Sublime

The Shah threw himself into a modernization and Westernization of the country, the white revolution: He carried out land reform where land was redistributed to farmers, landlords were compensated for their land by shares of privatized state-owned factories, transport networks were expanded, dam and irrigation projects carried out, malaria

Did he do a deal with Nader? We will probably never know. The Nezam does seem to have been given an easier ride in the collection of tribute than the other great nobles; Nader’s warning to Mohammad Shah about the Nezam before he left could have been a dark joke, a double bluff.

For more than three decades following the end of World War II, Iran was a stable, relatively secular, and pro-Western, pro-American country, in part because many Iranians feared (with good reason) Soviet ambitions. Like most other countries in the region, it was led by an authoritarian figure, Shah Reza Pahlavi, who ruled for nearly forty years.

When asked for a decision, Shah Soltan Hosein would tend to agree with whoever approached him last – usually with the words Yakhshi dir (‘It is good’ in the Turkic court language).

He made the man who had forcibly married her sign and seal a divorce decree before witnesses, and got Nader’s secretaries to write a raqam saying that the girl was to remain a Christian and should marry a Christian, and that the abductor should not be allowed to bring litigation over the case. Then he gave the girl and the raqam to the father, and

Iran’s political stability and orientation proved to be temporary, however, and in 1979 a revolution overthrew the Shah. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, a senior religious figure, led this revolution and instituted a unique theocratic system that fused religious and political authority and insisted on building a society that conformed to a strict

In some ways, Iran’s new constitution did not differ markedly from the one written after the country’s first anti-imperialist revolution in 1905, except that this constitution appeared to envisage two governments. The first, representing the sovereignty of the people, included a popularly elected executive heading a highly centralized state, a