Patriot of Persia

by Christopher de Bellaigue

  At length, after being pressed several times – the bride must not appear forward – Zahra consented to be Mossadegh’s wife. The newly-weds were congratulated and family members poured sugared almonds and gold and silver pieces over their heads, which the children present picked up as keep-sakes.

  Only after the ceremony, when they were alone, did Zahra reveal her face to her husband. It was not a success. Zahra had been heavily made up according to custom, with woad mascara, rouge, and kohl outlines to accentuate her almond-shaped eyes. She must have looked rather dramatic, and Mossadegh was unhappy. ‘Madam!’ he demanded. ‘What is this get-up? Go immediately and wash your face.’18

  The marriage of Mossadegh and Zahra Zia al-Saltaneh owed less to Leyla and Majnun than to ordinary calculations of preferment and propriety. Marriage was a way of allying families, producing heirs and pleasing God. The chances of a loving partnership were slim, not only because the parties had no say in the choice of spouse, but also because men and women, even after marriage, continued to live largely separate lives.

  After the wedding, Bayat writes, installed in her husband’s home, Zahra ‘reigned over the women in the private apartments. She had her coach and team and a eunuch to wait on her. For his part, Mossadegh spent most of his time in his own quarters; he had his own stable, his own servants.’ Zahra’s life was far from taxing. She ‘made herself up, received visitors, heard the latest titbits from the city, consumed sweets and smoked the water-pipe. She said her prayers, enjoyed hearing religious recitals; her life progressed without the slightest collision, without the slightest demand from society.’19

  Mossadegh was clearly not indifferent to Zahra’s beauty, and there was an early flurry of children, but there was precious little common ground between the two. Zahra was traditional and pious; Mossadegh was neither. She had none of her husband’s (or mother-in-law’s) interest in the affairs of the nation. She preferred flowers.

  For all that, in spite of these beginnings, the partnership would prosper over sixty-four years. Although they would spend many years living apart, a bond of affection and trust would form between Mossadegh and Zahra, with much waspish humour. And when, on the day of the coup, the mob approached to destroy her house and kill her husband, it was with the greatest difficulty that Zahra was persuaded to abandon him and flee to safety. ‘If they want to kill him,’ she protested, ‘they should kill me too.’20

  In 1906, following Russia, and anticipating Turkey, Persia had a constitutional revolution. It was not driven by formal political parties, but a shifting alliance between young radicals and secularists on the one hand and an array of more conservative forces on the other: sections of the Islamic scholars (the ulema), the merchants (the bazaaris) and provincial notables. The revolution would not achieve its goals but it would redefine the country – and Mossadegh with it. Henceforth, to be a ‘constitutionalist’ would mean something specific: to follow a dream which flared and guttered over the next few years and to take strength from those who manned the barricades. In time, Mossadegh would be recognised as constitutionalism’s champion.

  The Persian constitutionalists were fired by the ideals of the French Revolution: to truss up the monarch using the law, control his spending and prevent absolutism. In France, constitutionalism had led to regicide and a republic, but not in Persia, where many people regarded the monarchy as a bulwark against godless communism. Constitutionalism in Persia was forced to make room for different views, from the radical to the religiously conservative. Inevitably, there was a parting of the ways.

  By 1905, Muzaffar ud-Din had turned out to be almost as bad a Shah as his father had feared. (He was known in diplomatic circles as ‘Mauvaise Affaire ud-Din’.) He devoted his energies to appeasing the army, whose pay was as much as two years in arrears, and raising secret loans to finance foreign trips which had been recommended by his doctors. Persia prostituted itself for the sovereign’s kidneys, and popular resentment against Europe increased. The country experienced another surge of nationalist feeling. A vital condition for the making of a modern nation was being met.

