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On the 7th of January 1978 an article entitled 'Iran and Red and Black Colonisation' appeared in Ettela'at, an Iranian daily newspaper. It put forward an implausible argument that the conservative religious leaders of Iran were in league with the Communists and were attempting to overthrow the government of the Shah, the royal ruler of Iran. The article is widely understood to have been written at the behest of the Shah and ultimately sparked the first stages of the Iranian Revolution. Why was the Shah so unpopular and what did he do to try to cling
to power? This is the story of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and the White Revolution. The man known to history as Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was born on the 26th of October 1919 in the city of Tehran in Iran. Mohammad had a twin-sister named Ashraf. His father was Reza Khan, though he is more widely known as Reza Shah Pahlavi. Reza was born in 1878. He joined the Persian military when he was 14 years old and became a rising officer in the
Persian Cossacks Brigade by his twenties. Reza was interested in western culture and ideas and was well connected by his mid-twenties with the ambassadors and consuls representing the European powers in Tehran. Reza married four times. His second wife was Nimtaj Ayromlou, later known as Tadj ol-Molouk. They married in 1916. Mohammad had ten siblings and half-siblings, but he was his father's oldest son. When Mohammad was born in 1919, the Qajar Dynasty was celebrating the 130th anniversary of their rule over Iran. Persia, as the
western powers termed it, was one of the very few countries outside of Europe and the Americas which managed to remain independent during the first age of globalisation in the nineteenth century and the accelerated wave of western imperialism that came with it. This reflected Persia's status as a great centre of civilization stretching back to ancient times. The Persian Empire between the mid-sixth and mid-fourth centuries BC had ruled from Egypt and Turkey all the way east to Afghanistan. Later the Persians exerted substantial influence over the Arab Caliphates that were ruled from Baghdad,
while Safavid Persia resisted the armies of the Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. In the nineteenth century, after the establishment of the Qajar Dynasty, the country became a focus of geopolitical rivalry between Russia and Britain, with Russia controlling all of the land north of Persia and east of the Caspian Sea, and Britain ruling over India and Pakistan. The 'Great Game', as this Russo-British rivalry in Central Asia was known, came to an end in the 1890s and 1900s through several agreements between Russia and Britain. Persia remained independent,
but Britain did have a substantial interest in the country, particularly after the discovery of large petroleum reserves here and the formation in 1909 of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company. Although Persia had managed to remain nominally independent under the Qajar Dynasty, and also tried to remain neutral in the First World War when it broke out in 1914, the country's geostrategic importance meant that large parts of it were occupied between 1914 and 1918 as the British and Russians, who were now allies, tried to defeat the Ottoman Empire in the Middle East. Later the country was also impacted by the spillover effect of the Russian Revolution and Civil War from 1917 through to the early 1920s.
All of this instability led to a terrible famine in Iran between 1917 and 1919. This often overlooked and forgotten event led to the deaths of an estimated two million Iranians. This, combined with the impact of the Spanish Flu pandemic at the same time, and the way in which the Qajar Dynasty had been damaged by the occupation of the country during the war, led to a military coup in Persia on the 22nd of February 1921. This was led by Mohammad's father, with clandestine British support. Reza Khan then became the Minister of War and spent the next two years
quelling numerous local rebellions across Persia. In 1923 he assumed the office of Prime Minister. Finally, on the 15th of December 1925, the Qajar Dynasty, which had been left in place after the coup of 1921, were removed entirely and Reza Khan ascended as the new Shah or king of Persia, with the dynastic name Pahlavi. Ten years later, in 1935, he began issuing directives that henceforth the nation was to be known as Iran rather than Persia, the latter of which is actually a Greek exonym for the entire Persian Empire rather than the local name for the country.
