Shah of Shahs (7 page)

This is not exactly a photograph but rather a reproduction of an oil painting in which a panegyrist-dauber portrays the Shah in a Napoleonic pose (as when the French emperor, mounted, was directing one of his victorious battles). The Iranian Ministry of Information distributed this picture, and the Shah, who gloried in such comparisons, must therefore have approved. With galloons in giddy profusion, a plenitude of medals, and an intricate arrangement of cords across the chest, the well-cut uniform accentuates the attractive, athletic silhouette of Mohammed Reza. The image depicts him in his favorite role: commander of the army. The Shah, of course, always concerned himself with the welfare of his subjects, occupied himself with accelerated development, and so on, but these were all burdensome obligations resulting from the fact that he was the father of his country, while his true hobby, his real passion, was the army. Nor was this an entirely disinterested fascination. The army had always constituted the main prop of the throne and, as the years passed, it became more and more the sole support. At the moment that the army scattered, the Shah ceased to exist. And yet I hesitate to use the term "army," which can lead to mistaken associations—this
was nothing but an instrument of domestic terror, a kind of police that lived in barracks. For this reason the nation looked upon any further development of the army with fear and terror, realizing that the Shah was swinging an ever thicker and more painful whip that would fall sooner or later across the backs of the people. The division between army and police (of which there were eight varieties) was merely formal. Army generals, intimates of the dictator, commanded each type of police. No less than Savak, the army enjoyed all the privileges. ("After studying in France," one doctor recalled, "I returned to Iran. My wife and I went to a movie and we were waiting on line to buy tickets. A noncomissioned officer appeared and went past everyone, straight to the box office. I made a remark about this. He walked back to me and slapped my face. I had to stand there and take it, because my neighbors in the line were warning me that any protest would land me in prison.") And so the Shah felt best in uniform and devoted the better part of his time to the military. For years his favorite occupation had been reading the magazines that the West produces in such profusion, displaying the newest varieties of weapons as advertised by their merchandisers and manufacturers. Mohammed Reza subscribed to all these periodicals and read them from cover to cover. For many years, before he had the money to buy every deadly toy that caught his fancy, he could only daydream, while engrossed in his reading, that the Americans would give him this tank or that airplane. And to be sure the Americans gave him a lot, but some Senator would always stand up to criticize the Pentagon for sending the Shah too many arms. Then the shipments would stop for a while. But now that the monarch was getting all that oil money, his problems were over. He immersed himself even more deeply in reading his magazines and arms catalogues. A stream of the most fantastic orders flowed out from Teheran. How many tanks does Great Britain have? Fifteen hundred? Fine, said the Shah—I'm ordering two thousand. How many artillery pieces does the Bundeswehr have? A thousand? Good, put us down for fifteen hundred. And why always more than the British army and the Bundeswehr? Because we've got to have the third-best army in the world. It's a shame that we can't have the first or the second, but the third is within reach and we're going to have it. So once again the ships steamed, the airplanes flew, and the trucks rolled in the direction of Iran bearing the most modern weapons that man could devise and produce. The more trouble it is to build factories, the more attractive the supply of tanks looks. So Iran quickly transforms itself into a great showplace for all types of weapons and military equipment. "Showplace" is the right word, because the country lacks the warehouses, magazines, and hangars to protect and secure it all. The spectacle has no precedent. If you drive from Shiraz to Isfahan even today you'll see hundreds of helicopters parked off to the right of the highway. Sand is gradually covering the inert machines.

