The establishment of a republic in Turkey on October 29, 1923, had served as an inspiration to political modernizers in much of the Middle East, and soon talk circulated in Iran of establishing a similar system in preference to the archaic monarchy of the Qajars. The idea was celebrated by the small but growing cadre of intellectuals who equated republicanism with modernity. Poets, whose elevated art form had long been used to convey social and political messages, composed stirring poetry in praise of the new concept.56 Reza Khan appears to have initially supported the idea as well, although he soon changed his mind after consulting with members of the Shiʿite clergy (ulama), whose ranks in the central city of Qom had grown following the establishment of the British mandate in Iraq. Weakened central authority had also enhanced the influence of the clerical establishment. Seeing the systemic destruction of Islam’s influence in republican Turkey, which had been the seat of the caliphate not too long ago, Iranian clerics feared a similar fate in a republican Iran. Reza Khan’s personal ambitions for power dictated against active antagonism of the ulama and their possible alliance with Ahmad Shah.57
While the notion of republicanism was soon dropped, moves to change the dynasty continued. In fact, the idea of replacing Ahmad Shah with Reza Khan suddenly gained increasing currency, propagated most vocally by some of the regional army commanders and by members of the Majles, many of whom by now owed their positions to the country’s strongman.58 Finally, on December 12, 1925, by a margin of 257 to 3, the Majles voted to abolish the Qajar dynasty and to recognize Reza Khan as the new monarch, Reza Shah. A few months earlier, he had started using the last name Pahlavi, the name of an ancient Iranian script.59 Thus was established the Pahlavi dynasty, first by a military coup and then by a legal, constitutional one.
Reza Shah and Atatürk were in many ways similar, and the two men are said to have struck up a personal friendship near the beginning of Reza’s reign.60 Both men sought to establish modernizing political systems that radically altered the traditional cultural landscape of their societies. But the two differed in the predicaments they faced and the extent to which they were willing or able to implement change in their countries. For Atatürk, the weakness of the Ottomans meant that the empire was losing its grip on the provinces but not necessarily on the Anatolian heartland, which was, instead, occupied by a number of foreign powers, the Italians and the Greeks chief among them. Once these areas were liberated, the project of state building was facilitated by the existence of previous mechanisms of centralized political control emanating from Istanbul.
This was not the case in Iran, however, where the Qajar dynasty had long lost its effectiveness and maintained only nominal control over the country’s territories. Since the early 1900s, Russia and Britain had carved Iran into respective spheres of influence—Russia in the north and Britain in the south—where their own agents and Iranian proxies operated with complete immunity from government forces. Weakened central authority had also given rise to a number of powerful tribal confederacies; the Bakhtiaris in central Iran and the Lurs in the west and northwest were especially defiant of government efforts to impose taxation and conscription. On the whole, as compared to Turkey, Iran was ethnically and tribally more divided, was economically and industrially less developed, and had a more powerful, conservative clerical establishment with which the modernizing state had to contend. For much of his fifteen-year reign, therefore, Reza Shah was busy extending government authority over contested areas, at times personally commanding the army. More frequent were his extensive trips throughout the country in an effort to personally supervise state building and economic development. While at times brutal, he was often forced to compromise with the ulama.
As stated earlier, Atatürk’s self-ascribed mission in Turkey had four components: popularizing a new, Turkish national identity; constructing a new state apparatus; fostering economic development; and engineering social and cultural change. Reza Shah’s goals in Iran were similar, although his nationalist aspirations were somewhat different in his ethnically and tribally diverse country than in Turkey, where by Atatürk’s time the only remaining significant minority was the Kurds. Three aspects of Reza Shah’s reign deserve special attention. First was the attempt to make the Pahlavi dynasty national in scope and nature. Second was the desire to bring about economic and infrastructural development. Last was the new shah’s campaign to institute social change and to make Iran “modern.” By the time his reign ended in 1941, tangible progress had been made in each arena, although the apex of Pahlavi political and military power would be reached during the reign of his son and successor, Muhammad Reza Shah. Muhammad Reza’s rule would come to an abrupt and bloody end in 1979.
