Patriot of Persia Read online

  Deliberations in the chamber acquired a shrill, egalitarian tone. Mossadegh was unsympathetic to the republican movement and his decision to stand for the deputy speakership was unwise; he mustered a single vote, presumably his own. Titles were abolished, and Mossadegh al-Saltaneh became Muhammad Mossadegh, the name he had adopted when going abroad as a student, and by which the world would come to know him. Reza chose the surname Pahlavi, the name of an ancient Iranian language, thereby associating himself with a glorious, pre-Islamic past.

  Mossadegh resisted Reza’s attempts to buy his support with the offer of a government post. He acted as Reza’s liaison with a kitchen cabinet which tried to steer the prime minister away from abolishing the dynasty. There was little mirth in these meetings, and the prime minister did not conceal his ambition. ‘The British brought me to power,’ he said, ‘but they didn’t know who they were up against.’11 Reza’s belief that he owed his throne to the British would sharpen the sense he had of his own vulnerability. Whatever they had given, they could also take away.

  Mossadegh and the others hoped that Reza could be appeased with authority short of absolute power. But the opposite happened. With each concession, his confidence grew. In October 1925 pro-government deputies prepared a resolution abolishing the Qajars and entrusting the nation’s affairs to Reza Khan until a constituent assembly convened. A procession of deputies filed through the basement of one of his palaces, where they were threatened or cajoled into supporting the plan. The celebrated poet Muhammad Taqi Bahar was one of a few opposition deputies to answer Reza’s summons, but he resisted the blandishments of ‘that strange and cunning man whose face lacked light’. That evening, a group of Reza’s supporters shot and started hacking off the head of an unfortunate man they had mistaken for Bahar. The press tactfully ignored this grisly murder.

  Two days later the resolution came to vote. Support for Reza in the chamber was strong and any opposition deputy showing his face would be risking physical attack. That morning the outgoing speaker, Mostowfi al-Mamalek, phoned Mossadegh (who was his cousin) to consult him on whether he should attend the decisive session. Mossadegh compared a parliamentary deputy to a gunner who is paid on the understanding that he will fire his cannon if the country comes under threat. In the same way, Mossadegh continued, the deputy is expected to defend the constitution. His resolve stiffened, Mostowfi joined Mossadegh at the parliament building.

  Inside the chamber the usual spectators were conspicuous by their absence. Their places had been taken by agents and uniformed police. Reza’s goons herded the deputies in. One growled at a hesitant deputy, ‘Do you have a family, children? Do you care for them?’12 The man took the hint – and his seat.

  Mossadegh was one of five deputies who turned up to speak against the motion. Appalled by what was about to happen, he was overcome by emotion and retreated to the lavatories, where he wept hard. By the time he had composed himself and returned to the chamber, Seyyed Yaghub, a cleric and former constitutionalist, was justifying his support on the grounds that Reza was still needed to prevent the provinces from relapsing into chaos. ‘In order to attain a new felicity,’ he declared, ‘one is obliged to tear up the old tree.’

  Now it was Mossadegh’s turn. Pale and balding, but not yet gaunt, he rose to defy the new dictatorship. He had ignored his usually reliable instinct for self-preservation and was starting a new and more radical phase in his career.

  The orators Modarres and Hassan Taqizadeh, the latter of whom had been a celebrated advocate of the constitution, had already spoken against the resolution, but neither approached Mossadegh in power and logic. Mossadegh’s was a passionate production, painstakingly prepared. It was not a defence of the old order but a denunciation of the new one, and his evidence was moral as well as legal. He succeeded in presenting himself as an advocate of both Islam and democracy, twinning the old faith with the modern cult of the nation. Only someone with a mastery of constitutional precepts could have done so.

  He started by holding up a copy of the Qoran and bearing witness to Islam, obliging his adversaries to rise out of respect for the holy book. He said that anyone forgetting Islam and the nation was ‘base and dishonourable and should be killed’. With this trumpet blast Mossadegh hoped to silence anyone who might question his religious sincerity – as well as to cast doubt on Reza’s own claims to piety.

