Patriot of Persia Read online

  It was relatively new. It had not existed in Safavid times, when English traders and ambassadors marvelled at the country’s prosperity and even took service in the Shah’s Court. It began to be felt in the nineteenth century, as the empire took over much of the globe – and it persists, sotto voce, even today. Sir Mortimer Durand, the British minister in Tehran in the 1890s, has been described as possessing a ‘good deal of contempt for the Persians’. The writer Harold Nicolson, who served in Persia in the 1920s and considered himself a friend of the country, called the Persians ‘the most contemptible race on earth’, and their finest minds ‘no better than an English schoolboy’. In the Second World War, Winston Churchill worried lest the British minister in Tehran, Sir Reader Bullard, allow his contempt for the Persians, ‘however natural’, to impair his judgement. There were exceptions – British decision-makers who preferred honest Persian patriots to the schmaltzing of a Firooz – but the supremacists ruled the roost.

  Policy was the casualty. The pathetic and unworthy Persians could not be trusted to take the right decisions. Britain’s diplomats diligently undermined their own public support for Persia’s independence. Thus, in 1920, we find Herman Norman, the minister in Tehran, writing that he had installed the current Persian government and would endeavour to keep it in power.14 The British prided themselves on their clean hands, but usually the only people prepared to be their local allies were the venal and the unpatriotic. When the results were unsatisfactory, the British denounced the Persian political class as venal and unpatriotic. ‘We cannot,’ Curzon wrote, ‘support these corrupt and rapacious oriental officials if we earnestly desire to improve the general condition of the country and of the administration.’ 15 But Curzon did not have any better idea.

  They railed against the illogicality of it all, but the British were complicit in the blackening of their own reputation. If the English language had a word for well-founded paranoia, it might be applied to Persian feelings towards the British for much of the twentieth century.

  Iran’s history would have been poorer if Mossadegh had been born with commercial nous. So incensed was he by the Anglo–Persian Agreement, he resolved to make his home in Switzerland once and for all, and to go into trade. Borrowing heavily from his mother, he went to Basle and bought a cornucopia of health and vanity products, which he dispatched to Tehran. But Mossadegh’s shipment went astray and two years passed before it eventually reached its destination. The thermometers were in smithereens, the washing powder was damp, and the scented soap had become viscous and slimy. Zahra said, ‘Muhammad, that’s enough trade.’ Najm al-Saltaneh was less forgiving. Mossadegh was forced to sell a property in order to pay her back.16

  By that time, he had returned to Persia, heartened by the demise of the Anglo–Persian Agreement and resolved to repatriate the teenagers Zia Ashraf and Ahmad, whose long exile had caused them to forget their Persian. In June 1920 he had received a telegram in Neuchâtel from his old friend Moshir ul-Dawleh, a liberal politician of great integrity, who had become prime minister and wanted Mossadegh to take the justice portfolio. Moshir had accepted the premiership on the condition that the Anglo–Persian Agreement was formally placed in abeyance. Mossadegh dropped his plans to emigrate.

  As a government minister, Mossadegh was entitled to privileged travel arrangements, and he and the children received visas to return home by the quickest route – on a P&O liner, the Delta, sailing from Marseille to Bombay, from where they would board another vessel bound for the Persian Gulf. After dinner one night on the way to Bombay, he was engaged in conversation by an Englishman of imposing appearance, tall and spare, blond and blue-eyed. This was Sir Percy Cox, who was now on his way to Iraq to run the British mandate there. Cox had spent his early career as unofficial ruler of the Persian Gulf from the Iranian port of Bushehr, where he carried the deceptively modest title of ‘political resident’. He viewed with scepticism the polite fiction of Persian sovereignty over a region that had effectively submitted to British rule. One of Cox’s most significant acts while at Bushehr had been to negotiate on behalf of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company a lease on coastal land suitable for refineries and depots. He had reached agreement not with the Tehran government, but with the local Arab ruler.