Mohammad would barely have been aware of the turmoil which surrounded him throughout his youth. He was born into a country suffering through civil war, disease and famine, and grew up surrounded by military coups and political scheming that his father was at the heart of. He had only recently celebrated his sixth birthday when his father became Shah, an event which saw Mohammad become the Crown Prince of Iran. His status meant that his education was overseen closely by his father, who enlisted military officers as his tutors. Although Reza had no major experience of Europe
himself, he was aware of the need to modernise Iran, and so he sent Mohammad off to attend a boarding school in Switzerland, the Institut le Rosey. This was in 1931, when he was nearing his twelfth birthday. Clearly, he arrived in Europe with an elevated sense of himself as Crown Prince, but his years here were formative. Mohammad developed a love of French culture and learned to speak several European languages. In later years he and his third wife spoke with their children in French at home. His later modernisation programme in Iran was partly due to his experiences during
his teenage years in Europe. He returned home in 1936 to enter the Military Academy in Tehran. By then it was clear that the world was becoming more militaristic and violent again. Nazi Germany was rearming speedily after breaching the terms of the Treaty of Versailles and would soon annex Austria and then Czechoslovakia in Europe. Italy conquered Abyssinia via the Second Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935 to 1937, and Japan expanded its plans to conquer China in 1937, having previously annexed Korea and created the puppet state of Manchukuo in Manchuria. The outbreak of
the Second World War in September 1939 after Germany invaded Poland would lead to Mohammad becoming Shah of Iran sooner than expected. Mohammad's father adopted a policy of neutrality following the outbreak of the war. However, over time, Iran was dragged into the conflict more and more. It was strategically important because of its oil supplies, which Nazi Germany was anxious to acquire, and it also became central to Britain's campaign to supply the Soviet Union after the Germans invaded the USSR in the summer of 1941. Within days of the commencement of the
war between the Soviets and the Nazis, there were discussions in London, Moscow and Berlin about the strategic necessity of securing control over Iran for both sides. The Germans were hoping to pull Mohammad's father into the Axis alliance, but the Soviets and British acted decisively before they could do so. They felt they needed to act as Reza had adopted an increasingly independent position in the 1930s and was anxious to break away from British and Russian influence in Central Asia and the Middle East. Fearing that he might ally with Germany, on the 25th of August 1941 a
join Anglo-Soviet campaign was launched to invade Iran and take over the country's key apparatus. A ceasefire was agreed to, five days later, and the Iranian army collapsed in the face of the Allied invasion. Reza Khan was sent a polite message by the British two weeks later instructing him to kindly abdicate in favour of his son. The British had briefly considered whether it would be best to reinstall the Qajar Dynasty that Reza had removed from power back in 1925, but in the end, they decided that maintaining the Pahlavi Dynasty was as satisfactory, if Mohammad proved to be biddable
for so long as the war was underway. Reza had no option except to do as instructed, which meant that on the 16th of September 1941, six weeks before his 22nd birthday, Mohammad became the Shah of Iran. His father went into exile and died in Johannesburg in South Africa in July 1944. The new, young Shah in Tehran had no independence of action in the first years of his reign. Iran had effectively been occupied by the Allied Powers and remained under Allied occupation until the war ended. Iran was even host to the first major meeting of the 'Big Three' Allied leaders,
the British Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, the Soviet dictator, Joseph Stalin, and the US President, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, between the 28th of November and the 1st of December 1943. While the Shah was involved in a ceremonial capacity in the governance of Iran between September 1941 and the end of the war in 1945, the real rulers of the country were the British and Soviet ambassadors and their staff. Ahmad Qavam, an Iranian politician who had served as Prime Minister back in the early 1920s after the coup of 1921, returned to the office of Prime
Minister during the war and was actually more influential than the young Shah. Mohammad grew to resent Qavam's power. The shift in the power dynamic between them only started once the war ended in Europe in May 1945. A crisis erupted in the Middle East after Stalin was slow to withdraw the Red Army from Iranian territory. A prolonged dispute over the border region between Iran and Azerbaijan provided the opportunity for the Shah to push Qavam out of the office of Prime Minister and to assert his own position as ruler of the country. Thus, from late 1947 onwards,
the Shah began to transition from a puppet ruler of a militarily-occupied country to an independent ruler of a post-war sovereign nation. This capacity for asserting his independence was reflected in the Shah's personal life. Shortly after he returned to Iran from Europe, back in 1936, his father had entered negotiations with the Egyptian royal family to organise a dynastic alliance between Egypt and Iran by marrying Mohammad to Princess Fawzia, the daughter of King Fuad I of Egypt and sister of King Farouk I who ascended to the throne in 1936.