  Next, Mossadegh countered suspicions that he was defending the family firm. He had been ‘utterly disappointed’ with the Qajars, and would not defend people who ‘use the country in good times and disappear in bad’. For all that, Mossadegh discerned some advantage in the present situation. The country had a ceremonial Shah whose sole responsibility was to anoint a prime minister according to parliament’s wishes. Was that not constitutionalism?

  Mossadegh praised Reza’s achievements, but then his tone became passionate and reproachful. ‘So, the prime minister becomes sultan . . . is there such a thing as a constitutional country where the king also runs the nation’s affairs?’ He turned on Seyyed Yaghub, who had spoken in favour of the motion:

  If they cut off my head and cut me into pieces and if Seyyed Yaghub assails me with a thousand curses I will not accept this! After twenty years of bloodshed! Seyyed Yaghub! Were you a constitutionalist? A freedom-seeker? I myself saw you in this country ascend the pulpit and urge the people on to freedom. And now it is your opinion that this country should have one person who is Shah and prime minister and magistrate all at once? If so, this is reactionary! It is despotism! Why did you needlessly shed the blood of the martyrs on the road to freedom? Why did you send them off to die? From the beginning you should have come out and said we lied and never wanted constitutionalism. You should have said that this is an ignorant people who must be beaten into submission!13

  Later that evening, in the Golestan Palace, the Crown Prince heard the cannon that proclaimed the fall of a dynasty. He expected to be imprisoned, but then came Reza’s message that he should gather his personal effects, put on a commoner’s clothes, and set out for exile without delay. The Crown Prince complained that he was penniless, but the treasury was sealed. The royal carriage was no longer at his disposal. Reza sent him a piffling sum to see him across the Iraqi border.

  In years to come Reza would remain touched by contempt for the Qajars. He embarked on the resurfacing so beloved of usurpers, changing street names and replacing Qajar buildings with severe neoclassical confections. The press depicted the Qajars as unpatriotic and treasonous. There had been just one man among them, Reza quipped: Muzaffar ud-Din Shah’s favourite daughter – and she was reduced in her old age to roaming Tehran’s tree-lined avenues looking for fuel. Rubbing in his new prerogative, Reza took a descendant of Fath-Ali Shah to be his fourth wife: almond-eyed Esmat, who was famous for her bruised, voluptuous lips. Reza was constantly nibbling them, so the gossip went. Thus a softer light fell on a hard man.

  In truth the Qajars could never be wholly wiped out. Thanks to the prodigious loins of Fath-Ali and Nasser ud-Din, there were too many of them. Mostly they went obscurely about their lives and were left alone, while a small number achieved high office under the new regime. Most found that the name had lost its draw. Well-born Qajar women struggled to find husbands for their daughters, and were forced to trawl the middle classes.

  Several members of Mossadegh’s paternal family – a bureaucratic family, rather than a royal one – adapted nicely to the new dispensation. Mossadegh’s nephew Ahmad Matine-Daftary, who was also his son-in-law, became prime minister under Reza Shah, although later on the Shah had him imprisoned. Several of his Mostowfi cousins reached senior positions in an expanding, modernising bureaucracy.

  Tiny, formidable and old, Najm al-Saltaneh remained the Qajar matriarch par excellence. But even she got used to her altered circumstances, throwing her energies into a foundation hospital which she had built, the Najmiyeh Hospital, living in a small house in the same compound and paying the labourers herself at the end of the working day. S
he never lost her foul tongue – nor her love for her elder son. On one occasion she turned up at Mossadegh’s front door at three in the morning and the household was roused to receive her. ‘Sit with me,’ she ordered the future prime minister, and he did.14

  Mossadegh’s speech against the abolition had made him famous, and after it he was visited by Farmanfarma. The prince kissed his nephew’s hand – an unusual act of humility – and exclaimed, ‘Truly, you have brought the Qajars back to life!’15 But Farmanfarma had mistaken Mossadegh’s hatred of dictatorship for clan loyalty, and in any case the thrill did not last. A few weeks later, when Reza inaugurated an assembly to change the constitution and establish the Pahlavi dynasty, he was amused to spot Farmanfarma sitting in a sulk on the steps of the parliament building, his chin in his hands.16

  Farmanfarma observed the eclipse of his family with revulsion. He was not alone in regarding the Qajars and the monarchical principle as one and the same, and he and his sister thought of Reza as a grubby dictator got up in royal plumage. But Farmanfarma had not survived at the top of public life by disclosing his true feelings. He had flattered Reza since the latter began his rise, visiting him regularly and referring to himself as Reza’s ‘old slave’. He had even supported the idea of a republic, or at least pretended to. But Reza had no need for a hanger-on from the old regime.

