Why ‘return of the Shah’ is about history and memory in Iran

Anything may be projected onto a legendary, Arthurian figure who will return in his people’s hour of greatest need. Historically, however, the support for real, mortal exiled “kings over the water” has often come from a particular, dispossessed section of society — for instance, Catholic support for the Jacobite pretenders in 18th-century Britain. Specifically, it can come from a displaced elite who had done quite well under the former regime, such as French émigrés during the Revolution or Iranian émigrés (who sometimes prefer to identify themselves as “Persian”) today. All those photographs pointedly floating about on the internet, of women in mini skirts and so on during the Shah’s rule (or for that matter, mid-century Afghanistan), depict the world of an urban elite far removed from the conservative rural populace who form the backbone of the Islamic regime’s support today. It may be that the protesters chanting “victory to the Shah” largely come from this elite, and perhaps disaffected youth with no experience of monarchical rule. 

Beyond the specifics of Reza Pahlavi, another factor that may be at play is cultural memory. The figure of the king has been a powerful cultural motif over millennia of Iranian history, reinforced by propaganda. Moments of Iranian assertion have coincided with, or been driven by, kings’ assertions of their own Iranian-ness. The question, then, becomes how much Iranian identity is bound up with the idea of the Shah.

The earliest known instance of such propaganda may be as far back as the fifth or sixth century BCE, when Darius the Great, in his Behistun Inscription, both identified himself as “an Aryan, son of an Aryan, a Persian, son of a Persian” and wove an elaborate tale of his familial connection with Cyrus the Great, how he had succeeded Cyrus’s son Cambyses on the throne, and overcome a pretender pretending to be Cyrus’s other son, Bardiya. Modern historians, however, suspect that the “pretender” really was Bardiya and that the possibly unrelated Darius had orchestrated a successful coup, cementing his victory with propaganda that went unquestioned for the next 2,500 years.

The memory of Darius’s Achaemenid dynasty would fade — or be erased — under the later Sasanians, who had their own propagandistic goals and promoted a Zoroastrian idea of the mythic past, alongside their own identity as Iranian rulers. After the Sasanians fell to the Arab conquest, Iranian assertion soon re-emerged, on two levels. Even as the “courtier-gentlemen of Persia” learned Arabic and “stormed the governing class of the Arab empire”, as Peter Brown writes in The World of Late Antiquity, Iranian kings, too, made a comeback, with rulers using pre-Islamic titles, claiming Sasanian lineage and promoting the Persian language and culture. As the translators of a ninth-century Arabic work explained, “in this province the language is Persian and in this region the kings are Persian kings”. The great national epic, the Shahnameh, composed a couple of centuries later, is literally “the book of kings”.  Over the course of the second millennium, as the “Persianate world” grew to sprawl from Constantinople to Vijayanagara, exporting a cultural package whose contents ranged from dress and manners to literature and architecture, a Persian conception of the justice-dispensing king went with it.

The Pahlavis, though a dynasty only two kings old, have played the propaganda game with aplomb, reclaiming the Achaemenid past — Mohammed Reza Pahlavi hosted a grand celebration of “2,500 years of the Empire of Iran” in Persepolis in 1971, and issued commemorative coins to mark the occasion. He adopted the Cyrus Cylinder issued by Cyrus the Great as a national symbol and anachronistically promoted it as the “first charter of human rights” — weaving together the tradition of royal propaganda and the Shah’s own bid to build a modern, liberal image. Darius might have smiled to see it. 

In the present moment, some of these factors might have come together: The informed yearning of the old elite, the uninformed desperation of the youth, the need for a symbol to rally around and the cultural memory of “2,500 years” of monarchy. What that means in the context of resistance is up to Reza Pahlavi: Given the opportunity, could he become another Juan Carlos?

The writer is senior assistant editor, The Indian Express. rohan.manoj@expressindia.com