Iranians fondly recall days of shah

CAIRO, Egypt — Stylish in tiny black dresses and tailored suits, the mourners gathered in the lobby of a downtown hotel. They filled the air with expensive perfume, their handbags and sunglasses gilded with designer logos.

On Wednesday, as they do every year, scores of Iranian monarchists were in the Egyptian capital to pay homage to the late Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and recall the long-lost Middle Eastern belle epoque he represented to them.

Before al-Qaida and the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, at a time when Sunnis and Shiites intermarried and no U.S. warplanes scoured the region, the shah and his wife reigned over a land in which, for the well-to-do, local currencies traded as high as skirt lines, nightclubs rocked and the future shined brightly.

"It was the greatest era of my life," said Shahareh Shirvani, a Houston real-estate agent who left Iran as a teenager but comes to the memorial each year.

Most historians don't share the same view.

The shah inherited his post from his father but left the country after a democratic and nationalist groundswell in the early 1950s. A U.S.-funded coup restored him to his throne in 1953.

He surrounded himself with U.S. advisers and military hardware. Flush with oil money, he became Washington's enforcer in the Middle East, a key ally against the Soviet Union. The SAVAK, his secret police, became notorious for torture and domestic espionage targeting the Islamic activists who ultimately took control of the country, but mostly the leftist and liberal dissidents who might have more effectively opposed them.

The shah's rule was extinguished in the flames of a 1979 revolution that set in motion Islamic movements throughout the Middle East and contributed to the start of several wars that changed the region forever.

"There was stability and peace," said Farah Diba, the late shah's widow, who joined the procession. "Unfortunately, I can say that after what happened 28 years ago in Iran, everything moved in the opposite direction."

The Islamists who took over Iran set it on a collision course with much of the world over its nuclear program and support for extremist Muslim groups, failed to resolve the country's economic difficulties and repressed opponents as harshly as the shah, if not more.

Those gathered here wistfully remember the days before the shah's fall.

"There was no fear in Iran back then," said Jaffar, a bald man in a bow tie and tuxedo. "You never had to look behind your back."


The shah found refuge in Egypt, were President Anwar Sadat gave the ailing shah sanctuary when President Carter refused to let him stay in the United States.

The shah succumbed to cancer while in Egypt in June 1980; Sadat, who made peace with Israel and realigned his country with the United States rather than the Soviet Union, was assassinated in 1981.

On Wednesday, Diba and Sadat's widow, Jehan Sadat, together led the procession to Egypt's Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, the triangular monument where Sadat is buried, and placed flowers at his grave.

They then traveled across town to the shah's tomb. They entered the 19th-century Rifai mosque without putting on headscarves, and the men walked without taking off their shoes, obligatory for entering a Muslim house of worship.

The Iranians were seemingly oblivious to their host country's deep-felt piety.

Diba knelt before her late husband's final resting place, placing first her hand and then her forehead on the marble tomb.

"We can lose a lot of things," she said later. "We can lose our country, our loved ones, our positions, our belongings, but we can never lose hope. One day, I am sure, this nightmare will be over."

By Borzou Daragahi

Los Angeles Times