in 1976 caused needless offense to religious conservatives and confused the public—Iranians went to bed in the year 1355 and woke the next morning in the year 2535. By now it was clear that the Shah and his chief minister had ruled in isolation for too long. The Shah’s public pronouncements hinted as much. “My motto is: ask the advice of the technocrats and … well, just do the opposite and you’ll succeed,” he boasted. Another time he said, “I not only make the decisions, I do the thinking.”
These debacles suggested the Shah was losing touch. Years earlier, Britain’s ambassador Sir Denis Wright had fretted that he “was taking on too much, he wouldn’t delegate.… He had got into a position where he was taking all the small decisions, all sorts of decisions, and no man could cope with that. What one was frightened of was that he would do something silly because he just hadn’t got the knowledge, and might resort to brinkmanship in a way which would get him into serious trouble.”
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WHILE IRAN’S ECONOMY weakened, popular interest in religion gathered strength as Muslim clerics rejected modernization, which they associated with corruption, income inequality, and political repression. The phenomenon was hardly limited to Iran: in the 1970s tens of millions of Sunni and Shia Muslims shared a horror of Western-style corporate capitalism. They instead found solace in tradition and the old ways. “People are turning to Islam because they recognize that modernization and development have not brought peace of mind,” observed Grand Ayatollah Kazem Shariatmadari. “It takes religion to do that.” In November 1974 the authorities in Saudi Arabia reported a surge in attendance at the annual hajj, the pilgrimage by observant Muslims to Mecca’s Grand Mosque, the holiest site in Islam, whose Kaaba, a fifty-foot-high cloth-covered stone structure, was revered as the “House of God.” Each successive hajj broke the record of the previous year until November 1977, when an estimated 1.6 million pilgrims gathered on the plain of Arafat, a barren field twelve miles east of Mecca, to recite verses from the holy book the Quran and to pray for forgiveness of their sins. Their devotions symbolically represented both an end and a beginning: the end of centuries of decline and the beginning of a new, more militant phase in the history of a faith that had emerged from the deserts of western Arabia in the seventh century.
Nowhere was the pace of Western-style development as rapid, or the side effects of the
oil boom more keenly felt, than in Iran, where religious sentiment quickened in response to a slowdown in the economy. The first sign of unrest came in June 1975, when supporters of Grand Ayatollah Khomeini staged demonstrations at the Feiziyah seminary in Qom to commemorate the twelfth anniversary of the Fifteen Khordad uprising. Iran, cried the students, was “like a harlot running after the evil ways of the West.” The Shah initially interpreted the unrest as a last gasp by “the unholy alliance of black reactionist[s] and stateless Reds.” Khomeini’s name had recently been raised in his presence. “Khomeini?” he asked. “No one mentions his name any more in Iran, except, perhaps, the terrorists. The so-called Islamic Marxists pronounce his name every now and then. That’s all.” But Court Minister Alam’s diaries traced the gradual realization on the part of both men that old forces were starting to stir and that the ground beneath their feet had shifted. On April 12, 1976, the Shah told his minister that he had interceded on behalf of Grand Ayatollah Khoi with Saddam Hussein, the young Iraqi strongman who had recently launched a crackdown against his country’s Shia population. But he said he doubted the Iraqis would pay attention: “Right across Islam, the mullahs are doomed.” Then, on the twenty-sixth, Alam delivered a speech at Pahlavi University in Shiraz, where he was “rather alarmed to see so many of the girls wearing the veil.”
The revival of popular interest in Islam was not confined to the poor and uneducated. Members of the government and top-ranking generals made pilgrimages to the holy sites and joined Quran study groups. Attendance at Friday prayers marked atonement and was a way for the wealthy and privileged to show solidarity with the less well-to-do. “There seems to be a need for religion, as if we have moved too fast in a direction that is not native to us,” said Mahnaz Afkhami, Iran’s minister for women’s affairs and a self-proclaimed feminist. She spoke from personal experience, having visited holy shrines in Iraq and completed the hajj. “I found it in myself,” she told the New York Times. The Shah saw attitudes like this as evidence of backsliding. In October 1976 he erupted when Alam broke the news that a party of society ladies led by his sister Princess Fatemeh and his mother-in-law, Madame Diba, requested use of a 707 army plane to fly them to the holy city of Mashad, where they planned a pilgrimage. “Do they suppose the military have nothing better to do than to act as courier to a bunch of redundant old bags in search of God’s mercy!” the Shah snapped. Still, nothing prepared him for the most bitter blow, the decision by his daughter Shahnaz to reject secular life and become a religious convert. The beautiful young woman who at one time had resembled a San Francisco flower child now covered herself head to toe in black, her long tresses hidden by a flowing chador.
