Reza Pahlavi

Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878-1944) was the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty. He rose from the ranks to become minister of war, prime minister, and then shah of Iran. As a reformer-dictator, he laid the foundation of modern Iran.

Reza Khan, later Reza Shah Pahlavi, was born in the Caspian province of Mazandaran. He was orphaned in infancy, and at the age of 14 he chose the military career of his father and enlisted in the Persian Cossack Brigade, which was under the command of Russian officers. A tall and rugged young man, Reza Khan rose by sheer courage and ability. He was highly intelligent without any formal education, had vision without much information, and was a champion of Westernization without having seen any other country but Iran.

Reza Khan was also very sensitive, and from his youth he must have been disgusted with the despicable condition of the country and also of the army. As a soldier, he took part in many engagements, but what bothered him most was the fact that he was under the command of foreign officers. After the Russian Revolution, some of the Russian officers in the brigade left, but the White Russians, who could not go, remained in command. In 1920 Reza led his fellow Persian officers in ousting the Russians, and he himself became commander of the brigade.

Coup d'Etat

On Feb. 21, 1921, he, together with Sayyed Ziya al-Din Tabatabai, a brilliant journalist, overthrew the government in Tehran. Sayyed Ziya became prime minister and Reza Khan minister of war and commander in chief of the armed forces. During the next 3 months it became evident that the civilian and the soldier could not agree on specific goals or methods. Since Reza Khan was the stronger of the two, it was Sayyed Ziya who was forced to leave the country. From 1921 to 1925, as minister of war and later as prime minister, Reza Khan built a strong modern army, subdued the rebellious tribes, and brought about a peace and security which the country had not experienced for a century.

Ahmad Shah, the last of the Qajar kings, was so overshadowed by the popular Reza Khan that he left for an indefinite stay in Europe. The creation of a republic in Turkey influenced many Persians, including Reza Khan. For a time there was a movement to create a republic, but it soon became evident that, although Persians did not mind changing kings, they were reluctant to do away with the monarchical principle. So on Oct. 21, 1925, the Majles (Parliament) deposed the absent Ahmad Shah and in December of the same year proclaimed Reza Khan as the shahanshah (king of kings) of Iran.

The Persian Revolution, which had started in 1906, had at last produced a leader to implement its ideals, even though some of the early revolutionaries had not envisaged the methods used by Reza Shah. He was at first popular among the masses and peasants because he gave them security. He was also popular among the educated classes because he was for modernization and reform.

In the field of foreign affairs he ended the system of capitulation; created an autonomous customs; terminated the right of the British Bank to issue currency notes; and in 1931 negotiated a new oil agreement with the Anglo-Persian Oil Company which, he believed, was more advantageous to Iran.

Internal Reforms

Reza Shah's main activity, however, was in internal reforms, which he carried out with the help of the army, which remained the object of his special devotion. He built roads, established a wireless service, and took over the management of the telegraph service from the British. He was rightly proud of the trans-Iranian railway from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian, which he had built without a loan from any foreign government. He set up trade monopolies, thus limiting the freedom of the merchants, and established the National Bank of Iran.

Like his predecessors Shah Abbas I and Nader Shah, Reza Shah tried to break down the power and prestige of the clergy. Islamic law was partially discarded; Islamic education was abandoned; religious processions were forbidden; the Islamic calendar was replaced by the old Persian-Zoroastrian solar calendar; mosques were modernized, and some of them were equipped with pews; the call to prayer was frowned upon; and pilgrimage to Mecca was discouraged.

All titles were abolished, and people were asked to choose family names; Persian men were ordered to don European attire and headgear, and Persian women were encouraged to discard the veil. Reza Shah founded the University of Tehran in 1934 and established the Persian Academy, whose task was to rid the Persian language of borrowed Arabic and other foreign words.

These and many other far-reaching and essential reforms in a country ridden with illiteracy, superstition, and vested interests could not be accomplished without the use of force. So, in order to silence the critics of the reforms, all criticism was banned. In order to have internal security, the army had to be strengthened, but this very act made tyrants of a number of officers who suppressed the masses.

Reza Shah's greatest weakness was his desire to amass wealth, especially real estate. In the acquisition of property he had to depend upon others, who in the process acquired wealth for themselves. Being a self-made man, he was loathe to delegate power to others. Unlike other reformers, he had no ideology, no party, and no well-defined program. Being in complete control of every aspect of life, he improvised and made decisions on the spot as he saw fit. Perhaps his ideas of modernization were superficial, but undoubtedly he forced the country to face the necessity of change, without which modernization would not be possible.

At the outbreak of World War II, Iran declared its neutrality. When Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Iran, already important to the allies for its oil, became the best supply route to Russia. Reza Shah failed to comply with the Russo-British plan of using Iran as a supply route and with their demand to deal effectively with the German agents active in Iran. On Aug. 26, 1941, Russian and British troops entered Iran; the Persian army put up a token resistance which lasted less than a week. Reza Shah abdicated the throne in favor of his son, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Reza Shah died in exile in South Africa.

