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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Iran
Index
Tabatabai became prime minister and Reza Khan became commander
of the armed forces in the new government. Reza Khan, however,
quickly emerged as the dominant figure. Within three months,
Tabatabai was forced out of the government and into exile. Reza
Khan became minister of war. In 1923 Ahmad Shah agreed to appoint
Reza Khan prime minister and to leave for Europe. The shah was
never to return. Reza Khan seriously considered establishing a
republic, as Atatürk had done in Turkey, but abandoned the idea as
a result of clerical opposition. In October 1925, a Majlis
dominated by Reza Khan's men deposed the Qajar dynasty; in December
the Majlis conferred the crown on Reza Khan and his heirs. The
military officer who had become master of Iran was crowned as Reza
Shah Pahlavi in April 1926.
Even before he became shah, Reza Khan had taken steps to create
a strong central government and to extend government control over
the country. Now, as Reza Shah, with the assistance of a group of
army officers and younger bureaucrats, many trained in Europe, he
launched a broad program of change designed to bring Iran into the
modern world
(see Historical Background
, ch. 5). To strengthen the
central authority, he built up Iran's heterogeneous military forces
into a disciplined army of 40,000, and in 1926 he persuaded the
Majlis to approve a law for universal military conscription. Reza
Shah used the army not only to bolster his own power but also to
pacify the country and to bring the tribes under control. In 1924
he broke the power of Shaykh Khazal, who was a British protégé and
practically autonomous in Khuzestan. In addition, Reza Shah
forcibly settled many of the tribes.
To extend government control and promote Westernization, the
shah overhauled the administrative machinery and vastly expanded
the bureaucracy. He created an extensive system of secular primary
and secondary schools and, in 1935, established the country's first
European-style university in Tehran. These schools and institutions
of higher education became training grounds for the new bureaucracy
and, along with economic expansion, helped create a new middle
class. The shah also expanded the road network, successfully
completed the trans-Iranian railroad, and established a string of
state-owned factories to produce such basic consumer goods as
textiles, matches, canned goods, sugar, and cigarettes.
Many of the Shah's measures were consciously designed to break
the power of the religious hierarchy. His educational reforms ended
the clerics' near monopoly on education. To limit further the power
of the clerics, he undertook a codification of the laws that
created a body of secular law, applied and interpreted by a secular
judiciary outside the control of the religious establishment. He
excluded the clerics from judgeships, created a system of secular
courts, and transferred the important and lucrative task of
notarizing documents from the clerics to state-licensed notaries.
The state even encroached on the administration of vaqfs
(religious endowments) and on the licensing of graduates of
religious seminaries.
Among the codes comprising the new secular law were the civil
code, the work of Justice Minister Ali Akbar Davar, enacted between
1927 and 1932; the General Accounting Act (1934-35), a milestone in
financial administration; a new tax law; and a civil service code.
Determined to unify what he saw as Iran's heterogeneous
peoples, end foreign influence, and emancipate women, Reza Shah
imposed European dress on the population. He opened the schools to
women and brought them into the work force. In 1936 he forcibly
abolished the wearing of the veil.
Reza Shah initially enjoyed wide support for restoring order,
unifying the country, and reinforcing national independence, and
for his economic and educational reforms. In accomplishing all
this, however, he took away effective power from the Majlis,
muzzled the press, and arrested opponents of the government. His
police chiefs were notorious for their harshness. Several religious
leaders were jailed or sent into exile. In 1936, in one of the
worst confrontations between the government and religious
authorities, troops violated the sanctity of the shrine of Imam
Reza in Mashhad, where worshipers had gathered to protest Reza
Shah's reforms. Dozens of worshipers were killed and many injured.
In addition, the shah arranged for powerful tribal chiefs to be put
to death; bureaucrats who became too powerful suffered a similar
fate. Reza Shah jailed and then quietly executed Abdul-Hosain
Teimurtash, his minister of court and close confidant; Davar
committed suicide.
As time went on, the shah grew increasingly avaricious and
amassed great tracts of land. Moreover, his tax policies weighed
heavily on the peasants and the lower classes, the great
landowners' control over land and the peasantry increased, and the
condition of the peasants worsened during his reign. As a result,
by the mid-1930s there was considerable dissatisfaction in the
country.
Meanwhile, Reza Shah initiated changes in foreign affairs as
well. In 1928 he abolished the capitulations under which Europeans
in Iran had, since the nineteenth century, enjoyed the privilege of
being subject to their own consular courts rather than to the
Iranian judiciary. Suspicious of both Britain and the Soviet Union,
the shah circumscribed contacts with foreign embassies. Relations
with the Soviet Union had already detiorated because of that
country's commercial policies, which in the 1920s and 1930s
adversely affected Iran. In 1932 the shah offended Britain by
canceling the agreement under which the Anglo-Persian Oil Company
produced and exported Iran's oil. Although a new and improved
agreement was eventually signed, it did not satisfy Iran's demands
and left bad feeling on both sides. To counterbalance British and
Soviet influence, Reza Shah encouraged German commercial enterprise
in Iran. On the eve of World War II, Germany was Iran's largest
trading partner.
Data as of December 1987
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