The Stationery Shop of Tehran

After many years of political turmoil in Iran during the first decades of the 20th century, Reza Khan rose to power and established the Pahlavi dynasty of Shahs in 1921, which would rule the country until the Islamic Revolution of 1979. The Pahlavi Shahs favored a moderate approach to Islam and instituted many social and economic reforms, raising hopes that Iran would become a modern and fully independent democracy with a constitutional monarchy. Tehran, the capital, became a flourishing cultural hub, rapidly absorbing Western influences while cherishing its own ancient history and culture.

However, when Prime Minister Mossadegh passed a parliamentary bill to nationalize the British-owned oil industry, Britain and the United States grew determined to remove the democratically-elected leader. Mossadegh was first briefly removed in 1952, but was swiftly reappointed due to a large-scale popular uprising. Another foreign-backed coup on August 19, 1953, successfully overthrew the Prime Minister, who spent the rest of his life under house arrest.

Iran continued to be ruled afterward in an increasingly autocratic manner by the last Pahlavi Shah, Mohammad Reza, who had acceded to the throne during WWII and cultivated close relationships with the Western Bloc. During the 1960s, the Shah instituted the “White Revolution,” which brought in sweeping resolutions involving issues such as economic reforms and granting more rights to women. The “White Revolution” caused deepening rifts between the Pahlavi government and some of Iran’s more fundamentalist clerics, who opposed the Shah’s secularizing initiatives. One such cleric, Ayatollah Khomeini, became a prominent figurehead of the Islamic opposition movement. After an oil crisis began to rock Iran’s economy in the early 1970s, causing widespread economic hardship, the Shah’s popularity faltered and mass protests began.

Ayatollah Khomeini capitalized on the popular discontent to denounce the Shah’s regime as tyrannical to Western powers while he was abroad, gathering both homegrown and foreign support for the regime’s overthrow. In 1979, the Shah went into exile, and that same year the Islamic Republic of Iran was declared, with the returned Ayatollah Khomeini as its leader. The Islamic Revolution brought an end to the rapid modernization that Iran had been undergoing, ushering in the banning of secular influence and the increasing theocratization of law and society.

In 1980 the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, sought to capitalize on the disarray in the immediate wake of the Revolution and on the Islamic regime’s unpopularity with Western governments by attacking Iran. Saddam bought arms and received substantial covert support from the US during the war, which resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of Iranian citizens. The Iran-Iraq War ended in defeat for Iran in 1988.