Further Reading

There is no adequate biography of Reza Shah. A sketch of his life is in his son's Mission for My Country (1961). Ramesh Sanghvi, The Shah of Iran (1969), is less a study than an enumeration of Reza Shah's political achievements. A brief, but probably the most sophisticated, treatment of him is in Richard Cottam, Nationalism in Iran (1964). The Shah is discussed in Peter Avery, Modern Iran (1965; 2d ed. 1967), and Yahya Armajani, Middle East: Past and Present (1970).

For more information on Reza Shah Pahlavi, visit Britannica.com.

Reza Shah Pahlevi (rē'zä shä pä'ləvē) , 1877–1944, shah of Iran (1925–41). He began his career as an army officer and gained a reputation for great valor and leadership. He headed a coup in 1921 and became prime minister of the new regime in 1923. He negotiated the evacuation (1921) of the Russian troops and (1924) of the British forces stationed in Iran since World War I. Virtually a dictator, Reza Khan deposed (1925) Ahmad Mirza, the last shah of the Qajar dynasty, and was proclaimed shah of Iran. He changed his name to Reza Shah Pahlevi, thus founding the Pahlevi dynasty, and in 1935 officially changed the name of Persia to Iran. Reza Shah introduced many reforms, reorganizing the army, government administration, and finances. He abolished all special rights granted to foreigners, thus gaining real independence for Iran. Under his rule the Trans-Iranian RR was built, the Univ. of Tehran was established, and industrialization was stepped-up. In World War II his rapprochement with the Germans was protested by the Allies, and in 1941 British and Russian forces invaded and occupied Iran. Forced to abdicate in favor of his son, Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlevi, he died in exile in South Africa.

1878 - 1944

Founder of the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran.

Reza Shah Pahlavi was born into the family of a foot soldier in a small village near the Caspian Sea and given the name Reza. A few months after his birth, he lost his father, and he spent most of his childhood with his maternal uncle, an officer in the Cossack Brigade in Tehran. At the age of fifteen, at the behest of his uncle, he enlisted in the Cossack Brigade; on the strength of his personal traits and leadership qualities, he rose to officer rank. Surnames were not common in Iran in the early twentieth century, and his peers called him Reza Khan, the title khan being one of respect.

Reza Khan rose to prominence in the early 1920s when Iran was on the verge of economic collapse and political and territorial disintegration. The southward push of the newly established Soviet Union already threatened traditional British strategic and commercial interests in Iran and its colonial rule in India. The creation of a functioning central government capable of holding Iran intact as a buffer state became the main concern of Great Britain. Reza Khan, who aspired to save the country from disintegration, had risen to the rank of brigadier general and replaced the Russian commander of the Cossack Brigade. The commander of British forces in Iran did not oppose the coup d'etat engineered by Ziya Tabatabaʾi, with the support of Reza Khan, who marched his troops, some 2,500 men, into Tehran on 21 February 1921. The prime minister and cabinet were dismissed and Ahmad Shah, the reigning Qajar monarch, was forced to appoint Tabatabaʾi prime minister and Reza Khan army commander. Within a few months, however, Reza Khan ousted Tabatabaʾi and, having become the dominant player on the country's dis-arrayed political stage, virtually forced the powerless Ahmad Shah first to appoint him minister of war and then to appoint him prime minister. In 1925, Reza Khan masterminded a parliamentary act by which the Qajar dynasty was deposed. He was entrusted with the throne as the founder of the Pahlavi dynasty.

To modernize a debilitated and backward country, Reza Shah began to reorganize and rebuild the army and the bureaucracy practically from scratch. A universal conscription law was passed in 1925 and young army officers were sent to France for military training. He ordered the purchase of a limited supply of weapons, including armored vehicles, fighter planes, and small warships. Administrative and judicial reforms began as early as 1922, when the Iranian majles (parliament) enacted a law calling for competitive entrance exams and specific qualifications for prospective civil servants. A new ministry of justice was established in 1925 and charged with drafting and applying a new legal code based on European judicial systems. These legal reforms helped create a secular system of justice that took away much of the clergy's traditional control over the administration of justice.

