Iran: Empire of the Mind

by Michael Axworthy

  A second major effort by the new regime was in the improvement of transport infrastructure. In 1927 there were an estimated 5,000 km of roads fit for motor transport (nearly a third of which had been built by foreign troops during the First World War); by 1938 there were 24,000 km. Where in 1925 there were only 250 km of railways, by 1938 there were 1,700—but by that time motorised road transport, because it was cheaper (even for countries without their own oil reserves), was tending to supplant rail. Under Reza Shah a similar amount was invested in industry to that invested in railways, especially in industries aimed at substituting domestic production for imports, like textiles, tobacco, sugar, and other food and drink products. Over half of the investment came from private capital.5 Not a huge transformation by comparison with what was being achieved in Turkey, let alone Stalin’s Russia in the same period (at much higher human cost), but impressive nonetheless, especially given the low base point from which Reza Shah started, and the failures of the past.

  More impressive, and in the long run probably more important, was the expansion of education. Total school attendance went from 55,131 in 1922 to 457,236 in 1938. In 1924 there were 3,300 pupils in secondary schools; by 1940 there were 28,200. The school system was far from universal, and it neglected almost all the rural population (though there was a small but successful initiative for schools in tribal areas). The system has been criticised for being overly narrow and mechanical, teaching through rote learning and lacking in intellectual stimulation. This reflected its main purpose: to educate efficient and unimaginative army officers and bureaucrats. Reza Shah did not want to educate a new generation of freethinkers who would oppose his rule and encourage others to do so. But as elsewhere, education proved a slippery thing, and many educated in this way nonetheless went on to dispute Reza Shah’s supremacy in just the way he had sought to avoid. Through the 1930s a small but significant élite were sent on government-funded scholarships to study at universities abroad (especially in France) and in 1935 the foundation-stone was laid for a university in Tehran. In 1940 there were 411 graduates, and in 1941 the university awarded its first doctorates.6

  From the point at which he became Shah, Reza inexorably strengthened his own position and the autocratic nature of his regime. Although he came to power with the agreement of the Majles, opponents like Mohammad Mossadeq and Seyyed Hasan Modarres (the leading representative of the ulema in the Majles) predicted that he would erode the liberal elements of the constitution, and tried to prevent him being made Shah. Mossadeq held firm to his position (and was later imprisoned), but after the coronation Modarres and others attempted to make a compromise with Reza Shah that would leave some space for the Majles and constitutional government. Constitutionalists took office under Reza Shah as ministers—including (later) Hasan Taqizadeh, who had been prominent in 1906-1911. But few of them had happy careers in office, and a series of ministers were sacked, imprisoned or banished, sometimes for no clear reason other than the Shah’s suspiciousness or his need to assert his personal authority. Modarres himself did not accept office, but his compromise failed, he was arrested in 1928, sent in custody to Khorasan, and was murdered there at prayer in 1938. Loyal ministers like Teymurtash, Firuz and Davar were arrested and murdered in prison, or induced to commit suicide. Taqizadeh was fortunate to be sent overseas in semi-banishment instead. Writers and poets like Eshqi, Hedayat and Arif also suffered, as censorship was tightened and freedom of expression curtailed, strangling the burst of literary output that had emerged in the early decades of the century.

  Sadeq Hedayat was one of the most distinguished writers of the twentieth century in Iran. He was born in 1903 in Tehran, and studied in France in the 1920s. As a young man he became an enthusiast for a romantic Iranian nationalism that laid much of the blame for Iran’s problems on the Arab conquest of the seventh century. His short stories and novellas like Talab-e Amorzesh (Seeking Absolution), Sag-e Velgard (Stray Dog) and his best-known, Buf-e Kur (The Blind Owl) combined the everyday, the fantastic and the satirical, rejecting religion, superstition and Arabic influence in Iranian life (sometimes in unpleasantly vivid terms), but in an innovative, modernist style, that through its relentlessly honest observation of everyday life reaches the highest standards of world literature. He translated works by Kafka, Chekhov and Sartre into Persian and was also an enthusiast for the poetry of Omar Khayyam. Hedayat committed suicide in Paris in 1951; his works were banned in their entirety by the Ahmadinejad government in 2006.7