  Much ire was directed against the Belgian civil servants who had been engaged to reform the country’s customs administration. Revenues duly rose but were used to fund Muzaffar ud-Din’s jaunts to Europe, where he purchased every new curiosity he was offered. Russia’s support for the Belgian customs administrators called into question their loyalty to the Persian state, and Persian merchants grumbled that new tariffs favoured their Russian counterparts. The Belgians were not popular in the revenue department that employed Mossadegh. With the creation of a unified exchequer staffed by civil servants, they started taking over its functions. Evidence for personal conflict comes in the form of a letter from this time, signed by several public figures, bluntly warning the Belgians not to confiscate land owned by Mossadegh al-Saltaneh.21 The Belgians’ unpopularity was compounded by their hauteur, and their top official was eventually sent home after a photograph circulated showing him dressed up as a mullah.

  The Belgian experience showed the dangers inherent in foreign-led reforms. Some of the Belgians’ rationalising measures were eminently sensible, but they were carried out by the wrong people and for the wrong reasons. Over the coming decades, the country would engage Swedes to set up a gendarmerie, Russians and Englishmen to start armies, and Americans to run the economy. With the exception of the admirable American Morgan Schuster, who ran the country’s finances between 1909 and 1911, and was forced out by Russia (with British connivance), Persian patriots regarded these foreign missions with suspicion. They contributed to a near-universal conviction that the country’s woes were the fault of outsiders.

  Different groups spent the first years of the century manoeuvring against a backdrop of deepening crisis. While Muzaffar ud-Din Shah took the waters at Baden-Baden, Persian towns erupted in riots – against the new tariffs, against the Bahais, against tyrannical provincial governors and the price of bread. When the Shah was at home, Tehran seethed with plots and he was constantly rumoured to be dead. Women threw themselves at his carriage; illegal pamphlets inveighing against ‘parasitical’ mullahs were smuggled in from socialist cells abroad. Islam was in danger and a mob took an hour to obliterate a bank that the Russians had foolishly built over a cemetery. ‘I knew then’, remarked one awe-struck observer, ‘that the spiritual power of the people is a superior force of God.’

  The revolution started in earnest at the end of 1905, when some sugar merchants were bastinadoed for raising prices. The bazaar closed and the shrine at Shah Abdolazim was occupied by radical mullahs and their supporters, issuing demands for a new body – a ‘house of justice’, whose functions no one could quite define.

  The dispute dragged on until the British intervened in the summer of 1906. Distinguishing themselves adroitly from the Russians, who were identified with society’s ultra-conservative elements, the British minister turned over the grounds of the Tehran legation to thousands of constitutionalists and helped them articulate their demands. On August 5, an ailing Muzaffar ud-Din signed the law that would establish the first parliament, or majles, in an old palace in Baharestan Square, in the eastern part of central Tehran.

  The foundations had been laid for a constitutional monarchy, and Mossadegh was prominent enough to have played a shining young man’s role. But it would be hard to imagine a young man more closely associated with Persia’s ruling establishment than Mossadegh al-Saltaneh. He passed close to events, rather than plunged in.

  For all that, his opinions were starting to emerge, and they were cautiously reformist. He was aware that the days of unaccountable revenue officers passing on their posts like heirlooms were coming to an end, but he could not support the culling of the elite by abusive radicals who might drag the country towards a republic. He supported the idea of a constitutional monarchy but doubted that the movement sat on sure foundations. Many of those who criticised the old order, he complained, had spent ‘a little time abroad, watching the approac
h of the constitution from afar’, and had returned to Iran equipped with only a ‘superficial’ knowledge of events, while others ‘hadn’t even heard of constitutionalism, and didn’t know the difference between absolutism and constitutionalism’.22

  Shortly before the first constitution, Mossadegh had taken a step back from public life. The reformists were rounding on the revenue department as a haven for idle reactionaries, so he quitted and took the opportunity to improve himself. The Qoranic Arabic and Islamic jurisprudence he had learned as a child had been supplanted in the new syllabuses by French, modern political philosophy and the law. He engaged private tutors. ‘Nothing’, he would recall, ‘was important to me save increasing my knowledge, even slightly, every day.’23

  Iran’s first parliament opened in October 1906, as soon as the Tehran seats were filled. Elections had taken place on a restricted franchise – women, the poor and other undesirables were denied the vote – but members of the new chamber were trenchant in their defence of what they considered to be the national interest. They rejected a new Anglo-Russian loan, threw out the Belgian customs chief and fostered a press, critical and satirical. This last innovation was a particular irritation to Muzaffar ud-Din’s successor as Shah, his son Muhammad-Ali.

