Page 325 - Arabia the Gulf and the West

322 Arabia, the Gulf and the West

What the outcome will be for Persia is even more uncertain. Every time in
the past that a dynasty has fallen the country has been rent by civil war and
subjected to foreign invasion. With the disintegration of the centra), govern­
ment, regional loyalties are bound to assert themselves with varying degrees of
vigour. The Persians are not yet a nation, however long the ghost of the Persian
empire has endured. They are, on the contrary, a miscellany of Persians,
Afghans, Kurds, Turcomans, Arabs, Baluchis and other peoples, set apart
from one another by ethnic, cultural or religious differences. Beyond the

frontiers of Persia dwell larger communities of all those non-Persian
minorities, each of them with irredentist claims of some sort upon Persian soil.
Nor does the prospect of a turbulent future arise solely from the diversity of
Persia’s population, or from the danger of interference from without, or even
from the doctrines of political violence preached of late by Muslim and Marxist
revolutionaries. It derives also from the character of the Persians themselves,
and from the singular talent they have displayed throughout their history for
devising bizarre and gruesome methods of exacting vengeance or compelling
obedience.
The founder of the Qajar dynasty, Agha Muhammad Khan, after defeating
the last of the Zand rulers of southern Persia in 1795, erected a pyramid of
skulls from the slaughtered bodies of the Zand ruler’s followers over the spot
where he was slain. To punish the men of Kirman for supporting the Zand
cause, Agha Muhammad Khan ordered their eyes to be torn out. It was not
until 7,000 eyes had been delivered to him that he declared himself satisfied.
Manuchehr Khan, the governor-general of Fars, after suppressing a tribal
revolt in 1841, built a tower of 300 living men, packed in layers of mortar, near
Shiraz. After the defeat of the Persian army at the battle of Muhammarah
during the Anglo-Persian war of 1856-7 the officers of one regiment were
taken in chains to Tehran, where they were dragged, by ropes attached to rings

inserted in their noses, through the ranks of their men before being publicly
flogged and cast into prison. Common methods of punishment for criminals up
to the early years of this century included crucifixion, impalement, live burial,
mutilation, flaying ab've and the bastinado. Against such a background of
horrors, the treatment meted out by S AVAK to political prisoners of late years
appears almost mild. It will be instructive to see how it compares with the pena
regime instituted by the new rulers of Persia, whoever they may eventually be.

There was about the latter years of the reign of Muhammad Reza Shah an air of
grim inevitability, of hubris and nemesis and the ‘Gods of the Copyboo
Headings’. He would brook no dissent, heed no advice, listen to no voices ut
those uttering his praises. Vanity was his overriding weakness, and too muc
flattering unction was laid to his soul over the years by foolish or though ess

Western statesmen. Tran, because of the great leadership of the Shah, is< an
island of stability in one of the more troubled areas of the world, gu