1878-1944
Reza Khan, Shah of Iran
Iranian royalty
1. Introduction
Reza Khan was shah (king) of Iran from 1925 to 1941. He gained the throne after leading a military coup rather than by descent. He founded the Pahlavi dynasty, continued by his son Mohammad Reza until the monarchy was abolished following the 1979 Revolution. He is known for modernising the country while becoming increasingly autocratic. He tried to counter British and Soviet influence through a closer relationship with Germany, which concerned Churchill and Stalin sufficiently for them to order the invasion of Iran in 1941 and force Reza Shah’s abdication. He went into exile and died in South Africa three years later.
2. Stories
- Reza Khan came to power as Major-General Ironside’s second choice as head of Persia’s main military force.
- Churchill’s first involvement with Iran was when he expanded the British navy’s use of oil rather than coal in the early 1910s.
- The D’Arcy concession was revised in 1933, after which Iran’s chief negotiator died mysteriously in prison.
- In 1935, Reza Shah decreed the use of the name ‘Iran’ instead of ‘Persia’.
- Reza Shah abdicated after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941 and was replaced by his son, Mohammad Reza.
- Tehran was the location for ‘Eureka’, the first of the World War II conferences between the ‘Big Three’.
- Reza Shah’s mausoleum was levelled in the 1979 Revolution but his remains could not be found.
Reza Khan came to power as Major-General Ironside’s second choice as head of Persia’s main military force.
Edmund Ironside was a large, rugby-playing, multilingual Scotsman, nicknamed ‘Tiny’. He served in the Second Boer War, after which he spied on German South West Africa, disguised as a Boer wagon driver. His World War I activities included commanding a brigade on the Western Front, and in 1920 he was posted to Iran.
Iran bordered the Ottoman Empire and was neutral in World War I, but was partially occupied by Ottoman, British and Russian troops. Britain and Russia maintained a strong and competing influence in Iran after the war, with Britain running the new oil industry and Russia having considerable sway in the northern provinces.
The Persian Cossack Brigade was modelled on the Cossack units of the Imperial Russian Army and was led by Russian officers until 1920 when its commander was discredited and control passed to the British. Major-General (later Field Marshal) Ironside first approached Sardar Homayoun to become head of the brigade, an aristocrat and graduate of Saint-Cyr military academy in France, but Homayoun declined. Both Ironside and Homayoun, it seems, were aware that the appointee could become the next head of Iran by military coup.
Ironside then promoted Reza Khan to brigadier-general and head of the brigade, its first and last Iranian leader. Reza had joined at age 16 and risen through the ranks. Within a few weeks of gaining control in 1921 he led around 3,500 troops into the capital Tehran and forced the government to resign. He left the existing shah, Ahmad, temporarily in place, the last of the Qajar dynasty, and had him appoint a pro-British journalist as prime minister. Reza became minister of war and after two years took over as prime minister. After another two years he became shah, establishing what he called the ‘Pahlavi’ dynasty, a reference to Middle Persia.*
The extent of British involvement in the coup is unclear but appears to have been mainly in the form of military advice. The following month, Churchill, as the new secretary of state for the colonies, appointed Ironside as head of British forces in Iraq but Ironside suffered severe injuries in an aircraft crash and had to return to the UK.
* ‘Pahlavi’ was a Middle Persian language but it seems that Reza Shah mistakenly believed it was a noble honorific.
Churchill’s first involvement with Iran was when he expanded the British navy’s use of oil rather than coal in the early 1910s.
As first lord of the Admiralty, Churchill undertook a major expansion of vessel construction in response to Germany’s shipbuilding programme. Fuel was a key issue: Britain had a plentiful supply of coal, but oil had a higher calorific value for the same volume, enabled greater speeds, and allowed ships to be refuelled at sea, among other advantages. Some ships were already using oil but Britain had limited storage and was dependent on vulnerable imports and a small number of oil companies.
Churchill took the risky decision of committing the navy to oil for all newbuilds and to the conversion of coal-fuelled vessels. To mitigate the supply risk, he convinced parliament in 1913 to approve the purchase of a controlling 51 percent interest in the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (‘APOC’), a subsidiary of the Glasgow-based Burmah Oil Company.
