First marriage (right) and Princess
Fawzia of Egypt at
Abdeen Palace in
Cairo, 1939 One of the main initiatives of Iranian and Turkish foreign policy had been the
Saadabad Pact of 1937, an alliance bringing together
Turkey, Iran,
Iraq, and
Afghanistan, with the intent of creating a Muslim bloc that, it was hoped, would deter any aggressors. President
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk of Turkey suggested to his friend Reza Khan during the latter's visit that a marriage between the Iranian and Egyptian courts would be beneficial for the two countries and their dynasties, as it might lead to Egypt joining the Saadabad pact. Dilawar
Princess Fawzia of Egypt (5 November 1921 – 2 July 2013) was daughter of King
Fuad I of Egypt and
Nazli Sabri, and sister of
King Farouk I of Egypt. In line with Atatürk's suggestion, Mohammad Reza and the Egyptian Princess Fawzia were married on 15 March 1939 in
the Abdeen Palace in
Cairo. In the summer of 1941, Soviet and British diplomats passed on numerous messages warning that they regarded the presence of Germans administering the Iranian state railroads as a threat, implying war if the Germans were not dismissed. Britain wished to ship arms to the Soviet Union via Iranian railroads, and statements from the German managers of the Iranian railroads that they would not cooperate made both the Soviets and British insistent that the Germans Reza Khan had hired be sacked at once. As his father's closest advisor, the Crown Prince Mohammad Reza did not see fit to raise the issue of a possible Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, blithely assuring his father that nothing would happen. The Iranian-American historian
Abbas Milani wrote about the relationship between the Reza Khan and the Crown Prince at the time, noting, "As his father's now constant companion, the two men consulted on virtually every decision". and Foreign Minister of the Soviet Union
Vyacheslav Molotov at the
Tehran Conference. Later that year, British and Soviet forces occupied Iran
in a military invasion, forcing Reza Shah to abdicate. On 25 August 1941, British and Australian naval forces attacked the
Persian Gulf while the Soviet Union conducted a land invasion from the north. On the second day of the invasion, with the Soviet air force bombing Tehran, Mohammad Reza was shocked to see the Iranian military simply collapse, with thousands of terrified officers and men all over Tehran taking off their uniforms in order to desert and run away, despite having not yet seen combat. Reflecting the panic, a group of senior Iranian generals called the Crown Prince to receive his blessing to hold a meeting to discuss how best to surrender. When Reza Khan learned of the meeting, he flew into a rage and attacked one of his generals,
Ahmad Nakhjavan, striking him with his riding crop, tearing off his medals, and nearly personally executing him before his son persuaded him to have the general court-martialled instead. The collapse of the Iranian military that his father had worked so hard to build humiliated his son, who vowed that he would never see Iran defeated like that again, foreshadowing the future Shah's later obsession with military spending.
Ascension to the Sun throne in the National Assembly, 17 September 1941 On 16 September 1941, Prime Minister
Mohammad Ali Foroughi and Foreign Minister
Ali Soheili attended a special session of parliament to announce the resignation of Reza Shah and that Mohammad Reza was to replace him. The next day, at 4:30p.m., Mohammad Reza took the oath of office and was received warmly by parliamentarians. On his way back to the palace, the streets filled with people welcoming the new Shah jubilantly, seemingly more enthusiastic than the Allies would have liked. The British would have liked to put a
Qajar back on the throne, but the principal Qajar claimant to the throne was Prince
Hamid Mirza, an officer in the
Royal Navy who did not speak Persian, so the British were forced to accept Mohammad Reza as Shah. The main Soviet interest in 1941 was to ensure political stability to ensure Allied supplies, which meant accepting Mohammad Reza's ascension to the throne. Subsequent to his succession as king, Iran became a major conduit for British and, later, American aid to the USSR during the war. This massive supply route became known as the
Persian Corridor. Much of the credit for orchestrating a smooth transition of power from the King to the Crown Prince was due to the efforts of Mohammad Ali Foroughi. Suffering from