  After becoming Shah, Reza resisted Farmanfarma’s advances, seizing the luxurious house of one of his sons in central Tehran. (Reza would eventually take over several of Farmanfarma’s properties, and build his winter palace, the Marble Palace, on one of them.) White-haired and riddled with gout, the old prince took his decline philosophically, abstaining from politics but siring heirs with undimmed vigour. He ended up with thirty-six children from eight wives (not counting many more from concubines along the way) and many of these births necessitated a change to his complicated will, infuriating the elder children as bits fell off their inheritance.

  Mossadegh’s relations with his uncle cooled in the latter’s old age. The family lost focus with Najm al-Saltaneh’s death in 1932, but by then Reza’s terror had reached its zenith and many political personalities refrained from meeting for fear of being accused of plotting. Having fallen out with Curzon over his supposed indifference to their imprisonment after the 1921 putsch, Farmanfarma later tried desperately to paddle back into favour. For once the British were immune to the old prince’s charm. Sir Percy Loraine had a new horse to ride.

  Mossadegh can only have felt extreme distaste for all the backsliding. He was already a man of significant pride – not the pompous, l’état c’est moi pride of a Farmanfarma, but the pebbly pride of a loner who values above all his reputation and integrity. He differed in almost every way from some of his mother’s relations, Prince Firooz in particular. The glittering Firooz had passed on his Rolls-Royce to Reza Shah, a British chauffeur at the wheel. And Firooz saw no shame in becoming a member of the Pahlavi inner circle.

  Reza was impervious to the manoeuvring; the Qajars were doomed. An imperial decree would bar anyone with Qajar blood from ascending the Pahlavi throne, disqualifying Esmat’s sons as well as that from another Qajar wife. In time, even Firooz would fall – as would all the hangers-on – as soon as he was no longer regarded as an asset to Reza’s mission to modernise Iran. ‘When you have a whore,’ as the new Shah put it, ‘you use her, pay her and kick her out, and there the matter ends.’

  It is impossible to understand Reza Shah’s reign without appreciating the shame he felt at Iran’s backwardness. Turkey would be his sole foreign destination; he refused to go further west for fear of being demoralized by the gulf which separated Persia from Europe. Some of his foibles invite derision – his banning of photographs of camels; his championing of the WC – but he should be judged by his significant actions, and Iran changed more thoroughly in the sixteen years of his reign than in the half-century that preceded it.

  Reza was a dynamic man and he inspired dynamism in those around him. He promoted men like the judicial reformer Akbar Davar, who worked a fifteen-hour day rather than gossip over the water-pipe, and his court minister, Abdolhossein Teimurtash, as intelligent as he was brutal. Reza implemented an impressive number of reforms that were designed to turn the cracked empire he had inherited into a purposeful nation state. But he ended up, like so many of his fellow dictators, alone in his citadel. And much of the good he did was nullified by the way he did it.

  At the next parliamentary elections, in 1926, Reza allowed Mossadegh and some of his other critics to be returned from Tehran. But Mossadegh did not attend the final session of the constituent assembly which set up the new, Pahlavi dynasty, telling a government emissary that he was not feeling well. He also refused to swear fidelity to Reza when taking up his seat in the sixth majles. Although Reza was not yet an undisputed dictator, this required considerable courage.

  Mossadegh’s cousin Mostowfi had agreed to form a government, and the Shah had insisted on a cabinet place for the ageing architect of the Anglo–Persian Agreement, Vusuq ul-Dawleh, who was now back from exile. The confirmation debate offered Mossadegh a chance to nail Vusuq for what he regarded as his treachery. Mostowfi pleaded with him to let bygones be bygones, but Mossadegh was not the forgiving type.

