Iran - Andrew Burke [16]
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THE PAHLAVIS
From the moment in 1921 that Reza Khan staged a coup d’etat to, in effect, end Qajar rule, the poorly educated but wily soldier was king of Persia in all but name. Initially he installed a puppet prime minister, but in 1923 he took that role himself and in 1925 crowned himself, Napoleon-like, as the first shah of the Pahlavi line.
Reza Shah, as he became known, set himself an enormous task: to drag Iran into the 20th century in the same way his neighbour Mustafa Kemal Atatürk was modernising Turkey. Literacy, transport infrastructure, the health system, industry and agriculture had all been neglected and were pathetically underdeveloped. Like Atatürk, Reza Shah aimed to improve the status of women and to that end he made wearing the chador (black cloak) illegal. Like Atatürk, too, he insisted on the wearing of Western dress and moved to crush the power of the religious establishment.
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Unlike his royal predecessors and the clerics who followed, who concentrated on religious architecture, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi commissioned secular buildings in strikingly modern styles. Tehran’s Carpet Museum of Iran, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tezatre Shahr (City Theatre; ) and monolithic Azadi Tower are among the best.
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However, Reza had little of the subtlety of Atatürk and his edicts made him many enemies. Some women embraced his new dress regulations, but others found them impossible to accept. Even today, some older Iranians talk of how their mothers didn’t leave home for six years; too scared of prosecution to go outside wearing a head-covering, too ashamed to leave home without one.
Despite being nominally neutral during WWII, Reza’s outspoken support of the Nazis proved too much for Britain and Russia. In 1941 Reza was forced into exile in South Africa, where he died in 1944. The British arranged for his 22-year-old son, Mohammad Reza, to succeed him. In 1943 at the Tehran Conference, Britain, Russia and the USA signed the Tehran Declaration, accepting the independence of Iran. The young Mohammad Reza regained absolute power – under heavy influence from the British.
By now the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum) was churning out petro-dollars by the million and there were calls for it to be nationalised. When prime minister Ali Razmara was assassinated in 1951, 70-year-old nationalist Dr Mohammad Mossadegh, leader of the National Front Movement, swept into office on the back of promises to repatriate that money. Mossadegh succeeded in nationalising Anglo-Iranian as the National Iranian Oil Company, but in 1953 he was removed in a coup organised by the USA and Britain (see the boxed text, opposite).
With Mossadegh gone, the US government encouraged the shah to press ahead with a program of social and economic modernisation dubbed the White Revolution because it was intended to take place without bloodshed. Many Iranians remember this period fondly for reforms including the further emancipation of women and improved literacy. But for a conservative, mainly rural Muslim population it was all too fast. The religious establishment, the ulema, also took exception to land reforms depriving them of rights and electoral reforms giving votes to non-Muslims.
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All The Shah’s Men, by Stephen Kinzer, is the incredible true story of the CIA’s coup to overthrow Mohammad Mossadegh. It reads like a thriller and draws a line between the coup and the rise of Islamic terrorism. Highly recommended.
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By 1962 Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, then living in Qom, had emerged as a figurehead for opposition to the shah. In 1964 the shah approved a bill giving US soldiers in Iran complete immunity from arrest. Khomeini responded by claiming the shah had ‘reduced the Iranian people to a level lower than that of an American dog’, because if anyone ran over a dog in America they would be prosecuted