Patriot of Persia Read online

  ‘Brown-haired and thin,’ she would recall, ‘with the eyes of a gazelle, always calm and reserved, he did not mix with his classmates. Once classes were over, he would return to his room in the very modest guest house in the rue Gay-Lussac where he lived . . . how to explain this sense of deference which I felt for this man who was so different from those around him!’ And so, ‘the young Iranian and the young Frenchwoman . . . influenced each other reciprocally by these exchanges, without any discordant note entering our relations. Ours was an exalting spiritual communion.’2

  Renée Vieillard had to overcome Mossadegh’s reticence before he consented to speak to her on the record about events in Persia. The interview she conducted with ‘A Persian Constitutionalist, Mossadegh al-Saltaneh’, in August 1909, came at a hopeful time. Muhammad-Ali Shah had been overthrown a few weeks before, and parliamentary democracy would soon resume. She published the interview in the Parisian newspaper Les Nouvelles, under the pseudonym A. de Rochebrune. It is likely that Mossadegh insisted she use an alias of indeterminate sex in order to avoid embarrassing questions back home. He was aware of the effect that an interview in the foreign press could have on his reputation in Persia.

  A. de Rochebrune found the young Mossadegh al-Saltaneh to be ‘very educated, boasting a very enlightened patriotism’, and not hesitating to ‘sacrifice all for the cause of liberty’. Mossadegh waxed lyrical about ‘the achievement of all the people of Persia’, but he did not neglect to puff up his uncle Farmanfarma, whom he depicted as a top constitutionalist. When the subject turned to Persian women, Mossadegh was careful to define their role within Islam, but also asserted that ‘our women are not inert dolls, capricious and vain little creatures,’ but ‘queen of the household’. He tactfully praised France’s role as a trailblazer for nations such as Iran. Renée concluded her article by suggesting that, for the countries of the East, France was ‘an elder sister’, and that ‘in the Orient, there are races that continue the task started by the French revolution of 1789’.3

  Renée Vieillard was barely out of her teens for the few months that she was close to Mossadegh, but she would cherish the episode for the rest of her life. She cited Mossadegh’s doctoral thesis in a book which she wrote many years later about the Prophet Muhammad, and there would be more letters after Mossadegh became prime minister. Later still, she would develop close relations with several younger members of his family. In truth, her effect on the studies of the young émigré seems to have been beneficial, for in his first exams in Europe he scored a creditable 16/20 in his main subject, general finance.

  That Renée Vieillard meant something to Mossadegh is not in doubt. He spent many intimate moments with her and confided to her the strength of his feelings for his mother – giving her a rather preposterous picture of Najm al-Saltaneh as a ‘passionate social reformer’. Five years later, when she was in Egypt, Mossadegh sent Renée a copy of his recently completed doctoral thesis, which he had just published.

  Mossadegh’s position at home meant that the friendship could not last, and he did not publicly acknowledge Renée except to refer in his memoir to a certain ‘very intelligent’ person who helped him with his studies during his first summer in Paris.4 Subsequent researchers, trying to track down the newspaper interview in the national archive in Paris, found that the only issue of Les Nouvelles to have gone missing was the one with the interview in it, raising the tantalising possibility that Mossadegh himself destroyed it. The copy of the interview that is now in the public domain was found in an archive of press clippings in the Tehran University library.5

  Mossadegh was not the first Muslim man to be drawn to the seductive autonomy which flourished in Europe, and which, in Iran, was stifled through family supervision and the seclusion of the sexes. He was part of a generation of Iranian men who were inspired by Europe but who expected their wives to remain Iranian. It is hard not to feel for the wives. In his interview in Les Nouvelles, Mossadegh gave an unintentional insight into his own marriage at this stage when he described Iranian women as ‘more mother than wife’.

  It is impossible to know whether some upheaval in Mossadegh’s relationship with Renée Vieillard contributed to the dramatic deterioration in health that he experienced towards the end of 1909, and which has generally been imputed to overwork, exacerbated by the damp winter. The symptoms, including stomach ulcers which forced him to lie down during lectures, sleeplessness and extreme nervous tension, would recur throughout his life. A reputable physiologist ordered complete rest, and was ignored.

