Patriot of Persia Read online

  In sum, there was much for Mossadegh to like, and yet he was the most trenchant critic of the new regime, for his differences with the Shah were profound and philosophical. Mossadegh was an anachronism in an age that aspired to human perfection. His politics lacked the clean Nietzschean lines of the transformative dictators, and were unshaded by the revulsion that some of Reza’s followers felt for the rest of society. The court minister Abdolhossein Teimurtash, for instance, considered himself a superman and believed that his compatriots ‘should be struck, should be ridden, should be held by the stirrup leather’.

  Again and again in Persian history one meets this same hatred of the elite for the rabble. It was typical of Mossadegh to speak out against the Tehran mayor whose policy of destroying old houses in order to widen roads saw many homes ruined before their inhabitants could save their belongings. It was all part of an effort to make Tehran look more western, but Mossadegh noted that the destruction of private property was illegal in the West.

  Behind his comments lurked a suspicion of material aspiration, drawing from an ascetic ideal located in Iran’s poetic and spiritual past. There is poetry in his question, posed in an article around this time: ‘What would happen if the roads were not paved and the buildings and guesthouses went un-built? Where would be the harm in that? I wanted to walk over the earth’ – and here, inevitably, politics intervened – ‘and not suffer my country to be taken over by others.’

  In 1926 Modarres narrowly escaped death while walking to class before dawn, pulling his camel’s wool aba over his head so his assassins would not have a clear view of him. He was wounded nonetheless, and taken to a police hospital where he was assigned a doctor who was notorious for administering lethal injections. A crowd barged into the hospital and, lifting up Modarres’s sick-bed, carried him to a different hospital where the doctors would not try to kill him. Reza, enjoying the air up on the Caspian, sent his sympathies.

  Mossadegh struck back with humour, which dictators hate. In a speech he observed that Tehran had become a less dangerous place under Reza, before adding mildly, ‘It is possible that Mr Modarres’s neighbourhood is unsafe.’18 During a debate on financial savings he proposed cuts in two sectors it was impolitic even to acknowledge: the secret police and the censors. Once, when mealtime approached and Mossadegh was still speaking, a deputy interrupted him to ask for a recess. Mossadegh said, ‘Your tummy is rumbling, but I will keep my belly-full of beliefs.’19

  Mossadegh’s issue with the dictatorship was not just its emphasis on coercion, but also its showiness and lack of discernment. Reza fitted into the mould of contemporaries such as Ataturk, Mussolini and Primo de Rivera – men on a personal mission to transform their countries. Mossadegh was also a rationalist. ‘Knowledge’, he said, unconsciously echoing one of Ataturk’s most famous aphorisms, ‘is the sole means of distinguishing good from bad.’ But knowledge did not only mean science and progress. It also meant using the favours one is born with – the physical and moral environment, religion, race and tribe.

  Reza Shah reformed furiously. He scrapped the Arabic and Turkish names for the months and introduced their old Persian equivalents. He replaced the Arabic lunar year, in use since the Arab invasions, with the Iranian solar year, which starts on March 21, the vernal equinox. He developed a cumbersome civil service and later on laid the foundation stone for the new University of Tehran, to which boys and girls were admitted on equal terms. There was a tentative industrialisation, with a small number of new factories being built. In 1935 Reza would substitute ‘Iran’ for ‘Persia’ as the official name of the country – the name used by the people, not a European derivation from antiquity.

  Mossadegh recoiled from measures that were harmful to the nation’s ‘Iranian-ness’ and ‘Islamic-ness’, because they were the building blocks of Persia’s identity. The Shah’s historical distortions left him cold. The government privileged Persia’s distant, pre-Islamic heritage over the more recent past, when the country’s native institutions and culture had been sapped, so the theory went, by Arab influence. (In fact the Arab invasions had invigorated Persian institutions and culture, leading to a renaissance of statecraft and the arts.) Mossadegh admired the ancients, sponsoring a translation of Fustel de Coulanges’ La Cité antique, but he had no truck with Reza’s antiquarian fantasies, which led to a rash of mock-Achaemenid public buildings and a new vogue for pre-Islamic names. ‘We should live as Iranians,’ Mossadegh said, ‘retaining the good things we have while accepting the good things of others.’20

