by Abbas Milani
For Reza Khan, being a rich and powerful prime minister was no longer enough. With the help of other charismatic officers, he had successfully put down all the rebellious forces around the country and forged a unified Iran. Of these rebels, the most sensitive case was surely that of Sheikh Khaz’al. The British were, in the words of their Ambassador, “placed in a most embarrassing position: on the one hand stood our definite assurances to the Sheikh . . . on the other our . . . desire to see and help a strong and stable central government in Persia.”52 Reza Khan assured the Ambassador that in arresting the Sheikh, and dismantling his fiefdoms, he was in fact doing the Sheikh “a good turn.”53
Reza Khan toyed with the idea of turning Iran into a republic, with himself as the first president. By then he was already a fan of Atatürk in Turkey and was interested in emulating his success in changing the Islamic Ottoman Sultanate into the militantly secular Republic of Turkey. But a combination of forces, including his political enemies and his critics in the political establishment, as well as some in the ranks of the Iranian clergy, ever watchful of the dangers of creeping secularism, opposed the idea.54 It was not that difficult to convince Reza Khan to change his mind. Even more than the presidency, he now coveted the throne. In December 1924, the British Embassy, which closely monitored events in Tehran, offered this succinct summary of the changes that were taking place: “A movement has been worked up during the last few days for a crowd to stop PM [Reza Khan] carriage on his imminent return here and insist on taking him to palace to be crowned Shah. . . . I do not think the Persian government is privy to this. . . . It is significant that Persian divisional commanders in the provinces have been secretly warned of probable impending changes. . . . Their previous instructions were to pave the way for a republic. These are now suspended.”55
From early 1925, Reza Khan began to make it increasingly clear that “he cannot continue to work effectively in the present conditions and that the country must now choose between him and the Shah.”56 By then Ahmad Shah, the sitting king, who had been spending his time gambling and investing, often with disastrous results, in the European stock market, was itching to come home again but had grown frightened of Reza Khan. The British had lost all hope and respect for Ahmad Shah. One of their diplomats railed against his “contemptible cowardice, avarice and treachery.”57 And when the embarrassingly weak and vacillating king approached the British Embassy in Paris “with a request for British advice whether he should return to Persia or not, the same reply had been returned to His Majesty as was given to him last year, viz, that the question of his return to Persia was a purely internal one . . . that the British government was . . . unwilling to be involved in any way in the issue.”58
About the same time, Ahmad Shah sent his Crown Prince—who despised his brother and used every opportunity to take his place59—to visit the British Legation in Tehran and “ask the personal views” of the Ambassador about the possibility of Ahmad Shah’s return. But the answer in Tehran was no different than that in Paris. The Ambassador declared that he was shocked to be asked for such advice, and “declined to be involved in this purely internal question.”60
During these weeks of turmoil and tension in Tehran, and in most other major cities, Reza Khan apparently instigated mass demonstrations against the return of the Shah.61 Both Ahmad Shah and Reza Khan clearly understood this to be the deathknell of the Qajar dynasty.
In the mind of Reza Khan, the last hurdle between him and the throne was the support of the British government. He knew well that Qajar kings and princes had for a long time enjoyed the support and sometimes the “largesse” of the British government. By late 1925, he had set the stage to get rid of the Qajars, but in the words of the British Embassy, he still “fears disapproval of His Majesty’s Government.” Britain had maintained a studied silence on his activities, and Reza Khan had interpreted this as a sign of their discontent and their continued support for the Qajar dynasty. The British Ambassador arranged a meeting with a close confidante of Reza Khan and sent him a message. Reza Khan should not, the message said, “hope for more than loyal and friendly attitude of strict non-interference” by the British.62 This message of “neutrality” was music to Reza Khan’s anxious ears. He could now make his final move.
