The Shah’s Iranian Monarchy Was By no means as Secular as Its Admirers—or Critics—Declare

With the newest U.S. and Israeli assaults on Iran, speak of regime change has gone from discredited to possible inside the Western public sphere. Reza Pahlavi, the exiled son of the deposed king, needs to steer the transition, confidently issuing plans for his first 100 days after the autumn of the regime. Some distinguished publications are even asking whether or not he might certainly be the answer to Iran’s ills.

Following the disastrous U.S. interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the well-known penalties of Iran’s 1953 coup, how is the potential of bringing again one other Pahlavi to the throne even up for dialogue? The cruelty and corruption of the present Iranian authorities are actually a giant a part of the reply. However rigorously cultivated Pahlavi nostalgia additionally performs a key half. Photos of unveiled, trendy ladies in Seventies Tehran have been essential to portray an idealized portrait of a contemporary, peaceable, and affluent Iran supposedly stolen away by the mullahs.

Critics, after all, have been fast to level out that social media celebrations of pre-revolution Iran disguise the realities of a dictatorial regime that tortured dissidents whereas its monarchs cavorted with European elites and feasted on Maxim’s desserts. For each photograph of Farah posing with Andy Warhol, the pondering goes, there’s a hidden picture of demise, ache, and squalor.

Criticism of the shah’s authoritarianism is eminently truthful. Mockingly, although, it usually accepts the identical assumption put ahead by the shah’s apologists: that the Pahlavis had been simple Westernizers, secularists who forcefully tried to pull Iran into full alignment with the West. The true story was a lot messier. As students like Ali Mirsepassi and Zhand Shakibi have proven, the Pahlavi’s self-presentation was by no means straightforwardly pro-Western or secular.

More and more in the course of the Seventies, the Pahlavis relied on traditionalism, Islam, and mystical claims to legitimacy—forces that will later feed the revolution that toppled them. Farah herself was a number one sponsor of traditionalist thinkers who criticized Western materialism and sought to advertise Iran because the shining instance of Islamic spirituality. The complete story of her reign reveals her to be not merely a feminist icon or Persian Marie Antoinette, however fairly a extra sophisticated and cautionary determine completely.

Farah speaks with journalists, in her white Christian Dior marriage ceremony robe, on the day of her marriage ceremony to the shah in Tehran on Dec. 21, 1959.Mario De Biasi/Mondadori through Getty Photos

If the 86-year-old former monarch, who at the moment divides her time between Washington and Paris, is following social media, she should be experiencing déjà vu. Because the shah’s third and last spouse, she represented Iran to the world from the second she acquired married. In any case, between 1959, when she first acquired engaged to her twice-divorced husband, till 1979, once they fled collectively into exile, the empress was on the heart of a working debate about authoritarianism, Islam, and democracy. Supporters—together with the Iranian state—promoted her as the proper embodiment of Iran’s correct progress beneath righteous royal rule. Detractors, in the meantime, maligned her as a distraction, a “painted doll” who hid the realities of the Pahlavis’ corruption, cruelty, and servitude to imperialism.

Very similar to Empress Soraya earlier than her, Farah initially turned a logo of Iran’s pro-Western modernization in international media. Particularly, she was related to the shah’s bold improvement venture, the White Revolution, which he launched in 1963. This system’s initiatives included large infrastructure initiatives, land redistribution, public well being campaigns, profit-sharing for staff, new literacy packages, and girls’s suffrage. Domestically, these measures introduced actual shifts: Per capita incomes rose, outdated feudal ties weakened, and cities expanded quickly. Overseas, they gave Iran—and its royal household—a a lot greater rating on the West’s modernity scorecard, reworking the nation’s picture in just some years.

