Word: reza
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Victors in the fortnight-old, 80-hour Iranian War, the British and the Russians had at week's end not yet signed an armistice with Reza Shah Pahlavi, Iran's King of Kings. Mootest point in the haggle was the expulsion or surrender for internment of Iran's large German colony. It was expected that the Shah would shortly come to terms...
...such kidney was the ruler of Persia when Colonel Reza Khan took over. The treasury was empty, the Army little more than an armed rabble. Brigandage and tribal disaffection were rampant. The country's roads were hardly better than camel tracks, and so dreadful was transportation that fields of surplus wheat and barley might rot in one section while 600 miles away a bread famine would rage. The citizenry was saturated with corruption, ignorance and disease...
Through this horrible mess Reza Khan swept like God's wrath: first as War Minister, then as Premier, finally (1925) as Shah in Shah. He reorganized the Army on western lines, put down brigandage, overthrew rebel chieftains, stripped the mullahs of their judicial and political powers, drew up a code of civil law, hobbled child marriage by raising to 15 the age at which a girl might marry, removed the veils from the womenfolk and bettered their status in life, ran the royal Grocery Boy out of the land, fostered education, set up schools and colleges, tore down slums...
...than another Oriental despot who has caused shoals of his enemies to be murdered, tortured, kidnapped, imprisoned. They claim he slaps Cabinet Ministers in the face, beats up priests, kicks irksome subjects in the crotch. (It is said that for tiresome gabbling he once booted even Crown Prince Mohammed Reza into a palace fountain.) Iran is ruled entirely by fear, they insist; bribery is still prevalent, taxation overpowering; Iran's 136-man National Assembly, the Majlis, and all Cabinets are solidly enstooged. By this time, they add, the One-Man New Deal has turned into a One-Man Corporative...
...unfair to apply Western standards to Iran, and then they point to some of the flowers of civilization which have blossomed in the West since 1933. They recall that, unlike Kamâl Atatürk, he had no elite of European-educated intellectuals to help him.‡ "Reza Khan made Iran out of nothing," they say and, knowing Persia and Persians, they insist that force was the only way. As for opium, 60% of the population smokes it. Descended from generations of opium smokers, it is said they are largely immune to its effects...