In his march to power and to the throne, his most important move was to convince the parliament to pass a law, on February 12, 1925, that made him the “Supreme Commander of all Defensive and Security Forces of the Country.” Hitherto, that title had been the monopoly of the king, and it did not take Reza Khan long to use his position as the commander in chief to become king himself. This experience had a profound impact on his son, Mohammad Reza, and helped shape one of the central tenets of his own later political vision. In Iran, the Shah believed, the military is the key to power, and if a king wants to have any political relevance or even remain in power, he must keep not just the titular role of commander in chief, but the actual and practical command of the armed forces. By October 31, 1925, Reza Khan was ready to make his last move. He set the stage for the Majlis (parliament) to pass a resolution abolishing the Qajar dynasty, making him the head of a provisional government, and ordering elections for a Constituent Assembly. Only four deputies, each fulsome in their praise of Reza Khan as prime minister, voted against the abolition of the Qajar dynasty—and all four went on to play crucial roles in the life of the future king, Mohammad Reza Shah.
On December 12, 1925, the Constituent Assembly voted to name Reza Khan the new king, and make his male descendents heirs to the throne. When news of the change was sent to the Foreign Office, the Minister wrote on the margin of the report, “The new dynasty, if it survives the first generation, will be purely Persian, whereas the Qajar were Turkish and remained Turkish.”63 In fact, it had been hundreds of years since a Persian family ruled Iran. Both the Qajar and the Safavid dynasties, who together ruled Iran for over four centuries, were Turkish.
On January 14, 1926, the day after his coronation, Reza Shah signed a decree conferring the title of Vali Ahd (Crown Prince) on his oldest son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. He was six years old.64
* In recent years, some cultural critics have tried to deduce, from Iranian mythology, the predestined path of the country’s history. The long night of despotism, they argue, has been the result of the murder of Sohrab by his father Rostum, the hero of Shahnameh. Filicide, they say, is a precursor for stasis and patriarchic despotism. If Iran is ever to transcend its cursed cycle of replacing one despot with another, or one father with another, in the words of Fereydoon Hoveyda, it must jettison its attachment to Rostum and embrace instead the story of Kaykavous—a benevolent and democratic king who shared power with others and descended from the throne when he could no longer be of service to his people. See Fereydoon Hoveyda, The Shah and the Ayatollah: Iranian Mythology and Islamic Revolution (New York, 2003), pp. 102–105
† Some sources have the city with thirteen gates, but as thirteen is a number of ill omens, most historians talk of twelve gates. Jafar Shahri, in his Tehran Gadim [Old Tehran] talks of thirteen doors. (Tehran, 1355/1977)
Chapter 3
THE PEACOCK THRONE
Landlord of England art thou, not King
Shakespeare, King Richard II, 2.1.113
The Peacock Throne, that “superb and barbarous divan of enamel and precious stones,”1 with its Arabesque designs, was wrought of 26,000 gems brought back from India as spoils of war. It uses bright red rubies, deep blue sapphires, and verdant green emeralds, and it is flanked by two golden snakes each peering from one side.* In the beginning the Peacock Throne was called Takht-e Khorshid—the Sun Throne. It was built for Fath-Ali Shah, the “super-procreant”2 Qajar king infamous for his ignorance and incompetence, and for signing the 1828 Turkemanchai Treaty that ceded big parts of Iran to Tsarist Russia—the treaty recognized in Iranian history as the beginning of the country’s decline. Fath-Ali Shah was also notorious for his lechery and for the “close to 1000 wives of diverse origins”3
he kept. One of his favorite concubines was named Tavous, Persian for “peacock.” And as the Throne was used on the night of the King’s marriage to his beloved Tavous, it was, the next morning, renamed the Peacock Throne.4 In January 1926, the Peacock Throne, and the room and the palace where it was kept, indeed the whole city of Tehran, were undergoing a facelift. The Throne was about to have a new occupant, and the country a new King.
By fortuitous coincidence, Vita Sackville-West, the renowned Edwardian writer and intimate of Virginia Woolf, was visiting Tehran at the time of Reza Shah’s coronation. At that time, her husband, Harold Nicolson, served as a diplomat in the British Embassy. Before long, she was involved in planning a few aspects of the coronation. Her masterful narrative of her Persian journey describes not only the official coronation ceremonies, but the backdrop to the unfolding drama. The Crown Prince, a boy of six and the future Shah, played a fascinating role in the ceremonies.
