The Fall of Heaven Read online

  I see no signs of justice, sense, or worth;

  A man does evil deeds, and all his days

  Are filled with with luck and universal praise;

  Another’s good in all he does—he dies

  A wretched, broken man whom all despise.

  —THE PERSIAN BOOK OF KINGS

  Ingratitude is the prerogative of the people.

  —THE SHAH

  On Sunday, February 15, 2015, under a low gray canvas of threatening skies, two motorcades flanked by police escorts pulled up outside the Unknown Soldier Memorial in Cairo, Egypt. Bodyguards armed with automatic weapons quickly formed a protective cordon, and military officers in attendance smartly saluted, but the smiles on the faces of the two women at the center of the scrum showed they were more interested in each other than in the men fussing around them. Farah Pahlavi, Iran’s last queen and empress, and Jehan Sadat, former first lady of Egypt, were old friends and had looked forward to their reunion. They embraced, chatted, and then walked in silence toward the soaring arches of the memorial and beyond to the eternal flame that marked the resting place of Jehan’s husband, the late president Anwar Sadat, slain by Islamist gunmen a few hundred yards away during a 1981 military parade. The sight of the two ladies standing with heads bowed stirred powerful emotions among spectators and brought back memories of another time and another place. Forty years ago, Farah Pahlavi and Jehan Sadat were young women at the forefront of progressive change in the Middle East. Passionate advocates for the rights of women and children, they lobbied for passage of laws to empower women in the workplace and in the family. They supported literacy campaigns; women’s access to education; health care, arts, and culture; and antipoverty initiatives. They traveled widely in their own countries, delivered speeches and addressed public rallies, received visiting dignitaries, and represented their countries abroad. Their activism was encouraged by two husbands who welcomed the presence of strong, intelligent wives as partners and helpmates. The Pahlavi and Sadat marriages broke the mold in conservative Muslim societies, where the consorts of ruling leaders were expected to maintain a dignified silence in public.

  The clouds over Cairo were a reminder of the tempests brewing elsewhere in the region. Four years earlier, the Arab Spring revolutions had raised hopes for a new era of democracy and prosperity in a part of the world sorely lacking both. Euphoria soon gave way to despair. From the shores of the southern Mediterranean to the heartland of the old Babylonian Empire political extremists and religious fanatics rushed to fill the void left by the collapse of the old order, and the region’s architecture crumpled beneath the pressure of civil wars, insurgencies, rebellions, assassinations, and terrorist atrocities. Borders dissolved, cities were sacked, and hundreds of thousands were put to the sword in scenes more reminiscent of the thirteenth than the twenty-first century. Women and children were sold as war booty. Barrel bombs and chemical weapons rained down from the sky on once peaceful hamlets and villages. Archaeological ruins that had stood since antiquity were leveled. Journalists and aid workers who rushed to the scene were captured and publicly beheaded. Millions of terrified, traumatized people poured out of Iraq and Syria in search of safe havens and refuge in Turkey, Jordan, and Lebanon. Others decided to abandon the region altogether and make the long, dangerous trek to Europe. Terror followed in their wake: several weeks before Farah Pahlavi arrived in Cairo black-clad gunmen pledging allegiance to the Islamic State and al-Qaeda carried out atrocities near her home in Paris, massacring journalists and shoppers in two separate attacks.

  The sight of Farah Pahlavi and Jehan Sadat in Cairo presented a poignant reminder that the removal of their husbands from power a generation earlier opened the floodgates to today’s carnage. In the 1970s Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the King of Iran, and his friend President Anwar Sadat of Egypt dominated political life in the Middle East. The Shah’s great hope was that he and Sadat, inheritors of two great empires, could work together to form a bulwark of stability and moderation and keep the forces of extremism at bay. When the ground suddenly shifted beneath their feet, the first pillar fell with surprising ease. After a year of mounting unrest the Shah was forced from power in January 1979 and died in Cairo the following year. Eighteen months later the second pillar fell, this time in a matter of seconds. In October 1981 the Egyptian president was slain when Islamist gunmen attacked the presidential reviewing stand at an army parade. The Shah’s eldest son and heir, Reza Pahlavi, had been invited to attend the ceremony as Sadat’s personal guest; his last-minute cancellation probably saved his life.