APOC’s first oil had been discovered in 1908 in Iran by a prospector financed by British businessman William Knox D’Arcy who had made a fortune from a gold mine in Australia. In 1901, D’Arcy negotiated a 60-year concession with Iranian monarch Mozaffar al-Din, covering most of the country.* Prospecting was expensive and in 1904 D’Arcy sold much of his venture to Burmah Oil.
In May 1908, D’Arcy and Burmah sent a telegram to the prospector, George Reynolds, to stop drilling but he continued, striking oil a few days later. Arnold Wilson, a colleague, sent a weakly coded message to the UK: ‘See Psalm 104 verse 15 second sentence and Psalm 114 verse 8 second sentence.’1 The sentences are: ‘oil to make his face shine’ and ‘the flint into a fountain of waters’.
A pipeline was built to Abadan in western Iran where a large refinery was constructed. Shipments began from the Persian Gulf** to the UK in 2013 under long-term contracts.
Churchill lost his parliamentary seat in 1922 and the following year Shell and Burmah appointed him to lobby the British government to sell them its shares in APOC. However, he regained a parliamentary seat unexpectedly in 1924 and had to end his brief commercial lobbying career with no results for his clients despite his £5000 fee (equivalent to £300,000 today).
* D’Arcy was given oil rights in exchange for £20,000 cash (equivalent to £2.5 million today), the same amount in shares and 16 percent of the profits.
** See below for terminology.
The D’Arcy concession was revised in 1933, after which Iran’s chief negotiator died mysteriously in prison.
Nationalist feeling ran high about Iran not being in control of its oil industry and receiving only 16 percent of APOC’s profits. Abdolhossein Teymourtash, Iran’s chief of court and Reza Shah’s close confidant, was appointed to renegotiate the D’Arcy concession. Well educated, highly cultured and speaking six languages, he had the task of modernising the country and dealing with foreign powers, while Reza Shah paid more attention to military matters.
Teymourtash engaged in complicated negotiations from 1928 to 1932 when Reza Shah suddenly announced the cancellation of the D’Arcy concession and dismissed Teymourtash as negotiator, ostensibly for failure to reach an agreement, but it was part of a pattern of Reza Shah bringing down prominent leaders to protect his own position.
Britain took its case to the World Court in the Hague, which directed that negotiations should continue. The agreement was finalised by Reza Shah himself, on terms that nationalists decried as being far too favourable to APOC.
Teymourtash was convicted of corruption in a flawed trial and was jailed in the notorious Qasr (‘castle’) prison. It held many political prisoners during the reigns of Reza Shah and his son, including Ayatollah Khomeini, later leader of the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and Ali Khamenei, later supreme leader of Iran. Teymourtash died in the prison in 1933 in unexplained circumstances.
Teymourtash’s considerable amount of property was confiscated after his death. A number of his immediate family members were placed under house arrest, only being released seven years later after Reza Shah was deposed in the 1941 Anglo-Soviet invasion (see Mohammad Mossadegh), at which point some of the family’s property was returned.
Tehmourtash’s daughter Iran made use of her release to lobby successfully to have a former Qasr prison physician, Ahmad Ahmadi, extradited from Iraq to Iran. He was tried and executed in 1943 for giving lethal air injections to some of the prisoners. His daughter believed that her father was one of them, although it has not been proven. An alternative theory is that he was poisoned, perhaps by Ahmadi.
In 1935, Reza Shah decreed the use of the name ‘Iran’ instead of ‘Persia’.
British and other foreign governments complied with the decree, although during World War II Churchill requested that the name Persia be used temporarily by the Allies to avoid possible confusion between Iraq and Iran, which was approved. In general, Churchill was against name changes, insisting, for example, on using the name ‘Constantinople’ for some time after it became ‘Istanbul’ in 1930.
Variants of the name ‘Persia’ had been used since ancient Greek times by many foreign countries (‘exonyms’) but ‘Iran’ was used domestically (an ‘endonym’). The original territory of ancient Persia corresponds approximately to today’s province of Fars in south-west Iran. ‘Fars’ is Arabic for ‘Pars’ in the Persian language, from which the name for the province’s language was derived: Farsi or Parsi.
