by Abbas Milani
General Hassan Pakravan had been named as Bakhtiyar’s replacement as head of SAVAK in 1961, and the change was profound in terms of SAVAK’s culture and image. Pakravan was known as the intellectual of the Iranian security organizations. He was a man of considerable erudition and refinement himself, and some of Iran’s well-known intellectuals, including famed writer Sadeq Chubak, well-known politician Ali Zohari, and Mozzafar Baghai were amongst his friends. Immediately after taking over, he ordered an end to all torture in SAVAK prisons. In 1958, when he was still deputy director of SAVAK, he concluded that not Communists but “radical nationalists,” who represented the “frustrated nationalism and reformist aspiration of the urban Middle classes,” had become “the greatest danger to the future stability of Iran.”40 Now that he was named the new head of SAVAK, he had a chance to make his ideas into policy. His views were a radical departure from the dominant paradigm of the Shah and of the intelligence agencies, who believed that Communism was the main threat faced by the regime and that, in the fight against the infidel Marxists, the pious mullahs were the monarchy’s natural allies and nationalist democrats a secondary foe. But Pakravan’s turn at the helm was short-lived.
As the Shah gingerly maneuvered the fine line of appearing to support Amini while maintaining as much of his own power as possible, other issues also complicated his agenda. On March 30, 1961, the eighty-nine-year-old Grand Ayatollah Boroujerdi died in the city of Qom. In terms of its effect on the development of Shiism in Iran, his death had an enormous impact. A book published only weeks after the Ayatollah’s death by a group that called itself the National Central Committee of Islamic Societies in Iran discusses, in detail, the perils and promises entailed in the death of the Grand Ayatollah for the Shiite world. Several of the authors of the compilation were virtual unknowns at that time, but they would become in less than two decades the leaders of the Islamic Revolution of 1979.
The book offers fascinating clues to the sophisticated network of Islamic groups that operated in Iran, even during the period when the Shah’s authoritarianism was at its height. The Left was self-indulgent, believing that the inevitable laws of history would eliminate religion—“the opium of the masses”—and place them as the revolutionary vanguard on history’s pedestal. The Shah and his secret police, on the other hand, were focused on fighting Communists and the National Front and believed the forces of faith to be the best antidote to the spread of the Communist disease. In the meantime, the Islamists were creating a vast, nimble, multi-layered network of groups and institutions—everything from armed organizations to the most apparently benign classes in how to read the Qu’ran.
Almost concurrent with the mid-1961 publication of the book on Shiism and the death of the Ayatollah, two of the contributors to the book, Mehdi Bazorgan and Mahmoud Taleghani, both hitherto little-known members of the National Front, wrote a letter to Mossadeq, asking his permission to split from the National Front. The note caught all but no attention at the time. It heralded the birth of the Freedom Movement. The group might have remained a small footnote to Iranian history had it not, in 1979, been chosen by Ayatollah Khomeini—better yet, used by him as his democratic camouflage—to form the first provisional revolutionary government of Iran. In that capacity, the group also played a crucial role in the last months of the Shah’s life.
Ayatollah Boroujerdi’s death also raised for the Shah the thorny question of sending a note of condolence. It was a custom that upon the death of an ayatollah of Boroujerdi’s stature, the Iranian king, as the only ruler of a Shiite-dominated state, would send a note of condolence to the presumptive successor of the dead cleric. There were at the time several ayatollahs who lived in the two Iranian cities of Qom and Meshed and in the Iraqi city of Najaf. Each of the men could easily be considered the legitimate successor to Ayatollah Boroujerdi. Moreover, since the early twentieth century there had been a constant competition between the Iraqi city of Najaf and the Iranian city of Qom to become the center of Shiite learning and authority. The Shah, worried about the emergence of a contending center of power in his domain, was keen on strengthening Najaf’s claim to supremacy, and thus chose to send his telegram of condolence to Ayatollah Hakim,* in Najaf. Hakim had the added advantage of also being from the “Quietist” school of Shiism, wherein the task of the clergy is not to seize political power and create the Islamic state—as Ayatollah Khomeini later advocated—but to focus on the spiritual health of the flock and on blocking laws and values inimical to Islam.