  Fig. 15. Sadeq Hedayat

  Another literary figure to die in 1951 was Mohammad Taqi Bahar, himself a poet but also the great critic of Persian poetry. Bahar put forward a theoretical structure for the literary history of Persia, identifying in particular a return or revival (bazgasht) in the latter part of the eighteenth century, in which poets deliberately rejected the Safavid style in favour of a return to the poetic style of the tenth and eleventh centuries. In Bahar’s own lifetime another new wave of poetic style came in, linked (like the innovatory prose of Hedayat) to the change in attitudes that took place in the period of the Constitutional Revolution. The first great exemplar of this change was Nima Yushij, who lived from 1895 to 1959. Nima wrote in a new way, breaking many of the rules of classical Persian poetic form, using new vocabulary and new images drawn from direct observation of nature. For many years his freer style of poetry was resisted by the more traditionally-minded, but it became accepted in later years, and was the model for later poets, notably Forugh Farrokhzad (1935-1967).8

  Reza Shah visited Atatürk in Turkey in 1934, and the visit symbolised the parallels between the two regimes. The nationalist, modernising, secularising, westernising features shared by both were obvious. Reza Shah’s education policy supported the founding of girls’ schools, and he banned the veil. He wanted Iran and the Iranians to look western and modern—men too had to wear western dress, and at one point (at which the arbitrariness of his rule most closely approached Ruritanian absurdity) he decreed that all should wear western headgear, with the result that the streets were suddenly awash with fedoras and bowler hats.9 As in Turkey, the Shah set up a language reform to remove words that were not of Persian origin (especially the large number of Arabic ones), and replace them with Persian words. Primarily to differentiate his regime from the lackadaisical, decadent style and the national humiliations of the Qajar period, in 1935 (at Noruz) he ordered that foreign governments should drop the name ‘Persia’ in official communications and use instead the name ‘Iran’—the ancient name that had always been used by Iranians themselves. In 1927/1928 he ended the capitulations, according to which, since the treaty of Turkmanchai, foreigners had enjoyed extraterritorial privilege in Iran, being free from the jurisdiction of the Iranian authorities.

  But Reza Shah did not pursue the westernising agenda as far as Atatürk. For example, despite the language reform, there was no change of alphabet to the Roman script as was done in Turkey. And although he achieved the removal of some of the worst abuses of foreign interference in Iran, he had to accept the continuation of British exploitation of oil in the south, on a basis that, despite yielding significant revenue to the Iranian government, in reality gave only a poor return in proportion to the real value of such an important national resource. In 1928 the court minister Teymurtash (the Shah’s closest adviser at the time) wrote to the Anglo-Persian Oil Company announcing that the terms of the original D’Arcy oil concession had to be renegotiated (under those terms the Iranians had been getting only a meagre 16 per cent of the profits). The negotiations swung back and forth over the next few years, and in 1932 the Shah intervened, unilaterally cancelling the concession. The British sent additional ships to the Persian Gulf, and took the case to the International Court of Justice in the Hague. Shortly afterwards the Shah, frustrated by the failure of the negotiations, sacked Teymurtash, imprisoned him and in October 1933 had him murdered there. Eventually a deal was patched up, only modestly increasing the Iranian government’s share of the profits to
20 per cent, and extending the duration of the concession to 199310.

