Shah of Iran's heavenly legacy

THE FALL OF HEAVEN
The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran
Andrew Scott Cooper
Henry Holt & Company
587 pages; $36

The former shah of Iran, Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, staked his modernisation project on the secularisation of Iranian life, and the emancipation of traditionally religious women. He urged them to come out from under their veils, attend university and show up as citizens in the public sphere. He passed sweeping secular laws that gave women greater rights in the family, appointed women to high office and encouraged a Western liberality that involved Dior swimsuit shows and broadcasts of The Mary Tyler Moore Show. His efforts empowered a small elite of secular feminists, and led to women making up one-third of all university students by 1978.

The 1979 Iranian revolution disrupted all this. It produced an Islamic Republic that imposed Sharia law and mandated veiling. But in the years that followed, female literacy spiked, women's university attendance expanded dramatically and women's participation in public life soared. By the 1990s, far more Iranian women were "emancipated" than had ever been under the shah.

Despite this lived experience, the common opinion that West Asian women are best served by secular dictators endures. It underpins Andrew Scott Cooper's The Fall of Heaven, which sets out to correct the "one-dimensional" Western narrative around the shah, with an eye to what we should expect of the region's present dictators as they, like the shah, face off against "political extremists and religious fanatics."

Mr Cooper shows his hand with his title. He is determined to focus on what was heavenly in imperial Iran, while glossing over the grievances that led to the political revolt: the Shah's aversion to even peaceful resistance to his regime, the enduring resentment at his restoration to power in 1953 by the United States and the lingering view of his rule as an enabler of American imperialism.

The chief problem with Mr Cooper's account is his reflexive hostility toward Islamism writ large, which ends up being analytically debilitating. Khomeini "understood that in Iran the path to power lay in the gutter," he writes with the snootiness of the same secular elite he faults for failing to appreciate Iranians' religiosity.

Mr Cooper tends to clump the broad array of revolutionary groups under the religious banner. "Khomeini had already won the hearts and minds of the children of the Pahlavi elite and many in the middle and upper classes." This is simply not true. The youth and technocratic elite described here certainly did want the regime gone, but they were drawn to a wide range of groups - democratic, constitutionalist, nationalist, Communist. That they coalesced behind Khomeini does not mean they were enraptured by "the forces of Islam."

The Ayatollah kept his political vision conveniently obscure, and his real designs became clear only months after his return, when it was too late. These pre-revolutionary currents matter because they reflect the sophisticated, complex history of Iranians' engagement with politics, and also the origins of the contestations we see in Iran today. The real question to pose about 1979 is why so many Iranians with everything at stake in the system saw no reason to defend it.

Mr Cooper's main objective is to rehabilitate the Shah, who in the late 1970s became associated with brutality on a scale all out of proportion to the truth. This was largely the work of President Jimmy Carter, who grew so obsessed with the Shah's human rights record that his ambassador to the United Nations likened the Shah to Adolf Eichmann. Compared with Iraq's Saddam Hussein or Syria's Hafez and Bashir al-Assad, who massacred in the tens of thousands, Mr Cooper insists "the Shah was a benevolent autocrat." (Carter's antagonism to the Shah coincided roughly with Iran's inflexibility on oil prices, but Mr Cooper, whose previous book concerned oil politics, oddly makes little of this.)

The numbers of the Shah's victims were far more modest than what Carter claimed - or Khomeini for that matter. The Islamic Republic set about memorialising those victims, and the lead researcher, the seminarian-turned-dissident Emad al-Din Baghi, discovered that instead of 100,000 alleged deaths at the hands of the Shah, only a few hundred names could be found.

Nonetheless, if Mr Cooper is going to stake so much on accuracy with numbers, he might have been more scrupulous himself. He mentions no source for his own figure of 12,000 deaths in Khomeini's first decade and recycles widely rejected figures for deaths in the Iran-Iraq war.

In the light of what we now know, Mr Cooper asks us to revisit our inherited memory of the Shah, and consider returning with a different verdict. There seems to be lurking in these pages a wish that the Shah had cracked down, and kept the forces that opposed him, "the floodgates to today's carnage," at bay. But, this desire is fundamentally at odds with the personality of the Shah, a proud man who rejected the scale of violence the moment seemingly demanded of him. In exile, shortly before his death, a friend asked him why he didn't crush Khomeini. "I wasn't this man," the Shah replies. "If you wanted someone to kill people you had to find somebody else."

©2016 The New York Times News Service