Revolution from the Throne

Iran is a land where history vies for attention with even the most spectacular events of the present. It was in Iran, once ancient Persia, that roses first bloomed and nightingales sang. There, astronomy grew as a science and mathematics as an art, chess was invented--and the Garden of Paradise was lost. Long before the Romans dared venture out of Rome, the Persians ruled an empire that stretched from the Indus to the Nile, so that Darius the Great could justly describe himself as "King of Kings, King of the lands of many races, King of this earth." But nothing in its past prepared Iran for what is happening there today. The country is being shaken by a two-pronged revolution--social and industrial--that is bringing to the mass of its people the first real taste of prosperity in 6,000 years.

Across the huge land, almost equal in size to France, Germany, Spain and Italy combined, great factories are springing up everywhere--in Hamadan, once the capital of the Aryan Medes; in Tabriz, where Marco Polo was entertained by the mongol Khans; in Isfahan, whose fragrant splendors led the Arabs to call it "One Half of the World." The night sky flares bright in the oilfields of Abadan, where the Zoroastrians built fire temples over ducts of natural gas. A railroad is stretching out across the treacherous Dasht-i-Kavir Desert, once traversed only by spice caravans from the Orient. A giant dam now irrigates the rolling grainlands below Shush, the ancient capital of the Elamites, where Daniel had his second vision.

Below the Parthian battleground where Marc Anthony met defeat, Japanese mini-tractors now wade into paddies thick with rice. Along the Caspian seashore, the highways are clogged with slat-sided Mercedes trucks hauling a record cotton crop to market. The beaches bounce with bikinis, and teen-agers in Teheran have joined the Transistor Generation. The ancient, withered men of Yezd are being taught to read. In Qum and Bam, in Dizful and Gowater and 50,000 villages throughout Iran, 15 million peasants have been transformed, almost overnight in history's terms, from feudal serfs into freeholders whose land is now their own.

Iran's economy is growing at the rate of 12% a year, and the per-capita income of its 26 million people has nearly doubled--from $130 to $250--in the past ten years. The country, which once depended on U.S. aid ($1.7 billion since World War II) for its very survival, now stands proudly on its own feet, a good example of what an underdeveloped land can do with determination and some good sense. Gone are the swarms of U.S. advisers, administrators and technical experts who once inhabited every government ministry and hovered over every government project. Their places have been taken by Iranians. Gone as well, to everyone's satisfaction, are the aid dollars from Washington. With industry booming and the earnings from its huge fields of oil ever higher ($800 million this year), Iran has now reached the stage where it can underwrite its own development. Next March it will launch an ambitious new five-year plan that will cost $10.4 billion.

Seven Roaring Days. This month, Iran will hold a blowout the likes of which few countries have ever seen. For seven roaring days and seven joyous nights, it will celebrate the coronation of the man responsible for it all: Mohammed Reza Pahlevi, 47, Shahanshah (King of Kings), Aryamehr (Light of the Aryans), and absolute ruler of his nation. It will be history's most belated crowning, for the Shah has already occupied Iran's throne for 26 years. Until now, however, he had steadfastly rejected the idea of a formal coronation. "It is not a source of pride," he often explained, "to become king of a poor people."

The Shah has worked hard to alleviate his country's poverty. While his Arab neighbors feuded, fussed and fought with each other, he was busy building, investing most of his oil earnings in development instead of armaments, plants instead of planes. He decreed a radical land reform, gave women equal rights and promoted education at every level. By creating a climate of stability, he has induced private foreign investors to pour $1.3 billion into Iran. Having visited 57 countries, he has used personal diplomacy to put Iran on good terms with most of the world. Although a Moslem, he has steered carefully clear of the Arab-Israeli conflict. He ships oil to Israel, but has made friends (and exchanged visits) with Iraq's Arab Socialist President Abdel Rahman Aref, his western neighbor, and most other Arab leaders. But he abhors Nasser, whom he sees as a continuing threat to the security of all the Middle East.