With the creation of a modern national system of education, the number of pupils in modern schools increased more than tenfold, from approximately 30,000 in 1921 to 370,000 in 1941. In 1935, the University of Tehran was founded; between 1925 and 1940, some 1,500 Iranian students were sent abroad for study in various fields. Concerted efforts were made to revive and propagate Iran's ancient cultural heritage and values in order to strengthen Iranian national identity as the indispensable foundation for a modern nation-state. Reza Shah paid considerable attention to improving the country's communications, transportation, and industrial capacities. An 850-mile-long railway, running from Bandar Shah on the Caspian to Ahvaz near the Persian Gulf, was completed in 1938. The quality of roads was improved and new highways, bridges, and tunnels were constructed. With foreign assistance, the country's postal and telegraph systems were drastically upgraded and a radio transmission system was installed in Tehran. The founding of a national bank in 1927, which replaced the British-controlled Imperial Bank of Persia and was given the right to issue legal tender in 1931, gave the government effective control over the country's financial markets. Bent on asserting Iran's economic independence, Reza Shah expanded Iran's nascent light industries. Although he relied on foreign technical assistance, especially from Germany, for his modernization program, he eliminated virtually all vestiges of foreign, and particularly British, economic and administrative tutelage in Iran.

Reza Shah's modernization policy led to the formation of new urban middle classes and, more specifically, a new professional bureaucratic intelligentsia which became the main support of his regime. He also had the support of the leaders and supporters of the 1905 through 1911 Constitutional Revolution and of the Social Democrats in his efforts to create a modern, independent nation-state. However, his political and social reforms were met with strong resistance from two major traditional forces: tribal chiefs and the clergy. The formation of a centralized bureaucracy and the unification and strengthening of the armed forces undermined the traditional privileges of tribal chiefs and eventually led to the expansion of the central government's authority over tribal areas. The secularization of Iran's judicial and educational systems greatly alarmed the clergy, who had also become concerned about some of Reza Shah's other innovations, such as public dress codes for both men and women, which they saw as undermining traditional Islamic lifestyles and values. Especially controversial was his order that women not appear in public covered in the traditional Iranian chador.

Reza Shah lived the life of a simple soldier. He was known for his parsimony and distaste for luxury. He had a great capacity for work, was often personally involved in minor administrative matters, and had a remarkable memory for the mundane details of governance. However, he also developed an obsession with acquiring large landed estates, mostly through forced gifts from private owners or through outright confiscation. A much more serious character flaw with respect to the sociopolitical development of the country was his highly autocratic and arbitrary leadership style, particularly in the latter half of his reign, in the 1930s. His method of ruling left little room for the development of personal initiative or a genuine parliamentary system of government. Furthermore, his autocratic regime also blocked the formation of a viable political elite that could guarantee the continuation of reforms undertaken during his reign. His mounting fear of disloyalty, rivalry, and sedition led to the banishing or elimination of a number of prominent political figures, most of whom had supported him in his meteoric rise to power and helped him set the country on the path of modernization. Prominent among his victims were the court minister Abdul Hussein Teymurtash; Ali Akbar Davar, the architect of Iran's modern judicial system, state industries, and enterprises, who was driven to suicide; and the chiefs of the Qashqaʾi and Bakhtiari tribes. Taqi Arani, the leader of a group of leftist intellectuals, died in prison under suspicious circumstances. Sayyid Hasan Modarres, a leading political cleric, and Farrokhi Yazdi, an acerbic poet and journalist, were also among Reza Shah's victims. By the end of his reign, his authoritarian rule had alienated not only an important group of the professional bureaucratic intelligentsia but also a growing number of the independent intelligentsia, such as Sadeq Hedayat and Malek al-Shoara Bahar; the intelligentsia of the left; and the nationalist figures who rallied around Mohammad Mossadegh in the 1940s.

With the outbreak of World War II in 1939, Iran declared its neutrality. In 1941, after Germany invaded the Soviet Union and Moscow and London became wartime allies, Iran suddenly acquired strategic importance as a potential Allied supply route that circumvented Nazi-controlled Europe. A joint Anglo-Soviet force invaded Iran on 25 August 1941. On 16 September 1941, Reza Shah was forced to abdicate in favor of the crown prince, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Reza Shah left Iran on 28 September aboard a British vessel. He remained under de facto house arrest in Mauritius and later in Johannesburg, South Africa, where he died on 26 July 1944.

Bibliography

Banani, Amin. The Modernization of Iran, 1921 - 1941. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. 1961.

Cronin, Stephanie, ed. The Army and the Creation of the PahlaviState in Iran, 1910 - 1926, London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997.

Elwell-Sutton, L. P. "Reza Shah the Great: Founder of the Pahlavi Dynasty." In Iran under the Pahlavis, edited by George Lenczowski. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1978.

Ghani, Cyrus. Iran and the Rise of Reza Shah: From Qajar Collapse to Pahlavi Rule. London: Tauris, 1998.

Wilber, Donald. Riza Shah Pahlavi: The Resurrection and Reconstruction of Iran, 1878 - 1944. Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press, 1975.

Zargar, Ali. Anglo-Iranian Relations: 1925 - 1941. Geneva: Institut Universitaire de Haute Etudes Internationale, 1983.

— AHMAD ASHRAF

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