From a dynastic perspective this was an excellent alliance for the upstart Pahlavi Dynasty, which was looking to cement its place among the royal houses of the Middle East, but it was not a happy marriage. They had a daughter together in 1940, Princess Shahnaz, following which they became increasingly estranged. Once the war began to wind down in Allied victory, Fawzia returned to Egypt, where she obtained a divorce under Egyptian law. The Shah obtained a separate Iranian divorce in 1948. He then married Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary in 1951.
This second marriage ended in divorce too in 1958 after the union failed to result in any children. The Shah needed a legitimate male heir to continue the dynastic line and so he divorced Soraya and married Farah Diba in 1959. This third marriage produced four children, two boys, Reza and Ali, and two daughters, Farahnaz and Leila. The claim that the Shah was possibly gay, based on his very close friendship with the Swiss man, Ernest Perron, has been put forward in several studies. They met while the Shah was studying in Switzerland in his teenage years and Perron
became a powerful courtier and official in Iran after the war. While Perron was clearly gay, and the position he obtained in Iran based on his close relationship with the Shah was unusual, there is no concrete evidence to imply the Shah was gay or bisexual. Perron fell from power at the Shah's court owing to his role in the Abadan Crisis. This was the name given to the general period of crisis in Iran's politics between 1951 and 1954. Abadan was the centre of the oil-extraction industry in the country. The crisis was sparked by the assassination on the 7th of March 1951 of the Iranian Prime Minister, Haj Ali Razmara, by an
Islamic fundamentalist. Although this foreshadowed later clashes between conservative religious elements in Iran and the Shah's government, the immediate cause of the assassination was a widespread belief that Razmara was about to sign an unfavourable deal with the British that would extend the rights of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in the country, which was perceived as a legacy of the European age of imperialism. Razmara was succeeded by Mohammad Mossadegh. As Prime Minister he was the driving force behind the nationalisation of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company.
This in turn created two years of tensions as the British argued to their American allies that the nationalisation of the oil industry was a sign that Iran was about to fall into the Soviet, communist camp in the intensifying Cold War. Although it is very doubtful that this was likely, British resentments ultimately resulted in a western-backed coup in August 1953. While it was occurring the Shah fled Iran, flying to Europe. He remained in Rome until the unrest had died down, spending much of his time in the nightclubs of the Italian capital and waiting to see what
would happen back home. Even supporters of the Shah condemned his flight to Europe as an act of cowardice, but when he returned to Iran his position was stronger than it had ever been, as the western powers were content to have a strong Shah in Iran who would act as a bulwark against the growing pan-Arabism elsewhere in the Middle East, which had a socialist ideology and leaned more towards Moscow on account of Washington's support for the state of Israel. The Shah became a much more authoritarian ruler following his restoration. It must be admitted
that he was overseeing a country that was very difficult to rule. Iran is often viewed as a homogenous state, but it is actually a patchwork of different ethnic and religious groups, with the Balochs in the southeast and the Azeris and Kurds in the northwest all being inclined towards regional separatism. On top of this, the more secular policies which the Shah, and his father before him, favoured had brought the Pahlavi Dynasty into conflict with the conservative religious leaders of the country as early as the 1930s. Add to this the tensions
created by the crisis of the early 1950s and the experience of having to flee the country in 1953, and the Shah was consequently inclined to adopt a more authoritarian approach by the mid-1950s. Press censorship and the monitoring of religious groups and leaders became commonplace. Then, in 1957, the Bureau for Intelligence and Security of the State, better known by its acronym, SAVAK, was set up. This secret police force expanded through the late 1950s and 1960s to become a small, secretive army with thousands of members. It has been observed by many commentators that the
Shah's SAVAK paved the way for later militias and secret police forces established by the Islamic Republic of Iran. While there is no denying that SAVAK was a brutal regime that killed thousands of people and detained and tortured many others over 22 years, its activities pale in comparison to the murder and illegal detention of hundreds of thousands of people by modern Iranian security services such as the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Nevertheless, SAVAK's conduct remains a black mark on the record of the Shah as ruler of Iran. In 1963 the Shah began a programme of modernisation known as the White Revolution.
