Page 293 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

290 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

leadership, just as the satraps of the East had looked to the court of Cyrus the
Great 2,500 years ago.

Notwithstanding his exalted vision of himself and his destiny in this
world, he was nagged through his reign by an anxiety to invest his dynasty
with the legitimacy which, in his heart of hearts, he knew it lacked. His
father, Reza Khan, had been a near illiterate soldier in the Persian Cossack
brigade (the only military unit worthy of the name in the Persian army
before the First World War), who had risen to command of the brigade after
its Russian officers had been dismissed in the aftermath of the Bolshevik
revolution. Reza Khan overthrew the government of the reigning Qajar
shah by means of a military coup d'etat in 1920-21, and at the close of 1925
he proclaimed himself shah. To confer some kind of historical legitimacy upon
his rule, Reza Shah adopted the factitious patronymic of ‘Pahlavi’, the name
given to the archaic form of the Persian language before the admixture of

Arabic. In a further attempt to link his regime with Persia’s remote past, and
especially the glories of the Sassanian empire, he changed the name of the
country in 1935 to ‘Iran’, which derives from the same root as ‘Aryan’, the
generic term for the group of Indo-European languages of which Persian is
one. Muhammad Reza Shah continued his father’s efforts at legitimization,
carrying them often to extreme lengths.
Like his father - upon whom in later years he bestowed the cognomen of
al-Kabir, ‘the great’ - he assumed the titles of shahanshah (‘king of kings’, the
style affected by ancient Persian monarchs to denote their sway over the

subject rulers of Georgia, Kurdistan, Arabistan and Afghanistan), ‘centre of
the universe’ and ‘Shadow of God upon earth’, the Muslim dignity accorded in
days gone by to, among others, caliphs of Islam, Ottoman sultans and Mughal
emperors. Not content with this impressive array of titles, Muhammad Reza
Shah invented a new dignity for himself at the time of his coronation in 1967
(an event he had postponed until after the birth of a male heir) - Aryamehr or
‘light of the Aryans’. The institution of kingship in Persia was imbued with a
sacred quality, a survival from the distant days of the Achaemenian and
Sassanian kingdoms and the religion of Zoroaster. It was also invested with a
strongly theocratic character through its association with Shii Islam, the
monarch being looked to as the active head and defender of the faith. Muham­
mad Reza Shah chose to emphasize the ancient Persian conception of kingship,

with its concomitant doctrine of the divine right of kings, rather than the Shu
interpretation of the nature and duties of the office. The choice was dictated by
his own inclinations and his passion for modernity but it was one which
offended the more devout Shii mullahs, who firmly believed that he should rule
in strict accordance with the prescriptions of Islam.
Reza Shah is said to have modelled himself and his endeavours to transform
Persia into a modern state upon Mustafa Kemal, Ataturk, and his deli erate
Europeanization of Turkey after 1923. Muhammad Reza Shah would appear