  Every summer since then Farah Pahlavi had flown to Cairo to honor her husband’s memory and legacy. Her pilgrimages were curtailed in 2011 when Sadat’s successor, President Hosni Mubarak, was overthrown in a revolution that brought an Islamist government to power. Farah thought it prudent to stay away until political passions cooled. During her years in exile she had earned a reputation as a tenacious critic of fundamentalist Islam and she continued to champion the rights of women and campaign against religious law. Two years passed and protests by Cairo’s middle class led the army under General Abdel Fattah el-Sisi to stage a coup against the Islamists. Eighteen months later, Sisi signaled the Queen that she was welcome to return to Cairo for a visit that he hoped would be brief and low-key. His conditions suited her wishes. “I didn’t want to come on the anniversary with the crowds and photographers and flowers,” she said. “It is better to be discreet. I want this to be private.”

  * * *

  IN THE FIVE years she was away Farah Pahlavi experienced unfathomable personal tragedy and a late life triumph. The suicide of her third child, Ali Reza, in 2011 and the tragic echoes of his sister’s death a decade earlier left her in a daze of grief. Both her youngest children had been traumatized during the revolution and suffered from depression and anxiety. Her distress was further compounded when Ben Affleck’s movie Argo resurrected old allegations that her husband had ruled Iran as a blood-soaked tyrant while she, the Queen, had whiled away her time bathing in milk. Farah was warned by friends not to watch Argo but she attended a screening anyway to see what the fuss was about. She left the cinema devastated and wrote the director a letter defending her husband’s record and pointing out Argo’s factual inaccuracies and falsehoods. Affleck ignored her and went on to win an Oscar. During that bleak period it seemed as though every time Farah Pahlavi tried to move on with her life events from the past kept pulling her back. Above all, she longed to be near her husband. “She needs to talk to him,” said a close friend—she needed to go to Cairo. Yet even in the midst of her sadness and frustration, Farah Pahlavi experienced a remarkable revival of her fortunes.

  The Queen’s decision to participate in a documentary on the Iranian revolution seemed straightforward enough. From Tehran to Cairo was produced by Manuto, a London-based Persian-language television station whose programming is beamed into Iran via satellite. The station’s mix of current affairs and pop culture is a favorite among young Iranians. What happened next caught everyone by surprise. When word spread that Iran’s last queen was set to talk about the revolution the streets of Tehran emptied out as commuters rushed home to turn on their televisions. Farah’s warmth, humor, and intelligence came as a surprise to younger viewers conditioned to see her as one of the “corrupt of the earth.” In their tens of thousands, after the broadcast, Iranians wrote to the Queen applauding her courage and thanking her for her years in public life. Many correspondents expressed regret that the 1979 revolution had happened at all. They included ordinary citizens but also government officials, clerics, and even officers serving in the armed forces who sent the Queen their best wishes and apologized for her treatment at the hands of the regime. Remarkably, some regime officials even declared themselves ready to support the overthrow of the Islamic Republic and a restoration of the monarchy.

  Their e-mails and letters were filled with regret, longing, and bitter self-reproach. “Dear Lady,” wrote one young Iranian, “I did not live during
the reign of the Shah nor did I witness the revolution. Each time I look at the photos of you and the Shah, I wonder what our future could have been. My generation was not the cause of the revolution. The people in power are a bunch of Arab worshippers. I was recently beaten up by the Basiji [security forces] who found a photo of the late Shah on my phone. I love you.” “As an Iranian,” wrote one middle-class woman, “I am ashamed of what my compatriots did to you and your family. We did not appreciate you at the time you were in power. We are now paying the price for our ignorance. How can we ever renew those days? I want you to know that an entire nation is sorry and full of remorse. Your memory is the brightest part of our history. Your good name is eternal.” And this, from a young man clinging to a past he never knew: “I take great pride in being born in Iran in 1977 in the last year of the reign of the Shah,” he wrote. “I have a big collection of photographs of you and your family and I look at them for solace. It is my wish to visit the grave of the Shahanshah. I thank you for all your interviews and speeches in defense of the Shah.… Please call me if you can. And please send me some photographs.”