This was not entirely novel. All the way back in the 1930s, his father had begun introducing measures to orientate Iran towards becoming a more western-style country. For instance, industrial advisors were brought in to begin setting up factories and providing technical knowledge for new Iranian businesses and companies. There was also a drive to break down the traditional pillars of Iranian society, religion and the social hierarchy that went back hundreds of years. As a Francophile who was educated in Europe, the Shah wanted to go even further. In 1963,
a referendum was put to the Iranian people to commence a sweeping range of reforms. It passed in a landslide, primarily because it was boycotted by those who opposed the proposed reforms. Thus, over the next fifteen years, under the auspices of the White Revolution, huge amounts of land that belonged to the traditional aristocracy, tribal chiefs and the powerful Shia Muslim clerics was taken into state ownership and then redistributed to farmers and the lower-middle class. There was also a very considerable investment of Iran's oil revenue into expanding the education system and
improving the country's infrastructure. Literacy levels improved markedly. In the 1950s only 15% of Iranians were literate but by the end of the 1970s nearly 50% of the population could read and write. There were political reforms too. Women were given the right to vote in Iranian elections at the start of the White Revolution. Healthcare access was expanded. A Health Corps was set up which trained around 4,500 groups of medical officials to offer local healthcare around Iran. As positive as many of the outcomes from the White Revolution were, the reforms were opposed
by a conservative element in Iranian society. Iran is a complex country. On the one hand, its sophisticated culture and history going back to ancient times has made it a learned society and one of the most liberal in the entire Middle East. On the other hand, there is a strong conservative, ultra-religious element. That duality exists in Iran in the early twenty-first century and was there too in the Shah's time. In the 1960s, the closest thing which the conservative, religious faction had to a leader was Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a senior Twelver Shia cleric.
The opposition which the Shah's reforms of 1963 created turned Khomeini into a national figure. In January 1963, when the White Revolution started, Khomeini began giving speeches around Iran in which he denounced the Shah and condemned the reforms which were being initiated. He also led the boycott of the referendum which the Shah called on the reform programme. Then, on the 3rd of June, Khomeini compared the Shah to the Caliph Yazid, an early ruler of the Arab Caliphate back in the seventh century, who played a role in the split within the Muslim world into Sunni and
Shiite camps. Khomeini was basically saying that the Shah was a divisive figure who was splitting Iran into two camps through his aggressive modernisation. The comparison also questioned the Shah's legitimacy as ruler of Iran. The Shah ordered Khomeini to be arrested two days later, a move which led to major protests and riots in which around 400 people were killed. Khomeini was placed under house arrest. When he was released, he returned to giving provocative speeches against the Shah and in the end he was arrested again and banished in November 1964 when he was placed on a
flight to Turkey. He quickly relocated to Iraq and spent the next thirteen years based in the city of Najaf there, becoming a focus of opposition to the Shah just over Iran's western border. The growing schism between conservative religious forces in Iran and a more secular, liberal community that looked towards the west was exacerbated by the economic growth of Iran. It is a basic fact of modern politics that leaders can bring a certain part of their population along with them if there is economic growth in their country. The reforms overseen by
the Shah's government ushered in the greatest period of economic growth in Iranian history. GDP growth in the 1960s and 1970s averaged nearly 10% per year. Without a doubt, this was based to a considerable degree on oil revenue, especially after the 1973 Oil Crisis, when the average cost of a barrel of oil on the international markets quadrupled in the space of six months from October 1973 onwards. But oil revenue does not always lead to national economic growth if the profits are mismanaged. The Shah's government oversaw an intelligent re-investment of