Ayatollah Boroujerdi’s death even put the U.S. government in an awkward position. On the one hand, the White House knew that the Soviet Union and Great Britain were sure to have one of their most prominent leaders send the Shah a note to “offer their condolences.” On the other hand, the White House was also fully aware of Ayatollah Boroujerdi’s role in the persecution of the Baha’i minority in 1955. The White House worried that “the Bahai’s of the US, centered in the Chicago area might react unfavorably” to a formal communication from the President. Eventually it was decided that in his next meeting with the Shah, the U.S. Ambassador to Iran should offer him the President’s sympathy verbally.41
Amini, ever sensitive to the clergy’s power and hoping to garner their support for his government, not only sent notes of condolence to all the ayatollahs, but decided before long to go to the city of Qom and visit with the top clerics there. There was considerable behind-the-scenes bickering about the list of ayatollahs Amini should visit, and for reasons that have been never made clear, he chose to include Ayatollah Khomeini in that list. While certainly an influential teacher of the seminary and popular with the young generation of clerics, Khomeini was certainly not on par with other established ayatollahs of the city. The decision dismayed other ayatollahs, particularly the moderate Ayatollah Shariat-Madari, who later became Khomeini’s chief clerical opponent and a secret ally of the Shah.
Though by then Amini had developed a reputation for his love of long, meandering speeches, in the meeting with Ayatollah Khomeini, it was the Ayatollah who did almost all the talking. In a tone that was surprisingly conciliatory, the Ayatollah talked of two kinds of prime ministers in the past: those who served the people and became popular, and those who worked against the people and begot only the people’s hatred. He invited Amini to try and join the rank of the first group and offered an alliance with the clergy as the surest way for him to achieve that goal. Amongst the clergy’s concerns, Ayatollah Khomeini said, was the fact that universities around the country were spreading the seeds of faithlessness, and he wanted Amini to unite with the mullahs—“five or six thousand of them studying in Qom’s Howze [seminary] alone”—and rid the universities of the curse of secularism. Ayatollah Khomeini wanted the clergy consulted on the question of university curriculum. The demands seemed outlandish at the time. Less than two decades later, they became the official government policy of the new clerical regime in Iran. Even in 2010, after thirty years of clerical rule and with one “cultural revolution” behind them already, Khamenei, the leader of the Islamic regime, still defiantly railed against what he called the rampant materialism, rationalism, and skepticism of Iranian universities, particularly those teaching social sciences. He ordered an “Islamization” of the curriculum—just as Khomeini had done in 1961. Amini ended his controversial meeting with Khomeini by admitting that the Iranian government in the last twenty years had indeed “misled the people into moral and spiritual morass” and promised, “With God’s help, all of these problems will be solved.”42 The implicit criticism of the Shah was hard to miss. Amini’s remarks also captured the disharmony that defined the nature of power in Iran. Though the country was in a state of crisis, the Shah and the Prime Minister were both engaged in a dance of deception—both pretended unity in public, and each worked hard against the other in private.