  In February 2016 the Islamic Republic celebrated thirty-seven years in power, coincidentally the same length of years as the Shah ruled over Iran. The anniversary provided Iranians with an opportunity to compare and contrast two very different eras and systems of government. Yet if the attitudes expressed by many ordinary people were any indication, the guardians of the Islamic Republic were wary about submitting to the litmus test of public opinion. Many Iranians associated religious rule with failed state policies, corruption, and repression. Even in clerical circles there was a quiet admission that the regime’s unpopularity had translated into broad public apathy and cynicism toward religion. Religious and political leaders worried about the secular mood stirring among a new generation of Iranians who were enamored with Iran’s pre-Islamic Persian heritage. These rebels sported amulets, necklaces, and rings inscribed with images of Cyrus and Darius, the celebrated kings who centuries before the birth of the Prophet Mohammad transformed Persia into the world’s first sole superpower. They made the trek to Pasargade outside Shiraz to stand before Cyrus’s tomb, where the Shah celebrated twenty-five hundred years of Persian monarchy in 1971. They immersed themselves in the art and culture of the Safavid and Qajar Eras. Even the tourist store at Niavaran Palace where the Pahlavis once resided now hawked Cyrus memorabilia.

  During my visit to the holy city of Qom in 2013 I listened as a group of religious scholars conceded that universities around the country felt compelled to offer special history courses tailored to remind students why there had been a revolution in the first place. As part of its propaganda offensive to discredit the Pahlavi Dynasty, state-run television produced a soap opera that depicted the Shah as an American stooge while his family and courtiers flounced about in ball gowns and elaborate uniforms. In a country where people assume the opposite of what the government tells them to be true, the show’s popularity suggested that the public appetite for programming on Iran’s former imperial dynasty had only been whetted.

  After a long pause the wheel of history was turning again. Nostalgia and reverence for the past were hardly confined to the generation of young Iranians born after the revolution. Their parents and grandparents reminisced about the 1960s and ’70s, when their passports were welcomed in every country and when Iran was known for social reforms, a booming economy, and the glamour of royalty, and not for stonings, religious extremism, terrorism, and nuclear bombs. The ceaseless regret for what might have been suggested many Iranians were not at peace with themselves or the past. Their discontent would not have surprised the late Shah, who once predicted that his fickle people would live to regret their decision in 1979 to replace him with Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and the mullahs. Told during the revolution that one of his statues had been pulled down, he offered a brisk rejoinder: “It will be back up soon enough.” He liked to cite one of his favorite quotes, “Ingratitude is the prerogative of the people,” and on another occasion said, “If the Iranian people were fair and compared their situation with other countries and how Iran was fifty years ago, they would see that they were living in peace. They had it so easy that they decided to have a revolution to supposedly further improve their lives. But this was not a revolution of the Iranian people. In fact it was collective suicide on a national scale that took place at the height of prosperity.”

  Two days after uttering those words the Shah died in a Cairo hospital.

  * * *

  WHY DOES HE still matter?

  The answer to that question is apparent to any visitor to the Iranian capital. Tourists enter Tehran from the south on a carriageway built by order of the Shah. On the city’s outskirts they pass through the green belt he envisioned would protect Tehran from the twin scourges of desert wind and dust. In the central city visitors pass by the government ministries, hospitals, universities, schools, concert halls, monuments, bridges, sports complexes, hotels, museums, galleries, and gleaming underground metro that were among his many pet projects. It was the Shah who invested in the technology and purchased the reactors that started Iran’s nuclear program. He championed the social welfare state that today provides Iranians with access to state-run health care and education. He raised the scholarship money that allowed hundreds of thousands of Iranian university students, including many luminaries of the Islamic Republic, to study abroad at leading American and European universities. The Shah ordered the fighter jets that made Iran’s air force the most powerful in southwestern Asia. He established the first national parks and state forests and ordered strict water, animal, and environmental conservation measures. Perhaps it is no surprise that Iran today has the look and feel of a haunted house. The man who built modern Iran is nowhere to be seen but his presence is felt everywhere. The revolutionaries who replaced the Shah may not like to hear it, but Iran today is as much his country as it is theirs.