oil revenue to develop other parts of the economy such as the production of textiles, cement, petrochemicals, fertilisers, and cash crops like sugar, dates and pistachios. In this way, Iran set an early template for economic diversification from oil revenue that was subsequently adopted by the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia. Living standards jumped. A better-educated and more affluent cohort emerged in Iran's cities who dressed like they lived in Paris or Rome, went to the cinema to watch western-produced films and acted very differently to how their contemporaries
did in places like Saudi Arabia in the 1960s and 1970s. Underneath all of this economic change, though, was a society that was divided over the White Revolution for a multitude of reasons. In the short term, this new prosperity led to a growing centralisation of power at the royal court, where the Shah had an increasingly elevated sense of his own self-importance. Beginning in the mid-1960s he started to grant himself a series of evermore elaborate titles, which is rarely a good sign of things to come in an autocratic state. For instance, on the 15th of
September 1965 the announcement came that the Shah would be known as Aryamehr, a word which means 'Light of the Aryans', a reference to the pseudo-scientific view that the vast array of people who speak Indo-European languages, from England all the way east to Iran and India, are descended from a root 'Aryan' people. The Shah also held the title of Bozorg Arteshtaran, meaning 'Great Army Leader'. In 1967, not content with being a king, he proclaimed that he was now Shahanshah, which means 'King of Kings'. The elevation of his title was accompanied by a new
formal coronation on the 26th of October that year. Finally, in mid-October 1971, the Shah presided over the 2500-year celebrations of the founding of the Persian Empire in ancient times by Cyrus the Great. These festivities were held over a week in a tent city erected at Persepolis, which was attended by heads of state from abroad and other royal families. The dating was questionable. Cyrus the Great had conquered the Babylonian Empire in 539 BC, so it would have made more sense to hold this 2500-year anniversary in 1961. Ultimately it, along with his expanding array of
titles, was a sign of the Shah's accelerating sense of his own importance and power. There was also an evolving foreign policy adopted by the Shah in the 1960s and 1970s. The Pahlavi Dynasty's foreign relations had shifted repeatedly. The desire to break away from British dominance of the oil industry in the Middle East had led to some scepticism about western influences in Iran, which peaked in the Abadan Crisis and the coup of 1953. Despite later interpretations of the Shah as being a classic Cold War-era strongman aligned with Washington,
the relationship was more complex. The US and British intervention in 1953 led to a new arrangement whereby Iran's oil industry was placed into a trust controlled by various international entities. Because of this, the Shah and his government were tied to the western powers for the next 19 years but he demonstrated his independence of action in March 1973 when he nationalised all foreign oil interests, nullifying the actions of the British and Americans twenty years earlier. Although Saudi Arabia led the oil embargo on western nations later that year,
Iran benefited greatly from the pursuant price increase. In terms of his diplomatic stances throughout the Middle East, the Shah adopted a much more conciliatory line towards Israel than the vast majority of other Muslim nations. This was in return for US support in Iran's regional rivalry with Iraq. More broadly, as his reign went on, he cultivated strong ties to the US, Britain and France, particularly with leaders like Charles de Gaulle in France and the US President Richard Nixon. was shaped by a desire for energy diversification and military power in the Middle East and Central
Asia. The 1950s, 1960s and 1970s were an era in which nuclear power was a favoured source of energy production. The Shah's government began developing a nuclear programme in the late 1950s with technical advice from the Americans, French and West Germans. In 1967 the Tehran Research Reactor became operational. Like so many other nations of the era, as soon as enriched uranium was present in the country for the purposes of producing domestic energy, thoughts turned to how to produce a nuclear weapon. By 1974 the US State Department was concerned that the Iranians
were looking to use enriched plutonium to manufacture one. They were also anxious about the proliferation of nuclear material around the country and concerns were expressed in Washington about what might happen to these resources if Iran experienced a new revolution, invasion or change of government. It was understandable that the administrations of both President Gerald Ford and President Jimmy Carter were concerned about this. The Shah started behaving from 1974 onwards in ways that led to rising unrest in Iran. This is surprising on some level. Rapidly rising oil revenue and the nationalisation of foreign