Although basically pro-West, the Shah has also refrained from taking sides in Viet Nam. In fact, he has so improved his once-strained relations with Russia that the Soviet bloc in the past year has negotiated to build for him more than a billion dollars worth of heavy industry, including Iran's first full-fledged steel mill, in return for surplus natural gas and oil. The deals have not changed the Shah's pro-Western views. Iran, he says, is "importing iron but not ideology."

Thousand Families. The Shah has not always been so enlightened. Installed by occupying British and Russian troops in 1941 to replace his pro-Nazi father--an illiterate foot soldier who rose to the rank of general and then seized the throne--the Shah came to the palace as a spoiled young man interested mainly in pretty girls and flashy cars. He had plenty of oil money to spend, and the unqualified cold-war backing of Washington, which saw him mainly as an anti-Communist with a long border with Russia. For ten unremarkable years, he lived in luxurious disdain of the welfare of his countrymen. Then along came a crusty old nationalist named Mohammed Mossadegh, who as Premier nearly overthrew the Shah in 1953 and, in the process, woke him up. "Suddenly, I realized that we were not only standing still but losing ground," says the Shah. "We had to develop or die."

The most obvious threat to his throne came from Iran's feudal countryside, where almost all the land, including thousands of rural villages, was owned by a class of rich landlords who called themselves "the Thousand Families." Their power, enforced by their own private police and condoned by traditionalist mullahs (Moslem religious leaders), was all but unlimited. They exacted as much as 80% of their tenant-farmers' crops, "supervised" every election, then used their control of Parliament to steal the government blind. One landlord, who owned 59 villages in Azerbaijan, regularly declared an annual income of only $1,200.

At first, the Shah tried to loosen the landlords' hold by persuasion and personal example. He turned over the deeds to his own extensive royal estates to the tenants who had been farming them, in hopes that the Thousand Families would follow suit. They did not. Then he sent two land-reform bills to Parliament, which promptly amended both bills into uselessness. "Finally," the Shah recalls today, "I became so exasperated that I decided we would have to dispense with democracy and operate by decree."

In May of 1961, he did just that. To help him rule by decree, he filled his Cabinet with a group of earnest technocrats who called themselves "the Progressive Center," set them to work fleshing out his own blueprints for "the White Revolution," a bloodless, coordinated program of reform and development. The White Revolution originally consisted of six basic commandments that have since been increased to ten; they range from compensation of the landlords with shares in government-owned industries to electoral reform and nationalization of forests and water resources. Together, they form the guiding principles of the Shah's government, almost a substitute for the nation's outdated 1906 constitution.

The first basic step was land reform, and the Shah was tough about it. Operating by timetable, he broke up the great estates, paying off the dispossessed landlords with shares in new government industries and distributing the land to their former tenants at nominal prices, with payment terms of up to 30 years. He tolerated no delay. When a land-reform surveyor was murdered on a rural road in Pars, he stepped up the timetable in the district, showed up to hand out the deeds in person. Now all but complete, the land-reform program has freed 98% of Iran's 50,000 villages from landlord control.

Incredible Ignorance. His other basic measures have been generally just as successful. The Shah decreed compulsory profit-sharing (of 20% of net profits) for Iranian factory workers, a step that inspired an immediate increase in productivity and virtually eliminated strikes. He created a "Literacy Corps," whose khaki-clad volunteers have built thousands of schools, taught a million Iranians to read and write. The ignorance of rural Iran was incredible. One village elder, watching his first movie, ordered a feast prepared for all the actors, convinced that they could somehow step out of the screen and join him for a chelo kebab. In another village the audience wrecked the screen by giving chase to the villain of a Hollywood western.

The Shah has also been tampering with male superiority. In 1963, he gave Iranian women, traditionally regarded as creatures with "more hair than brains," equal rights with men. By Shahvian decree, women can now vote, run for public office, hold government jobs (the under secretaries of three government ministries are now women), and even divorce their husbands. Their husbands, on the other hand, can no longer be married to more than one wife at a time, unless the first wife gives her consent. Since the matrimonial reform was put into effect, Iranian courts have consented to only one menage `a trois.