angina, a frail Foroughi was summoned to the Palace and appointed prime minister when Reza Shah feared the end of the Pahlavi dynasty once the Allies invaded Iran in 1941. When Reza Shah sought his assistance to ensure that the Allies would not put an end to the Pahlavi dynasty, Foroughi put aside his adverse personal sentiments for having been politically sidelined since 1935. The Crown Prince confided in amazement to the British minister that Foroughi "hardly expected any son of Reza Shah to be a civilized human being", (left) with Mohammad Reza Shah A general amnesty was issued two days after Mohammad Reza's accession to the throne on 19 September 1941. All political personalities who had suffered disgrace during his father's reign were rehabilitated, and the forced unveiling policy inaugurated by his father in 1935 was overturned. Despite the young king's enlightened decisions, the British minister in Tehran reported to London that "the young Shah received a fairly spontaneous welcome on his first public experience, possibly rather [due] to relief at the disappearance of his father than to public affection for himself". During his early days as Shah, Mohammad Reza lacked self-confidence and spent most of his time with Perron writing poetry in French. In 1942, Mohammad Reza met
Wendell Willkie, the Republican candidate for the US presidency in the
1940 election who was now on a world tour to promote his "one world" policy. Willkie took the Shah flying for the first time. The prime minister,
Ahmad Qavam, had advised the Shah against flying with Willkie, saying he had never met a man with a worse flatulence problem, but the Shah took his chances. Mohammad Reza told Willkie that when he was flying that he "wanted to stay up indefinitely". Enjoying flight, Mohammad Reza hired the American pilot Dick Collbarn to teach him how to fly. Upon arriving at the Marble Palace, Collbarn noted that "the Shah must have twenty-five custom-built cars ...
Buicks,
Cadillacs, six
Rolls-Royces, a
Mercedes". During the
Tehran Conference with the Allied forces in 1943, the Shah was humiliated when he met
Joseph Stalin, who visited him in the Marble Palace but did not allow the Shah's bodyguards to be present, with the
Red Army alone guarding them.
Opinion of his father's rule Despite his public professions of admiration in later years, Mohammad Reza had serious misgivings about not only the coarse and roughshod political means adopted by his father, but also his unsophisticated approach to affairs of state. The young Shah possessed a decidedly more refined temperament, and amongst the unsavory developments that "would haunt him when he was king" were the political disgrace brought by his father on
Teymourtash, the dismissal of Foroughi by the mid-1930s, and
Ali Akbar Davar's suicide in 1937. An even more significant decision that cast a long shadow was the disastrous and one-sided agreement his father had negotiated with the
Anglo-Persian Oil Company (APOC) in 1933, one which compromised the country's ability to receive more favourable returns from oil extracted from the country.
Relationship with his exiled father Mohammad Reza expressed concern for his exiled father, who had previously complained to the British governor of
Mauritius that living on the island was both a climatic and social prison. Attentively following his life in exile, Mohammad Reza would object to his father's treatment to the British at any opportunity. The two sent letters to one another, although delivery was often delayed, and Mohammad Reza commissioned his friend, Ernest Perron, to hand-deliver a taped message of love and respect to his father, bringing back with him a recording of his voice:
Onset of the Cold War In 1945–46, the main issue in Iranian politics was the Soviet-sponsored separatist government in
Iranian Azerbaijan and
Kurdistan, which greatly alarmed the Shah. He repeatedly clashed with his prime minister
Ahmad Qavam, whom he viewed as too pro-Soviet. At the same time, the growing popularity of the
communist Tudeh Party worried Mohammad Reza, who felt there was a serious possibility of them leading a coup. In June 1946, Mohammad Reza was relieved when the
Red Army pulled out of Iran. In a letter to the Azerbaijani Communist leader
Ja'far Pishevari, Stalin wrote that he had to pull out of Iran, as otherwise the Americans would not pull out of
China, and he wanted to assist the
Chinese Communists in their
civil war against the
Kuomintang. However, the Pishevari regime remained in power in
Tabriz, Azerbaijan, and Mohammad Reza sought to undercut Qavam's attempts to make an agreement with Pishevari as way of getting rid of both. On 11 December 1946, the
Iranian Army, led by the Shah in person, entered Iranian Azerbaijan and the Pishevari regime collapsed with little resistance, with most of the fighting occurring between ordinary people who attacked functionaries of the Pishevari that had treated them brutally. In his statements at the time and later, Mohammad Reza credited his easy success in Azerbaijan to his "mystical power". Knowing Qavam's penchant for corruption, the Shah used that issue as a reason to sack him. By this time, the Shah's wife Fawzia had returned to Egypt, and despite efforts to have King Farouk persuade her to return to Iran, she refused to go, which led Mohammad Reza to divorce her on 17 November 1948. By now a qualified pilot, Mohammad Reza was fascinated with flying and the technical details of aeroplanes, and any insult to him was always an attempt to "clip [his] wings". Mohammad Reza directed more money to the
Imperial Iranian Air Force than any branch of the armed forces, and his favourite uniform was that of the Marshal of the Imperial Iranian Air Force.
