The more things change in Iran, the more they remain the same

In September 1941, a 22-year-old Mohammad Reza Pahlavi ascended the throne of Iran while his father, Reza Shah, was sent into an honourable exile to Johannesburg by the British. Becoming a monarch at such a young age, the Shah tried his best to emulate his father. Towards the end of his reign, he even invoked his larger-than-life father’s authority till the Iranian revolution of 1979 forced him to flee.

Cut to the present. Amid a deepening economic crisis, Iran has been bombed by Israel and the United States. Its Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has been assassinated and more than 780 people have been killed in the country so far. Iran has struck back, and the war has plunged the entire West Asian region into turmoil. Shah’s son Reza Pahlavi, who has lived in the U.S. since 1979, has declared that he is ready to return to Iran “as soon as possible”.

While there has been a clamour in some quarters in Iran to have the crown prince back, he has a complex legacy — his father’s era is seen as a time when Iran had closer ties to the West, but it was also a time when there was censorship, human rights abuses, and a Savak secret police, which suppressed dissent with impunity.

A disconnected Shah

In this backdrop, reading Polish journalist and writer Ryszard Kapuściński’sShah of Shahs, which traces the last days of the Shah before the Iranian revolution, is an eye-opener. Kapuściński’s book was first published in 1982 and was translated into English by William R. Brand and Katarzyna Mroczkowska-Brand. The book gives a sense that the more things change in Iran, the more they remain the same. At present, instead of Savak, for instance, there are units of the Revolutionary Guard, keeping a fierce eye on dissenters, sending them to prison and, in many cases, to their death.

The Shah, says Kapuściński, made a sweeping claim, betting on oil, that “Iran will leap forward and build a Great Civilization.” The only magic wand the Shah held in his hand and with which he thought of transforming Iran in just 10 years was oil. As Kapuściński writes: “Oil kindles extraordinary emotions and hopes, since oil is above all a great temptation. It is the temptation of ease, wealth, strength, fortune, and power. It is a filthy, foul-smelling liquid that squirts obligingly up into the air and falls back to earth as a rustling shower of money.” With oil, the Shah used to say, “I will create a second America in a generation!” He never did, but this vanity ended up being one of the reasons for his downfall.

What was strikingly absent in the Shah’s grand idea of Iran was the well-being of its people. His notorious intelligence agency, Savak, was the Shah’s eyes and ears. Savak eavesdropped on everyone who dared to speak out against the Shah. Books and films by Iran’s best writers and filmmakers were banned. As for the intellectuals, their thoughts were stifled and they were condemned to silence.

The Shah, writes Kapuściński, left people with a choice between Savak and the religious leaders. The Islamic revolution of 1979 was thus more of an anti-Shah revolution than a pro-Ruhollah Khomeini one. He writes: “A dictatorship [Shah’s reign] that destroys the intelligentsia and culture leaves behind itself an empty, sour field on which the tree of thought won’t grow quickly. It is not always the best people who emerge from hiding, from the corners and cracks of that farmed-out field, but often those who have proved themselves strongest; not always those who will create new values but rather those whose thick skin and internal resilience have ensured their survival. In such circumstances, history begins to turn in a tragic, vicious circle, from which it can sometimes take a whole epoch to break free.”

Despite a dose of magic realism in his reportage and beautiful prose, Kapuściński leaves out the many instances in which America acted behind the curtains to bring about these changes in Iran.

Moral police

But terror did not disappear from Iran. In his groundbreaking book, What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom, Arash Azizi argues that after taking the reins of power from the Shah, “Khomeini wanted to fundamentally reshape life in Iran to conform to his idea of Islam. Muslim reformers had, for decades, attempted to reconcile their faith and its ideals with the necessities of their age. Khomeini wanted none of that. His government was to be Islamic, as he understood it, ‘not a word more, not a word less’.”

After Khomeini’s death, Khamenei became the rahbar of the Islamic Republic. One of the most consequential figures in Iran in recent times, he built a theocratic system. But over the last few years, on Khamenei’s watch, there was unrest in Iran due to both political and economic reasons. In 2022, a Kurdish Iranian woman, Mahsa Amini, was mysteriously killed in Tehran. All that she lacked was a proper headscarf. Her death in detention led to nationwide waves of protests spearheaded by the women of Iran under the slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom’.

Azizi guides readers through a new history that was being written on the streets of Iran by its women. For them, the revolutionaries of 1979 had transformed into today’s regime. They believed that the Guidance Patrol, a dreaded wing of the Iranian police’s moral division that killed Mahsa Amini in detention, was just another name for the Shah’s dreaded Savak.

The women’s movement

Journalists who reported on the women’s movement faced imprisonment and even death, but they courageously brought to the fore the atrocities being inflicted on the people of Iran. Fatemah Jamalpour was one such fearless journalist who, despite being arrested multiple times and having faced many interrogation sessions, kept reporting on state repression. She was accompanied by another Iranian journalist, Nilo Tabrizy, who, however, emigrated from Iran after covering the women-led movement from the frontlines.

Corresponding through encrypted platforms to protect Fatemah (who was still in Iran), the two journalists wroteFor The Sun After Long Nights: The Story of Iran’s Women-Led Uprising. In it, they document the spirit and legacy of the movement and all the events that led them to this point.

Today, many women are once again out on the streets, this time protesting the Israel-U.S.-led war. In Shah of Shahs, Kapuściński recalls a scene: a policeman under the Shah orders a protester to run. The man refuses to move and stands there until he is no longer afraid. Kapuściński writes that it is “precisely the beginning of the revolution.” The lesson resonates now.

The turmoil in Iran may be shaped by the geopolitical designs of powerful states, but no durable change can be engineered from outside. As in Kapuściński’s account, it begins when ordinary people claim their own political future. Any path forward must therefore be led by the Iranians themselves.

Saleem Rashid Shah is a book critic and an independent writer based in Kashmir