Reza Shah

Biography

Reza Khan was born in 1878 in Alasht, in the Savadkuh district of Mazandaran; his father, an army officer, died months later and he was brought up partly in the household of an officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade. He joined the brigade at about sixteen, made his name as a machine-gunner and rose to colonel by 1915 and later brigadier general. In 1919 he took the surname Pahlavi.

In February 1921, commanding the Cossack Brigade, he marched on Tehran from Qazvin and seized the capital, installing Zia ol Din Tabatabaee as prime minister while he became army commander and minister of war. In October 1923 he became prime minister himself. In 1925 a constituent assembly deposed Ahmad Shah, the last Qajar ruler, and made Reza Pahlavi shah, founding the Pahlavi dynasty.

As shah he set out to build a centralised modern state. He worked with foreign firms such as Škoda and Kampsax on railways, industry and the army, clashed with the Shia clergy, imposed Persian as the national culture at the expense of ethnic and tribal groups, and in 1936 banned the Islamic veil by decree. Critics describe his rule as despotic, while supporters see him as the founder of modern Iran.

When Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran in 1941, he ordered his forces to stop fighting and was forced to abdicate in September in favour of his son Mohammad Reza. He was sent into exile and died in Johannesburg in 1944.