  The new men worshipped Napoleon, but Mossadegh found inspiration in Montesquieu’s De l’esprit des lois of 1748, in which the Frenchman assigned to each form of government an animating principle (republican virtue; monarchical honour; despotic fear), introduced for the first time the separation of powers (legislative, executive and judicial), and suggested an assembly of secondary causes, such as climate and religion, which make governments different from each other. From here it was a short step to Mossadegh’s ‘Iranian-ness’ and ‘Islamic-ness’, and his belief that a constitutional monarchy was the most appropriate arrangement for Iran. But it was obvious to everyone that under Reza the separation of powers was a sham. The Shah considered no sphere of national life inviolate.

  Mossadegh spent much energy puncturing Reza’s grandest ambition, which was to throw a railway from the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf. For Reza, Persia’s lack of a railway was a shameful omission and he took charge of the project, casting a hypercritical eye over miles of track, haranguing labourers for their idleness and laying the last rail himself, in 1938. With its formidable natural barriers, plunging elevations and complex systems of switchbacks and tunnels, the Trans-Iranian Railway was (and remains) a spectacular feat of engineering, and it was financed indigenously through patriotic taxes on tea and sugar.

  It was one of those ideas that Mossadegh demolished from a position of pretended support. His prediction of miles of gleaming underemployed track running through sparsely populated country proved accurate, and his suggestion of more roads self-fulfilling. Years before the railway was finished, the long-distance lorry had become the country’s symbol of internal trade. Reza’s achievement was of greatest use to the Allied occupiers who unseated him in 1941, when it was used to transit materiel for the Soviet war effort.

  In the words of an acute modern historian of Iran, Peter Avery, Reza’s trouble was that he held up the triumphs of the past to a people who knew better. ‘They . . . know from experience better than almost any other nation on earth how transient are material achievements and pomp and glory . . . the New Order pointed to the ruins of Persepolis as reminders of what Iran had once been and must strive to be again. The Iranian people also see in those ruins a monument to the vanity of human success.’21

  During the elections to the seventh majles in 1928, a drawn-out process again marred by vote-rigging, Mossadegh went to the Shah and demanded that the polling happen without hindrance. The Shah summoned Teimurtash, who assured him that the elections were being conducted freely, only for Teimurtash to tell Mossadegh out of Reza’s earshot, ‘I could hardly say anything else in the presence of the Shah! Why not draw up a common list of six government and six popular candidates and settle the matter in this fashion?’22 Mossadegh refused to compromise.

  In the event, the polls were horribly corrupt. Of the old guard, Mossadegh’s friend Moshir and Moshir’s younger brother, another veteran constitutionalist, Motamen al-Mamalek, were elected, but refused to take up their seats. Mossadegh and the dissident divine Modarres, who did stand, were not returned. Modarres failed to get a single vote. ‘I assume that the 14,000 people who voted for me in previous elections changed their minds,’ he said, ‘but what happened to the vote I gave myself?’

  Mossadegh and the others now resolved to leave public life. Of those obstinate souls who had refused to bless Reza’s advance to absolutism, Mostowfi died a few years later, while Moshir and Motamen retreated completely from the public ey
e. The poet Bahar, who had barely escaped assassination on the eve of the Qajar abolition, was persecuted, jailed and exiled, and Modarres sent to prison in the deserts of eastern Iran. Only Hassan Taqizadeh, the veteran constitutionalist who had spoken against the Qajar abolition, joined Reza’s gang, before he too fell under suspicion and was banished to an embassy abroad.

  When Mossadegh left the majles his fame had never been higher, and his prospects never bleaker. He had done as much as anyone to show that Reza was the angel of death for constitutionalism. But the Shah’s position seemed unassailable. Mossadegh was in the wilderness. He was forty-five years old.

  Chapter 6

  Isolation

  Returning to Tehran after the fall of Seyyed Zia, Mossadegh and his family had gone to live at Najm al-Saltaneh’s home in Yusufabad Street in the northern part of the city. Later they moved to a prominently placed house in a garden compound on the corner of Heshmat ul-Dowleh Street and Palace Street – so called because it led to the entrance of the Shah’s Marble Palace. With the intensification of Reza’s dictatorship, however, Mossadegh’s instinct was to withdraw from the public eye. He let the Heshmat ul-Dowleh house to the Japanese Embassy, while the northern part of the same compound was developed by his son Ahmad, now an engineer, and he and Zahra moved to a complex of rooms in a garden owned by a niece.