interests in the oil industry in 1973 meant that the coffers of the Shah's government were never fuller but the unprecedented amount of money at his disposal led to hubris. In March 1975, Mohammad turned Iran into a one-party state when he set up the new Rastakhiz Party, or 'Resurrection' Party, and made it the sole legal political party in the country, merging multiple existing political parties into it. More worryingly, rampant corruption developed. Billions of dollars' worth of oil revenue were siphoned off into the hands of the Shah,
his family and a close coterie of aristocrats and politicians. This uneven distribution of Iran's newfound wealth was compounded by steeply rising inflation as money poured into the country without proper fiscal management. Inflation rose to an average of about 15% per year in the second half of the 1970s. Corruption seeped into everyday life, with government officials, police and court officers all requiring bribes to serve the public interest. Opposition to the regime spiralled amongst both left-wing, secular liberals and much more conservative religious leaders who looked to
Ayatollah Khomeini in exile across the border in Iraq as a leader of their movement. The Iranian Revolution began with the publication of the article 'Iran and Red and Black Colonisation' in Ettela'at in January 1978, most likely at the behest of the Shah. It escalated incrementally over the next year. The deaths of an estimated 450 people in the Cinema Rex Fire on the 19th of August 1978 was a major turning point. The Shah did try to respond as opposition demonstrations intensified around the country, drawing hundreds of thousands of people out onto the streets. For instance, in October
1978 the Shah announced the dissolution of the short-lived Rastakhiz Party, hoping that political liberalisation would quell the unrest. He also pressured the Iraqi government to expel Khomeini. The Ayatollah briefly resettled in France and waited for the opportune moment to return to Iran. These measures were ineffective and unprecedented rallies in December 1978 led to upwards of ten million people taking to the streets to show their dislike of the regime and signal the need for change. By then the Shah was becoming increasingly desperate and paranoid. He attacked British and
US diplomats in Tehran and claimed they were clandestinely supporting the protestors in the hope of displacing him. Once street fighting commenced between the government and protestors, the regime was on borrowed time. Word soon reached Mohammad that leading generals were in discussions with the opposition. On the 16th of January 1979, the Shah flew out of Iran, never to return. Two weeks later, on the 1st of February, the Ayatollah arrived home after fifteen years in exile. Intense debates over the future trajectory of the country followed and it was only in December that the
Ayatollah was confirmed as the first Supreme Leader of the new Islamic Republic of Iran. The narrative will always be that the Shah fled from Iran as the opposition to his rule reached a crescendo and he was in danger of being overthrown and detained if he didn't leave the country in January 1979. In this light, the cover story that the Shah was ill and was travelling abroad for health reasons is seen as a smokescreen however two things can be right at the same time. The Shah was genuinely very ill. He had been suffering from chronic lymphocytic leukaemia since
around 1974, a type of blood cancer. By the time he went into exile for the second time in 1979, his condition had sharply deteriorated. Indeed, western leaders perhaps did not back him as strongly as they otherwise might have because they believed he would not live much longer. What he did after leaving Iran was therefore unwise. Instead of immediately seeking out the best healthcare he could, which the family certainly had the finances to do, he spent months travelling across North Africa and then to Central America. Mohammad spent time in Egypt, Morocco, Panama and
Mexico. When he was finally examined in Mexico by a high-level physician, Dr. Benjamin Kean, things were drastic. He had developed severe gallstones and had multiple tumours. At that stage, President Jimmy Carter was convinced to allow the Shah to enter the US on compassionate grounds. Carter had previously been reluctant to do anything that might look like he was granting the Shah political asylum in the US. He was receiving treatment in America by October 1979, but surgery revealed the extent to which his cancer had progressed and showed that his condition was now terminal.