  Mossadegh’s work ethic was already formidable, and eventually he had a complete collapse, stopped attending classes and engaged a full-time nurse – a welcome maternal figure called Marie-Thérèse, of whom he became very fond. There was a spell in a sanatorium and Marie-Thérèse, having lent him money for his passage, accompanied him to Iran to recuperate.* The invalid was so weak that, when the party changed trains at the Russian border, he had to be carried from one to the other in a wheelbarrow.

  It says much for the dominance that Najm al-Saltaneh exerted over her son, even now that he was married, that she took charge of his convalescence after he arrived back in Tehran, weak and emaciated, one summer’s day in 1910. She was furious with him because he had not been in touch since January’s great flood, news of which had reached Tehran, and he replied with the classic filial evasion that he had not wanted to worry her. There was immediate strife when he insisted on observing his French doctor’s orders that he drink only small quantities of water. Tehran is boiling hot in summer, and within a short time Mossadegh had dehydrated himself to the extent that his tongue had stuck to the roof of his mouth and he could barely speak. Still, he refused to bow to his mother’s entreaties until she learned what the weather was like in Paris. When she heard that it was cold and wet, she swore roundly at him and ordered two watermelons to be brought, which he gratefully gobbled up.

  Mossadegh went to convalesce at the property of a friend, Eqbal al-Mamalek, in the cool hills north of Tehran. Eqbal enquired what he had learned of French cooking and, not wanting to reveal his ignorance, Mossadegh claimed to have mastered the French dessert crème renversée. In fact, Mossadegh had seen Marie-Thérèse make crème renversée, but remembered little. He ordered eggs and milk to be procured and mixed with sugar, but the proportions were wrong and the woodstove too cold. After a day and a half’s puffing and prodding, the ingredients were quite raw. ‘If you know as much about finances as you do about cooking,’ Eqbal sighed, ‘one can only weep for this country.’6

  It is not impossible that news of Mossadegh’s friendship with a European woman had reached home. Certainly, his subsequent, hyper-cautious conduct while abroad, and his fear of adverse reports reaching Tehran, suggest a determination to avoid further entanglements. Whatever the reason, when Mossadegh embarked on the second leg of his European education, in the autumn of 1910, he was on a very tight leash indeed. The party that set out for Switzerland in that month comprised, besides Mossadegh himself, Zahra and their three children, two female companions for Zahra, a brace of young male cousins also seeking European knowledge, and the indefatigable Najm al-Saltaneh, hoping for relief from her cataracts.

  The group must have looked very fine. Mossadegh was quite used to the western uniform of starched collar, frock coat and pinstriped trousers. For the women, on the other hand, entering non-Muslim lands for the first time, sartorial choices were a minefield. The chador, the black length of cloth that pious Iranian women of all classes wear when out of doors, was ill-suited to Europe, but it would be unthinkable to go about bare-headed. Najm al-Saltaneh donned a woollen headdress favoured by Russian peasant women. Zahra and her companions devised an arresting ensemble composed of long European dresses, gloves and veiled, large-brimmed hats. Later on, the Swiss would not conceal their perturbation at the refusal of one of Zahra’s companions to remove her gloves to learn the violin.

  Their destination of choice was Fribourg, but they were not made welcome by
the fervent Catholics of that pastoral canton, so they moved to Neuchâtel, at the north-east corner of the lake of the same name: industrious, bourgeois and Protestant. At first they were refused lodging on account of being Muslim, but Mossadegh managed to rent a four-bedroom flat in a secluded spot overlooking the famous vines. A few months later, after an inconclusive visit to a Paris eye specialist, Najm al-Saltaneh would return to Persia. She had spent much of her sojourn in prayer, and declared herself well satisfied with her first and only experience of Europe.

  It would be hard to imagine a university town further from the continent’s gnashing ideologies than Neuchâtel. The place was silent after 9 p.m. and had neither theatre nor bar. But Mossadegh, it was already clear, had a nervous disposition, and he thrived, albeit slowly, in a place with few external stimuli. Over the next four years, he made the classic journey of emancipation of a pampered Middle Easterner in a rigorous western environment. When he arrived in Neuchâtel he was still a grandee defined by birth, and by the time he left he had become a doctor of law earning distinction by his own hard work. In Neuchâtel, his meticulous, fussy, lawyerly side found full expression, and of course he improved his French, the international language of the age.

