Towards Mohammed Reza Pahlavi (1919–1980), the last or most recent Shah of Iran, there are two principal attitudes. To the Islamic Republic and many in Europe and the US, Mohammed Reza was a tyrant, womaniser and poltroon, who was put on the throne by Britain and Russia in 1941 and maintained there by the US, till a popular uprising sent him scurrying abroad in 1979 where he died, unlamented, in Egypt 18 months later.
The second attitude, which is gaining ground even in Iran, is that Mohammed Reza was a man of intelligence and industry. From exceptionally unpromising beginnings in 1941, his country overrun by British empire and Soviet troops, he outwitted his rivals and the great powers, survived at least two assassination attempts and three air crashes, and raised Iran to a prosperity and influence that his revolutionary successors have not begun to match. His departure from the scene inaugurated 30 years of warfare in the Middle East. As for his crimes, more political prisoners were killed by the Islamic Republic in the single year 1981 than in all Mohammed Reza’s lifetime. As Montesquieu noted, republics are always more vindictive than monarchies.
Abbas Milani, a professor at Stanford in California, belongs to neither school, or rather to both. A student radical of the 1970s, he was locked up by the Shah for a year in the Komiteh and Evin prison, where his blockmates included the revolutionary jurist, Ayatollah Montazeri. In 2009, Milani was denounced by name by the Islamic Republic as one of the architects of ‘the project of velvet revolution’ which is what the regime calls the tumult over the disputed presidential election of that June. For Milani, Mohammed Reza was neither hero nor coward, but a Shakespearian compendium of visions and weaknesses, and not without a certain tragic allure: ‘one that lov’d not wisely but too well.’
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