Marvin Zonis wrote that Mohammad Reza's obsession with flying reflected an
Icarus complex, also known as "ascensionism", a form of
narcissism based on "a craving for unsolicited attention and admiration" and the "wish to overcome gravity, to stand erect, to grow tall ... to leap or swing into the air, to climb, to rise, to fly". Mohammad Reza often spoke of
women as sexual objects who existed only to gratify him, and during a 1973 interview with Italian journalist
Oriana Fallaci, she vehemently objected to his attitudes towards women. As a regular visitor to the nightclubs of Italy, France, and the United Kingdom, Mohammad Reza was linked romantically to several actresses, including
Gene Tierney,
Yvonne De Carlo, and
Silvana Mangano. At least two unsuccessful assassination attempts were made against the young Shah. On 4 February 1949, he attended an annual ceremony to commemorate the founding of
Tehran University. At the ceremony, gunman Fakhr-Arai fired five shots at him at a range of about three metres. Only one of the shots hit the king, grazing his cheek. The gunman was instantly shot by nearby officers. After an investigation, Fakhr-Arai was declared a member of the communist
Tudeh Party, which was subsequently banned. However, there is evidence that the would-be assassin was not a Tudeh member but a religious fundamentalist member of
Fada'iyan-e Islam. The Tudeh were nonetheless blamed and persecuted. The Shah's second wife was
Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, a half-German, half-Iranian woman and the only daughter of
Khalil Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, Iranian Ambassador to West Germany, and his wife Eva Karl. She was introduced to the Shah by Forough Zafar Bakhtiary, a close relative of Soraya's, via a photograph taken by Goodarz Bakhtiary, in London, per Forough Zafar's request. They married on 12 February 1951, Under the leadership of Mosaddegh and his nationalist movement, the Iranian parliament unanimously voted to nationalise the oil industry, thus shutting out the immensely profitable AIOC, which was a pillar of Britain's economy and provided it political clout in the region. At the start of the confrontation, American political sympathy with Iran was forthcoming from the
Truman Administration. In particular, Mosaddegh was buoyed by the advice and counsel he was receiving from the American Ambassador in Tehran,
Henry F. Grady. However, eventually American decision-makers lost their patience, and by the time the
Republican administration of President
Dwight D. Eisenhower entered office, fears that communists were poised to overthrow the government became an all-consuming concern. These concerns were later dismissed as "paranoid" in retrospective commentary on the coup from US government officials. Shortly prior to the
1952 presidential election in the United States, the British government invited
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) officer
Kermit Roosevelt Jr., to London to propose collaboration on a secret plan to force Mosaddegh from office. This would be the first of three "regime change" operations led by
CIA director Allen Dulles (the other two being the successful CIA-instigated
1954 Guatemalan coup d'état and the failed
Bay of Pigs Invasion of
Cuba). Under the direction of Roosevelt, the American CIA and British
Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) funded and led a
covert operation to depose Mosaddegh with the help of military forces disloyal to the government. Referred to as
Operation Ajax, the plot hinged on orders signed by Mohammad Reza to dismiss Mosaddegh as prime minister and replace him with General
Fazlollah Zahedi, a choice agreed on by the British and Americans. Before the attempted coup, the American Embassy in Tehran reported that Mosaddegh's popular support remained robust. The Prime Minister requested direct control of the army from the
Majlis. Given the situation, alongside the strong personal support of
Conservative Prime Minister
Winston Churchill and Foreign Secretary
Anthony Eden for covert action, the American government gave the go-ahead to a committee, attended by the Secretary of State
John Foster Dulles,
Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles, Kermit Roosevelt Jr.,
Loy W. Henderson, and
Secretary of defense Charles Erwin Wilson. Roosevelt returned to Iran on 13 July 1953, and again on 1 August 1953, in his first meeting with the king. A car picked him up at midnight and drove him to the palace. He lay down on the seat and covered himself with a blanket as guards waved his driver through the gates. The Shah got into the car and Roosevelt explained the mission. The CIA bribed him with $1 million in Iranian currency, which Roosevelt had stored in a large safe—a bulky cache, given the then-exchange rate of 1,000
rial to 15
US dollars. Meanwhile, the Communists staged massive demonstrations to hijack Mosaddegh's initiatives, and the United States actively plotted against him. On 16 August 1953, the right wing of the Army attacked. Armed with an order by the Shah, it appointed General
Fazlollah Zahedi as prime minister. A coalition of mobs and retired officers close to the Palace executed this coup d'état. They failed dismally and the Shah fled the country to
Baghdad, and then to
Rome.