The first few years of the sixties were also times of triumph and turmoil in the Shah’s private life. First there was the birth of a much-anticipated son and an he
ir to the throne. On October 31, 1960, the Court issued a statement announcing the birth of a son to the royal couple. Six months earlier, on the eve of the Persian New Year, in a similar announcement, the Court had announced that the Queen was pregnant. In those days there was no ultrasound technology, and thus the gender of the fetus remained a mystery to the parents. Traditional families resorted to varieties of rituals and prayers as well as exotic herbs and strange animal parts to ensure that the child was a boy. The Queen was already feeling pressure from the royal family and was even told that she should visit a doctor to increase her “chances of bearing a son.”43 An old seamstress who had worked for the Queen’s family in earlier years told her that writing a prayer on her belly with mud that had been blessed by a saint would guarantee a son while another believed that a diet of mandarins and oranges would also get her a son.44 The future of her marriage, she knew, depended on the gender of her fetus. In her memoir, she writes of bursting into tears when she heard she had given birth to a boy. “I thought to myself,” she writes in refreshing honesty, “if I had had a daughter, what would have happened?”45
Before the day of delivery, the attending gynecologist predicted “that the child would be a boy.” The Shah, on the other hand, told a press conference that while for a “father it makes no difference whether his child is boy or girl, but as I notice that the press and people very much hoped that I have a male heir, I am glad to associate with their point of view.”46
Her delivery had not been free from anguish. She had chosen as her gynecologist Dr. Jahanshah Saleh, a famous professor of medicine and brother to one of the Shah’s favored but intractable foes, Alahyar Saleh. Her long labor had necessitated the use of pain medication, and the anesthesiologist chosen to help Dr. Saleh had, in excitement, given her a higher than normal dose, causing her a late recovery of consciousness. At 11:15 on the morning of October 31, the birth of a new imperial prince was announced with a forty-one-gun salute. While the royal family rejoiced in the hall, the Queen lay unconscious in her bed. As she writes in a querulous tone in her memoir, “in the rejoicings, I think I was almost forgotten, and only my mother thought to ask: and my daughter, how is she?”47 On November 4, the Court announced that, “on the orders of His Majesty, the Shah, the newborn Prince has been called Reza.” And then, the next day, only hours after the Queen and the newborn left the hospital, the Shah issued a new order, using article 37 of the constitution and appointing Reza as the crown prince.
The inherent tensions and contradictions in the Shah’s theory of kingship—at once modern and traditional—can be seen in his firman. He writes, “By the Grace of Almighty God, We, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Shahanshah of Iran, hereby proclaim that we now offer thanks to Almighty God for his blessings, and as one of the foremost pillars of constitutional monarchy is an heir and Crown Prince, and since the Almighty God has bestowed upon us a son, by virtue of our authority, and in accordance with provisions of article 37 of the constitution, and in consideration of his natural abilities and merits, we hereby decree our beloved son Prince Shapour Reza Crown Prince.” In other words, it is not clear whether the appointment is by royal fiat, dependent on the will of the people as manifest in the constitution, or based on the son’s “natural abilities and merits.”
It is a remarkable fact of the Shah’s political life that during his entire thirty-seven-year rule, he never commissioned or made an effort to offer a serious theory of why monarchy was suited to Iran’s modern situation. When the American Constitution was drafted, some of the Founding Fathers felt compelled to write the Federalist Papers and offer a reasoned argument explaining why the new federalism was optimal. When, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the English monarchy was experiencing a crisis, King James I wrote dozens of treatises arguing that monarchy was the best system possible for England. Though the Shah and his Court commissioned a dozen biographies of himself and the Queen, though they sponsored hundreds of books chronicling the accomplishments of the Pahlavi dynasty, the Shah’s only articulated thought on the monarchy’s legitimacy was repeating the claim that monarchy is a “natural system” and deeply rooted in the Persian Geist.
Equally revealing about the firman appointing the Crown Prince was the order of appearance of different social strata. The Shah ordered “that all members of our family, highest ranking clerics of Islam, members of government, elected members of the Majlis and Senate, governors, city managers, all commanders of the military and the national police” must follow the new Crown Prince; only after mentioning all of these groups did he go on to mention “everyone in the great nation of Iran.” In other words, the legitimacy of the new Crown Prince was assured first and foremost by royal fiat, and of all of those who must afford the future ruler due deference, the royal family came first, followed by clerics of Islam; the people came last. This was a reversal of the order stipulated in the Iranian Constitution, where kingship was a divine gift entrusted by the people. Such kingship was not so much an anointment as a gift—thus one that could be taken back by the same people who had bestowed it. In the Shah’s firman, his anointment played the most crucial role, and the people’s consent was of least importance.†
Roughly four months after the announcement about the Crown Prince, in March 1961, the royal Court issued another statement, announcing that “in the royal titles of ancient Persia” the original Persian term of shahbanou was used in place of malekeh (Queen) and thus in accordance to the new decree by the Shah, “the word Shahbanou will henceforth replace the word Malekeh.” Foreign embassies were also informed that henceforth, in referring to the Queen, the correct title would be “either the Empress Farah, or Her Imperial Majesty, the Empress Farah.”48
The news of the birth of a successor to the throne was celebrated around the country, as much by spontaneous bursts of enthusiasm as by government “encouragement.” There was soon also a cacophony of destructive rumors spread by the opposition. Some claimed that the Shah was in fact impotent and that the Queen had feigned pregnancy by hiding a pillow under her dress. Others suggested that the infant had in fact been a girl and that she was changed with someone else’s boy at the hospital. Even the choice of a clinic in the poorer sections of Tehran became the subject of conspiracies.49 The Queen used a hospital in the poor section of town, some whispered, only to facilitate the swap of her infant girl with a boy. The health of the newborn also became the subject of these rumors. Some said the infant was a mute while others claimed that his demeanor showed him to be less than brilliant.50 Many of these rumors were first broadcast over radio stations based in Eastern Europe that were funded by the Soviet Union and run by the Tudeh Party.