  As Mossadegh’s grandson Majid would recall, the house was built modestly

  and irregularly, and was surrounded by trees and a high wall. At the entrance to the garden there was a carriage gateway and, on either side of that, rooms for the gatekeeper and the gardener; a hedge of trees . . . hid the view of the main house. At the far end, after crossing an alley of trees, one came to a single, straight, raised storey, incorporating rooms of different sizes. French windows opened onto the terrace, and in front of the building to one side there was a high-roofed building, also opening onto the same terrace, with some colonnades. This big room was called the hauz-khaneh, or bath house, and it had a marble basin in the middle which was fed by a spring. The water . . . was channelled across the room, and spilled onto the terrace. Around the basin there was a tiled masonry platform with scattered carpets and cushions, for resting on during hot days.1

  Mossadegh’s room was on the first floor of another, L-shaped building, whose lower section contained reception rooms. Much of the house was out of bounds to visitors, in keeping with Iranian tradition.

  Mossadegh had spent much of his life participating in the social round that was, and remains, inseparable from politics. Iranians are delightful friends: warm, waspish and emotional. No conversation is complete without consumption: tea in the winter, cordials and fruit in the summer, followed by an invitation to stay for a meal. The Tehrani in need of lunch needs only knock at a friend’s door at noon. The days are fluid and spontaneity is the watchword. ‘Let us go to so-and-so’s house,’ someone suggests, and with that the evening is accounted for. People drop whatever they are doing to attend the funeral of an acquaintance’s mother. The structure of life is provided by the calendar with its holidays and mourning days, and the seasons with their different produce and entertainments. In Ramadan everything gets turned on its head. Life acquires a nocturnal character, with discussion fuelled by stews, rice dishes, fruit and an array of fried sweets, lasting until the dawn prayer and the onset of sleep.

  Mossadegh was far from being a glutton, but he participated in all of this. Standards of entertaining were maintained even when the country was on the precipice. In the First World War, a crony received at Mossadegh’s house wrote that the two of them demolished a tray of rice and potato accompanied by a superlative lady’s finger stew and two portions of kebab, followed by melon. Mossadegh spoke more than he ate. ‘Then we occupied ourselves with tea and conversation until an hour before dusk.’2

  With Reza’s dictatorship, the days of relaxing on bolsters and plotting the country’s future ended. The shutters came down on chaotic Iran, and another Iran emerged, furtive and frowning from the epic complexes of its ruler.

  For Mossadegh it was significant that this change took place when he should have been reaching the summit of politics. Rather than fill the top offices, he spent the next thirteen years largely confined. There were times of depression, even of despair, but by and large Mossadegh stoically accepted his lot. Alongside the garrulous politico there had always been a reclusive Mossadegh: convalescing, his head buried in a textbook. This would now become the prominent feature of his personality, and in later life the popular image of him would be of an ascetic – frugal and cerebral.

  Even this life was not without consolations. He had been an absent father for his elder children. Now he had another chance. In 1923 Zahra gave birth to her last child, a girl called Khadijeh, and in 1925 a first grandson, Majid, was born. Majid’s mother, Zia Ashraf, was an inattentive parent, and he and Khadijeh were raised as siblings in the house of Mossadegh and Zahra, whom they called Maman and Papa, in the French manner.3

  Mossadegh lovingly watched his charges grow. He supervised the children’s homework after they started school, taught them backgammon and chess, and slipped them chocolate and sweets. They adored him in return and treated him with unabashed affection. Ideas about parenthood had changed since Mossadegh was a boy, when his father had been a spectral presence and Farmanfarma’s children trembled to be near him. With Khadijeh in particular, a pretty, mischievous, sociable child, a keen pianist and tennis player, who was headstrong enough to run away from school and lose herself in the bazaar, Mossadegh had a remarkable bond, the kind that sometimes arises in Iran’s extended families, confounding observers with its strange, cross-generational chemistry.