  The Mossadeghs kept themselves to themselves. Their daughter and elder son, Zia Ashraf and Ahmad, were sent off to board with a well-to-do local family, the Pernouds, to improve their French. They attended a local school and came home at weekends. Mossadegh’s third child, a boy called Ghollamhossein, was too young to be sent away. Zahra returned to Tehran for the birth of her fourth child, also a boy, but the infant died of measles shortly after she brought him back to Neuchâtel. By this time Zahra’s companions had also returned to Tehran. A pious Muslim woman mourning her child in an alien environment, she found life in exile a trial.7

  They were the only Persians in the place and Mossadegh was determined to give a good account of himself. He dressed dapperly, paid his bills on time and won the gratitude of some local boys when he defended them in court after they were collared for stealing fruit. He was less understanding when his own children transgressed. Once, returning home for lunch, a delicious Persian aubergine stew made with tart, unripe grapes, he was appalled to learn that Ghollamhossein and Ahmad had stolen the grapes from a neighbour’s vines. ‘I’ll murder the pair of you!’ Mossadegh shouted, and leaped at the boys, who fled. ‘Don’t be scared,’ Ghollamhossein consoled his weeping brother. ‘He can’t kill us. They’d put him in jail!’8

  Years later, as prime minister, Mossadegh would recall the manner in which he quite undeservedly got his motorcycle licence in Neuchâtel, chuckling at the unworldliness of the Swiss – and at his own physical clumsiness. Rather than ride with the candidate, the invigilator had sent him down to Lake Neuchâtel and back. Mossadegh rode confidently as far as the lake, where, unable to stop, he cannoned into a fruit stall and turned it over. ‘Cochon! Cochon!’ screeched the stall-holder. Mossadegh compensated her, righted his vehicle and drove back to the invigilator. ‘Mr Mossadegh,’ he said, ‘you have taken a long time. You must have driven very carefully. I congratulate you. Here is your driving licence.’9

  There is no sense from Mossadegh’s stay in Switzerland of an impressionable young man devouring the culture around him. He did not expect to become like the Swiss, and was not surprised when they behaved differently from him. On the one occasion when he forgot to bring money to a restaurant where he had eaten dozens of times and was well known, the restaurateur took his watch as collateral. In Iran, the man’s behaviour would have been considered extremely hostile. In this instance, Mossadegh derived satisfaction from finding a key to the Swiss character, which, he believed, was to behave in the same way with a customer of long standing as with a perfect stranger.

  The essays he wrote for his degree necessitated a study of Swiss law and the other European codes, but his overriding interest lay in the Muslim Middle East. For his doctoral thesis, on the last will and testament in Islam, he studied Ottoman and Egyptian legal theory and spent three months in Tehran consulting senior doctors of Islamic law. In the published thesis, he came down on the side of clerical modernisers when he argued that Islamic laws were historical phenomena and subject to revision as society changed. He also attacked the ‘imposition’ of European laws and institutions on Iran, arguing that ‘the direct result of imitating Europe will be the spoliation of a country like Iran, for everything should be in proportion with the need’.10

  Switzerland offered peace of mind enough for him to contemplate returning there whenever (as would happen often) he despaired of Iran’s future. But he never wavered in his own identity, telling the children, ‘We are Iranian, and we are going to stay a short period in Europe and then go back to our country.’ If he had Swiss nationality, however, it would allow him to practise there, and he was close to that goal when he, Ghollamhossein and the pregnant Zahra returned to Tehran for what was planned as a short trip in the summer of 1914. They arrived in Tehran on the eve of World War One, and were prevented from returning. The elder children, Ahmad and Zia Ashraf, were still in neutral Switzerland with the Pernouds. They would remain there until the end of hostilities.

