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 Tabataba’i, 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 Tabataba’i prime minister and Reza Khan army commander. Within a few months, however, Reza Khan ousted Tabataba’i and, having become the dominant player on the country’s disarrayed 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 Qashqai 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 Pahlavi State 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.