  During his conversation on board with Cox, Mossadegh mentioned that he hoped to disembark at the Iraqi port of Basra and take the train to Baghdad, from where he would cross the Persian border and make for Tehran. The following day, Cox received news that the Basra–Baghdad railway had been sabotaged, so Mossadegh would have to find an alternative route. It evidently amused the Englishman to hear Mossadegh reply that he would disembark at Bushehr, ‘one of our own ports’. Cox enquired innocently: ‘Bushehr is a Persian port?’ Mossadegh never forgot the slight.17

  In Bombay, Mossadegh and the children stayed in the neo-Gothic Taj Mahal Palace, the city’s grandest hotel, receiving visits from Iranian nationalists who were in exile in India. He avoided Vusuq ul-Dawleh, who had left Persia after being ejected from power and was in the same establishment. Mossadegh cabled for a loan from Farmanfarma, which he used to buy a car and engage an Indian chauffeur. Since 1916, Farmanfarma had been governor of the southern province of Fars, and Mossadegh expected to enjoy his uncle’s hospitality on the road from Bushehr to Tehran.

  For Mossadegh, perhaps the most challenging aspect of the trip home was dealing with his adolescent daughter. Feeling herself to be Swiss, missing the Pernouds terribly, fifteen-year-old Zia Ashraf had not concealed her reluctance to return to Iran, and she defied her father’s wish that she wear the hejab – the Muslim head-covering – during the passage from Marseille. There was a row and at Bombay Mossadegh instructed her to keep her distance from him in public. Mossadegh took no issue with Zia Ashraf’s emancipation but, as usual, fretted for his reputation.18 He had even booked the family’s tickets on the Delta under an assumed name, for it would not do for it to be known that he, that stern critic of the Anglo–Persian accord, was travelling on a British ship!19

  The Mossadeghs’ passage ended at Bushehr, from where they drove north to Shiraz. The hometown of the medieval poets Hafez and Saadi, graced by elegant palaces and fragrant rose-bowers, Shiraz was Persia’s most romantic city. It stands amid good farmland close to the ruins of Darius the Great’s seat at Persepolis, and was renowned at the time for the excellence of its wine. Fars, the province of which Shiraz was the capital, was strategically very important. Populated by recalcitrant tribes, bordering the oil-producing region and the Gulf ports, it had been the scene of much German intrigue during the First World War and had been brought to heel by a British-led levee, the South Persia Rifles, which Persian nationalists regarded as a barely-concealed occupation force.

  Even by its own standards, the region was agitated in the autumn of 1920. Influenza and cholera had ravaged the population and the crops were destroyed by drought and locusts. The tribesmen were moving from their upland summer quarters towards the provincial capital, from which unruly movement of people and animals the sedentary population recoiled in fear. There had been shock too at the recent robbery, on the Shiraz–Bushehr road, of Persia’s envoy to the League of Nations, Prince Arfa ul-Dawleh. Worse still, the province had an absentee governor. Threatened with an insurrection against his misrule, Farmanfarma had retreated from Shiraz and would soon return to Tehran.

  The British had pushed for Farmanfarma’s appointment in 1916, when German agents had been rampant over the south. The prince cooperated with his old friend Percy Sykes, the founder of the South Persia Rifles, in pacifying the region, but his lodestar, as ever, was self-interest. Finding himself answerable to the Persian government, the British and the tribes, Farmanfarma took money from all and satisfied none. He played the tribes off against each other and received a huge sum in return for conferring the vacant leadership of an important tribe on an undeserving candidate. The salaries of local functionaries had fallen into arrears. When nationalist voices were raised against his governorship, he h
ad them suppressed.

  The quintessential Anglophile had become a liability to his British paymasters. Irked by his incessant demands for money, wary of his ambitions to become the uncrowned king of southern Persia, they cut off Farmanfarma’s monthly subsidy and rejected his demand for control over the South Persia Rifles. He only desired this, wrote Herman Norman, the British minister in Tehran, ‘for the purpose of extorting money from the people’.20

  To the great and the good of Shiraz, the arrival of Farmanfarma’s very different nephew, a man of the world with no prior connections to the province, was a godsend. They immediately pressed the prime minister to release Mossadegh from the justice ministry and appoint him governor in place of his uncle. Mossadegh was amenable and asked for time to negotiate conditions.