  The Persia to which Mossadegh returned in 1914 was no longer young from the elixir of constitutionalism. In his absence the country had been exhausted by internal strife and the abysmal interventions of the powers. The optimism generated by Muhammad-Ali Shah’s abdication in favour of his eleven-year-old son, Ahmad, had evaporated as a result of divisions between radical and moderate constitutionalists. A conservative ayatollah was publicly hanged; a deputy told the mullahs to withdraw from politics. Appalled, the clerical mainstream turned its back on constitutionalism, which many now associated with atheism and immorality.

  In foreign affairs, too, there had been reverses. Russia, encroaching on various pretexts, had stealthily colonised much of the north of the country, while in the south-west the British nurtured the new asset that would transform Persia from a pawn in the Great Game to a prize of capital importance: oil.

  Chapter 4

  Razing Caesarea

  For centuries there had been oil seepages onto the bleached hills of western Persia. The oozings were used for caulking boats on the great rivers of Mesopotamia – the Tigris and Euphrates – and, before Islam, for feeding the fire temples. Oil rights had been part of the ill-fated Reuter concession of 1872, but exploration only started in earnest after 1901, when a fresh concession was awarded to a British entrepreneur, William Knox D’Arcy.

  D’Arcy had made his fortune mining in Australia, but Persian black gold proved more elusive, and conditions for his engineers – drilling in one of Persia’s hottest, least accessible places, surrounded by villainous tribesmen – were almost unbearable. After three years of fruitless exploration, D’Arcy was running out of funds. In the nick of time, geopolitics intervened, for the British government feared that the Russians might try to hijack the concession, allowing them to break out of their corral in the north and loom threateningly over the Persian Gulf. The government drummed up a ‘syndicate of patriots’ to take over D’Arcy’s venture, but even after oil was struck, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, as it was now called, remained vulnerable to absorption by one of the more established oil companies.

  Again, imperial strategy overrode the market. At the time of Anglo-Persian’s troubled birth, the Royal Navy was engaged in an arms race with a new pretender, imperial Germany. The First Lord of the Admiralty was a youthful Winston Churchill, and he hoped to make a quantum leap. In 1912, Churchill decided that in future all battleships should be built to run not on coal, the standard fuel for such vessels, but oil. Oil-powered ships travelled faster than coal-fired ones, and could refuel while at sea. They could also carry bigger guns. But there was a powerful argument against making the switch. Britain had an abundance of coal; oil, on the other hand, would have to be imported, putting the country at the mercy of distant suppliers. ‘To commit the Navy irrevocably to oil’, as Churchill p
ut it, ‘was indeed to “take arms against a sea of troubles”.’ And yet, if that could be achieved, the navy would gain a new potency. ‘Mastery itself was the prize of the venture.’1

  Once Churchill had taken his decision, it was vital to ensure that the Royal Navy would have as dependable a supply of oil as possible. If Anglo-Persian was to be swallowed up, why should the British government not do the swallowing? On June 17, 1914, after listening to the First Lord at the dispatch box, the House of Commons overwhelmingly authorised the government to buy just over half of Anglo-Persian’s shares. A second, secret contract gave the Admiralty a twenty-year supply of fuel oil, on generous terms. Churchill was well satisfied. Anglo-Persian was saved for the nation, and the navy had a guaranteed supply of oil. No one asked the Persians what they thought. The following month the First World War broke out and the question became academic. Production from the Persian fields soared, and British naval superiority was maintained for the duration of the war.

  Persia was a non-belligerent on the edge of events, but the Great War was a catastrophe for the country which would affect national politics for years. Most Persians fervently supported Germany and its ally, the Ottoman Turks. The Turks were Muslims and a popular rumour had it that the German Kaiser had converted. (‘Haj Wilhelm’ was the unlikely nickname given to this Prussian Protestant.) The traditional powers in the region, Russia and Britain, were now in alliance, and in November 1915 a Russian force advanced to within a day’s march of Tehran, prompting pro-German deputies to go into exile – first to the west of the country, and later, scattered by the Allies, to Ottoman territory and Berlin. The north and the west of Persia remained a battlefield, with the Ottomans fighting the Russians and British, while German agents infiltrated the south. Crucially for the British, their oil interests in the south-west were protected by their tribal allies there.