Many linguists continue to use the historic name ‘Persian’ for language classifications, including Old, Middle and New Persian. ‘Iran’ is the New Persian name for Persia, derived from Middle Persian ‘Eran’, which described its people as ‘Aryans’, that is, ‘of the Iranians’.
In eighteenth and nineteenth century Europe, the term ‘Aryan’ came to be applied to a broad range of peoples who spoke Indo-European languages. It was initially a description of language (in the field of linguistics), not race (in the field of anthropology), but became muddled. The term was later appropriated by the Nazis via French author Arthur de Gobineau and others to signify a superior, Nordic race.* It has sometimes been suggested, without evidence, that Reza Shah’s decree regarding the use of the name ‘Iran’ was prompted by Iran’s diplomat to Nazi Germany to imply an Iranian-German connection via the term ‘Aryan’.
In 1959, the government of Reza Shah’s son (Mohammad Reza) indicated that the names ‘Iran’ and ‘Persia’ could be used interchangeably, although the country formally remained the ‘Imperial State of Iran’. Since the 1979 Revolution, it has been the ‘Islamic Republic of Iran’.
Today, around 60 percent of the population is Persian; only two percent is Arab. This ethnicity split explains Iran’s insistence on the name of the ‘Persian Gulf’, the only term it recognises. After the rise of Arab nationalism, some Arab countries have referred to it as the ‘Arabian Gulf’. The United Nations uses the name ‘Persian Gulf’.
* One of the other writers who influenced Nazi racial theory was British-born German philosopher Houston Stewart Chamberlain (see Adolf Hitler).
Reza Shah abdicated after the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941 and was replaced by his son, Mohammad Reza.
Iran declared itself neutral at the beginning of World War II but the UK viewed Reza Shah as being in favour of Nazi Germany. Lebanon became pro-Axis in 1940 and Germany supported a coup in Iraq in 1941 (see al-Gaylani), intensifying Allied fears, particularly about the possible diversion of Iranian oil to Germany. When Germany attacked Russia in June 1941, Russia and the UK aligned and devised Operation Countenance to invade Iran: the UK to secure the oil and Russia to ensure an international supply route from the south.
In July and August 1941, the UK sent two separate demands to Reza Shah to expel German residents, which he refused to do. This became the nominal reason for the invasion, which occurred without a declaration of war. Iran was taken by surprise and the fighting lasted for only six days.
The occupiers demanded that all German nationals be handed over. Instead, Reza Shah ensured that they escaped, mostly over the Turkish border. Russian troops then entered the capital city Tehran and Reza Shah abdicated in September 1941. The UK considered restoring the pre-Pahlavi dynasty but there was no suitable descendant, so Reza’s son Mohammad Reza was installed, aged 21.
Reza Shah was taken into UK custody to be exiled. He believed he was being transported to somewhere in the Americas but ended up in Mauritius for a few months and then South Africa which he enjoyed at first but soon became despondent in his isolation. He died of a heart attack in Johannesburg in 1944.
The UK and the Soviet Union signed a treaty with Iran which obliged Iran to provide the Allies with non-military support and committed the UK and the Soviet Union to withdraw within six months of the end of World War II. The UK forces left by the deadline of March 1946 but the Soviets refused to do so, creating one of the early crises of what would soon be known as the Cold War. After pressure from the United States and the newly formed United Nations, they withdrew three months after the deadline.
Tehran was the location for ‘Eureka’, the first of three World War II conferences between the ‘Big Three’.
The heads of state of the USA, Soviet Union and UK met for conferences in Tehran (codename ‘Eureka’, 1943), Yalta (‘Magneto’*, 1945) and Potsdam (‘Terminal’, 1945). Eureka took place in the Soviet embassy in Tehran, three months after the Soviet/UK invasion.
The Soviet and UK embassies were next to each other; the American one was five to ten minutes away by car. The main meetings were going to be held at the US embassy to minimise travel for Roosevelt and his wheelchair. However, the Soviets announced they had uncovered a German plot to assassinate the Big Three leaders and that German troops had parachuted into Iran. Averell Harriman advised Roosevelt to stay at the Soviet embassy, which he did, in case the USA was held responsible for any assassination attempt while Stalin and Churchill travelled to and from the American Embassy.
