The Pahlavi Dynasty

¹ Reza Khan, an officer in the Persian Cossack Brigade, seized power in a 1921 coup and was crowned Shah in 1925, ending the Qajar dynasty. His reign pursued rapid, often forcible, secularizing modernization — a new dress code, the Trans-Iranian Railway, a national university, and, in 1935, the formal renaming of the country from “Persia” to “Iran” in official international correspondence. He was forced to abdicate in 1941 by a joint Anglo-Soviet invasion driven by Allied fears of his government’s ties to Nazi Germany, and died in exile in South Africa in 1944.

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi’s long reign included the 1953 coup, backed by the British and American governments, that overthrew the elected prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh after his nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and the sweeping land and social reforms of the 1963 “White Revolution.” In 1971 he staged an immense celebration at Persepolis marking, by his own dynasty’s reckoning, “2,500 years of the Persian Empire” since Cyrus the Great — implicitly casting the Pahlavis as heirs to the Achaemenids. Mass protests against his autocratic rule, economic inequality and repression by the secret police (SAVAK) culminated in the Iranian Revolution of 1978–79; he fled Iran in January 1979 and died in exile in Egypt in 1980, ending the monarchy Cyrus had founded some 2,500 years before.