An Enduring Love and Loyalty

An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah
Farah Pahlavi
447 pp. Miramax Books. $24.95
 
For over thirty years, Farah Pahlavi has been forbidden from setting foot in the country she once ruled. Married in 1959 to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, she reigned alongside him until the 1979 Islamic Revolution made pariahs of Iran’s powerful royal family, forcing them into the nightmare of exile. In her 2004 memoir An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah, Pahlavi chronicles this nightmare and the years leading up to it with a bias only a proud leader could possess. Her pride in the Iranian people, in the monarchy, and, most all, in her late husband nearly distorts history to describe an idealistic Iran that arguably never existed.
Her memoir’s defense of the monarchy is steadfast to a surprising degree; over the years, the monarchy’s critics have accused the shah of varying degrees of fiscal irresponsibility, censorship, oppression, and subservience to the West, but Pahlavi rarely acknowledges any of these accusations – and when she does, a short justification undoubtedly follows.
The monarchy has historically been lambasted for living in extravagance while other Iranians suffered in abject poverty, but Pahlavi repeatedly insists that the monarchy was careful to avoid excessive costs in all endeavors – including the infamous 1971 festival at Persepolis. Its grand purpose, she insists, was to celebrate the Persian Empire’s 2,500th anniversary and foster a sense of national unity and identity. But even here, Pahlavi hardly admits fault: She justifies the festival by insisting that the high price tag was unintentional on the monarchy’s part because only European businesses could provide services in time for the festival. Foreign journalists and Islamic clerics, she continues, exaggerated the expense and distorted the festival’s meaning.
Even SAVAK, the monarchy’s notorious intelligence agency, nearly escapes Pahlavi’s criticism. Frequently referred to as the shah’s secret police, it is now blamed for the ruthless suppression of any opposition to the monarchy. Pahlavi blames any “indefensible acts” on a few overzealous agents rather than the monarchy itself. For her, the reason behind SAVAK’s redemption is simple: If the king only had enough time, SAVAK would have evolved into Iran’s CIA.
That refrain of a just reign cut lamentably short is repeated throughout the memoir. She credits the Pahlavi dynasty’s tireless efforts and her husband’s six-point White Revolution for leading Iran’s transition from “medieval” to modern, from an underdeveloped country to developing. If the shah had more time, she insists, the monarchy would have nurtured Iran to stand among the Western powers.
To her credit, Pahlavi herself did more than her expected share of nurturing the nation. Striving to be more than just a hostess for royal dinner parties, she was the champion of numerous social causes, including the improvement of the status of women, lepers, and orphans. It seems that her happiest memories come from her efforts to be a people’s queen, humbled by their adoration of her and eager to help as many of them as possible. Entire sections of the book are devoted to the plights of ordinary Iranians, describing how so many of them – especially women – reached out to her with their troubles and how she strove to fix them. Her methods of meeting these Iranians were, at times, endearing and amusing: knocking on the door of a random house in the city Rasht, visiting a small candy shop and having tea with the family who lived above it.
But Pahlavi’s happy years as queen do end with the tide of revolution. She credits a series of misunderstandings – the cost of the Persepolis celebration ranking high among them – and Khomeini’s sly scheming for the monarchy’s demise. Some of Pahlavi’s most potent writing rises from these turbulent years, chronicling her anxiety on the eve of revolution and her depression in its aftermath. She describes the humiliation of exile with a lingering sense of indignation, depicting the royal family? as unjustly ousted from the throne by the people they spent decades working tirelessly to help. Frequently separated from her four children and with her husband slowly dying from lymphoma, Pahlavi recounts her disbelief as the world turned its back on the exiled royal family – presidents and prime ministers, kings and queens, even apartheid South Africa – until Egypt seemed to be the last ally standing.
Reserved even when describing those disturbing months of exile, Pahlavi is finally and uncharacteristically candid about the suicide of her daughter, Leila, in 2001. “I, it is said, can help a whole community expelled from its homeland, yet I was not able to come to the aid of my own daughter,” she writes in the memoir’s final pages. Her pain is amplified by the knowledge of a tragedy yet to come: Her youngest son, Alireza, committed suicide in Boston in 2011, seven years after her memoir was published. It is a grim marker of the violent history that haunts the Pahlavis, revealing just how much death the former queen has experienced – that of her husband, her children, and, as she describes occasionally with great sadness, the many family friends executed immediately after the revolution.
Despite such morose themes, Pahlavi’s memoir details not only an enduring love for her husband, but also an enduring faith in the promise of an Iran free from its ruling clerics. Given the rosy depiction of the monarchy, it seems that the broader purpose of Pahlavi’s memoir is to rally support for her oldest son, Reza, who was crowned shah in a small ceremony in Egypt on his twentieth birthday in 1980; she notes that if the Iranian people ever look to her son for leadership, he will provide it. Just as the gears of revolution turned in 1979, Pahlavi does not dismiss the possibility of them turning again. In the memoir’s last paragraph, she all but guarantees it. “I have boundless faith in the ability of the Iranian people to throw off their chains and find the path of democracy, freedom, and progress,” she writes. “I know that light will triumph over darkness and Iran will rise from her ashes.”