It is widely believed that the alleged plot, ‘Operation Long Jump’, was a ruse so that Stalin could spy more easily on Roosevelt. Its supposed leader, Otto Skorzeny, who played a leading role in freeing Mussolini from Italian incarceration in 1943, denied that it had existed but it remains a popular story in some circles.
The main outcome of the Eureka discussions was an agreement to open a second front against Nazi Germany in western Europe in order to relieve Russian forces on the Eastern Front. The discussions also covered an early concept of what would become the United Nations, replacing the ineffective League of Nations. The Big Three also made a pledge of economic support for Iran, with a large caveat about their limited wartime resources.
Mohammad Reza Shah gave Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin valuable Persian rugs, the first two of which can be seen in their deceased owners’ studies in New York and Kent. There is a rumour that Churchill cut the tassels off his rug to avoid tripping over them.
The conference coincided with Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday. His birthday dinner with Stalin and Roosevelt, which relieved tensions at a difficult stage of international relations, has been described as one of ‘ten meals that changed the world’.2 **
* A preparatory meeting was held in Malta by senior staff called ‘Cricket’. Together, ‘Cricket’ and ‘Magneto’ were called ‘Argonaut’.
** Other meals include Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s dinner in Sarajevo the night before being assassinated in 1914 and the 1928 banquet in the Scottish highlands at which the secret Achnacarry Agreement was made between oil cartel members Anglo-Persian Oil Company, Royal Dutch Shell and Standard Oil of New Jersey (later Exxon).
Reza Shah’s mausoleum was levelled in the 1979 Revolution but his remains could not be found.
After his death in South Africa in 1944, Reza Shah’s body was transported to Egypt, where it was embalmed and kept in the Al Rifa’i Mosque in Cairo. Seven years later, it made a complicated journey from Cairo to Tehran by train and aircraft via Mecca and Medina, the locations of Islam’s two holiest sites. On 8 May 1951, a large state funeral took place at the mausoleum constructed for him in Rey, now in southern Tehran, in which he would later be joined by his second son, Prince Ali Reza Pahlavi, a pilot who died aged 32 in a plane crash. Others buried there included three former prime ministers (two of whom were assassinated) and Reza Shah’s valet.
Various dignitaries, including Queen Elizabeth II, visited the mausoleum to pay their respects while Mohammed Reza Shah was on the throne. A bomb exploded nearby shortly before US president Richard Nixon visited in 1972, but this was viewed as a protest rather than an assassination attempt and the visit proceeded after security checks.
Shortly after the 1979 Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini sanctioned the destruction of the mausoleum to eliminate memories of the Pahlavi dynasty. It was a sturdy building, modelled on the substantial tomb of Napoleon Bonaparte, and took around three weeks to bring to the ground.
A search was made for Reza Shah’s remains but they were not found, leading to various theories. One is that Mohammed Reza Shah had his father’s body taken back to Egypt. Another (promoted by Mohammed Reza Shah’s widow, Empress Farah) is that he was buried elsewhere on the site. In 2018, construction workers discovered a mummified body at a shrine near the mausoleum. It is not known if identification tests have been done or where the body is at present. The site of the mausoleum now belongs to a Shia Muslim seminary.
Reza Shah had four wives (died, separated, divorced, survived). Mohammed Reza Shah was the third of his eleven children, whose eldest son, the former crown prince, is Reza Pahlavi. He is in his sixties and lives in the USA.