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PRINCESS SHAHNAZ’S CONVERSION from royal rebel to religious revolutionary mirrored the experiences of her generation of young, well-heeled northern Tehranis. Raised in the gilded ghettos of Tajrish and Niavaran, cut off from their cultural roots, educated in the world’s finest universities, they returned home surprised to learn that they lived in a developing country with serious social problems. They cast the Shah in the role of villain and held him responsible for more than two thousand years of poverty and illiteracy. Anxious to identify with the masses and their deprivations, these sons and daughters of privilege exchanged one set of drag for another, donning austere Muslim garb as a way of distancing themselves from everything their parents held dear. Few had ever opened a Quran, and fewer still had any in-depth knowledge of Shia theology, but in their rebellious naïveté they rushed to embrace the latest opiate. “Young professional people want to escape the establishment,” said Karim Pakravan, the son of General Hassan Pakravan, the former Savak chief. He had been raised in comfort and privilege but he too felt no compunction in rejecting the security offered by the Pahlavi state. “The establishment is everybody who has real power. In one way or another, either morally or financially, it is corrupt. We are not brave enough to join the opposition, but by being at the university we maintain a passive opposition. Our case against the government is lack of freedom.”
In the months that preceded his marriage to Princess Shahnaz, Khosrow Djahanbani had moved into the home of his fiancée’s cousin. Prince Patrick Ali was the son of the Shah’s late brother Prince Ali Reza, killed twenty years earlier in a plane crash. During the brief interregnum between his father’s death and the birth of Crown Prince Reza, Patrick Ali had been recognized as the legitimate heir to the Peacock Throne. Raised a Catholic—his mother, Christiane Choleski, was Polish—the prince lived in San Francisco in the late sixties, where he studied Taoism and became interested in all religions. After returning to Iran he immersed himself in Islam as a student of Ayatollah Malayeri, a radical cleric, and began publicly criticizing his uncle’s regime as unjust and corrupt. At the time he was in a relationship with Catherine Adl, the daughter of Professor Yahya Adl, the Shah’s surgeon and one of the monarch’s closest male friends. Their relationship ended soon after a rock climbing accident that left Cathy paralyzed. The spirited young woman had been an accomplished equestrienne. Now confined to a wheelchair, she fell into despair and drug addiction.
Cathy Adl eventually married Bahman Hojat, a fellow drug addict and the son of a major general in the Shah’s army. Against the odds, she became pregnant and gave birth to a baby girl. The couple weaned themselves off drugs and followed Patrick Ali’s example by embracing political Islam. But they went one step farther in 1975, when they fled to the hills with a cache of guns and explosives and declared their intention to overthrow the state. They didn’t get very far—Cathy was crippled and the couple had brought along their baby girl and his son from an earlier marriage—but they still managed to ambush and kill several rural police officers. The security forces eventually tracked them down, cornering them in a cave, where they were shot to death in a final blaze of gunfire. The children were found alive, hidden beneath their parents’ corpses.
The tragedy in the cave stunned Pahlavi high society. The King and Queen had known Cathy since childhood and considered her a part of their extended family. The depths of her sudden, ferocious turn were almost impossible to fathom. The tragedy led to a bitter generational family rift. Prince Patrick Ali issued a public denunciation of his uncle’s regime, an act of defiance that led to his arrest and imprisonment in Evin Prison. The onetime heir to the Peacock Throne claimed he was interrogated for seventeen days and “psychologically tortured, notably with a fake execution.” As soon as he was released he was placed under house arrest to prevent further scandal. U.S. intelligence sources reported back to the State Department that Princess Sarvanaz, the daughter of Prince Abdul Reza, the Shah’s half brother, declared she hated her uncle and “would like to lead a revolution to overthrow the government.” Most affected by the deaths were Princess Shahnaz and Khosrow Djahanbani, who had counted Cathy Adl and her husband as among their closest friends. Their response to the carnage was to emulate their friends’ example by converting to Grand Ayatollah Khomeini’s brand of fundamentalist Islam.
The Shah was deeply hurt and bewildered by his daughter’s rejection. In June 1975 Alam witnessed a heated exchange between the pair at the dinner table, where they bickered over “the recent outrages by Muslim fanatics (outright lunatics I would call them).” Shahnaz vigorously defended her friends even though they had shot to death several farmers and gendarmes during a short-lived rebellion. Alam was so incensed that he cut in to deliver a lecture on what he regarded as the true meaning of Islam. Looking directly at her, he told the princess that religious fanatics should be sent to psychiatric wards or given the lash in a military prison. “This put the Princess in her place,” he observed, “and much to His Imperial Majesty’s relief she preferred to change the subject.”
Though Khosrow Djahanbani proved himself a reliable and loving stepfather to his stepdaughter Mahnaz, his influence over her mother caused great alarm at court. Despite rejecting the Pahlavi inheritance, the couple insisted on maintaining their right as members of the Imperial Family
to reside at Saadabad for free. They even sought permission to raise a wall around the couple’s villa, though their request was rejected by Alam on the grounds that no walls were permitted within the park. Djahanbani sent his wife to request more pocket money from her father and lobbied for state support in a harebrained scheme to import luxury motorbikes into Iran. More serious were his ties to the Mujahedin terrorists, who assassinated government and security officials, ambushed police officers, murdered American military personnel, and were dedicated to overthrowing the monarchy. If the Shah was looking for evidence of treason he need only lock eyes with the brooding young man who stared across from him at his own dinner table.
The Fall of Heaven Page 29
