In late April 2018 a mummified body alleged to be that of Iran’s late ruler Reza Shah was discovered in Tehran, potentially prompting another debate among Iranians about the legacy of the first Pahlavi king, the father of the last Shah of Iran.
The incumbent Iranian regime immediately rushed to dismiss the find and the rumours that the body was in fact Reza Shah’s as mere speculation. Regardless of whether or not it truly was the corpse of the long-dead king, Iranians, who are discontent with almost four decades living under the rule of the Islamic Republic, have often expressed sympathy over the first Pahlavi Shah, also known as Reza Khan, believing that he, in spite of his brutal means, strived to make Iran a modern and developed country.
Unlike his son Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who inherited his throne from his father in 1941 and ruled Iran until 1979, Reza Shah was quite a brutal leader, particularly against Iran’s clergy, whom he believed stood in the way of Iran becoming a modern and developed country.
An old Iranian song succinctly summed up his rule, roughly, as follows:
Once upon a time there was a Shah.
Tall and striking.
Reza Khan – don’t say his name.
He had a foul temper, people were shit scared of him.
A man of few words.
He said ‘R’ and they built Railways.
He said few words.
He said ‘V’ and the veil was gone.
A foul-temper brought progress.
His ban of the veil (chador), which he saw as necessary for women’s empowerment, ultimately resulted in a backlash from the clergy, who organized a revolt in Iran’s Imam Reza Shrine in the northeastern Iranian city of Mashhad in 1935. Imam Reza is the only shrine of one of the Imams in Shiite Islam and is therefore the most sacred site in Iran, the world’s largest Shiite country. This did not deter Reza Shah. He sent in the army and police (the latter were sent from Iranian Azerbaijan in northwest Iran since none of the local police in Mashhad would dare enter the holy site) and killed over 100 people to crush the revolt.
It’s for his anti-clerical policies that the ruling clergy around the present ruling regime in Iran curse his name to this day, arguably more so than his son who ruled for much longer.
Nevertheless, his desire to make Iran a modern country is something many Iranians sympathize with. Most Iranians still take pride in the country’s Versek Bridge, a huge masrony arch bridge in the north of the country built during his rule – the bridge later became known as “the bridge to victory” during the Second World War. He also built highways, industrial plants and the country’s first university in the hopes that the next Iranian generation would not turn out ill-educated as he, and most Iranians of his time, had.
To this day he is often compared to Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, who founded and modernized the then-nascent Republic of Turkey that came out of the ashes of the Ottoman Empire, which had been on a steady decline for many of the preceding decades. In Reza Shah’s case he strove to modernize a country gripped by the feudalism of the Qajar Dynasty, which was largely corrupt and lost many of Iran’s former territories in the Caucasus to Russia. Unlike Ataturk, however, Reza Shah failed to make Iran a republic, as did his son.
Reza Shah’s fall from power was a humiliation. The United Kingdom and the Soviet Union swiftly invaded Iran in 1941 under the pretext that the Shah was too close to Nazi Germany. He abdicated in favour of his son, the then 21-year-old Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and died shortly after in South Africa a broken man.
Interestingly, in retrospect, the exhumation of his body and its return to Iran in 1951 came at a bad time for the young Mohammad Reza. He was struggling to hold onto power at that time against the populist Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadeq, who had nationalized Iran’s oil that year and sought to curtail the young Shah’s powers, demanding that he reign rather than rule. The young Shah briefly left the country two years later only to return with the help of an American and British-supported coup against Mossadeq. The Shah ultimately fled the country in 1979 rather than attempt to outright subdue the revolution with brute force.
The new Iranian rulers immediately destroyed Reza Shah’s masoleum and completely dismissed the monarchy he founded, claiming that it never did anything good for Iran throughout the entirety of its existence. Since then, however, under Iran’s relative isolation under the Islamic Republic compared to the Shah’s era — especially during the oil boom of the 1970s when Iran rapidly developed and modernized — Iranians have reevaluated and revised Reza Shah’s legacy.
During Ramadan in 2013, a documentary broadcast by a London-based Persian satellite channel highlighting Reza Shah’s achievements was received very well by Iranians. Ali Larijani, the parliament speaker under the current Islamic Republic, attributed this widespread appeal to the fact that the regime’s line on the Pahlavi Shahs now have far less credibility among Iranians.
“The rhetoric we’ve used has expired,” he admitted. “Plus we can’t deny history, people have eyes, they see the university and the railroad that he built.”
It makes sense for the current regime to downplay the discovery or outright deny that the body is possibly that of Reza Shah. Indeed, in the immediate aftermath of the body’s discovery they briefly detained two activists who arrived in the area. Aside from that brief incident they have remained pretty much completely silent on the matter, likely figuring that whatever they say will be disregarded or will serve to draw too much attention to a subject they would rather just go away.
As for the exiled Pahlavi descendants – particularly Reza Pahlavi, the son of Mohammad Reza and grandson of Reza Shah, who has been based in the United States since 1979 – the discovery serves as an apt catalyst to reinvigorate debate and support for the Pahlavi Dynasty and its legacy. He issued a statement which insisted that Reza Shah should be given a proper burial and treated first and foremost “as a simple soldier and servant of his country and his people.” He went on to insist that the “matter is not merely of a personal or familial nature” and called upon Iranians inside the country “to join and support my family, whether through social media or peaceful public protest” to push the matter and ensure Reza Shah gets a proper burial.
The exiled former crown prince to Iran’s Peacock Throne clearly has a lot to gain from even more reinvigorated debate and retrospection over his family’s legacy at a time when the Iranian people are extremely discontent with their country’s isolation, repressive governance and shambolic economy.
More generally it’s clear, even if it was not his body that was just unearthed, that an honest and thorough academic debate about the true extent of Reza Shah’s legacy, as well as that of his son’s, is long overdue in Iran.
Photo: Hamid Najafi/Creative Commons
Do you know where I can find a recording of the song about Reza Shah?