Mohammad Reza Pahlavi

Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was the last Shah of Iran, reigning from 1941 until the revolution of 1979. He came to the throne at twenty-one when Britain and the Soviet Union invaded Iran and forced his father Reza Shah to abdicate. For his first twelve years he was a constitutional monarch of limited power. That ended in 1953, when the elected prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalised the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company and was removed in a coup organised by the CIA and MI6; the Shah, who had fled to Rome, returned to rule in earnest. What followed was three decades of accelerating modernisation enforced by an increasingly repressive state. The White Revolution from 1963 redistributed land, gave women the vote and built schools and infrastructure, and it alienated the clergy and the bazaar merchants at the same time as it failed to satisfy the educated young. SAVAK, his security service, became notorious for torture. Oil revenue after 1973 was spent on armaments and on projects of great scale, and the inflation that followed hurt the people the reforms were supposed to help. In 1971 he held a celebration at Persepolis of 2,500 years of Persian monarchy that cost a fortune and was widely resented. Mass protests began in 1978, the army would not fire indefinitely, and he left the country in January 1979. Admitted to the United States for cancer treatment in October, he was the immediate cause of the embassy seizure in Tehran. He died in Cairo the following year.

• Lived: 1919 CE – 1980 CE
• Nationality: Iranian
• Roles: ruler