The last shah of Iran was a figure from Shakespearean tragedy: outwardly haughty and magnificent, inwardly insecure and indecisive, a Persian Richard II, self-regarding even in his own downfall. When he stood at the foot of his aircraft steps as he left Iran for the last time in January 1979, tears streaming down his cheeks and killer cancer working away inside him, surely even the stoniest heart must have felt some pity for this fallen autocrat?
Not so. The stony heart of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini contained only rage and a desire for vengeance towards the King of Kings (the Iranian monarch’s official designation). “This man has no place in Iran, and no place on Earth,” Khomeini told me in a chilling television interview before leaving Paris for Tehran. On the plane bringing him back from a 15-year exile a few days later to overthrow the shah’s regime, Khomeini muttered that he felt nothing – hichi – on returning home.
The fact is, not many of the people close to him really loved the shah. He let his friends down, he dithered, he habitually took the advice of the last person he spoke to. “He was a difficult man to like,” said Sir Anthony Parsons, the British ambassador during the shah’s last days, who was closer to him than any other foreign diplomat. “He was so suspicious, so certain we were all trying to do him down. And yet there was a naked vulnerability about him which made you feel genuinely sorry for him.”
King of Kings is a good and worthwhile account of his undoing, even if part of the subtitle – The Unmaking of the Modern Middle East – promises more than it delivers. It amply demonstrates the ways in which the shah was the author of his own downfall, constantly interfering in things he should have stayed away from. Of course there were broader causes of the Islamic revolution, chiefly the tidal wave of corruption that overwhelmed Iran when the oil price quadrupled after 1973; though the shah was partly responsible even for that, urging OPEC to screw more and more money from the battered west. But the revolution’s immediate cause was a single foolish brainwave of his own, at the very start of 1978 – exactly a year before he was dethroned.
That was when the shah entertained Jimmy Carter, and his wife, Rosalynn, at the Niavaran Palace in Tehran. There they celebrated the apparent fact that for the first time in years there was no major threat to either of their nations. Peace and stability seemed entrenched. As Anderson notes, it was the last time an American president would set foot on Iranian soil. Days, perhaps hours after the Carters left, the shah called a senior minister and told him to organise a pseudonymous, innuendo-laden newspaper article accusing the exiled Ayatollah Khomeini of being a British agent. The minister, an intelligent and rational man, complained that publishing the article would stir up trouble. But the shah, buoyed up by Carter’s compliments, refused to listen.
The article did stir up trouble. Khomeini’s followers in the religious schools of Qom and other centres poured out on to the streets in violent protest, and the army and police shot some of them down. In Shia Islam and Persian custom, each burial is followed 40 days later by another public commemoration, and every time, the police and army killed more demonstrators.
Even when the demonstrations were a regular and growing occurrence, the Ayatollah Khomeini, the absentee leader of the demonstrations, had long been a virtual prisoner in the Shia religious centre of Najaf, in neighbouring Iraq, then ruled by Saddam Hussein. It was impossible for outsiders to get to Najaf and speak to Khomeini; but for no good reason the shah put immense pressure on Hussein to get rid of him. Hussein (who had no time for the shah and could see how this would end) duly threw Khomeini out. Khomeini’s more worldly-wise advisers persuaded him to take shelter near Paris, in the village of Neauphle-le-Château, where, as Anderson puts it “the residents [adjusted] to the sight of the old man in his black turban and brown robes given to morning strolls along the surrounding country lanes”. Suddenly, the world’s press could visit him and interview him whenever they wanted, and every word was beamed back to Iran. By November 1978 the shah’s downfall was inescapable.
Anderson’s book suffers, in a way so many accounts by American writers seem to do, from concentrating on the Iran-US relationship to the virtual exclusion of any other (his excellent book Lawrence in Arabia’ was naturally free of this limitation). But he has interviewed some of the key people, including the genuinely tragic figure of the shahbanu, Farah Pahlavi, who understood what was happening in Iran but failed to influence her husband sufficiently, and gives a thorough overview of the sweep of events.
From the Middle East to the war in Ukraine, the world is still experiencing the aftershocks of the fall of the shah, and it’s not over yet. And all, one is tempted to say, because this latter-day Richard II couldn’t help meddling in things best left alone. It was a tragedy – and not just for him.
• King of Kings: The Fall of the Shah, the 1979 Iranian Revolution and the Unmaking of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson is published by Hutchinson Heinemann (£25). To support the Guardian buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
