Page 294 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

Mene, mene, tek.el, upharsin 291

to have taken as his exemplar Louis XIV, le roi soleil, both in his personal
conduct and in the absolutist nature of his rule. The guiding principle of his
government was centralization: every artery and sinew of the country’s
administration led ultimately to the royal palace in Tehran. The Persian

parliament, the majlis, was ignored. So, too, was the constitution enacted
under the Qajars in 1906, which had created the majlis and, in theory, placed
limits upon the power of the monarch. The judiciary suffered the same fate, the
administration of justice being conducted, for all practical purposes, by execu­
tive tribunals, often under military direction. No political institution, in short,
was suffered to function other than that of the sovereign in mystical commun­
ion with his people. To supervise the workings of the sprawling bureaucracy
necessitated by such a highly centralized and personal system of government
the shah relied upon a series of overlapping and interlocking agencies, all of
them responsible to him alone. The most important was the imperial inspecto­
rate, whose power of investigation, as well as its reach, was almost unlimited. It
worked hand-in-glove with a large and ubiquitous secret police force, the
National Information and Security Organization or SAVAK (Sazman-i
Ettelaat va Amniyat-i Keshvar), whose particular function it was to detect and
suppress political unrest, a function which led it eventually to extend its
tentacles into nearly every corner of the nation’s life. The attention of the

military intelligence service was as much directed towards internal security as
it was towards the safety and integrity of Persia’s frontiers, for the first and
overriding duty of the army was to keep the shah in power. The immediate
protection of the shah’s person was entrusted to the imperial guard, some 2,000
strong, which was backed up by elite units of the Persian army stationed in and
around Tehran.
Political activity of any real kind was effectively suppressed by the de facto
banning of political parties and the vigilance of SAVAK. Muhammad Reza
Shah never forgot the brief but distressing experience of being forced into
temporary exile in 1953 by the majlis under the leadership of Muhammad
Musaddiq, who two years earlier had boldly nationalized the Anglo-Iranian Oil
Company’s concession in Persia. After being restored to the throne by an army

coup, largely engineered by the Americans, the shah forbade those members of
themajZis who had constituted the National Front (a loose coalition of various
nationalist parties who had united behind Musaddiq as prime minister) ever to
engage in active politics again. He was even more ruthless with the Tudeh
(‘Masses’) party, a more radical movement under communist leadership which
purported to represent the Persian masses but in reality was thoroughly
subservient to the Soviet Union. Its leading members were executed, impris­
oned or exiled and the party itself was outlawed. Denied any kind of legitimate
political outlet, the educated classes in Persia more or less turned their backs on
politics for the next two decades, knuckling under to the regime and content­
ing themselves with the improvement of their material circumstances. In this