The Modern Middle East (12 page)

Reza Pahlavi’s Iran

Like Atatürk, Reza Khan was a soldier who had a distinguished record in the army and had risen rapidly through its ranks.
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He had served in the Cossack brigade, a separate military unit set up and administered by Russia though technically under the control and supervision of the Iranian government. Throughout the Great War, Reza and others like him had seen the de facto dismantling of Iran into spheres of influence by the Allied powers and the steady disintegration of internal order and politics at the hands of a fractious Majles.
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The Constitutional Revolution and his own lust for worldly pleasures had left the Qajar shah weak and ineffective, and it was within the context of a badly decaying polity that Reza Khan launched a military coup in February 1921. His coconspirator in the coup was a thirty-four-year-old journalist named Seyyed Zia-alddin Tabatabai, who initially assumed the office of prime minister, with Reza becoming the commander of the army. This arrangement lasted only three months, however, and in May Seyyed Zia was forced to resign from his post and leave Iran.

Initially, the coup makers did not have enough power of their own or enough of a support base to assume total control. For some time, Reza Khan exerted power from behind the scenes while remaining in command of the army, although the Majles, the prime minister, and to a lesser extent the Qajar king, Ahmad Shah, managed on occasion to influence the course of events. Throughout this time, Reza Khan concentrated on establishing domestic order and security. Consequently, he became very popular not only among elements in the military but also among the civilian population and even many politicians.
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By 1923 he had emerged as the dominant figure in the political establishment, eclipsing individuals in both the Majles and the royal court. In October of the same year, the shah was left with no alternative but to name the army commander as the new prime minister and to leave on a tour of Europe. Within less than two years, Reza Khan would overthrow the Qajars and replace them with a dynasty of his own.

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 banning of traditional ethnic clothes in 1928 in preference for European-style clothing and Pahlavi caps (later replaced by
so-called international hats).
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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 University of Tehran was also established in 1934, complete with a Theology Faculty designed to further undermine the influence of the Qom clerics.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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