  Persian politicians are not known for their economy in public speaking. Formless productions of eye-watering length are the norm, and quotations from the poets contribute to the sense of drift and abstraction. Mossadegh was capable of immensely boring speeches on policy, read in long monotonous gulps. But, in other circumstances, roused and inspired, he could be a quite different speaker. On these occasions his inhibitions fell away and he became cunning and lachrymose, a masterly manipulator of emotions. For a man who hated violence, he could be violent.

  Mossadegh must have known that the new cabinet would be approved, and Vusuq with it. But he wanted to be on the side of right, and he put seven years of bile into his denunciation of the former prime minister. In one passage he went too far, accusing Vusuq of planning Iran’s partition, and there was uproar. Then, with a change of gear, the nationalist lawyer became a mullah delivering a call to arms. Islam, he said, ‘commands that every Muslim should defend his country, and if he wins he will have endowed the country and the religion with a new spirit, while if he loses, he will have drunk the sherbet of martyrdom in the path of God.’ No one, Mossadegh complained, had ever heard an expression of remorse cross Vusuq’s lips, but what could be expected nowadays, when ‘there is no chance of punishment, when service and betrayal are one and the same,’ and ‘we stifle the spirit of freedom-seekers and patriots’? There is bitter poetry in these lines, which no other parliamentarian would have dared speak.

  Vusuq, in an otherwise ineffective response, perceptively pointed out the difference between a statesman who does not shirk his duty even when the nation is close to collapse and the statesman who prefers to stay on the sidelines rather than shoulder an impossible task. With Mossadegh there is sometimes a strong sense of the latter, of a man who snipes virtuously instead of sullying himself with office.

  For Mossadegh, as for Iran, the end of the Qajars was a milestone. He had started the constitutional era as a diffident reformer. Now, in the late 1920s, he found himself in the vanguard of a hopeless resistance. Who, apart from a cussed contrarian, would willingly occupy such a precarious position? But Mossadegh had become the most exuberant opposition politician operating in the country’s sole forum for dissent.

  There were attempts to stop him speaking but he got around them by tabling motions on subjects unrelated to the main debate, and then, in a style that ranged from intimate (sometimes inaudible) to bombastic and conversational (anecdotes about his mother), he sprang his argument on the very topic he was not supposed to be discussing. He was no stranger to self-righteousness, for instance threatening to leave Iran for ever because four foreign inspectors were working within the tax department. One Shah-loyalist noted his ‘negativity on all subjects and his failure to express
a single positive sentiment’.17

  Reza was not yet so dangerously isolated as to require yes-men for advisers, and in these early years showed signs of appreciating Mossadegh’s honesty and experience. He was sometimes summoned for informal chats and Reza even dangled the premiership before him – a hazard he sidestepped with another convoluted anecdote. Reza seems to have been intrigued by this noble who hated the monarchy’s pomp and luxury, and who advised him to let his palaces crumble and to sit in an unadorned room with a dripping roof, if only the people were properly fed. He also took note when Mossadegh upbraided him for the Potemkin-style displays, featuring triumphal arches and scrubbed-up schoolchildren in gleaming clothes that were not their own, which greeted him during his royal tours of the provinces. The absurdity of these displays had been lost on Reza.

  For his part, Mossadegh was impressed by Reza’s energy and ability to get things done. He applauded the Shah’s efforts to build a modern army and re-establish central authority over far-flung parts of the country, even when this involved smashing the tribes. He supported Reza’s attempts to liberate Iran from the influence of the powers, and described another of the Shah’s triumphs, his abolition of the capitulations – the old system of handing over sections of the economy to foreign interests – as a ‘source of Iranian pride’.

  He also broadly approved of Ali Akbar Davar’s drive to wrest control of the legal system from the clergy and give it to European-trained judges and lawyers. Mossadegh did not express himself on Reza’s educational reforms, under which new primary and secondary schools were built, as well as foreign-run technical colleges, but the efforts he spent educating his own children admit no doubt that he supported an expanded, secular system for all, including women. If there was a criticism to be levelled at Reza’s education policies, it was rather that they were superficial and underfunded.