U.S. President John F. Kennedy and first girl Jacqueline Kennedy host a dinner in honor of the shah and Farah on the White Home in 1962.IMAGO/piemags through Reuters

Farah’s time within the limelight coincided with increase years for the world’s illustrated press, and the capitalist Western media gave the Pahlavi regime an image-driven platform that helped its nationwide branding flourish. Western magazines listed the empress among the many world’s greatest dressed ladies—typically over fashion icons like Jackie Kennedy Onassis—and supplied the Empress’s well-known coiffure for adoption. Nevertheless, in addition they praised Farah for staying “as easy and unaffected as when she was a commoner-school lady.” Betty Friedan, the main voice of liberal feminism in america, referred to as the empress “a feminist” within the pages of Women Residence Journal, pointing to her understated make-up and busy schedule as proof. Such photos of simplicity and dealing motherhood wrapped the monarchy within the aesthetics of Westernized femininity. Predictably, these photos have discovered new life in immediately’s “Iran earlier than the Islamic Revolution” meme wars. They indicate {that a} renewal of Pahlavi rule will imply liberal improvement, respect for ladies’s rights, and pro-Western insurance policies.

Inevitably, the critiques of those photos even have their roots within the Nineteen Sixties and Seventies. In 1967, the Iranian leftist exile Bahman Nirumand argued that whereas the monarchy staged spectacular public diplomacy overseas, most Iranians nonetheless confronted poverty and the brutal repression of SAVAK, the shah’s infamous CIA-trained secret police. The polished imagery of the Pahlavi White Revolution—with the youthful, glamorous empress at its heart—was, in Nirumand’s eyes, purely a distraction from harsher truths on the bottom. As he put it bitterly, “To make up for it, Iran has a phenomenal Empress.”

The shah and Farah arrive in Berlin in 1967.Rogge/through Getty Photos

Nirumand’s critique discovered sharp echoes in a scathing open letter from German journalist and Pink Military Faction member Ulrike Meinhof, which circulated amongst scholar activists in the course of the shah and empress’s 1967 go to to Germany. Meinhof juxtaposed shiny journal tales about Farah’s privileged life with Nirumand’s proof of corruption and state violence, mocking the empress as an Jap Marie Antionette. For instance, she sneered at Farah’s wistful remark about craving Iranian sweets after a keep in Paris: “You see, most Persians aren’t hungry for sweets, however for a chunk of bread.”

For critics, this picture of gendered and classed corruption was captured within the idea of gharbzadegi. The phrase, which means “West-struckness” or “Westoxication,” was the title of a e-book in 1962, after which it rapidly gained forex in vernacular discussions concerning the shah’s feminine members of the family.

Inevitably, the reality was extra sophisticated. In any case, the person who coined the time period gharbzadegi was on the Pahlavi payroll: Heideggerian thinker Ahmad Fardid was one in every of a number of intellectuals who critiqued Western secularism and modernity, advocating for a return to Shia authenticity. However earlier than throwing his mental weight behind the Islamic revolution, Fardid frequently collaborated with the monarchy, explaining the shah’s one-party ideology to the individuals and showing on state TV networks to malign the false worship of the West.

As a number one sponsor of cultural initiatives throughout the nation, Farah performed a key position in calling for an genuine Iranian authenticity that was not solely royalist and Persian but additionally Shiite Muslim. Farah was topped empress and designated regent in 1967. As such, she didn’t merely have the shah’s ear. She additionally ran her personal particular bureau with a whole lot of staff, and oversaw numerous creative, cultural, academic, welfare, and public well being initiatives. Within the early Seventies, she additionally turned extra actively concerned in overseas coverage, notably representing Iran in China shortly after the shah’s 1972 go to to the Soviet Union.

Farah inspects a row of troopers in preparation for festivities celebrating the two,five hundredth anniversary of the Persian Empire in 1971.Hulton-Deutsch Assortment/Corbis through Getty Photos

As accusations of gharbzadegi unfold, Farah continued to emphasise that she believed in growing Iran in accordance with “Iranity.” She warned concerning the risks of superficial modernization, and voiced issues about Iranian youth’s admiration for all issues Western in her memoirs and interviews: “[C]ertain superficial facets of Western tradition and civilization—not their true values—could be extraordinarily harmful, notably for younger individuals, as a result of they copy unthinkingly.” Mockingly, this resembled the very critique the opposition leveled in opposition to the Pahlavis: that they privileged superficial modernization over substance, showcasing flashy initiatives and trendy ladies, whereas ignoring the actual wants of the inhabitants.