A Lufthansa airliner at Mehrabad airport in Teheran. It looks like an ad, but in this case no advertising is needed because all the seats are sold. This plane flies out of Teheran every day and lands at Munich at noon. Waiting
limousines carry the passengers to elegant restaurants for lunch. After lunch they all fly back to Teheran in the same airplane and eat their suppers at home. Hardly an expensive entertainment, the jaunt costs only two thousand dollars a head. For people in the Shah's favor, such a sum is nothing. In fact, it is the palace plebeians who only go to Munich for lunch. Those in somewhat higher positions don't always feel like enduring the travails of such long journeys. For them an Air France plane brings lunch, complete with cooks and waiters, from Maxim's of Paris. Even such fancies have nothing extraordinary about them. They cost hardly a penny when compared to a fairy-tale fortune like the one that Mohammed Reza and his people are amassing. In the eyes of the average Iranian the Great Civilization, the Shah's Revolution, was above all a Great Pillage at which the elite busied itself. Everyone in authority stole. Whoever held office and did not steal created a desert around himself; he made everybody suspicious. Other people regarded him as a spy sent to report on who was stealing how much, because their enemies needed such information. Whenever possible they got rid of someone like that in short order—he spoiled the game. All values thus came to have a reversed meaning. Whoever tried to be honest looked like a paid stoolie. If someone had clean hands, he had to keep them deeply hidden because there was something shameful and ambivalent about purity. The higher up, the fuller the pockets. Anyone who wanted to build a factory, open a business, or grow cotton had to give a piece of the action as a present to the Shah's family or one of the dignitaries. And they gave willingly, because you could get a business going only with the backing of the court. With money and influence you would overcome every obstacle. You could buy influence and use it afterward to multiply your fortune further. It is hard to imagine the river of money that flowed into the till of the Shah, his family, and the whole court elite. Bribes to the Shah's family generally ran to a hundred million dollars and more. Prime ministers and generals took bribes of from thirty to fifty million dollars. Lower down, the bribe was smaller, but it was always there! As prices rose, the bribes got bigger and ordinary people complained that more and more of their earnings went to feed the moloch of corruption. In earlier times Iran had known a custom of auctioning off positions. The Shah would announce a floor price for the office of governor and whoever bid highest became governor. Later, in office, the governor would plunder his subjects to recover (with interest) the money that had gone to the monarch. Now this custom was revived in a new form: The ruler would buy people by sending them to negotiate contracts, usually military ones.

The Shah's big money enabled him to breathe life into a new class, previously unknown to historians and sociologists: the petro-bourgeoisie. An unusual social phenomenon, the petro-bourgeoisie produces nothing, and unbridled consumption makes up its whole occupation. Promotion to this class depends on neither social conflict (as in feudalism) nor on competition (as in industry and trade), but only on conflict and competition for the Shah's grace and favor. This promotion can occur in the course of a single day, or even in a few minutes: The Shah's word or signature suffices. Whoever most pleases the ruler, whoever can best and most ardently flatter him, whoever can convince him of his loyalty and submission, receives promotion to the petro-bourgeoisie. This class of freeloaders quickly makes a significant part of the oil revenues its own and becomes proprietor of
the country. At their elegant villas its members entertain visitors to Iran and shape their guests' opinions of the country (though the hosts themselves often have scant familiarity with their own culture). They have international manners and speak European languages—what better reasons for the Europeans to depend on them? But how misleading these encounters can be, how far these villas are from the local realities that will soon find a voice to shock the world! This class we are speaking about, guided by the instinct of self-preservation, has premonitions that its own career will be as short-lived as it is glittering. Thus, it sits on its suitcases from the start, exporting money and buying property in Europe and America. But since it has such big money, it can earmark a part of its fortunes for a comfortable life at home. Superluxurious neighborhoods, with enough conveniences and ostentation to stupefy any sightseer, begin to spring up in Teheran. Many of the houses cost more than a million dollars. These neighborhoods take root only a few streets away from districts where whole families huddle in narrow, crowded hovels without electricity or running water. This privileged consumption, this great hogging, should go on quietly and discreedy—take it, hide it, and leave nothing showing. Have a feast, but draw the curtains first. Build for yourself, but deep in the forest so as not to provoke others. So it should be—but not here. Here, custom ordains that you dazzle, knock the wind out of people, put everything on display, light all the lights, stun them, bring them to their knees, devastate them, pulverize them! Why have it at all, if it's to be on the sly, some alleged thing that somebody has seen or heard about? No! To have it like that is not to have it at all! To really have it is to blow your horn, shout it, let others come and gawk at it until their eyes pop out. And so, in plain sight of a silent and increasingly hostile people, the new class mounts an exhibition of the Iranian
dolce vita,
knowing no measure in its dissoluteness, rapacity, and cynicism. This provokes a fire in which the class itself, along with its creator and protector, will perish.

