Word: ahmad
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...British control from the Persian Gulf to the Caspian Sea, thereby adding a magnificent frontier province to British India. The Mesopotamian campaign had slopped over into always neutral Persia, but in 1918 the British drove the Turks out and garrisoned Persia's strong places. The next year Shah Ahmad, even bleaker-brained than Shah Muzaffar, had no alternative but to submit to an agreement by which his country came under Britain's political and military control...
Shah of Persia then was the squat, pillowy royal jerk, Ahmad (height 5 ft., 2 in.; weight 275 lb.), a member of the Kajar Dynasty which had leeched on the Persian people since the late 18th Century. Ahmad's most solemn edicts, when there were any, were not obeyed outside of Teheran. He was known as the Grocery Boy Shah because he once cornered his country's entire grain crop during a famine and sold it to his starving subjects at colossal prices...
...night boxes and gambling joints of France were Ahmad's sole passion. When he left Persia he took an alleged $200,000,000 worth of jewels with him; gave an Oriental carnival for the whole town of Nice which lasted a week, and every night banqueted a thousand guests. On every damsel who tickled his fancy he bestowed a handful of precious stones. In 1930, aged 32, Ahmad died of cirrhosis. Gossip said that he had a liver like an old Spanish saddle. Provision for eight wives was made in his will (executed by Manhattan's Guaranty Trust...
Kismet, etc. One of the first acts of the new Government after the 1921 ride-in to Teheran was to tear up the treaty the bleak-brained Ahmad had signed with the U.S.S.R. The Bolsheviks condemned the aggressive policy of the Tsar, promised never to interfere in Persia's internal affairs, but reserved the right to occupy it temporarily in the event another power used Persia for an attack on Soviet Russia...
...skinned blend of Mickey Rooney and Jon Hall, snatches food from Arab peddlers, scampers mischievously through vari-hued sultans' palaces, grapples with monsters, summons a towering genie, flies over the top of the world, blows up the Grand Canyon and brings love to the lives of slim, handsome Ahmad (John Justin, now a pilot with the R. A. F.) and the buxom, slant-eyed Princess (June Duprez). The sinister forces are led by Conrad Veidt, who conjures up more dire magic and dirty treachery than the screen has seen since Dracula...