The empress additionally sponsored intellectuals who advocated for Islamic Iranian authenticity, together with the thinker Seyyed Hossein Nasr. In 1974, she directed Nasr to ascertain the Imperial Iranian Academy of Philosophy, then later appointed him director of her personal bureau. For Nasr, and different regime-aligned students resembling Fardid, Henry Corbin, and Dariush Shayegan, Iranian Shiism held the roots of an genuine mystical imaginative and prescient that would heal the wreckage of Western modernity. Nasr noticed his position as reclaiming the misplaced essence of Shia mysticism and limiting Western affect over Iran. He has subsequently stated, “lengthy earlier than Khomeini attacked the West, I attacked the West in Iran.”

Farah’s husband was equally dedicated to the language of spiritual and nationwide authenticity. The shah was usually solid as a materialistic technocrat who reportedly “devoured [military] manuals in a lot the identical means as different males learn Playboy.” However, beginning along with his first autobiography in 1961, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi positioned himself as a mystically guided, totally Muslim and Iranian chief. In his last e-book, Reply to Historical past, he doubled down on this, calling the college college students who rebelled in opposition to him “soulless.” “I’m a non secular man, a believer,” he emphasised, “I observe the precepts of the sacred E-book of Islam, precepts of stability, justice, and moderation.”

Actually, even the shah’s much-celebrated “granting” of rights to ladies was much less a product of his personal impulses than the persistent efforts and advocacy of Iranian feminists. Based on Iranian politician and girls’s rights activist Mahnaz Afkhami, within the lead-up to the 1967 household regulation reform, the shah supplied no help or course, solely cautioning “that no subject that contradicts the specific textual content of the Quran ought to be mentioned, particularly the subject of inheritance.” The shah confirmed little hesitation in dismissing ladies’s liberation and equality as misguided Western concepts. In an interview with Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci in 1973, he stated: “This ladies’s lib enterprise, as an example. What do these feminists need? What would you like? Equality, you say? Certainly! I don’t wish to appear impolite, however … you might be equal within the eyes of the regulation, however not, I encourage your pardon for saying so, in means.”

Demonstrators protest the shah’s arrival in New York Metropolis on June 10, 1968.Bob Dad or mum/Getty Photos

Though he was returned to energy in a coup backed by america and the UK, the shah didn’t at all times act in keeping with the desires of his geopolitical sponsors. In his conferences with Western leaders, he bristled at being learn as a pliant secularizer on behalf of america. In 1962, he informed President John F. Kennedy that “America treats Turkey as a spouse, and Iran as a concubine.” Nor was the White Revolution an easy pro-Western venture. The shah launched it after dismissing liberal Prime Minister Ali Amini, whom he thought of a favourite of Washington. Backed by oil revenues, he used these reforms to attempt to ease discontent amongst numerous teams, current the monarchy because the engine of “revolutionary” modernization, and entrench his one-man rule. Beneath President Richard Nixon and Kissinger, the shah was additionally in a position to direct a extra impartial overseas coverage. To today, some Iranian monarchists insist, conspiratorially, that this was why the West secretly backed the Iranian revolution.

Regardless of what critics and apologists nonetheless imagine, the Pahlavi venture was not merely Westernization by fiat. As a substitute, the monarchs supplied an in the end unstable mix of imitation, response, mysticism, and authoritarianism. The “pro-Western” shah wasn’t at all times pro-Western. Nor was he a feminist. As for the glamorous trendy empress in these photographs, she helped fund most of the anti-Western and traditionalist ideologies that we now affiliate with the Islamist republic—even because the opposition painted her as a Westoxicated Marie Antionette.

Farah’s story is one other reminder of how celebrating supposedly pro-Western dictators or modernizing monarchs can backfire. Romanticizing her household’s rule isn’t simply innocent nostalgia—it’s selective historical past that props up reckless insurance policies within the current.