Patriot of Persia

by Christopher de Bellaigue

  Modernity could not be repulsed and on May 1, 1896 it thundered through the Qajar ramparts. On that day Nasser ud-Din Shah was assassinated while leaving a shrine where he had given thanks for the fiftieth year of his reign. The Shah’s assassin was a follower of the pan-Islamist Jamal ud-Din al-Afghani, but his action spoke for a multitude of currents, secular and Islamist, democrat and revolutionary.

  ‘When a king has ruled for fifty years,’ the assassin told his interrogators, ‘and still receives false reports and does not ascertain the truth, and when after so many years of ruling the fruit of his tree are such good-for-nothing aristocratic bastards and thugs, plaguing the lives of Muslims at large, then such a tree ought to be cut down so it won’t yield such fruits again. When a fish rots, it rots from its head.’4

  Chapter 2

  A Silver Spoon

  Mossadegh came, as his political rivals would remind him, from a princely background, and his manner, even when he was propounding revolutionary ideas from a hospital bed, bore the signs of his caste. His mother, Najm al-Saltaneh, the person he loved more than anyone else in his life, was a great-granddaughter of Fath-Ali Shah, a first cousin of Nasser ud-Din, and a sister-in-law to the Crown Prince, Muzaffar ud-Din. She was very grand and she devoted her long and eventful life to trying to keep things that way.

  Iran had not had an enduring aristocracy along European lines. The trouble with the Duc de Luynes, the Comte Aimery de la Rochefoucauld observed in the 1890s, was that his family had been ‘mere nobodies’ in the year 1000. The Qajars had been minor tribal chieftains as recently as the mid-eighteenth century, and might easily sink back again. The precariousness of the succession was compounded by the majestic libido of Fath-Ali Shah. In between sitting for portraits, enjoying the chase and losing territory in ill-judged wars, Fath-Ali sired a mammoth progeny, extending to well over 100 children and innumerable grandchildren, who all but bankrupted the state with their demands for pensions and positions.

  Even if there was no succession crisis – and the British and Russians generally came together to ensure there was not – the death of a Qajar monarch produced angst and upheaval. The dead Shah’s wives, particularly the childless ones, were expelled from the seraglio and his cronies replaced. The new courtiers and hangers-on piled in from the north-western city of Tabriz, capital of the province of Azerbaijan and traditional seat of the Crown Prince, and offended the old guard with the brashness of their manners and their rush for the capital’s biggest houses.

  Petite and pale-skinned, Najm al-Saltaneh was a fighter and a survivor. Born subservient, a woman in a man’s age, restricted for the most part to the society of immediate family, fellow women and eunuchs, she exploited the few opportunities that were open to her and ended up wielding much influence over princes and ministers. Poorly educated but highly intelligent, Najm al-Saltaneh wrote better Persian than most women of her station, and the letters she composed to her brother, Prince Abdolhossein Mirza Farmanfarma, exhibit warmth and spontaneity alongside the usual pieties. Among her intimates, she was known for the foulness of her language, the prerogative – then, as now – of all upper-class Tehrani women.1

  Thrice married, each time to rich, older men, she thrice bore widowhood and the attendant financial uncertainty. She took a pragmatic approach to this world and the next. On the one hand she proclaimed her indifference to material possessions and her belief in destiny, organising religious ceremonies and making the perilous pilgrimage to Mecca and other shrine cities. On the other, she campaigned tirelessly for her family’s welfare, overseeing property and plotting matrimonial alliances.

  Najm al-Saltaneh’s first husband had died in 1880, indebted after a ruinous provincial governorship. The new widow was only twenty-seven, with two daughters to raise. There was no social or religious bar to a second alliance, and her elevated origins and relative youth drew suitors. Two years later, she married Mossadegh’s father, Mirza Hedayatullah Vazir-Daftar.

  Vazir-Daftar was forty years her senior, and had several children from previous marriages. He was, in the old Iranian parlance, a man of the pen, not of the sword – an administrator, not a ruler. But he had been minister of finance and the class he represented had penetrated society’s upper ranks. He had won office under relatively progressive statesmen, but he took his place in the reformist camp partly because his main rival (who happened to be his first cousin), was in the opposing, reactionary party. Vazir-Daftar’s outlook was mildly conservative. He blamed Iran’s shortcomings not on the unfitness of its institutions but the ineptitude of their occupants.