Ettelaat, the nation's largest daily newspaper, and its pro-Shah publisher, Abbas Masudi, criticised him, calling the defeat "humiliating". During the Shah's time in Rome, a British diplomat reported that the monarch spent most of his time in nightclubs with Queen Soraya or his latest mistress, writing, "He hates taking decisions and cannot be relied on to stick to them when taken. He has no moral courage and succumbs easily to fear". To get him to support the coup, his twin sister
Princess Ashraf—who was much tougher than him and publicly questioned his manhood several times—visited him on 29 July 1953 to berate him into signing a decree dismissing Mosaddegh. In the days leading up to the second coup attempt, the communists turned against Mosaddegh. Opposition against him grew tremendously. They roamed Tehran, raising red flags and pulling down statues of Reza Shah. This was rejected by conservative clerics like
Kashani and
National Front leaders like
Hossein Makki, who sided with the king. On 18 August 1953, Mosaddegh defended the government against this new attack.
Tudeh partisans were clubbed and dispersed. The Tudeh party had no choice but to accept defeat. '' naming General
Fazlollah Zahedi the new
prime minister. Coup operatives made copies of the document and circulated it around
Tehran to help regenerate momentum following the collapse of the original plan. In the meantime, according to the CIA plot, Zahedi appealed to the military, claimed to be the legitimate prime minister and charged Mosaddegh with staging a coup by ignoring the Shah's decree. Zahedi's son Ardeshir acted as the contact between the CIA and his father. On 19 August 1953, pro-Shah partisans—bribed with $100,000 in CIA funds—finally appeared and marched out of south Tehran into the city centre, where others joined in. Gangs with clubs, knives, and rocks controlled the streets, overturning Tudeh trucks and beating up anti-Shah activists. As Roosevelt was congratulating Zahedi in the basement of his hiding place, the new Prime Minister's mobs burst in and carried him upstairs on their shoulders. That evening,
Loy W. Henderson suggested to Ardashir that Mosaddegh not be harmed. Roosevelt gave Zahedi US$900,000 left from Operation Ajax funds. After his brief exile in Italy, the Shah returned to Iran, this time through the successful second coup attempt. The deposed Mosaddegh was arrested and tried, with the king intervening and
commuting his sentence to three years, to be followed by life in internal exile. Zahedi was installed to succeed Mosaddegh. Although Mohammad Reza returned to power, he never extended the elite status of the court to the technocrats and intellectuals who emerged from Iranian and Western universities. Indeed, his system irritated the new classes, for they were barred from partaking in real power.