The Shah's attempts at political reform have been less thorough. He reopened Parliament in 1963, but uses it mostly for window dressing. All candidates must be approved by SAVAK, his powerful security police, and elections are so arranged as to give the Shah's Iran Novin (New Iran) Party an overwhelming majority of the seats. The Shah, in fact, makes little pretense of being a democrat. "For 2,500 years," he says, "we have had a monarchical system, which implies a certain amount of imposed authority." His word is law, and he keeps his Prime Minister, Amirabass Hoveida, 48, working 15 hours a day making sure that his orders are carried out. The press is controlled, and all public criticism of the Shah is forbidden by law.

The Shah worries more about water than about criticism. "There is just not enough of it," he says. To make use of what there is, he has already built six major dams; eleven others are under construction. With intensive irrigation, the Shah believes that he could triple Iran's present arable land--now only 10% of its total area--and produce enough food to sustain a population of 75 million. To do so, however, will require more water than Iran's rainfall and rivers can provide, and the Shah intends to get it from the sea. He is negotiating with Washington for the installation of a network of desalination plants along the Persian Gulf. Once in operation, he believes, they could supply the needs of most cities and factories in southern Iran, making more river water available for irrigation.

Embarrassing Custom. As were their ancestors, the Iranians today are lovers of ceremony, formality and tradition. They expect their Shah to act like a king and treat them as subjects. When he appears in a village, they fall to earth to kiss his feet, a custom that causes him much embarrassment. In his private life, the Shah can unbend. He and Empress Farah--with their three children, Crown Prince Reza, 6, Princess Farahnaz, 4, and Prince Ali Reza, 17 months--live in Teheran's Saadabad Palace in the summer, move to the better-heated Niavaran Palace when the cold weather comes. The Saadabad has been equipped with a regulation bowling alley, and the Shah uses it at least once a week. He also watches spy movies and operates model trains. He no longer roars around Teheran in a Ferrari, but is a jet pilot with 5,000 hours' experience in flying just about everything but carpets. Both he and Farah--his third wife*--like nothing better than to escape for a skiing holiday in Switzerland or a week or so of waterskiing at Naushahr on the Caspian Sea.

For all his dislike of imposed formality, however, the Shah realizes its necessity in Iran. He is determined to make his coronation this month a ceremony that Iranians will never forget. Teheran's Golestan Palace has been remodeled--and reinforced with steel--for the occasion. Construction crews are putting the finishing touches on what will be the world's largest public square--almost five times bigger than St. Peter's. Six million colored light bulbs have been imported to turn on the streets of the capital, and millions of dollars worth of fireworks will rocket through its skies.

The Shah's own crown will outshine the neon. Made for his father, the autocratic Reza Shah, in 1924, it is studded with 3,380 diamonds, 368 pearls, two sapphires and five enormous emeralds, weighs a total of 10,400 carats. The lissome Empress Farah, 28, will be crowned with a diadem designed by Van Cleef & Arpels of Paris, and will wear a robe of green French velvet and gown of white Swiss silk on which 22 couturiers from the house of Dior have been working for four months. Farah is worthy of such extravagance. She has never allowed herself to be merely a palace ornament, has become her husband's closest partner in the development of Iran. She oversees his cultural, educational and children's-welfare programs, often takes his place at official ceremonies. And, if anything should happen to the Shah, she will take his place as Regent until Crown Prince Reza comes of age.

The cost of the official coronation celebrations will come to many millions of dollars--not counting the carloads of royal gifts to the Shah, such as the solid silver bridge table from the Prince of Pudakotah. The Shah has imported a $78,000 golden coronation carriage from Vienna and eight white carriage horses from Bulgaria. Throughout the country there will be balls, torchlight parades and folk-dancing festivals.

For most of the Shah's subjects, the celebrations will mark Iran's coming of age after 6,000 years and constitute a tribute to the man who has so improved their condition. Besides, there will be quite a bit of suspense: in hopes of having an heir born during the historic festivities, thousands of Iranian men consulted their calendars earlier this year, then made love to their wives. Hospitals all over Iran are expecting a population explosion on Coronation Day.

*His first wife, Egyptian Princess Fawzia, is now married to an Egyptian police official and lives in Cairo. His second wife, Soraya, whom he divorced in 1958 because she was incapable of bearing children, has tried to become an actress in Italian movies, spends most of her time in Europe.

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