  Vazir-Daftar’s huge extended family had made its money and reputation by controlling the country’s revenue administration. The duties of a provincial revenue official included preparing assessments, signing off accounts and clearing drafts on the provincial revenue. Officials were paid on a commission basis and there was no audit.2 Besides the inevitable abuses, the system was a bastion of the hereditary principle. More often than not, the title of revenue officer was passed from father to son, often at a very young age – along with account books written in baffling legalese. Later on, having inherited his father’s office, Mossadegh would admit the futility of trying to defend his fellow revenue officers from accusations of venality. For all practical purposes, he wrote, the office of revenue official was ‘synonymous with “thief”.’3

  The pattern of preferment in the revenue administration was complex, and the competition keen, even within one family. Having shown early promise as an official, Vazir-Daftar’s own father had blown his brains out after his honour was impugned in a dispute. Vazir-Daftar was married off to the daughter of his uncle, an even grander revenue officer, but would remember this as a humiliation, remarking that his uncle had given away his daughter as if ‘tossing a concubine to a slave’.4 There were other marriages, and legions of children. Vazir-Daftar’s last union, to Najm al-Saltaneh, had little to show for it save Mossadegh and his sister Ameneh, and a revealing vignette in Mossadegh’s memoir, in which he describes his father, at a time when he was managing the national tax administration, having been embarrassed by the gift of a crystal chandelier and a music box with dancing marionettes. The gifts had been made by a revenue officer who now sought Vazir-Daftar’s approval for his own corrupt practices. Vazir-Daftar wanted to return the gifts but Najm al-Saltaneh put her foot down, exclaiming, ‘You, who don’t accept anything from anyone – you want me to send back this gift which they brought for me?’ To this, Mossadegh’s father had no answer, and once his wife had left the room he muttered, ‘Let God ordain a happy conclusion to this affair.’5

  The anecdote shows two distinct moral exemplars acting on the young Mossadegh. On one side stood luxury-loving Najm al-Saltaneh, tearing a strip off her husband for not accepting the perks that came with his job, and capable of overriding his wishes. On the other stood strait-laced Vazir-Daftar, ‘forever invoking God’, and exceptional among revenue officers in that he could not be bought. It is unlikely that Mossadegh saw enough of his father to develop an intimate relationship with him. Sons were expected to stand with their heads bowed in their fathers’ presence, and to speak only if spoken to.

  Mossadegh’s love for Najm al-Saltaneh would naturally outweigh his feelings for his father, but it was Vazir-Daftar’s morality that he would adopt – even at the risk of his mother’s displeasure. Years later, when serving as deputy finance minister, Mossadegh would dispatch a collector to demand tax arrears from his mother. Arriving home for lunch, Mossadegh came across the collector shame-facedly discharging his duty, and the old lady subjected her son to such a tornado of invective as only a Persian matriarch can muster.

  Pale, as Persians of breeding were meant to be, wide-mouthed, a grave, economical little figure, the child-Mossadegh in the photographs is in fact a child in dimensions only. In a group portrait with his father and some other men, he sports a kolah, a white collarless shirt and a double-breasted coat, and occupies the most prominent position in the group after th
e rather wary-looking Vazir-Daftar. Echoing his father, who sits at a small table, his cane across his lap, Mossadegh rests his elbow on the same table – every inch the mandarin in waiting. In another photograph, wearing the same get-up, he sits alongside two other grandees, his hands joined in his lap, his expression of serenity compromised only by the fact that his feet do not reach the ground.

  It is hard to imagine this child scampering about or stealing fruit or getting up to no good and being thrashed in the large house he shared with his parents. It is much easier to imagine him as he is portrayed here, and in other photographs, awaiting the burdens and privileges of his station.