In an effort to make the Pahlavi dynasty national in scope, Reza Shah pursued a two-pronged policy. First, he sought to break the strength of the tribes and turn them into settled and increasingly “modern” subjects of the state. In the words of one historian, “For Reza Shah, as for many urban Middle Easterners, the tribes are uncouth, unproductive, unruly, and uneducated savages who have been left behind in the primitive state of nature.”61 To accomplish his goal of neutralizing the tribes, he used the military and entered into a series of temporary alliances with competing tribes, sowing dissent among them and using each to reduce the powers of the others. Gradually he disarmed their warriors, undermined their chiefs, conscripted their youths into the army, and forced many to settle into villages. Forced settlement, he thought, was the first step toward progress. Along the same lines, he repeatedly urged the rural population to engage in agricultural activity, which he saw as the key to economic self-sufficiency. Government authority over the different regions and the roads linking them was guaranteed with the establishment of remote military garrisons and the founding of a road police. To facilitate communication and transportation throughout the country, the state also built an estimated thirteen thousand kilometers of roads.62
The shah also engaged in a series of political and institutional maneuvers designed to enhance the strength and longevity of his young dynasty. Most of these initiatives were calculated political moves designed to reduce the powers of the regime’s opponents and entrench those of the monarchy. Steadily, Reza Shah undermined the independence and authority of the Majles. For example, he often personally determined who would or would not be elected to the body.63 Political parties, once a vibrant feature of the political landscape, were either banned or forced to curtail their independence if they wanted to survive. Several newspapers were banned, and editors who dared to be unflattering to the ruler were frequently arrested and beaten. A rash of “heart attacks” struck the regime’s famous opponents in the Majles, in the cabinet, and among other notables. At the same time, the army, from which the monarch’s rise to power had become possible, emerged as one of the most powerful institutions in the new system, with the shah personally in command of the forces until the end of his reign in 1941. A Conscription Law, enacted in 1925, led to a significant increase in the size of the armed forces. The number of men in uniform grew from 40,000 in 1926 to 127,000 in 1941, and the country acquired numerous tanks, military planes, and navy ships. The new king always appeared in an undecorated military uniform, and the political system over which he ruled in many ways came to resemble a military dictatorship. Between 1928 and 1933, the War Ministry reportedly consumed nearly 42 percent of the national budget.64 Complementing all of this was a burgeoning bureaucratic apparatus, which in time came to comprise some ninety thousand civil servants, ten cabinet ministries, and a host of administrators and functionaries at the provincial, municipal, and rural levels.65 Thus Reza Shah’s reign has been designated as the birth of the modern Iranian state.
Besides efforts to institutionalize and consolidate political control, Reza Shah sought to implement social and cultural changes designed to weaken the clerical establishment and modernize the country. These included judicial reforms in 1926, which led to the replacement of the sharia with a secular civil code, and the bann
ing of traditional ethnic clothes in 1928 in preference for European-style clothing and Pahlavi caps (later replaced by so-called international hats).66 The same year a law was passed regarding the examination and licensing of religious students and teachers, and the authority of the Ministry of Education was expanded in 1934. The Univer-sity of Tehran was also established in 1934, complete with a Theology Fac-ulty designed to further undermine the influence of the Qom clerics.67 Finally, beginning in January 1936, women were forbidden to publicly wear the veil (chador), and they risked assault and arrest by the police if they were caught in public with their veils on.68
Figure 3. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and Reza Shah conferring. Corbis.