3. Biographical summary
| Occupation | Army officer; royalty |
| Country | Iran |
| Career | Persian Cossack Brigade (1894). Various promotions including Captain (1912), Colonel (1915) and Brigadier General (1918). Coup leader (1921). Minister of War and Commander-in-Chief (1921-25). Prime Minister of Iran (1923-1925). Shah of Iran (1925-1941). |
| Born | 1878 in Alasht, Savadkuh, Mazandaran, Persia; now in northern Iran (four years younger than Churchill) |
| Father | Abbas-Ali Khan (c.1815-1878); army major; Mazanderani descent (Caspian Iranians); died when Reza was a few months old |
| Mother | Noush-Afarin; Muslim immigrant from Georgia, Russian Empire; Abbas-Ali’s second wife; remarried after Abbas-Ali’s death |
| Siblings | Only child. Three stepsisters from father’s first marriage. |
| Education | Home tutoring |
| Spouses | 1. Maryam Savadkoohi (1882-1904), m. 1894 until her death, aged 22 2. Nimtaj Ayromlou (1896-1982), m.1916 until his death in 1944 but separated from 1925 or earlier 3. Touran Amir Soleimani (1904-1995), m. 1922, div. 1923 4. Esmat Dowlatshahi (1904-1995), m. 1923 until Reza Shah’s death |
| Relationships | |
| Children | Four daughters and seven sons: By Maryam Savadkoohi: 1. Fatemeh (1903-1992) (daughter) By Nimtaj Ayromlu: 2. Shams (daughter) (1917-1996); married Fereydoun, son of Prime Minister Mahmoud Djam; died in USA 3. Mohammad Reza (1919-1980), Shah of Iran; Ashraf’s twin 4. Ashraf (1919-2016) (daughter), political activist; Mohammad Reza’s twin 5. Ali Reza (1922-1954), pilot; died in plane crash, aged 32 By Touran Amir Soleimani 6. Gholam Reza (1923-2017), army officer By Esmat Dowlatshahi: 7. Abdul Reza (1924-2004) 8. Ahmad Reza (1925-1981) 9. Mahmoud Reza (1926-2001) 10. Fatimeh (1928-1987) (daughter) 11. Hamid Reza (1932-1992) |
| Died | 1944 in Johannesburg, South Africa (21 years before Churchill), aged 66 |
| Buried | Embalmed (1944) and kept temporarily at the royal Al Rifa’i Mosque, Cairo; moved to mausoleum, Rey, Iran (1950); present location unknown |
| Nickname | Reza Maxim (ability with a Maxim gun); Reza Mirpanj (‘five stripes’; senior officer); Serene Highness (1923); The Great (parliamentary honour, 1950) |
| Height | |
| Time magazine | Front cover three times: 1934, 1938, 1941 |
4. See also
Iran
- Mossadegh, Mohammad
Middle East nationalism
- Al-Husseini, Amin
- Mossadegh, Mohammed
- Nasser, Gamal Abdel
Asian nationalists who sought Axis support
- Aung San
- Bose, Subhas Chandra
Tehran conference participants
- Roosevelt, Franklin D.
- Stalin, Joseph
Churchill controversies
- Financial affairs
- Imperialism
- Warmongering
5. Further reading
Reza Shah
- Majd, Mohammad Gholi, Great Britain & Reza Shah: The Plunder of Iran, 1921-1941 (University Press of Florida, 2011)
Iran
- Abrahamian, Ervand, A History of Modern Iran (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
- Amanat, Abbas, Iran: A Modern History (Yale University Press, 2017)
- Ansari, Ali M., Iran: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2014)
- Ansari, Ali M., Modern Iran Since 1921: The Pahlavis and After (Longman, 2003)
- Jackson, Ashley, Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq (Yale University Press, 2018)
- Richard, Yann, Iran: A Social and Political History since the Qajars (Cambridge University Press, 2019)
Oil industry (developing years)
- Davoudi, Leonardo, Persian Petroleum: Oil, Empire and Revolution in Late Qajar Iran (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2020)
- Ferrier, Ronald W., and J.H. Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company: Volume 1, The Developing Years, 1901-1932 (Cambridge University Press, 1982)
Miscellaneous
- Bowden, Mark, Guests of the Ayatollah: The Iran Hostage Crisis: The First Battle in America’s War with Militant Islam (Grove Atlantic, 2007)
- Ironside, Edmund, Ironside: The Authorised Biography of Field Marshal Lord Ironside (History Press, 2018)
- Stevenson, Struan, The Course of History: Ten Meals That Changed the World (Birlinn, 2017)
6. References
1. Ronald W. Ferrier and J.H. Bamberg, The History of the British Petroleum Company: Volume 1, The Developing Years, 1901-1932 (Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 88. Ferrier and Bamberg quote Wilson as referring to Psalm 104 verse 15 third sentence, but this does not match the relevant text, so either the authors or Wilson were in error.
2. Struan Stevenson, The Course of History: Ten Meals That Changed the World (Birlinn, 2017).