  If Najm al-Saltaneh had married Vazir-Daftar for his money, the plan did not work. By the time he was carried away by the cholera epidemic of 1892, Vazir-Daftar had confided his worldly possessions to his eldest son by his first marriage.6 This arrangement so displeased Najm al-Saltaneh that, rather than carry on living in her late husband’s house, she married a third time, to the private secretary to her brother-in-law, Crown Prince Muzaffar ud-Din, and took young Muhammad and his sister to Tabriz. Vazir-Daftar’s many heirs contested his estate, and family resentments deepened.7 In later life, Mossadegh would describe the practice of siring children from different wives as a recipe for fraternal strife.

  Even for Iran in the Qajar era, when childhood could be short for pauper and noble alike, Mossadegh was required to behave like an adult at a very young age. At nine, he was deemed mature enough to pay a courtesy call to a grandee. Two years on, following his father’s death, he began assuming some of the duties associated with being head of the family. Najm al-Saltaneh was to boast of his poise, the neatness of his bookkeeping and his conscientious management of her various properties.

  The death of his father can only have strengthened the bond between Mossadegh and his mother. As Najm al-Saltaneh’s elder son (she had one more son by her third husband), and the heir to his father’s position, Mossadegh was spoiled with love and burdened with expectation. He also received attention from his mother’s beloved younger brother, Prince Farmanfarma. The prince was a legendary figure: diminutive, regal and too ambitious for his own good. Through a convolution of betrothals, he was the uncle by marriage, son-in-law and second cousin of Crown Prince Muzaffar ud-Din. Farmanfarma shared his sister’s love of family, but his attitude to religion was expedient. He drank and womanised in the Qajar way, taking numerous temporary wives, as Shia Islam permits, but he also knew the value of pious gestures. He became a friend of the British diplomat Percy Sykes, though the latter never fully trusted him. Few did. Farmanfarma hungered for power at the centre, but he was often sent off to pacify faraway provinces, partly because he was an effective military administrator, partly because his rivals wanted him out of the way.

  In a photograph from Mossadegh’s teens, the dashing, still-youthful Farmanfarma, who is dressed like a Cossack officer – he owned a large collection of military uniforms, and picked up honorary commissions like any European grand duke – rests his hand affectionately on his nephew’s shoulder. Mossadegh stares impassively from the folds of his camel’s wool gown – his aba.

  Not surprisingly, given the chronic morbidity of her husbands, Najm al-Saltaneh reserved her most constant affections for her brother. The tone of her correspondence with Farmanfarma – affectionate, emotionally untrammelled, occasionally shrewish – hints also at her relations with her elder son as he got older and she came to depend on him. Even allowing for the suffocating attentions that many Iranian mothers lavish on their first-born sons, Najm al-Saltaneh’s references to Mossadegh glow with pride. In one letter she recorded that he had ‘grown up beautifully. It’s a miracle; fatherless children aren’t supposed to grow up this well.’8

  Najm al-Saltaneh had strong ideas about how a great man should behave. A few years later, when Mossadegh was starting his political career, he was the object of virulent press attacks and retired to bed, claiming to be suffering from a fever. Najm al-Saltaneh visited the invalid, but instead of comforting him, she started swearing and beating him with her cane. ‘Get up!’ she cried. ‘You think you can cross the sea without getting your feet wet?’ Mossadegh’s recovery was immediate.9

  With the assassination of Nasser ud-Din Shah and the accession of the mild, sickly Muzaffar ud-Din, Najm al-Saltaneh reached the summit of her vicarious power. She was sister-in-law of the Shah, her husband was his private secretary, and Farmanfarma captured the prestigious war ministry. Nasser ud-Din Shah had already awarded Muhammad the title Mossadegh al-Saltaneh, or ‘Verifier of the Sultanate’.* Now, aged just fifteen, backed by his mother’s clique, he was appointed chief revenue officer for the vast territories of Khorasan and Baluchistan, in eastern Iran, an office he discharged from an imposing building in central Tehran.