  Atatürk’s Turkey was not subject to any such foreign exploitation. And whereas Atatürk retained his personal popularity to the end, by the end of the 1930s Reza Shah had alienated almost all of the support he had been given when he took power. The ulema had seen most of what they had most feared in the Constitutional Revolution, especially in education and the law, come about without their being able to prevent it (by the end of the 1930s their prestigious and lucrative role as judges and notaries had been reformed away). They hated the rulings on western dress and the veil, and a protest against these developments in 1935 had led to a massacre in the shrine precincts of the Emam Reza at Mashhad, in which several hundred people were killed by the Shah’s troops with machine guns, deepening the regime’s unpopularity further.11 The bazaar merchants disliked the state monopolies on various items that the Shah had brought in to boost state revenue. Liberals and intellectuals were alienated by the repression, censorship and the closure of newspapers, let alone the murders in prison of popular politicians. There was even dissent within the army. So when a new war brought a new crisis, Reza Shah had few friends left.12

  New Masks, Same old Ugly Sisters

  It is usually said that the British and the Russians took over in Iran in 1941 because Reza Shah had shown himself to be pro-German and pro-Nazi, and the allies feared that if they did not move in, then the Germans would. But the situation was more complex than that. At the time of the Anglo-Soviet intervention of 1941 no German armed forces were threatening Iran directly. The German push south-east to take Baku and the Caucasus oilfields only came later, in the summer of 1942. The Shah himself, despite having encouraged the Germans earlier to a certain extent, had been resisting German influence within the country.

  But when Britain and the Soviet Union were thrown into alliance in 1941 by Hitler’s invasion of Russia (in June) Britain’s position in the Middle East was looking uncertain. The crucial interests for Britain were the Suez Canal and the Iranian oilfields. Having defeated an Italian effort to break into Egypt from Libya in 1940, British forces in North Africa were put on the defensive by the arrival of Rommel and the German Afrika Korps, and in the spring of 1941 had to retreat back towards Alexandria, leaving a garrison to be surrounded in Tobruk. At about the same time, in April, there was an anti-British revolt in Iraq, encouraged by the Germans, necessitating an intervention by British troops who completed their occupation of the country by the end of May. In June, rattled by these developments, Britain sent British and Free French troops into Lebanon and Syria to unseat the Nazi-aligned Vichy French governments there.

  Seen in that context, the British and Soviet takeover of Iran in August 1941 looks more like part of a rounding-out of strategic policy in the region, at a particularly dangerous and uncertain moment for the Allies; part of the inexorable totalising logic of the war itself. But Iran did have major significance in another aspect. Hitler’s successes from Norway to Denmark to Poland and France, Yugoslavia and Greece in 1940 and the early part of 1941 meant that the avenues for Britain and the Soviet Union to support each other were restricted to the hazardous Arctic route to Murmansk in the north, or some southern alternative. And once Hitler’s Barbarossa offensive had swept all before it in Byelorussia and the Ukraine, the Soviets urgently needed supplies from the West, to help equip the new armies to replace the masses of Soviet troops that were being herded off into German camps or slave-labour factories as prisoners of war. The route from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian, arduous and long though it was, appeared to be an answer (by the end of the war more than 5 million tons had been taken to Russia through Iran, by both road and rail—though this was a relatively small part of the overall effort).

  Reza Shah had flirted with the Nazi regime in the 1930s, and German diplomats had encouraged what they saw as the Shah’s Aryanisation of the language. Through the 1930s more German technicians and engineers arrived in Iran—the Shah favoured them as an alternative to the British, who were disliked and suspected by Shah and people alike. But the Shah was as hostile to possible German meddling in Iran as to any other kind of foreign meddling, and he disliked nascent fascist groups as much as any other communist or other political movements that might oppose his government. A small group of apparently pro-fascist students were arrested in 1937, and their leader was later murdered in prison, like others on whom the Shah’s displeasure had fallen. In 1940 a prominent Zoroastrian was shot in the street by the police because his son had made pro-Nazi broadcasts in Germany. A group of Marxists were also arrested in 1937; most of them were given harsh prison sentences, and later went on to form the pro-communist Tudeh party.13 These developments reflected the bitter polarisation of politics between fascism and communism in Europe at the time. Some of these radicals were from that small élite that had been educated at European universities at the government’s expense. There was an upsurge of ugly anti-Semitic journalism that contributed to a period of increased anxiety for Iranian Jews in the 1930s (and may have contributed to an increase in Jewish emigration to Palestine), but the notion of a rising tide of pro-Nazi and pro-German feeling among people and government before August 1941 has sometimes been overdone. Abrahamian has suggested that the Allied intervention may have been not so much to remove a pro-Nazi Shah, as to forestall a pro-German coup against the Shah, as had happened in Iraq14.