  Normally, this would have involved discussion of the stipends and subsidies that Mossadegh would be paid – and so it did, only he astonished everyone by rejecting the offers he received as being too generous. When the local grandees proposed to give him substantial monthly retainers, he not only declined but demanded that the grandees stop extorting money from their own people. Mossadegh cabled to Tehran that he would stay in office as long as these notables kept their promise.

  Accepted custom and a bond of affection constrained Mossadegh from criticising Farmanfarma openly, and yet he was clearly appalled by his uncle’s conduct. Once united in cautious espousal of reform, the two were now divided under the polarising pressure of the Anglo–Persian Agreement. Mossadegh was among the notables who saw off the prince when he left for Tehran. He also placed Ahmad and Zia Ashraf in their great-uncle’s charge. But once the uncle was out of sight, the nephew started ringing the changes.

  During his tenure in Fars, Mossadegh accepted a fraction of the emoluments that Farmanfarma had enjoyed. He returned gifts and directed disputants to the courts, rather than adjudicate personally in the old Qajar way. He cut the provincial budget and his own entertainments allowance. Most pointed of all, he criticised the policy of divide and rule that had been pursued by ‘representatives of the state’, and their ‘profiting from war and dispute and plunder and pillage’.21

  For all that, there was a certain hauteur in Mossadegh al-Saltaneh’s bowing to serve the people. He did not recoil from the notion of a governing class, though his gubernatorial style was to be widely accessible and not to stand on ceremony. ‘No society’, he wrote years later, ‘can achieve anything without a competent, self-sacrificing leader, and the definition of a trusted leader is that person whose every word is accepted and followed by the people.’22 His understanding of democracy would always be coloured by traditional ideas of Muslim leadership, whereby the community chooses a man of outstanding virtue – and follows him wherever he takes them.

  In some ways, the divide between uncle and nephew was generational. Farmanfarma approached things imperially. His every action seemed to emphasise the greatness of his birth and appetites. His personal army and his tribe of wives, concubines and children; his much-cherished British gong, the Order of St Michael and St George; his love of wine and the chase and his gleaming Hupmobile motor car – public life for Farmanfarma was more durbar than drudgery.

  For Mossadegh, by contrast, the game was not about power, but ideals. He was part of that generation of western-educated Asians who returned home, primly moustachioed, to sell freedom to their compatriots. Beholden to the same mistress, la patrie, these Turks, Arabs, Persians and Indians went on to lead the anti-colonial movements that transformed the map of the world. Though they would diverge, and native cloth would replace the starched collars, their political inspiration was shared and European.

  Mossadegh’s achievements in Fars were impressive. He brokered peace between the tribes and improved law and order to the extent that Prince Arfa’s possessions were returned and the Tehran–Shiraz road was made safe even for the treasury bullion coach. He outlawed the bastinado, paid overdue salaries and opened schools. A Shiraz newspaper called him a symbol of ‘unity, consensus and stability’.23

  The photographs from this time show him dapper in frock coat and wing collar, his receding hairline hidden by the customary kolah, thin, worrying hands emerging from oversize cuffs; or wearing an overcoat in among the chiefs, most of whom wear the more traditional aba. The contrast with Farmanfarma, lop-shouldered and walrus-moustached, taking the salute at a tattoo of the South Persia Rifles, must have struck everyone. Mossadegh was not the kind to attend a tattoo of the South Persia Rifles.

  He inclined to melodrama. When he learned that his deputy had been abusing his position, he threw the town into a panic by preparing to leave for Tehran. The townspeople besieged him and extracted from the deputy-governor a pledge of improved conduct. It was not Mossadegh’s style to bluff on a question of honour, and he would certainly have quit if he had not been satisfied. He took a fatalistic, almost careless view of power, but believed instinctively in his own moral impetus. Early in his governorship he responded to some act of presumption on the part of the British consul by saying that he might as well resign if the Englishman intended to behave in this way. The consul beat a hasty retreat.