  Muhammad-Ali came to the throne on his father’s death in January 1907. The American financial adviser Morgan Schuster described him as ‘perhaps the most perverted, cowardly, and vice-sodden monster that had disgraced the throne of Persia in many generations. He hated and despised his subjects from the beginning of his career, and from having a notorious scoundrel for his Russian tutor, he easily became the avowed tool and satrap of the Russian government.’24 The new Shah and his Russian backers immediately declared war on the majles.

  Mossadegh was a member of one of the myriad associations which had been set up in support of constitutionalism, but the radical constitutionalists distrusted him because of his uncle. Prince Farmanfarma was Muhammad-Ali Shah’s brother-in-law and the radicals saw him for the self-serving grandee that he was – and Mossadegh, his nephew and close adviser, in a similar light. So, when it came to filling the empty seats in the majles, and Mossadegh was elected from the central province of Isfahan, the deputies were only too happy to reject him on the grounds that he was not yet thirty, the minimum age for a deputy.

  The battle between the constitutionalists and their opponents was conducted without pity. Revolutionaries assassinated the prime minister and a bomb was thrown at the Shah’s car, while the radical press heaped odium on the Crown. Having supported the constitution, the conservative mullahs came to see it as a vehicle for secularism and awarded themselves a veto over legislation. Then, in 1907, the British and Russians came to an infamous arrangement whereby they divided Iran into zones of influence. Armed conflict became inevitable between the constitutionalists and the Shah’s Russian-led force of Cossacks. No longer would the British play the benign role of counterweight.

  On the morning of June 23, 1908, the parliament in Baharestan Square and an adjacent mosque, bristling with armed deputies and their supporters, were besieged by the Russian Colonel Liakhoff, his two thousand men, and their cannon. A tense stand-off followed, but the Cossacks were not interested in negotiating. Shots rang out, the constitutionalists replied, and the battle for Iran began.

  At first the constitutionalists surprised the Cossacks with the vigour of their response, but Liakhoff brought up more cannon and the bombardment took its toll. Inside the parliament building, two senior constitutionalist divines lost their nerve and fled. Younger militants fought on, but it was in vain. And so, in the words of E. G. Browne, the Constitutionalists’ most fervent supporter in Britain, ‘the buildings that had for the best part of two years been the centre of the Nation’s hopes, and the focus of the new spirit which had stirred the dry bones of a seemingly dead people to new life . . . were reduced to ruins, and the defenders either slain, taken captive, or put to flight.’25

  Mossadegh had been on his way to Baharestan Square to take part in the defence when he heard the sound of firing and cannons. ‘I was unable to go on,’ he would recall, ‘and returned home.’26 Another constitutionalist, more impulsive and hot-headed, would surely have forced his way through the chaos, but Mossadegh would never show much relish for physical violence.

  He went to ground during the retribution that followed, when some of the radical constitutionalists were executed or fled. Later, he reluctantly answered the Shah’s summons to join a sham assembly designed to mask parliament’s annihilation. Najm al-Saltaneh had arranged for his inclusion and one may easily imagine the alarm she felt at his progressive politics. Although she believed that the ruling class should help and if necessary suffer for the people, the levelling of society that is implicit in parliamentary democracy was not something she could welcome. Besides, for her, as for her brother, politics was not about being right. It was about winning.

  Mossadegh’s inclusion in a discredited assembly must have placed him in an acute dilemma. On the one hand, he could not associate himself with a despot like Muhammad-Ali Shah. On the other, he was tied by his mother to the ruling house and shared the traditional Persian fear of chaos. He had not been married long and had three young children. The solution he found was solitary exile aimed at self-improvement. Najm al-Saltaneh encouraged him; she saw the wisdom in an expedient absence from a sticky field.

