Iran: Empire of the Mind (37 page)

In 1926 Iran was still a country of peasant villages, tribes and small towns (in that order), with little industry and an overall population of only twelve million, the overwhelming majority of which was illiterate. Patterns of trade and the economic life in the bazaars had adapted to the wider world economy; in Tehran and other major cities there were some of the superficial trappings of modernity like street lights, motor vehicles and paving, but in the great expanses beyond little had changed since the time of Nader Shah.

Among the transformations imposed by Reza Shah, the first and most central was the expansion of the army. The army was the Shah’s highest priority and greatest interest, and most of the other developments he imposed can be explained in terms of the support they gave to the goal of making the army strong, efficient and modern. The plan for an army of five divisions, based on Tehran and the provincial capitals, with 10,000
men per division, was announced in January 1922 but problems with conscription, finance and equipment persisted, and the force was still 20 per cent under strength in 1926. Despite approval of the conscription law in June 1925, there was great opposition to its implementation, and serious tribal revolts among the Qashqai and other groups in Fars and elsewhere in 1929. The measure was not properly applied until 1930, and not imposed properly on the tribes until the mid-1930s or later. But by the late 30s the army stood at over 100,000 men, with reserves theoretically taking potential strength up to 400,000
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.

Despite these figures, the efficiency of the forces (outside Tehran, where the standard of the central division was rather higher) was not impressive, and for local actions against the tribes provincial commanders still recruited tribal contingents on an ad hoc basis, as had been done for centuries. Morale of the ordinary conscripts was low and they were not well paid—most of the large sums spent on the army went to pay for equipment, which included tanks (from the Skoda works in Czechoslovakia), artillery (from Sweden) and aircraft (an air force of 154 airplanes by 1936) as well as rifles and other material. Forty per cent of government expenditure went to the army even in the 1920s, and later it received almost all of the growing income from oil, though the overall proportion of state revenue spent on defence fell as the size of the total budget rose
³
. From 1922 to 1927 State finances were organised by another American, Arthur Millspaugh (after negotiations in which the Iranians had tried to get Schuster to return). But although their relationship was initially good (and the American had public approval to a degree no Briton or other foreigner could have expected), the Shah eventually grew resentful at the restrictions Millspaugh placed on his military spending. They argued (Reza Pahlavi declared ‘There can’t be two Shahs in this country’
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), Millspaugh’s position became impossible, and he resigned in 1927.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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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.
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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 1993
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.

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.
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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.
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