  For the first time, Mossadegh was subjected to British scrutiny. Assessing the implications of his appointment, Herman Norman had written that the new man enjoyed little influence or popularity, an unobjectionable statement at the start of Mossadegh’s tenure, but hardly perceptive. G. P. Churchill of the Foreign Office’s Eastern Department was as vague as he was ominous, describing Mossadegh as ‘very ambitious’ and not possessed of a ‘good reputation’, before concluding, somewhat farcically, that he constituted a ‘grave risk’.24 To what, it is hard to say, though Mossadegh was already known for his patriotism and honesty, qualities that acted like grit in the colonial machine.

  The bumptious British consul was soon replaced by a more ambivalent imperialist. W. L. Meade was an Irish patriot and a highly sympathetic character. The new consul supported Mossadegh’s efforts to make friends with the tribes, and Mossadegh respected the Irishman’s sense of honour and patriotism. The two men, in Mossadegh’s words, worked ‘like brothers’, and Meade’s communications to Mossadegh were couched in terms of such fraternal solicitude that one might easily forget he was a servant of the British Crown.

  They had a shared admiration for the Irish nationalist Terence MacSwiney, who starved himself to death in October 1920 in protest at his internment by the British. MacSwiney’s famous maxim, ‘Victory is won not by those who can inflict the most, but by those who can endure the most,’ was not dissimilar to Najm al-Saltaneh’s comment about the leader who suffers for his people. Mossadegh would go on hunger strike several times in the course of his life – though his appetite invariably got the better of him.

  If there had been more men like Meade in the imperial machine, Mossadegh’s relations with the British might not have soured so dramatically. But Meade was an exception who ended up disliking policy in Persia, and he was regarded without favour in Whitehall, where his nationalist proclivities may have been noted. A few years later, on his return from Persia, Meade had a meeting with Curzon’s principal private secretary, Laurence Oliphant, in the course of which he praised Mossadegh’s honesty and competence. Oliphant responded without enthusiasm to Meade’s local insights and commentary on policy, minuting that they were ‘of a destructive rather than constructive nature’. It was a classic encounter between a local expert, sympathetic to the aspirations of honest Persian patriots, and a Curzonite who approved of honest Persian patriots only if they did as they were told. Meade ‘has just retired from the political service,’ a relieved Oliphant ended his memorandum, ‘and will not be returning to the East.’25

  While Mossadegh restored order in Fars, the situation in other parts of the country continued to worsen. Revolts in the north made a mockery of the government; famine and pestilence raged and no caravan seemed safe from highwaymen. British officers and diplomats in Persia were resigned to the failure of the Anglo– Persian accord, and
considered alternative means of keeping Persia stable and immune from Bolshevism. They had taken control of the Cossack Brigade, whose personnel were by now mainly Persian, and were encouraging a group of ambitious civilians to plan a pro-British government fortified by the Cossacks. This government would not resurrect the Anglo–Persian Agreement. It would inaugurate a strong, militarised Persia.

  The man the British identified to lead the endeavour was Seyyed Zia ud-Din Tabatabai, the newspaper editor who had already crossed swords with Mossadegh when the latter was deputy finance minister. Small, delicately formed and highly ambitious, Zia was the son of an anti-constitutionalist preacher who had embraced constitutionalism at a providential moment. He wore a small turban or a sheepskin hat – reminder of his humble origins and loathing for the kolah-doffing elite – above pale, sensual features and a neat beard. Zia’s Anglophile enthusiasms were not in doubt. He had received a share of the ‘British bribe’ and defended the Anglo–Persian Agreement. Now he wanted to lead a national revival, with the Cossacks as his shock troops and the British in support.

  On February 21, 1921, the plan was put into action. The Cossacks marched on Tehran, brushing aside sporadic resistance. A terrified Ahmad Shah received Zia and installed him as prime minister, though he demurred when Zia (following Mussolini’s example) demanded to be named ‘Dictator’. Even more significant, Ahmad confirmed Colonel Reza Khan, who had led the Cossack assault, as the force’s permanent commander.

  Zia’s willingness to challenge vested interests won him early support. A member of a new class of bright Persian professionals, he poured venom on the blue-blooded ‘scions of the royal apartments’. His first, scorching proclamation, plastered on walls throughout the capital, promised revenge on the elite with their inherited privileges. Some eighty members of the ruling class were arrested, including Farmanfarma and Firooz.