Self-assertion: from figurehead monarch to effective authoritarian (left), 1950s In the aftermath of the 1953 coup d'état, Mohammad Reza was widely viewed as a figurehead monarch, and General
Fazlollah Zahedi, the Prime Minister, saw himself and was viewed by others as the "strong man" of Iran. Mohammad Reza feared that history would repeat itself, remembering how his father was a general who had seized power in a coup d'état in 1921 and deposed the last Qajar shah in 1925, and his major concern in the years 1953–55 was to neutralise Zahedi. American and British diplomats in their reports back to Washington and London in the 1950s were openly contemptuous of Mohammad Reza's ability to lead, calling the Shah a weak-willed and cowardly man who was incapable of making a decision. The contempt in which the Shah was held by Iranian elites led to a period in the mid-1950s where the elite displayed fissiparous tendencies, feuding amongst themselves now that Mosaddegh had been overthrown, which ultimately allowed Mohammad Reza to play off various factions in the elite to assert himself as the nation's leader. The very fact that Mohammad Reza was considered a coward and insubstantial turned out be an advantage as the Shah proved to be an adroit politician, playing off the factions in the elite and the Americans against the British with the aim of being an autocrat in practice as well as in theory. Supporters of the banned
National Front were persecuted, but in his first important decision as leader, Mohammad Reza intervened to ensure most of the members of the National Front brought to trial, such as Mosaddegh himself, were not executed as many had expected. Many in the Iranian elite were openly disappointed that Mohammad Reza did not conduct the expected bloody purge and hang Mosaddegh and his followers as they had wanted and expected. In 1954, when twelve university professors issued a public statement criticising the 1953 coup, all were dismissed from their jobs, but in the first of his many acts of "magnanimity" towards the National Front, Mohammad Reza intervened to have them reinstated. Mohammad Reza tried very hard to co-opt the supporters of the National Front by adopting some of their rhetoric and addressing their concerns, for example declaring in several speeches his concerns about the Third World economic conditions and poverty which prevailed in Iran, a matter that had not much interested him before. Mohammad Reza was determined to copy Mosaddegh, who had won popularity by promising broad socio-economic reforms, and wanted to create a mass powerbase as he did not wish to depend upon the traditional elites, who only wanted him as a legitimising figurehead. In 1955, Mohammad Reza dismissed General Zahedi from his position as prime minister and appointed his archenemy, the technocrat
Hossein Ala' as prime minister, whom he in turn dismissed in 1957. Starting in 1955, Mohammad Reza began to quietly cultivate left-wing intellectuals, many of whom had supported the National Front and some of whom were associated with the banned Tudeh party, asking them for advice about how best to reform Iran. It was during this period that Mohammad Reza began to embrace the image of a "progressive" Shah, a reformer who would modernise Iran, who attacked in his speeches the "reactionary" and "feudal" social system that was retarding progress, bring about land reform and give women equal rights. Determined to rule as well as reign, it was during the mid 1950s that Mohammad Reza started to promote a state cult around
Cyrus the Great, portrayed as a great Shah who had reformed the country and built an empire with obvious parallels to himself. Alongside this change in image, Mohammad Reza started to speak of his desire to "save" Iran, a duty that he claimed he had been given by God, and promised that under his leadership Iran would reach a Western standard of living in the near future. During this period, Mohammad Reza sought the support of the
ulema, and resumed the traditional policy of persecuting those Iranians who belonged to the
Baháʼí Faith, allowing the chief Baháʼí temple in Tehran to be razed in 1955 and bringing in a law banning the Baháʼí from gathering together in groups. A British diplomat reported in 1954 that Reza Khan "must have been spinning in his grave at
Rey. To see the arrogance and effrontery of the mullahs once again rampant in the holy city! How the old tyrant must despise the weakness of his son, who allowed these turbulent priests to regain so much of their reactionary influence!" By this time, the Shah's marriage was under strain as Queen Soraya complained about the power of Mohammad Reza's best friend Ernest Perron, whom she called a "
shetun" and a "limping devil". Perron was a man much resented for his influence on Mohammad Reza and was often described by enemies as a "diabolical" and "mysterious" character, whose position was that of a private secretary, but who was one of the Shah's closest advisors, holding far more power than his job title suggested. In a 1957 study compiled by the
U.S. State Department, Mohammad Reza was praised for his "growing maturity" and no longer needing "to seek advice at every turn" as the previous 1951 study had concluded. On 27 February 1958, a military coup to depose the Shah led by General Valiollah Gharani was thwarted, which led to a major crisis in Iranian-American relations when evidence emerged that associates of Gharani had met American diplomats in Athens, which the Shah used to demand that henceforward no American officials could meet with his opponents. Another issue in Iranian-American relations was Mohammad Reza's suspicion that the United States was insufficiently committed to Iran's defence, observing that the Americans refused to join the