The state also undertook a series of economic and industrial projects in its efforts to modernize the economy, especially in later years, when political consolidation was at hand. In August 1938, the Trans-Iranian Rail--way, linking the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf, was completed at a cost of $154,708,000.69 Several large-scale enterprises were established, mostly owned by the state, and manufacturing output and employment rose steadily. Agricultural output grew, although few deliberate efforts were made to increase the sector’s productivity.70 Determined not to resort to foreign loans to finance its various development projects, the government imposed heavy taxes and paid low wages to workers, prompting wildcat strikes in 1929 and 1931 in the oil and textile sectors, both of which were brutally suppressed.71 But there was always a fear that the government might spend beyond its means, and an innate sense of conservatism, born out of war-induced austerity, characterized the state’s finances. Reza Shah’s personal finances were a different story, however, as love of real estate holdings made him one of Iran’s richest men—if not the richest man—by 1941. By one account, by the time he was forced to abdicate in 1941, his assets included £3,000,000 in bank holdings and three million acres of land.72
The end for Reza Shah came in early September 1941, by which time the Second World War was reaching into the Middle East. Throughout the 1930s, Iran had looked toward Germany and the United States as welcome Western powers that could help it modernize and, at the same time, could check the traditional imperial designs of Britain and Russia. For the isolationist United States, however, Iran was too remote and geopolitically insignificant to warrant sending more than a few financial and technical advisers.73 Germany, in contrast, flooded Iran with its advisers and technical experts in an effort to undermine British and Soviet influence there and, eventually, make inroads into India.74 Most of the German advisers held sensitive positions in the telephone and telegraph offices. Despite repeated assertions of neutrality by Iran at the beginning of the Second World War, a combined force of British and Soviet forces invaded the country on August 25, 1941, the ground having been prepared earlier by virulent anti-shah propaganda beamed into the country by the British Broadcasting Corporation. An attempt to resist the invaders quickly proved farcical. On September 16, the shah announced his abdication in favor of his twenty-two-year-old son. The British government exiled him first to the island of Mauritius and then to Johannesburg in South Africa, where he died on July 26, 1944. The Pahlavi dynasty he founded was to last for another thirty-five years.
Reza Shah left behind a legacy of absolutist, personalist rule. When he had taken power in 1921, Iran was just emerging from the chaos of the Constitutional Revolution (1905–11) and the crippling effects of the Great War. The country did have a somewhat functioning parliament and the embryonic beginnings of party politics. But political life was at a standstill, economic progress a distant dream, and the influence of foreign powers paramount. Reza Shah’s efforts, while not as revolutionary as those of Atatürk, brought some order to Iranian affairs, fostered a measure of economic growth, and changed the social landscape, albeit superficially and in many cases only temporarily. But his tenure saw little in the way of “political development,” however the concept may be defined, with Iranian politics no less arbitrary and chaotic when he left office than when he took it. By the time of his forced exile, only three political institutions were left standing—the royal court, the bureaucracy, and the army. And, as the fateful summer days of 1941 bore witness, none could stem the tide of foreign invasion and imposition. At its core, the system was decayed and brittle, bound to fall with the slightest tilt in the balance of power. The son’s reign, it might be noted, fared no better historically than the father’s, ending unceremoniously thirty-five years later.
Ibn Saud’s Arabia
While Iran and Turkey were going through profound changes in their social and political landscapes, in the 1920s and 1930s, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia was just beginning to take shape. Here in the deserts of the Arabian peninsula, neglected by outsiders after the seat of the caliphate was moved from Medina, some of the most dramatic battles for national unification and political consolidation were fought in the late 1800s and early to mid-1900s. Although technically an Ottoman possession, the Arabian peninsula’s geography and climate had long buffered it from Istanbul’s penetrative reach, and the region had existed in a state of de facto semiautonomy. More importantly, by the late 1800s, Istanbul neither cared for nor was in a position to do much in Arabia; its concerns were limited to checking the incipient British presence there and, on occasion, arbitrarily imposing taxes on the local populace.75 The eruption of the Arab Revolt and the establishment of the Kingdom of Hijaz, however brief, highlighted the increasingly fragile hold of the Ottomans on the region. Within this context, in 1902 a young desert warrior named Abdel Aziz ibn Abd el-Rahman, later to be called Ibn Saud, rose from the Saud clan and, under the banner of his family, eventually established a unified kingdom in Arabia, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia.