  Mossadegh was affectionate but he expected to be obeyed unquestioningly, and in full. Having given the children instructions to do something, he would ask, ‘What did I just tell you to do?’ and they would repeat exactly what he had said.4 Once, when Majid was impertinent, Mossadegh chased him around the garden brandishing some branches until Zahra intervened, took the boy to her breast, and forced her husband to kiss him and retire.5 As a rule, Zahra tended to reinforce Mossadegh’s authority. Her stock way of defusing a dispute was to side with her husband, saying, ‘Whatever Agha [Sir] says is for the best.’

  For the children, unaware of events outside the walls, it was a blissful existence, with a big garden to play in and family visitors coming through the gate – particularly on Fridays, when Zahra might give lunch to twenty people. The Persian New Year was marked with new clothes and Mossadegh’s gift of money for each child. The twig effigy of the caliph Omar, anathema to traditional Shias, was ritually burned on the anniversary of his death.6

  There was a large and changing staff, for Zahra kept alive the Qajar practice of taking in orphan girls as domestic servants, giving them a rudimentary education and marrying them off. Zia’s housekeeper, a broad-shouldered Azeri Turk called Telli, had started her career as one of these interns, but never left. Telli moved in and out of the private apartments with impunity.

  Mossadegh hated nepotism, laziness and profligacy. He expected the highest standards from the young people, so that they might, as he put it, be ‘of use’ to the country. Not for him the ducal spending of a Farmanfarma; he demanded thrift and tore a strip off the young ‘Papoola’ (his nickname for Ghollamhossein) when the latter spent his way into debt in Europe. Mossadegh deplored show-offs and spivs, and later on advised Majid to leave his car at home when attending courses in a poor part of Tehran, ‘otherwise it will arouse jealousy on the part of the other students’.

  Nowhere are Mossadegh’s relations with his young dependents more charmingly preserved than in letters he addressed some years later to Ghollamhossein’s son Mahmud. It was the autumn of 1949 and Mahmud was at boarding school in Britain. The experience was evidently not to the young man’s liking and in a letter to his grandfather he complained about the weather and his new surroundings, as well as the school’s prohibition of wirelesses. In his reponse, Mossadegh gave no hint
of the political turmoil then prevailing in Tehran, but devoted frank and unguarded attention to Mahmud’s concerns.

  ‘I am your sacrifice,’ he began, using the traditional intimate salutation,

  I received your letter of October 1 and it caused me much happiness. I am grateful that you are well – thanks be to God – but can say nothing about your dissatisfaction with the weather and your situation, because you have not yet got used to them. Of course the sun does not shine in Britain, but on the other hand you will learn things which will be useful to this country, and things will not seem so bad once you have got used to the situation and I am sure that with every passing day you will get used to the way things happen there. On the question of the radio, you should observe the school rules whatever they are, and no student should receive something that another is denied . . . otherwise, son, it’s possible that a lord would have lots of things that you would covet. In this instance I have nothing further to write, for you are very intelligent and logical, and will accept anything I say.

  You asked after me, and the answer is that my ill-health knows no bounds. If Papoola sends you the newspapers you will be aware of what is going on here . . . definitely continue to write your news and these letters will aid you in not forgetting your Persian. I miss you enormously, but an education is more useful to you than anything else.

  I am your sacrifice, my dearest Mahmud.

  — Papa7

  As the daughter of Tehran’s Friday prayer leader, Zahra naturally concerned herself with the religious side of the children’s education. She said her prayers regularly, fasted during Ramadan, and invited her female relations to join her for rowzekhani, when a mullah would come to the house to recount the sufferings of the Shia imams, reducing his listeners to blubbering wrecks in return for a fat fee. Mossadegh, who teased his wife for her religiosity, abhorred these performances and tried to be out of the house when they took place. Despite the importance he attached to Islam as part of his cultural background, and his abstinence from pork and alcohol, he neither prayed regularly nor observed the Ramadan fast. Indeed, years later, during the fasting month, he would derive mischievous pleasure from sipping a glass of water during a parliamentary speech and then defending himself according to Islamic tenets: ‘I am ill . . . for the past twenty or thirty years I have been under doctor’s orders not to fast. If someone is ill and fasts, that is against [religious] law because he is doing himself harm.’