All the Shah’s Men (5 page)

Worst of all, the tenuous alliance between clerics and secular reformers began to unravel. Mullahs who had supported the reform movement became alarmed by the demands of radicals who they said had “thrown out the law of the Prophet and set up their own law instead.” The Qajar court played adroitly on their concerns and managed to persuade many of them that their true interests lay with the monarchy.

“It is not advisable for the government of Iran to be constitutional, for in constitutional government all things are free, and in this case there must also be freedom of religion,” one courtier asserted in a speech to the Majlis. “Certain persons will insist upon religious freedom, which is contrary to the interests of Islam.”

Many clerics shared these fears. When the Majlis debated a bill to legalize secular schools, one asked, “Will entry into them not lead to the overthrow of Islam? Will lessons in foreign languages and the study of chemistry and physics not weaken the students’ faith?” Others questioned the very premise of the reform movement: “By the use of two enticing words, justice and consultation, the freedom seekers have deceived our brothers into making common cause with atheists…. Islam, the most complete, the most perfect, took the world by justice and consultation. What has happened that we must bring our regulation of justice from Paris, and our plan of consultation from England?”

This clash between clerics and secular reformers would resonate through modern Iranian history. So would another clash that emerged during this period, the one that split the religious class itself. Some clerics believed that received religion was compatible with modern ideas, but others saw a contradiction and abandoned the reform movement. This debate reflected Iran’s age-old conflicts: ancient versus modern, religious versus secular, faith versus reason. It pitted, in the words of one historian, “the Persian trait of openness and assimilation against the Islamic trait of insularity and traditionalism.”

Confident that most of the country’s religious leaders were with him, Mohammad Ali Shah began a campaign of terror and violence against the Majlis. In June 1908 his men assembled a gang of thugs and sent them rampaging through Tehran shouting, “We want the Koran! We do not want a constitution!” Then he ordered his elite Cossack Brigade to bombard and sack the building where the Majlis was meeting. Iranians rose up in protest in several cities, and many were killed in street fighting. For a time it seemed that full-scale civil war might break out, and at one point the Shah even took
bast
at the Russian Legation.

Both of the imperial powers that sought to dominate Iran, Britain and Russia, realized that the reform movement now threatened their dominant position in the country and encouraged the Shah to continue resisting it. Still the Majlis pressed on. One of its most decisive steps was its vote to hire an American banker, Morgan Shuster, as Iran’s treasurer-general. Shuster arrived with a zealot’s energy and set out to dismantle the elaborate systems of tax exemptions and back-room deals through which British and Russian syndicates were looting Iran. The governments of both countries demanded that he be removed, and in the fall of 1911 the Russians sent troops to enforce their will. When the Majlis defiantly refused to dismiss him, the royal court, immeasurably strengthened by the presence of foreign soldiers, shut it down and arrested many of its members. Iran’s tumultuous five-year Constitutional Revolution, the first concerted attempt to synthesize Iranian tradition with modern democracy, was over.

The experience of these years profoundly reshaped Iran’s collective psychology. Unlike the Tobacco Revolt, which had the narrow aim of defeating a single arbitrary law, the Constitutional Revolution aimed to establish an entirely new social and political order. It was crushed with the decisive help of foreign powers, but only after it had laid the foundation for a democratic Iran. A constitution had been written and adopted, and under its provisions there would be regular elections, which meant political campaigns and at least the semblance of open debate. In the years to come, Iranian rulers could and would ignore, overrule, and act against public opinion, but they would never manage to extinguish the people’s conviction that they were endowed with rights no government could take from them. The lessons they learned during this burst of reformist passion shaped the peaceful revolution that Mohammad Mossadegh led nearly half a century later.

Iranians had flocked to the banner of democracy because they believed that establishing the rule of law in their country would help pull them out of poverty. They were also driven by mounting anger directed at two targets. One was the Qajar court, as exemplified first by the execrable Mohammad Ali Shah and then by his obese son, Ahmad, who ascended to the throne in 1909 at the age of twelve. The other was the suffocating role that foreign powers—Britain and Russia in particular—had come to play in Iran.