Though enamored of Persia and its past grandeur, Sackville-West found Tehran bereft of any charm. She found it a “squalid city of bad roads,” of “rubbish-heaps” and “few pretentious buildings and mean houses on the verge of collapse.” At the same, she found the city’s air “as pure as the note of a violin.”5
On the eve of the coronation, there was “an air of excitement hanging about” the city. In the public squares “flags were out; festoons of electric light bulbs swooped along the face of the municipal buildings. Wild romantic horsemen paraded the streets in little bunches. Triumphal arches were in the process of erection.” At the same time, according to Sackville-West, the government authorities had “with characteristic lack of foresight . . . left everything to the last.” Nevertheless, no one seemed nervous; they acted “like people preparing for amateur theatricals . . . sustained by the conviction that it would be all right on the day.”6
Tehran still had no electricity, yet the entire city seemed lit up by everything from the official lanterns and fireworks to oil lamps, night-light glasses, and candlesticks.7 Streets and even some buildings were covered with Persian carpets. The city was no longer of “bricks and plaster” but “a great and sumptuous tent open to the sky.”8 With the colorful representatives of different tribes and ethnicities parading through the city—from the Baluchies with embossed bucklers to the Turkmans and their tunics of rose-red silk, and the Kurds with turbans of fringed silk—Tehran had a new face.9 On the morning of Coronation Day, the people of the capital “woke to a Tehran spruce and furnished beyond recognition.”10 At Golestan Palace, the changes were no less far-reaching. The throne room was “repainted, the garden paved, such breaches in the walls as revealed the presence of rubbish-heaps were to be filled up.” The unmistakable Persian flavor of Reza Shah’s coronation stands in sharp contrast to his son’s later celebrations marking 2,500 years of Persian monarchy, when even the food was flown in from Maxim’s of Paris.
There was, however, according to Sackville-West, an endearing anxiety amongst the new members of Reza Shah’s Court to impress the Europeans who attended the celebration. There was “no point, however humble, on which they would not consult their British friends.”11 In fact they asked for a copy of the “proceedings at Westminster Abbey for the Coronation of His Majesty George V. The copy was procured, but was stiff with ceremonial language and created consternation; one of the ministers who prided himself on his English came to ask [Sackville-West] what a Rougedragon Poursuivant was, evidently under the impression that it was some kind of animal.”12
In the days leading to the celebrations, the British government was worrying about the gift they should give the new Shah. They certainly did not want to give him a gift cheaper than the one given his predecessor, Ahmad Shah—“a pair of silver gilt urns . . . cost 210 pound sterling.”13 They first considered “a highly caparisoned horse cloth, saddle, etc in the possession of the Foreign Office, prepared for the Sultan of Turkey” but never presented to him. That idea was rejected as inadequate. At last, “two large silver gilt cups at a cost of 200 pound sterling” were ordered for the occasion from Mssr. Collingwood.14 They were barely ready at the time of the coronation.
The ceremonies were set to begin at three in the afternoon. At two o’clock, Reza Shah was to leave his home, head for the Majlis (parliament), take the oath of office, and then go to Golestan Palace for a reception and the actual coronation. Every detail of the ceremonies had been meticulously planned—from the number of soldiers guarding the royal cavalcade (one hundred and seventy) to the number of cannon salutes during the taking of the oath (fourteen).15 The event’s program stipulated that twenty-two of the country’s top political dignitaries, led by the Prime Minister, would follow the Crown Prince when he entered the coronation hall.16 But nothing went as planned.
Punctuality had always been one of Reza Khan’s most celebrated characteristics. With capitalism, time itself became a commodity, and was thus in need of ever more precise measurement. In Europe, clocks began to become part of the city landscape after the rise of the Renaissance; in Iran, the first, and for decades the only, public clock was put up late in the nineteenth century—and it never kept time properly. Before long, the clock became a perch for a pair of owls, and the birds became, for the superstitious population of Tehran, omens of good or evil.