  The Allied demand that Iran should expel German nationals was nonetheless the immediate casus belli. After the demand was refused, the Allied invasion of Iran in August 1941 met only token opposition from the army on which Reza Shah had spent so much attention and money (this is where a comparison with Nader Shah finally breaks down), and after three days he ordered his troops to cease further resistance. British and Soviet forces met in central Iran and entered Tehran on September 17 1941.

  The Shah abdicated in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza, and the Allies maintained their control over the country until after the end of the war in 1945. It seems that Reza Shah’s relationship with his son had been something like that between a senior officer and a subordinate. Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was educated in Switzerland in the 1930s, which did not bring him any closer to his parents or to the people he was going to rule. Mohammad Reza had a sharp mind but was socially shy and diffident — a legacy from his education and his relationship with his harsh father.

  The Allies were the immediate cause of Reza Shah’s abdication, but his removal was welcomed by most Iranians, and some have suggested that his unpopularity would have made it impossible for the Allies to rule with him still on the throne15 (even if he had accepted that arrangement). Reza went into exile in South Africa and died there in July 1944. The USA joined the Allies against Germany and Japan in December 1941 and American troops joined the British and Russian forces occupying Iran in 1942. At the end of 1943 Tehran hosted the first great conference between the leaders of the three Allied powers, who (among the arrangements they set up for the conduct of the war, including the undertaking to open a second front in Western Europe in 1944) made a commitment to withdraw from Iran within six months of the war’s end.

  Fig. 16. Stalin, Roosevelt and Churchill met in the first of their great conferences in Tehran in 1943, and made promises to respect the sovereignty of Iran that were only patchily observed.

  Ripples from the terrible events of the Holocaust also reached Iran. In 1942 a group of orphaned children, refugees from the Jewish ghettoes and shtetls of Poland who had escaped into Russia only to be interned in Siberia and then released with other Poles and sent out of the Soviet Union by train southwards, arrived in Iran on the Caspian coast after many bitter hardships and were brought to Tehran, where they were given help by the Iranian Jewish community there and by Zionist organisations. Having recovered from the poor condition in which they arrived, 848 children eventually made their way to Palestine.16

  At the same time a descendant of the Qajar royal family, Abdol-Hosein Sardari Qajar, who has been called th
e Iranian Schindler, was looking after the Iranian embassy building in Paris after the embassy’s main functions had removed to Vichy. Sardari was left a supply of blank passports, and when Jews in Paris began to be rounded up by the Nazis in 1942, he began to issue them to Iranian Jews (a number of whom had lived in Paris for some years). He also secured an assurance from the German authorities in Paris that Iranian citizens would not be detained or harmed. But as the measures against Jews in Paris intensified, French Jews with no Iranian connections began to come to him, desperate for help. Becoming aware of the enormity of the crime being perpetrated by the Nazis, Sardari gave his passports (more than 500 of them) to those Jews as well. Sardari was charged with misconduct over these passports by the Iranian government after the war, but was given a personal pardon by Mohammad Reza Shah. He died in 1981, and was posthumously given an award by the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in 2004. After the war, when asked about what he had done for the Jews in Paris, Sardari had apparently said it had been his duty to help Iranian citizens. When asked about the Jews that had not been Iranians, he said ‘That was my duty as a human being’.17