A Monarch Dethroned
His reforms gave rise to a middle class that rebelled against his autocracy.
By JOSHUA MURAVCHIK
The central problems of world affairs today spring from the Iranian Revolution much as those of the 20th century sprang from the Russian Revolution. Each took an idea and transformed it into a political force. The Russian experience gave rise to a vast and rich literature—novels, memoirs, histories, social science. The Iranian experience has generated much less. But now, with Abbas Milani's "The Shah," we have a finely wrought, enlightening biography of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979 and whose policies inadvertently brought on the Iranian upheaval.
Mr. Milani is an American political scientist who emigrated from Iran as a teenager and later spent a decade teaching in Iran, spanning the last years of the shah's rule and the first years of the Ayatollah Khomeini's. The shah's government imprisoned Mr. Milani for a year, and he would have suffered the same or worse under the new regime had he not returned to the U.S. As befits someone who ran afoul of both sides of Iran's political divide, his treatment of the events surrounding the revolution and the decades leading up to it is even-handed and fair-minded.
The shah, as Mr. Milani presents him, is above all a man of weakness. His father, Reza Shah—the founder of a "Pahlavi dynasty" that consisted, in the end, of only himself and his son—was "an ignorant, but astute peasant," to quote from a British report. Reza commanded a cossack brigade that seized control of the capital in a moment of national disorder in 1921. Within four years he managed to dislodge the shah then in place (Ahmad Shah Qajar) and coronate himself, making his 5-year-old son crown prince. A swashbuckler himself, Reza somehow failed to foresee that the pampered upbringing he arranged for his heir was unlikely to breed in him the steel necessary in a coercive ruler.
Instead, what the upbringing produced was a man of timidity and indecision who decked himself out in uniforms and medals and bellowed from behind billions of dollars of weapons like the Wizard of Oz from behind his curtain. Despite the martial pretense, the flight that ended the shah's rule—he abandoned Tehran in January 1979 in the face of mounting protests and crumbling support—was not the first time he had fled the country: During his pivotal 1953 power struggle with Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, the shah—"a nervous wreck," in the words of Loy Henderson, the U.S. ambassador—determined to leave in February and was dissuaded, only to depart in August and return a few days later with outside help.
Nor was the thinness of the shah's claims lost on his contemporaries. Mr. Milani quotes a disdainful note from U.S. Secretary of State John Foster Dulles preceding a visit by the shah to President Dwight Eisenhower. "The shah consider[s] himself a military genius," wrote Dulles, suggesting that the president "flatter the Shah with the prospects of an exchange of view on modern military problems."
The Shah
By Abbas Milani
Palgrave Macmillan, 488 pages, $30
The shah was less suited to be a gladiator than a bon vivant. Mr. Milani alludes to his majesty's relentless womanizing, describes his personal collection of fancy cars, boats and planes (bought with money from the national treasury), and recalls one state banquet that made the Guinness Book of Records as the most extravagant party ever. The fête—a six-course dinner flown in from Maxim's of Paris, washed down with 25,000 bottles of the best French champagne—was held to celebrate 2,500 years of monarchy in Iran. The shah often professed that monarchy was "natural" for Iran; but, Mr. Milani says, "he never commissioned or made an effort to offer a serious theory of why monarchy was suited to Iran's modern situation."
This omission is remarkable because, as that anniversary reminds us, monarchy is an antique system, while the shah's mission was to modernize his country. Despite his playboy side, he was reputed to work hard, and it is clear that he took to heart the mission of bettering his country. His program, the White Revolution, entailed what Mr. Milani calls "a pseudo-socialist, statist vision of the economy."
Many good things were in fact achieved. The number of high schools increased sevenfold, universities from eight to 148. Along with education came increasing open-mindedness in some realms, although not in others. From 1965 to 1975, Mr. Milani writes, Iran "was a discordant combination of cultural freedoms and political despotism—of increasing censorship against the opposition but increasing freedoms for everyone else. It is far from hyperbole to claim that during the sixties and seventies, Iran was one of the most liberal societies in the Muslim world in terms of cultural and religious tolerance, and in the state's aversion to interfere in the private lives of its citizens—so long as they did not politically oppose the Shah."
The shah's tolerance of religious minorities—notably Bahai and Jews—and his advancement of women's rights brought him to daggers with Iran's clergy, led by Khomeini. The shah's father had been a secularizer, but his son reinvigorated religious institutions as a counterweight to the communists, a stratagem he would regret. In a further irony, his educational and industrial advancements gave rise to a new middle class that rebelled against his autocracy. Its members indulged in what Mr. Milani calls a "dangerous game of wishful self-delusion," believing that Khomeini and his legions would serve their purposes rather than the other way around. In this they were joined by the U.S. government and Western intellectuals.
"The paradox of the fall of the Shah," Mr. Milani says, "lies in the strange reality that nearly all advocates of modernity formed an alliance against the Shah and chose as their leader the biggest foe of modernity." The Iranians have already paid dearly for this folly. What price the rest of the world will pay remains an open question.Mr. Muravchik is a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.
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