Of his father’s famed punctuality, Mohammad Reza remarked, “Father was a strict disciplinarian. His sense of timing was simply amazing . . . before he became emperor [sic], we Iranians never really bothered about time.”17 Meetings he chaired began at the exact announced time. If cabinet ministers were even a few minutes late, they would be barred from entering. Moreover, he had placed a clock on his desk and set it ten minutes ahead of time; all top officials of the government also fixed their watches to match the royal clock.18
Despite all this, on the day of Reza Shah’s coronation, at half past three, there was still no sign of him. He was already more than half an hour late. The hall set aside for the actual coronation was by then filled with Iranian and foreign dignitaries. Near the steps of the Throne, to one side, “shuffled and squatted and pressed a crowd of mullahs.” To Sackville-West, this bevy of “bearded old men in long robes and huge turbans” seemed like a “baleful chorus in a Greek play”; they seemed arrogant and churlish, and she noted looks of dread and hatred cast upon the clerics by those guests. The Shiite clergy had played an important role in Reza Shah’s masterfully orchestrated rise to power. In a clear and successful ploy to garner their support, before his ascent to the throne, Reza Khan had exhibited fervent signs of piety. He participated in religious mourning processions and, like the most pious of the mourners, he beat his chest and brushed his forehead and the top of his head with ashes of sorrow and grief. Not long after he was crowned, Reza Shah would change course and begin a carefully planned policy of limiting the power and role of the clergy in Iran.
At the coronation, a rumor spread throughout the room that the new King was about to arrive. Even Vita Sackville-West, who found the idea of a coronation “absurd,” and dismissed its pageantry as fallacious and childish, found something gripping in the expectant atmosphere of the glittering hall. Like everybody else in the room, something made her crane to see the enthronement.19
At last there was a stir; the doors were opened and the six-year-old Mohammad Reza appeared in the hall. Behind him walked the procession of the twenty-two political dignitaries, led by the Prime Minister. They were carrying the many royal accoutrements necessary for the coronation—three different crowns, a scepter, three swords belonging to past kings, and even a diamond-studded royal bow and arrow.20 One of the swords belonged to Nadir Shah, a powerful king who united Iran and was reported to have been planning limits on the powers of the clergy; Nadir Shah was also alleged to have attempted a reconciliation between Shiites and Sunnis, and he was Reza Shah’s “great hero.”21
Before entering the hall, the young Mohammad Reza had been waiting in the adjacent room, playing with some of the jewels and medals that were to be taken to the co
ronation hall by the procession that he would lead. He particularly liked the medals made to commemorate the coronation, and he tried to give one of them to Suleiman Behboudi, Reza Shah’s chief of staff and one of the Crown Prince’s favorite personalities working at the Court.22 But by the time the young boy, now known as His Imperial Highness Shahpur Mohammad Reza, Crown Prince of Persia, walked into the coronation hall, he looked somber and serious, dressed in an exact miniature replica of the uniform his father wore. The young boy marched down the length of the room, saluting the generals who stood at attention, and finally took his place on the lowest step of the Peacock Throne.
Finally, Reza Shah entered and, escorted by generals, moved toward the Throne, slowly but with resolution. There was a strange quiet in the room. As a gesture of reconciliation to the mullahs, all musical gaiety except the new royal anthem played by the military band had been left out of the ceremonies. The Crown Prince seemed “frightened, possessed himself of a corner of his father’s cloak.”23
After the long delay, and after the heavy silence, broken only by the low murmur of hushed voices, suddenly the only sound in the room was that of the new King, reading in his low voice the oath of office. Like everything he said or read, there was a terse economy to his declaration. He was, all his life, a man of few words. When he participated in the ceremonies commemorating the construction of the first modern university in Iran, he said, we should have had a university long ago and I am happy we finally have one. His coronation was no different. He read the oath of office—just over a hundred words. He swore by God, and by the Qu’ran, and by all that is “sacred to the people of Iran” to do all in his power to safeguard the independence of the country, maintain its territorial integrity, abide by the constitution, and work to promote Shiism. Then, taking his cue from past monarchs like Napoleon, Nadir, and Shah Abbas (the powerful Safavid king who ruled Iran about the same time as Queen Elizabeth I ruled England in the sixteenth century), he took the crown into his own hands and placed it on his head. He would allow no mullah or, for that matter, no other mortal to presume to bestow upon him his crown. He had willed himself onto the throne, and now he insisted on reserving for himself the privilege of anointing himself king. All through these rituals, a subdued Mohammad Reza watched in silence. He would all but exactly replicate the ceremony when it became his turn to have a coronation.