  Mossadegh later claimed that he had easily learned the art of revenue accounting from the clerks he had inherited from his predecessor, and he won extravagant praise from one contemporary chronicler, who commented that he had come on ‘a century in a single night’, and noted his ‘wisdom, learning and intelligence’.10 But Mossadegh’s record was not, in fact, spotless, and evidence has come to light suggesting that he transgressed in such basic matters as the disbursement of salaries, and approved unauthorised expenditures.11

  A corrective to the ascetic self-image he cultivated in later life, our picture of Mossadegh from this early period is one of grateful accumulation. Between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five he acquired several properties around the country, and the revenues they brought him would allow him to educate himself abroad.12 Mossadegh was quite the young man about town. He was sighted with his mother at theatrical performances and tea parties, and Muzaffar ud-Din Shah visited one of his estates to see the irrigation system he had installed. It is more than likely that Mossadegh attended the lavish lunches that Farmanfarma gave at his palatial colonnaded house, which lay in a huge compound, full of smaller houses occupied by various wives and other relations, and which one of Farmanfarma’s sons called a ‘fairyland of pools and garden hideaways’.13 A formal portrait photograph taken around this time shows Mossadegh seated in braided jacket of some ostentation, a traditional agate-encrusted ring on his little finger. He sports a fashionable sliver-moustache and an equable, self-satisfied gaze.

  Given his background, it is not surprising that he grew up with a sense of destiny – even greatness. The granadee who had received Mossadegh when the boy was nine had taken the opportunity to consult his anthology of Hafez, whose supple and esoteric verses adapt themselves to auguries. More than half a century later, Mossadegh would recall the lines that were chanced upon, which touched on the romance of Leyla and her besotted lover Majnun, pointing to a career of ardour, privation and achievement.

  O my heart, it is better to be ruined by a rosy wine;

  It is better to achieve grace without gold or treasure.

  Where they give ministries to the poor, I expect you to be highest of all.

  On the road to Leyla’s house, which is fraught with mortal risk, the first condition is that you be Majnun.’14

  Najm al-Saltaneh was in pursuit of a more literal Leyla. Showing typical opportunism, she had pressed for Mossadegh’s engagement to her niece, the daughter of Muzaffar ud-Din Shah. With Mossadegh in his sixteenth year, it was time to close the deal, but this was to reckon without the recklessness of Farmanfarma. Scandal broke with allegations that he was plotting to depose the Shah. The prince denied it all, but to no avail. He fell, and the family fell with him.

  Farmanfarma was lucky to get away with his life. He was given three years’ exile. Najm al-Saltaneh’s husband was stripped of his position as the Shah’s private secretary, and her sister, the Shah’s wife, was cooped up in the harem. To complete the humiliation, at the beginning of 1898 Mossadegh lost his fiancée to the son of the prime minister. Najm al-Saltaneh, who had also fallen out with her sister in a dispute over property, was overcome with rage and grief, and swallowed opium – ‘though not�
�, a contemporary observed cattily, ‘enough to kill her’. A cruel, ‘very amusing’ ditty was composed around the incident.15

  Mossadegh seems to have reacted phlegmatically. He had shown no interest in contracting a temporary marriage, a common device for sating youthful appetites. Rather than a matter of the heart, he regarded marriage as an inescapable rite for someone of his background, believing (as his mother reported) that ‘if a man is somebody, and he has money, then people will give him their daughter. If not, they will not.’16

  A few years later, in 1903, after Farmanfarma had been rehabilitated, Najm al-Saltaneh aimed again – with more success. This time her target was Zahra Zia al-Saltaneh, the daughter of a senior divine. ‘Even if you didn’t give my son the Shah’s daughter,’ Najm al-Saltaneh sniped at her sister, ‘he shall have the daughter of the Shah of religion.’ And so he did.

  Zahra was a noted beauty: tall, slim and fair. At nineteen, she was older and more mature than most brides of the day. Mossadegh had only the reports of his mother to go on; he would not see her face until they were man and wife.

  An account of the wedding ceremony, based on Zahra’s recollections, has been relayed by the couple’s eldest grandson, Abdolmajid Bayat.17 Musicians played while the guests, segregated according to sex, ate from tables loaded with sweets and fruit. A mullah recited prayers and Qoranic verses. To make married life sweet, one of the guests rubbed two sticks of candy over a length of cloth that was held over the bride’s head. Another ran a needle and thread through the same cloth to shut the mouth of her new mother-in-law – a forlorn hope, in the case of Najm al-Saltaneh! Before them lay the traditional embroidered coverlet and an assortment of fruit and other adornments, symbols of wealth and fecundity.