In the decade after the birth of the Crown Prince, the Shah’s older daughter, Shahnaz, also suffered more than her fair share of rumors, gossip, and emotional travails. In a few months, there were rumors that Ardeshir Zahedi and Shahnaz had “apparently decided to get divorced. Strong pressure is being brought to bear on them to wait at least until” the end of the Shah’s American trip.51 When eventually in the mid-sixties divorce did become a reality, as Alam’s Daily Journals make clear, her life was complicated by increased tensions with her father over her chosen new husband, her lifestyle, and allegations of her attempt to live a “hippie life” along with all of its accoutrements.
The weight of events, the constant tension with Amini, and his anxiety about the Kennedy administration took their toll on the Shah. Their impact could be seen around the time of his scheduled state visit to Norway in May 1961. Amini, afraid that the military might attempt a coup in the Shah’s absence, tried to get the royal couple to delay their trip. The Shah rejected the idea, saying that such a cancellation would give the world the idea that there was a crisis in Iran.
On May 18 the Shah, accompanied by his wife, now officially bearing the title of shahbanou, arrived in Norway for what was to be an eight-day visit. To his hosts and to diplomats who saw the Shah in Oslo, he seemed clearly distraught. On the night of May 20, the Shah and
his wife gave a dinner in honor of their hosts at Oslo’s Grand Hotel. The Shah had brought with him a “large supply of special caviar,” and according to all accounts, “the dinner was one of the finest remembered in Oslo.”52
But during the evening, to everyone’s surprise, neither the Shah nor the Queen gave a talk, nor did either “make any attempt to talk” to their guests. The Shah was, by nature, a shy and timid man, invariably polite and attentive to the decorum of hospitality and diplomacy. Aside from being visibly angry with the Iranian Ambassador, the Shah, according to diplomats who met him there, was also worried about developments in Iran. By the evening of May 25, the Shah cut his journey short and left Norway. Again it was “widely believed that political developments in Iran necessitated [the royal family’s] premature departure.”53 In reality, the Shah and the Queen did not immediately return to Iran but spent a few days in Italy before returning to a tumultuous Tehran—a city made politically more volatile by the public knowledge of rifts between the Shah and the new administration in the United States.
A few months later, when the Shah and his queen visited French President Charles De Gaulle, his mood had clearly improved. The worst of the political crisis seemed to be behind him, and his visit to France might have been the most pleasant experience of the year for the Shah.
The Shah and the Queen left for France on October 10, 1961. Not only did he love France, as did his wife, but he perceived De Gaulle as something of an alter-ego. Those who knew him well—like Alam—knew that one of the highest compliments they could give him was to compare him to De Gaulle. Aside from all the many political qualities he admired in the General, there was also the question of his height—for the Shah one of the most important measures for judging beauty and gravitas. In men, tallness conjured memories of his father, Reza Shah. In women, lanky and lean were two of his favorite aesthetic measures. Such was the Shah’s adulation of De Gaulle that some observers have claimed that the referendum of January 26, 1961, when the six principles of the White Revolution were put to a popular vote, “was inspired by De Gaulle’s referendum.”54