In early 1980 his health continued to decline as infections set in. Undeterred, the Shah continued to travel, returning to Egypt. He ultimately died in Cairo on the 27th of July 1980 at 60 years of age. With the family unable to bury him back in Iran, his remains were laid to rest in the Al Rifa'i Mosque in Cairo in Egypt. Iran has gone through peaks and mostly valleys since the Shah's time as ruler of the country. The relationship between Iran and the western powers collapsed after the Revolution owing to the kidnapping of 66 Americans by Islamic
extremists with connections to the government at the US embassy in Tehran on the 4th of November 1979. Over fifty of these were held hostage for nearly 15 months. By the time the hostage crisis ended in January 1981, the relationship between Iran and the US was hostile. It never recovered. The US supported Saddam Hussein and the Baathists in the Iran-Iraq War that ran from 1980 to 1988, although there was a peculiar underhand attempt to supply Iran with weapons via the Iran-Contra affair in the mid-1980s. The Ayatollah died in 1989 and was succeeded by Ayatollah Ali
Khamenei as the Second Supreme Leader of Iran. Under his rule there was a window in which Iran could have changed course. Between 1997 and 2005 the Prime Minister, Mohammad Khatami, led a reform movement. The turning point came in the mid-2000s as the Ayatollah and the mullahs clamped down on the reform movement. Ever since then there have been protests against the regime every few years, notably in 2009, 2017, 2023 and 2026. To cement the position of the religious authorities, the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps and other security forces were expanded to include hundreds
of thousands of personnel. Meanwhile, on the international front, Iran remained under heavy sanctions which reduced the amount of income it could receive from the sale of its oil, while Iran's support for Hezbollah in Lebanon and the Houthis in Yemen, along with other regional proxies, made it a constant enemy of Israel. The US stance towards the country fluctuated, though there was unanimity that Iran could not be allowed to acquire a nuclear weapon. As this torturous relationship between Iran and the west played out in the 1980s and 1990s,
the Shah's eldest son and claimant to the dormant title of Shah, Reza Pahlavi, decided to move to the United States after first living in Egypt and Morocco for several years after his father's death. He had become a fulcrum for conspiracies concerning the Iranian regime. For instance, in the 1980s he was in contact with the Israeli government and elements in Saudi Arabia, which is opposed to Shiite Iran on religious grounds and because it views it as a regional rival. By the end of the 1980s, Pahlavi was presenting himself as the voice of the Iranian opposition in
exile and a leader of the Iranian American community, which grew considerably in the 1980s as a result of the exodus following the Revolution. As protests within Iran generated national attention from 2009 onwards, Pahlavi became more prominent, especially during the US-Israeli attacks on Iran in June 2025 and the spring of 2026. For instance, following the killing of Ayatollah Khamenei on the 28th of February 2026 there was speculation that Pahlavi could become involved in forming a new government in Iran. However, opinion polls and studies over
the years have consistently demonstrated that while Pahlavi might be well liked amongst the exile community, the Shah's son lacks the kind of internal support base within Iran that could translate into a restoration of the monarchy some day in the future, though he clearly aspires to a leadership role of some kind. The Shah of Iran's legacy is complicated. He was a man who came to power under difficult circumstances, who often tested his relationship with the western powers, yet managed to retain their support, and who is today viewed, somewhat
paradoxically, as both a modernising reformer and also an authoritarian. All of these things can be true at the same time. The Shah's rise to power in succession to his father occurred because of the unusual position Iran was in during the Second World War and the desire of both the Germans and the Allies to acquire control over the country and its vital oil supply. In the aftermath of the war, the Shah was able to retain the support of the United States in the context of the Cold War, even after Iran nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, an inflammatory action so far
as Britain was concerned. The simple reality was that his actions were tolerated when set against the backdrop of the Cold War, the rise of socialist pan-Arab states in the Middle East and the fact that his regime was one of the few ones in the entire region that was not bitterly opposed to Israel. He also did initiate reforms that improved life in Iran for a lot of people such as increasing literacy levels and he was also responsible for a period of huge economic growth. The country also became the most liberal in the Middle East. People in countries like Saudi
Arabia, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates did not enjoy anything near the liberties that Iranians did in the 1970s. Moreover, with oil prices turbocharging Iran's economic growth from late 1973 onwards, the Shah should have been popular and successful. His failing was in developing an overly authoritarian method of ruling and engaging in rampant corruption and financial mismanagement, along with completely misjudging the political atmosphere in the 1970s. Then again, maybe this challenge was beyond the ability of any leader. The same forces of liberalism and conservatism, of
secularism and religious zealotry, which the Shah failed to contain in the 1970s, have characterised Iran's turbulent politics ever since. What do you think of the Shah? Was he a liberal ruler who was building a secular, modern Iran before the Revolution led to his overthrow, or was he a corrupt authoritarian who caused the Revolution through his abuses of power? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