The Sauds were one of the prominent families in the Najd (central) region of Arabia who had long lived in the vicinity of Riyadh. Officially, the Saud “dynasty” dates back to 1726, when a certain Muhammad ibn Saud settled in and started ruling over the city of Daraʾiyah, northwest of Riyadh. In 1745 he met and was won over by the puritanical ideas of a traveling sheikh (literally, “teacher”) named Muhammad ibn Abdel Wahhab. Thus ensued a powerful alliance between the two Muhammads, with one in charge of military command and the other motivating the religio-ideological zeal of the Wahhabi movement. The Wahhabis were, more accurately, unitarians (Muwwahidun, from wahid, “one”) who sought to reverse what they perceived to be the corruption of Islam’s rigid monotheism by the increasing tendency among believers, particularly Shiʿites and Sufis, to deify certain individuals. The Muwwahidun’s spread was fast and ferocious—resulting in the sacking of Karbala in 1802 and the occupation of Mecca and Medina in 1803 and 1805, respectively—but it was not irreversible. By the 1880s, the Saud clan was being eclipsed by another rising family, the Al Rashids, who in turn ran the Sauds out of the Riyadh area in 1890. Not until 1902 did a twenty-one-year-old member of the Saud family, Abdel Aziz, recapture Riyadh in a daring raid and from there go on to become the king of Arabia.
A detailed discussion of Abdel Aziz’s conquest of Arabia and his rise to power, while fascinating and rich in melodrama, is beyond the scope of this chapter.76 By all accounts, however, Abdel Aziz was a brave warrior who, through a series of military conquests, the spread of Wahhabi doctrine, and countless marriages, gradually brought all of Arabia under his control.77 Throughout, he was aided in his endeavors by the British, who provided him with a monthly stipend plus arms and ammunition, finding him a convenient and willing thorn in the side of the Ottoman sultan.78 Abdel Aziz encouraged Wahhabi nomads (bedouins) to settle into village communities and to farm. Calling themselves the Akhwan (brothers), they in turn became fanatical warriors for his cause. But before long the Akhwan had become too powerful and unruly, as well as opposed to such modern and supposedly corrupting innovations as the radio. More damaging to Abdel Aziz were their frequent raids on caravans and attacks on British interests in Iraq. In 1932, in one of his last battles, Abdel Aziz finally subdued and disbanded them.
Although most o
f Abdel Aziz’s early conquests were in the Najd region, by the early 1920s his long-awaited dream of dominance over the Hijaz became a reality as British support for the Hashemite Kingdom of Hijaz began wavering. In the year 1924 the city of Taʾif fell to his forces, and within a few months he was in control of Mecca. Medina and Jedda fell the following year. By 1926, Abdel Aziz had grown confident enough to declare himself the king of Hijaz and sultan of Najd, a title he formally changed on September 27, 1932, to king of Saudi Arabia. His kingdom was now complete.
While Ibn Saud was renowned for his generosity—often giving visitors gold, Arabian horses, or cars (at a time when cars were a rarity)—the late 1920s and early 1930s witnessed a dwindling of his resources, to the point that at times he could not even pay his staff’s salaries.79 In May 1933, however, the Saudi government signed an oil concession agreement with the Standard Oil of California Company, which changed its name first to the California Arabian Standard Oil Company and then to the Arabian American Oil Company, Aramco. In many ways, the terms of this agreement, like those signed earlier between Western companies and other emerging Middle Eastern oil countries, laid the foundations for the later development of rentier economies (see chapter 10). On the basis of the agreement, after an initial loan of £50,000 in gold, the company would pay Saudi Arabia an annual rent of £5,000 in gold and a further loan of £15,000 in gold as soon as oil was discovered in commercial quantities.80
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