Baghdad Pact, and military studies had indicated that Iran could only hold out for a few days in the event of a Soviet invasion. '' on the Shah's 40th birthday, 1959 In January 1959, the Shah began negotiations on a non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union, which he claimed to have been driven to by a lack of American support. After receiving a mildly threatening letter from President Eisenhower warning him against signing the treaty, Mohammad Reza chose not to sign, which led to a major Soviet propaganda effort calling for his overthrow. Soviet leader
Nikita Khrushchev ordered Mohammad Reza assassinated. A sign of Mohammad Reza's power came in 1959 when a British company won a contract with the Iranian government that was suddenly cancelled and given to Siemens instead. An investigation by the British embassy soon uncovered the reason why: Mohammad Reza wanted to bed the wife of the Siemens sales agent for Iran, and the Siemens agent had consented to allowing his wife to sleep with the Shah in exchange for winning back the contract that he had just lost. On 24 July 1959, Mohammad Reza gave Israel implicit recognition by allowing an Israeli trade office to be opened in Tehran that functioned as a embassy, a move that offended many in the Islamic world. When Eisenhower visited Iran on 14 December 1959, Mohammad Reza told him that Iran faced two main external threats: the Soviet Union to the north and the new pro-Soviet revolutionary government in Iraq to the west. This led him to ask for vastly increased American military aid, saying his country was a front-line state in the Cold War that needed as much military power as possible. The Shah and Soraya's marriage ended in 1958 when it became apparent that, even with help from medical doctors, she could not bear children. Soraya later told
The New York Times that the Shah had no choice but to divorce her, and that he was heavy-hearted about the decision. However, even after the marriage, it is reported that the Shah still had great love for Soraya, and it is reported that they met several times after their divorce and that she lived her post-divorce life comfortably (even though she never remarried), being paid a monthly salary of about $7,000 from Iran. Following her death in 2001 at the age of 69 in Paris, an auction of the possessions included a three-million-dollar Paris estate, a 22.37-carat diamond ring, and a 1958 Rolls-Royce. Pahlavi subsequently indicated his interest in marrying
Princess Maria Gabriella of Savoy, a daughter of the deposed Italian king,
Umberto II.
Pope John XXIII reportedly vetoed the suggestion. In an editorial about the rumours surrounding the marriage of a "Muslim sovereign and a Catholic princess", the Vatican newspaper, ''
L'Osservatore Romano'', considered the match "a grave danger", especially considering that under the 1917 Code of
Canon Law a Roman Catholic who married a divorced person would be automatically, and could be formally,
excommunicated. In the
1960 U.S. presidential election, the Shah had favoured the Republican candidate, incumbent Vice President
Richard Nixon, whom he had first met in 1953 and rather liked, and according to the diary of his best friend
Asadollah Alam, Mohammad Reza contributed money to the 1960 Nixon campaign. Relations with the victor of the 1960 election, the
Democrat John F. Kennedy, were not friendly. In an attempt to mend relations after Nixon's defeat, Mohammad Reza sent General
Teymur Bakhtiar of
SAVAK to meet Kennedy in Washington on 1 March 1961. From
Kermit Roosevelt Jr., Mohammad Reza learned that Bakhtiar, during his trip to Washington, had asked the Americans to support a coup he was planning, which greatly increased the Shah's fears about Kennedy. On 2 May 1961, a teacher's strike involving 50,000 people began in Iran, which Mohammad Reza believed was the work of the CIA. Mohammad Reza had to sack his prime minister
Jafar Sharif-Emami and give in to the teachers after learning that the Army probably would not fire on the demonstrators. In 1961, Bakhtiar was dismissed as chief of SAVAK and expelled from Iran in 1962 following a clash between demonstrating university students and the army on 21 January 1962 that left three dead. In April 1962, when Mohammad Reza visited Washington, he was met with demonstrations by Iranian students at American universities, which he believed were organised by
U.S. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the President's brother and the leading anti-Pahlavi voice in the Kennedy administration. Afterwards, Mohammad Reza visited London. In a sign of the changed dynamics in Anglo-Iranian relations, the Shah took offence when he was informed he could join Queen
Elizabeth II for a dinner at
Buckingham Palace that was given in somebody else's honour, insisting successfully he would have dinner with the Queen only when given in his own honour. Mohammad Reza's first major clash with
Ayatollah Khomeini occurred in 1962, when the Shah changed the local laws to allow Iranian Jews, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Baháʼí to take the oath of office for municipal councils using their holy books instead of the Koran. Khomeini wrote to the Shah to say this was unacceptable and that only the Koran could be used to swear in members of the municipal councils regardless of what their religion was, writing that he heard "Islam is not indicated as a precondition for standing for office and women are being granted the right to vote .... Please order all laws inimical to the sacred and official faith of the country to be eliminated from government policies." The Shah wrote back, addressing Khomeini as
Hojat-al Islam rather than as Ayatollah, declining his request. Feeling pressure from demonstrations organised by the clergy, the Shah withdrew the offending law, but it was reinstated with the White Revolution of 1963. == Middle years ==