During the Constitutional Revolution, reformers tried repeatedly to pull Iran out of the orbit of foreign powers. At one point the Majlis went so far as to refuse a loan offered by Russian bankers. Soon afterward it voted to establish a national bank run by Iranians. These efforts, however, were in vain. Iran fell ever more deeply into bondage as the Qajars continued selling the country’s assets.

In 1907 Britain and Russia signed a treaty dividing Iran between them. Britain assumed control of southern provinces, while Russia took the north. A strip between the two zones was declared neutral, meaning that Iranians could rule there as long as they did not act against the interests of their powerful guests. Iran was not consulted but was simply informed of this arrangement after the treaty was signed in St. Petersburg. What had long been informal foreign control of Iran now became an explicit partition, backed by the presence of Russian and British troops. When the treaty formalizing it came before the British Parliament for ratification, one of the few dissenting members lamented that it left Iran “lying between life and death, parceled out, almost dismembered, helpless and friendless at our feet.”

As Russia was consumed by civil war and revolution, its influence in Iran waned. After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, they renounced most of their rights in Iran and canceled all debts that Iran had owed to Czarist Russia. The British, now at the peak of their imperial power, moved quickly to fill the vacuum. Oil was the new focus of their interest. The newly formed Anglo-Persian Oil Company, which grew out of the D’Arcy concession, had begun extracting huge quantities of it from beneath Iranian soil. Winston Churchill called it “a prize from fairyland beyond our wildest dreams.”

Realizing the immense value of this new resource, the British in 1919 imposed the harsh Anglo-Persian Agreement on Ahmad Shah’s impotent regime, assuring its approval by bribing the Iranian negotiators. Under its provisions the British assumed control over Iran’s army, treasury, transport system, and communications network. To secure their new power, they imposed martial law and began ruling by fiat. Lord Curzon, who as foreign secretary was one of the agreement’s chief architects, argued its necessity in terms that crystallized a century of British policy toward Iran:

If it be asked why we should undertake the task at all, and why Persia should not be left to herself and allowed to rot into picturesque decay, the answer is that her geographical position, the magnitude of our interests in the country, and the future safety of our Eastern Empire render it impossible for us now—just as it would have been impossible for us any time during the last fifty years—to disinherit ourselves from what happens in Persia. Moreover, now that we are about to assume the mandate for Mesopotamia, which will make us coterminous with the western frontiers of Asia, we cannot permit the existence between the frontiers of our Indian Empire and Baluchistan and those of our new protectorate, a hotbed of misrule, enemy intrigue, financial chaos and political disorder. Further, if Persia were to be alone, there is every reason to fear that she would be overrun by Bolshevik influence from the north. Lastly, we possess in the southwestern corner of Persia great assets in the shape of oil fields, which are worked for the British navy and which give us a commanding interest in that part of the world.

The Anglo-Persian Agreement removed the last vestiges of Iran’s sovereignty, but it also infused the nationalist movement with new passion. Iranian patriots were inspired by the emergence of anticolonial forces in other countries, including several under British rule. Radicals in northern provinces established a Communist party, and after Soviet troops landed on the Caspian coast and declared the surrounding area an “Iranian Soviet Socialist Republic,” it seemed possible that two world powers might soon be waging war on Iranian soil. In much of the country, millions of people were living in worse conditions than they had ever known. Separatist movements gained force in several provinces. Iran was on the brink of extinction. Conditions were ripe for the rise of a charismatic leader. In 1921 he burst into the nation’s consciousness, a rough man on horseback named Reza.

Born in the remote Alborz Mountains near the Russian border, Reza left home as a teenager to follow the family tradition of military service. Rather than join the private army of a local chief, he chose to enlist in the Cossack Brigade, the only unit in the country that was modern, disciplined, and well commanded. It had been founded by Russian officers dispatched by the Czar and served principally as a private guard for the interests of foreigners and the Qajar kings who served them. Reza signed on as a stable boy but was soon given a uniform and began rising through the ranks as Reza Khan. He was six feet four inches tall, as fierce a fighter with his scimitar as with his machine gun, and much admired for his bravery. Profane and hot-tempered, his face deeply pockmarked as a result of smallpox in childhood, he cut a fearsome figure.

