Iran in World History

particularly tense, especially following an incident in March 1928 
when he entered a holy shrine in Ghom and beat a cleric who had 
protested the queen’s removing her veil there the day before. The shah 
banned the veil altogether in 1936, thereby establishing it as an ongo-
ing symbol of Iran’s increasing social polarization. In response, some 
conservative men simply kept their wives at home and hired prostitutes 
to accompany them to public functions.
Nevertheless, Reza Shah’s autocratic rule brooked no opposition, 
whether from religious figures or from his own handpicked parlia-
ment. When a group of bazaar merchants, conservative villagers, and 
clerics staged a mass demonstration at the shrine of the Eighth Imam 
in Mashhad in 1935, the shah sent in the army to disperse them, 
disregarding an age-old principle forbidding the violation of holy 
places. When his own government ministers disagreed with him he 
simply threw them in jail where they usually died, often under suspi-
cious circumstances.
While he can be credited with catapulting Iran into the modern 
age in the space of little more than a decade, Reza Shah’s achieve-
ments came at the cost of democracy and created social divisions 
that would haunt the country for years to come. He was, simply put, 
a military dictator, and in some ways his approach to running the 
nation resembled not so much Atatürk’s as that of another of his 
contemporaries, Adolf Hitler, whom he frankly admired.
The prospect of increasing ties to Germany appealed to Reza Shah 
in several respects. Most important, it could act as a counterweight to 
the influence of Britain and the Soviet Union in Iranian affairs. There 
was a sentimental factor as well, however, which stemmed from Nazi 

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Germany’s appropriation of Aryan ideology. Since the nineteenth 
century German scholars, recognizing that “Iran” literally means 
“Land of the Aryans,” had been among Europe’s most enthusiastic 
students of ancient Iranian history and languages. In 1935, acting on 
the advice of the Iranian ambassador to Berlin, Reza Shah decreed 
that henceforth “Persia” would be referred to as “Iran” within the 
world of diplomacy.
Naturally, this pro-German policy was not acceptable to either 
Britain or the Soviet Union, and after the two countries became allies 
against the Germans in 1941, they launched a joint invasion of Iran in 
August of that year. Reza Shah was deposed and exiled to South Africa, 
where he died of heart disease three years later. In his place the allies 
installed his inexperienced, Swiss-educated twenty-one-year-old son, 
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.
While the changes brought about during Reza Shah’s reign were 
dramatic, they did not affect Iranian society evenly across the board, 
and despite his attempts to unify the country and centralize govern-
ment control his policies increased social divisions in many ways. The 
benefits of industrialization, improved education, and greater opportu-
nities for women accrued disproportionately to the urban elites and the 
landowning class, at a time when a majority of the population remained 
landless, poor, and illiterate. Reza Shah’s attempts to forcibly settle 
Iran’s many nomadic tribes, most notably the Bakhtiaris, Ghashghais, 
Shahsevan, and Turkmen, only made them more antagonistic toward 
government authority.
The urban upper classes became increasingly Westernized during 
Reza Shah’s reign, thanks to their increasing exposure to European 
goods and culture and the Western-style education they received at 
Iran’s newly established universities or abroad. A secular intellectual 
class emerged that espoused democratic notions and applied Western 
models in the creation of literature and the arts.
Writers such as Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh and Sadegh Hedayat 
had close connections to Europe. In fact, Jamalzadeh spent most of his 
long life in Geneva, and Hedayat ended his in Paris where he is buried. 
Hedayat’s short existence was a tortured one—he committed suicide 
at the age of forty-eight—and this is apparent in his most successful 
novel,