This is a reproduction of a caricature that some opposition artist drew during the revolution. It shows a Teheran street. Big American cars, gas-guzzling road-hogs, are slinking along the avenue. On the sidewalks stand people with disappointed faces. Each of them is holding a part of a car: a door handle, fanbelt, or gearshift. The caption under the cartoon reads: "A Peykan for Everyone" (the Peykan is an Iranian economy car). When the Shah got into the big money he claimed that every Iranian would be able to buy his own car. The caricature shows how this pledge was fulfilled. Above the street, an angry Shah is sitting on a cloud with this inscription running above his head: "Mohammed Reza is furious with a nation that will not admit it feels an improvement." This is an interesting drawing, which tells how the Iranians interpreted the Great Civilization—as a Great Injustice. It created even bigger gulfs in a society that had never known equality. The Shahs, of course, had always had more than others, but it was hard to think of them as magnates. They had to sell concessions to keep the court in respectable shape. Shah Nasr-ed-Din ran up such debts in Paris brothels that, in order to bail himself out and get back home, he sold the French the rights to carry out archaeological expeditions and keep whatever artifacts they found. But that was in the past. Now, in the mid-seventies, Iran has become a behemoth of riches. And what does the Shah do? Half the money goes to the army, some to the elite, the rest for development. But what does that word mean? "Development" is no indifferent, abstract concept. It always applies to someone, in the name of something. Development can make a society richer and life better, freer, more just—but it can also do exactly the opposite. So it is in autocratic societies (where the elite identifies its interests with those of the state that guarantees its control); in such societies, development, aiming at strengthening the state and its apparatus of repression, reinforces dictatorship, subjugation, barrenness, vagueness, and the emptiness of existence. The development packaged and sold in Iran as the Great Civilization worked in just that way. Can anyone blame the Iranians for rising up at the cost of great sacrifices and destroying that model of development?

A Shiite is, first of all, a rabid oppositionist. At first the Shiites were a small group of the friends and backers of Ali, the son-in-law of Mohammed and husband of the Prophet's beloved daughter Fatima. When Mohammed died without a male heir and without clearly designating his successor, the Muslims began struggling over the Prophet's inheritance, over who would be caliph, or leader of the believers in Allah and thus the most important person in the Islamic world. Ali's party (
Shi'a
means "party") supports its leader for this position, maintaining that Ali is the sole representative of the Prophet's family, the father of Mohammed's two grandsons Hassan and Hussein. The Sunni Muslim majority, however, ignores the voices of the Shiites for twenty-four years and chooses Abu Bakr, Umar, and Utman as the next three caliphs. Ali finally becomes caliph, but his caliphate ends after five years, when an assassin splits his skull with a poisoned saber. Of Ali's two sons, Hassan will be poisoned and Hussein will fall in battle. The death of Ali's family deprives the Shiites of the chance to win power, which passes to the Sunni Omayyad, Abassid, and Ottoman dynasties. The caliphate, which Mohammed had conceived as a simple and modest institution, becomes a hereditary monarchy. In this situation the plebeian, pious, poverty-stricken Shiites, appalled by the nouveau-riche style of the victorious caliphs, go over to the opposition.

All this happens in the middle of the seventh century, but it has remained a living and passionately dwelt-on history to this day. When a devout Shiite talks about his faith he will constantly return to those remote histories and relate tearfully the massacre at Karbala in which Hussein had his head cut off. A skeptical, ironic European will think, God, what can any of that mean today? But if he expresses such thoughts aloud, he provokes the anger and hatred of the Shiite.