  Thus, in early 1909, accompanied by his younger half-brother Abolhassan, whom he was to place in a French boarding school, Mossadegh set out for Europe to acquire an education.

  Chapter 3

  Fokoli

  Mossadegh was twenty-six when he arrived in Paris and although he had occupied high office, started a family and lived through revolution and upheaval, he was a stranger to the banal tribulations of modern life.

  He was a prince twice over when he left Iran, in the sense that he lived in regal serenity, isolated from petty domestic details, and because every first-born Iranian male, down to the poorest, is made to feel like a prince by his mother. Mossadegh’s knowledge was deep but rather arcane. He knew about crop-sharing, foreign concessions and Islamic jurisprudence, but less about posting a letter or riding an underground railway, let alone boiling an egg or unblocking a sink. He was a learned, rather serious-minded ingénu.

  In Paris he became a student at the elite École Libre des Sciences Politiques, running down his quarterly remittance from home, swotting at all hours to make up for his rudimentary French and moving from one set of modest digs to another. The host country was afflicted by strikes and political instability, but Mossadegh had turned to France for help in interpreting his own nation and those at a comparable stage of development. He read about Turkey, Algeria and Russia – sitting cross-legged, ‘à la turque,’ when he tired of chairs. At the beginning of 1910, he witnessed the silent, lapping Paris that came into being after the great flood, when the city was overwhelmed by the Seine and became Venice for a single uncanny week. And he had a love affair, probably unconsummated – he took that secret to his grave, as did she – with an adoring emancipated young woman. He, whose traditional Islamic culture proscribed all contact between unrelated men and women! He, who had not seen his bride’s face before they exchanged vows!

  It was well known that there was a danger in all this. To study abroad was to expand one’s horizons and there was a strong possibility that the exile would lose his moral, Muslim compass. To study in Paris, the world capital of sin, was especially risky. Paris was home to the so-called fokolis – from the French faux col, or detachable collar – a derogatory catch-all for Persian students who went to Europe claiming to seek an education, but brought back a fancy wardrobe and a case of the clap.

  Little could be more damaging for a young exile than for scandalous reports of licence and free-thinking to filter back home. Mossadegh’s French sojourn coincided with the publication of an article in Tehran about the ‘depraved of Paris’, but the young Persian’s instinct was not to revel but to
study, to the point that he neglected to visit the city’s main attractions.1 Indeed, it was his very seriousness, his combination of shyness and inscrutability, and the austerity of his lifestyle, which captured the heart of twenty-one-year-old Renée Vieillard.

  She was the daughter of a French colonial pioneer who had returned to France in 1892. A budding feminist, enthralled by the Muslim world, Renée took courses at the country’s top school of oriental languages, and knew many of the Middle Easterners who had converged on Paris to study and to plot the destiny of their nations. For these exiles, the French Revolution was an inspiration, and Auguste Comte, whose positivist philosophy presented science as an heir to religion, was a modern guide. Their home countries were thrillingly on the move. In Turkey, the Committee for Union and Progress had deposed the ‘red sultan’, Abdulhamit II. In British-run Egypt, nationalists were demanding self-government. In Persia, the constitutionalist opponents of Muhammad-Ali Shah were once more in the ascendant.

  Renée Vieillard relished this cultural and political ferment. Alongside her studies, she edited feminist and orientalist journals, argued for building a mosque in Paris – the plan would be realised after the First World War – and led discussions of women’s rights in the Muslim world. Mossadegh must have been astonished and flattered by this energetic young woman from France’s anti-clerical tradition, six years his junior and plainly besotted. She found in him a welcome contrast to some of the more ostentatious overseas students – the Egyptians were the worst, apparently – and later claimed to have had presentiments of his greatness. A stock romantic device was employed. She would help him with his studies and coach him in French. She wanted no payment.