  The Shah matters as much for his failures as for his successes. Though today he is remembered in the West as a brutal dictator forced from power by a brave people, this one-dimensional narrative is an airbrush of the historical record. The Shah spent the last two and a half years of his reign dismantling personal rule in an attempt to democratize Iranian political life. He ceded power back to the politicians, loosened restrictions on political activity, relaxed censorship, and pulled back the security forces. By the time the Shah left for exile in January 1979 he had reduced his own role to a constitutional figurehead, and made no attempt to save his throne through force. Unlike President Bashar al-Asad of Syria, the Shah surrendered power rather than unleash the army and start a civil war. At a time when a new generation of authoritarian rulers in the Middle East and elsewhere will soon face internal and external pressure to democratize, the Shah’s fall raises troubling questions. Did he move too slowly or not fast enough? Would a crackdown have prevented the revolution? If the Shah had not democratized when he did, if he had waited another year, would Iran today be a multiparty democracy with Western-style rule of law?

  Today Americans, if they remember the Shah at all, are likely to associate him with massive human rights violations and state-sanctioned repression. In the 1970s the Iranian leader was accused of overseeing a police state responsible for as many as a hundred thousand deaths. According to international human rights groups, an equal number of Iranians were imprisoned and tortured. The Shah became a hate figure for many people. When President Jimmy Carter grudgingly allowed the deposed monarch to enter the United States in 1979 for cancer surgery, his own ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, complained that it was like “protecting Adolf Eichmann.” By comparison, Young described Khomeini as “a saint.” In addition to the accusations of genocide, the Shah was accused of massive corruption and stashing away at least $25 billion in secret Swiss bank accounts (even higher estimates ran to $59 billion or the equivalent of almost three years’ worth of Iranian oil revenues). The Shah rebuffed the charges of mass murd
er and theft but never denied resorting to authoritarian rule in the latter stages of his reign. “No, I wouldn’t deny it,” he said. “But look, to carry through reforms, one can’t help but be authoritarian. Especially when the reforms take place in a country like Iran, where only 25 percent of the inhabitants know how to read and write.”

  The controversy and confusion that surrounded the Shah’s human rights record overshadowed his many real accomplishments in the fields of women’s rights, literacy, health care, education, and modernization. Help in sifting through the accusations and allegations came from a most unexpected quarter, however, when the Islamic Republic announced plans to identify and memorialize each victim of Pahlavi “oppression.” But lead researcher Emad al-Din Baghi, a former seminary student, was shocked to discover that he could not match the victims’ names to the official numbers: instead of 100,000 deaths Baghi could confirm only 3,164. Even that number was inflated because it included all 2,781 fatalities from the 1978–1979 revolution. The actual death toll was lowered to 383, of whom 197 were guerrilla fighters and terrorists killed in skirmishes with the security forces. That meant 183 political prisoners and dissidents were executed, committed suicide in detention, or died under torture. The number of political prisoners was also sharply reduced, from 100,000 to about 3,200. Baghi’s revised numbers were troublesome for another reason: they matched the estimates already provided by the Shah to the International Committee of the Red Cross before the revolution. “The problem here was not only the realization that the Pahlavi state might have been telling the truth but the fact that the Islamic Republic had justified many of its excesses on the popular sacrifices already made,” observed historian Ali Ansari. During Khomeini’s decade in power, from 1979 to 1989, an estimated 12,000 monarchists, liberals, leftists, homosexuals, and women were executed and thousands more tortured. The single worst atrocity occurred in one week in July 1988, when the Islamic Republic slaughtered an estimated 3,000 young men and women accused of engaging in leftist political activity. Baghi’s report exposed Khomeini’s hypocrisy and threatened to undermine the very moral basis of the revolution. Similarly, the corruption charges against the Pahlavis collapsed when the Shah’s fortune was revealed to be well under $100 million at the time of his departure, hardly insignificant but modest by the standards of other royal families and remarkably low by the estimates that appeared in the Western press.