During his years as a soldier, Reza had the chance to travel through Iran and see the misery in which most of its people lived. He participated in many operations against the tribes, gangs, and bandits who controlled much of the countryside. “Whenever an expedition was sent to any part of the country to round up brigands or quell a disturbance,” one British diplomat reported, “he seems to have taken part in it.”

Reza quickly came to share his people’s disgust with their Qajar rulers. That made him a logical tool for the British, who had tired of dealing with mercurial tribal leaders and wanted a stronger central government. They saw in the Cossack Brigade the means to impose it. To seize control of the brigade and oust its Russian officers, they resolved to stage a coup and replace the Shah’s prime minister with one of their choosing. Their candidate was a fiery ex-journalist, Sayyed Zia Tabatabai. To provide Sayyed Zia with the military power he needed, they approached Reza. He was willing. On the evening of February 20, 1921, he and a handful of his fellow officers led two thousand men to the outskirts of Tehran. He roused them with a passionate speech: “Fellow soldiers! You have offered every possible sacrifice in the defense of the land of your fathers…. But we have to confess that our loyalty has served merely to preserve the interests of a handful of traitors in the capital…. These insignificant men are the same treacherous elements who have sucked the last drop of the nation’s blood.”

The fervor in camp was intense, and Reza, not a patient man, seized on it. Before dawn the next morning, his soldiers entered Tehran and arrested the prime minister and every member of his cabinet. To the dissolute Ahmad Shah, Reza made two demands: Sayyed Zia must be named prime minister and he himself commander of the Cossack Brigade. The Shah had neither the will nor the means to resist. Within the space of a few hours, with almost no resistance, the coup had succeeded. It was a testament to the power of the British, the weakness of the dying Qajar dynasty, and the bold self-confidence of Reza Khan.

Cossack regiments immediately set about pacifying the country and suppressing tribal armies. Power flowed into Reza’s hands. He dismissed Sayyed Zia just three months after the coup and then forced him to leave the country. Soon afterward he persuaded the Shah himself to leave, ostensibly on a temporary trip for health reasons. Soon this ambitious soldier was prime minister, army commander, and effective head of the resurgent Iranian state.

Reza had proclaimed himself a nationalist, but he recognized the power of his British backers and the debt he owed them. One study of the coup concluded: “There can be no doubt about the involvement of British army officers…. The day before the march to Tehran, Sayyed Zia had paid 2,000 tumans to Reza Khan and distributed 20,000 among his 2,000 men. No Iranian could have raised such a substantial amount of cash over a short period of time.”

Once he had completed his drive to power, Reza had to choose a political framework in which to rule. He fervently admired the Turkish reformer Kemal Atatürk and for a time considered following Atatürk’s example by declaring Iran a republic and installing himself as president. That idea terrified the religious class, which had been deeply shocked by Atatürk’s decisions to abolish the sultanate and the Islamic caliphate. They insisted that Reza preserve the monarchy, and finally won him to their side.

Although Reza was uneducated and barely literate, he had a deep understanding of the Iranian style of politics. A couple of years after his coup, he conceived a theatrical drama that he correctly calculated would carry him to the pinnacle of power. He retired to a small village, supposedly to reflect and meditate, and resigned from all his government posts. Before departing, he had arranged to be bombarded by demands that he return to power. For a time Reza pretended to resist, but then, as he had hoped, the hated Ahmad Shah announced his intention to return home. The Majlis, which had reconstituted itself after the debacle of 1911 but never managed to accumulate any real power, was horrified at this prospect. United in rebellion, it pronounced the Qajar dynasty dead and offered the Peacock Throne to Reza. He assumed it on April 25, 1926, and proclaimed himself Reza Shah. His new dynasty, he announced, would be known by the family name Pahlavi, after a language that Persians spoke before the Muslim conquest.