Word: shahs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Face of the Land. Outwardly, last week, Iran was calm. In Teheran, on a sunny afternoon, the Shah and his young bride drove to the races in their new sea-blue Rolls-Royce. Across the city, the spring cycle of parties was in full swing...
...Shah's small (130,000) but loyal army was in its barracks, ready for trouble. For the present, at least, there was none. Beyond the capital, Iran's brown and barren face was peaceful. The skeletons of Persepolis, Susa, Pasargadae, the great dead imperial cities, were bleaching in the sun. Eastward the silent desert reached toward Asia. In the southwest, Iran's black treasure still gushed into the Abadan refinery from beneath the baked flats east of the Tigris. The people, moving herds across the plains and raising cotton in the steaming Caspian littoral, lived in poverty...
...grew up in Teheran, at the declining but still magnificent court of the Kajar Shahs (who had ruled the country for more than a century, were deposed in 1925). His father, Mirza Hedayat, was for 30 years the Shah's Finance Minister. His mother, Najmos Saltaneh, was a Kajar princess, the cousin of the Shah Nasr-ed-Din, an uxorious monarch (he had 50 wives) who hated foreigners...
Young Mohammed was educated in the shadow of the Shah's palace. Between assignments in classical Persian and Arabic, he hunted gazelles and wild pigs with the favorites of the Shah's court. His mother, a woman with a strong social conscience, took him with her on her visits to Najmieh Hospital, which she had founded in Teheran (and which Mossadeq still supports today). Outside the palace walls, young Mohammed found a troubled, poverty-stricken land beset by swarms of foreign adventurers and corrupted by the imperial court's mismanagement...
When he was 15, Mohammed was sent to the province of Khurasan as financial agent, for his apprenticeship in public service. When he returned to Teheran ten years later, a shrewd, aloof young official, the Shah granted him the title "Mossadeq" ("One who has been tried, tested and found to be worthy...