Page 301 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

298 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

promote Persian studies, donations which ran into millions of dollars and
which might have been better spent in trying to eradicate illiteracy among the
Persian peasantry.
Far from laying the foundations of an industrial economy in Persia in the
decade between 1968 and 1978, the shah, through his vanity, his impatience
and his intemperate ambitions, succeeded in erecting only the papier-mache
fagade of such an economy. The boom in Persia’s economy lasted only two

years, from the early months of 1974 to the early months of 1976. Oil revenues
had failed to keep up with the Persian government’s expectations, as the
world’s consumption of oil steadily fell after the quadrupling of prices in 1973.
By the spring of 1976 Persia was faced with a reversion to the financial situation
she had been in at the beginning of the decade, that of running an annual deficit
on her external balance of trade. (At the end of 1972 her outstanding foreign

public debt had stood at $5,900 million, the servicing of which consumed 18
per cent of her total export earnings every year.) Still the shah refused to reduce
expenditure, resorting instead to foreign loans and barter deals in an effort to
keep the party going. In a way, he had no choice but to continue to ride the tiger
of avarice which he had created by his unheeding expenditures and his lavish
disbursement of subsidies upon imports, especially foodstuffs - of which
Persia had produced an exportable surplus a decade earlier. For if he did not
keep up the supply of sops, the beast might well unseat and devour him.

Yet for all his foolish vaunting, for all his prodigious extravagance and even
more prodigious errors, Muhammad Reza Shah’s ambition to modernize his
country’s economy and to earn for his people a respected place among the
nations of the world was by no means an unworthy one. That he failed to
achieve it was due as much to what are the seemingly ineradicable vices oi
Persian society - vanity, self-deception, inconstancy, nepotism and venality -

as it was to his own personal failings and folie de grandeur. ‘The Persians’, wrote
Sir John /Malcolm, an early British envoy to Tehran, in his/fistwy of Persia a
century and a half ago, ‘are the vainest people on earth’, and ample evidence of
this attribute, as well as of the other prime constituents of Persian behaviour, is
to be found in James Morier’s tales of the estimable Haj ji Baba of Ispahan. (It is
not, perhaps, entirely incidental that the symbol of royal authority in Persia
should be the Peacock Throne, or that the throne itself is not the fabled

Peacock Throne of the Mughal emperors, which in popular legend was
brought back by Nadir Shah from the sack of Delhi in I739_4°» ^ut was *n
named after a wife of the first Qajar shah who was known by the soubriquet of
the ‘Peacock Lady of Ispahan’. ^Pishkesh, the system of bribery, is entrenche
in every layer of Persian society, and has been since time immemorial. Com
bined with the deep streak of vanity in the Persian character, and the ingraine

disposition to view public office as an opportunity for personal enrichment an
family advancement, it practically ensured that the windfall of wealth fro
in the 1970s would be consumed in a blaze of corruption, folly and ostenta