Age, Biography and Wiki
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was born on October 26, 1919, and passed away on July 27, 1980. He was the Shah of Iran from 1941 until the Iranian Revolution in 1979. During his rule, Iran underwent significant modernization and social reforms, including the "White Revolution," which aimed to improve literacy, land ownership, and women's rights.
| Occupation | Political Leaders |
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| Date of Birth | 26 October 1919 |
| Age | 105 Years |
| Birth Place | Tehran, Sublime State of Iran |
| Horoscope | Scorpio |
| Country | Egypt |
| Date of death | 27 July, 1980 |
| Died Place | Cairo, Egypt |
Height, Weight & Measurements
There is limited publicly available information regarding the specific height and weight of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. However, he was known for his dignified and imposing presence, which was often highlighted in official photographs and public appearances.
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Dating & Relationship Status
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was married three times: to Princess Fawzia of Egypt, Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary, and Farah Pahlavi. He had five children, including Reza Pahlavi, who is now a prominent figure in Iranian politics.
Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi (26 October 1919 – 27 July 1980) was the Shah of Iran. In 1941, he succeeded his father Reza Shah and ruled the Imperial State of Iran until 1979 when the Iranian Revolution overthrew him, abolished the monarchy, and established the Islamic Republic of Iran. In 1967, he took the title (lit. 'King of Kings'), and also held several others, including (lit. 'Light of the Aryans') and (lit. 'Grand Army Commander'). He was the second and last ruling monarch of the Pahlavi dynasty. His vision of the "Great Civilization" (تمدن بزرگ) led to his leadership over rapid industrial and military modernization, as well as economic and social reforms in Iran.
Born in Tehran, in the Sublime State of Iran, to Reza Khan (later Reza Shah Pahlavi, first Shah of the Pahlavi dynasty) and his second wife, Tadj ol-Molouk, Mohammad Reza was his father's eldest son and third of his eleven children. His father was of Mazandarani origin and born in Alasht, Savadkuh County, Māzandarān Province. He was a Brigadier-General of the Persian Cossack Brigade, commissioned in the 7th Savadkuh Regiment, who served in the Anglo-Persian War in 1856. Mohammad Reza's mother was a Muslim immigrant from Georgia (then part of the Russian Empire), whose family had emigrated to mainland Iran after Iran was forced to cede all of its territories in the Caucasus following the Russo-Persian Wars several decades prior. She was of Azerbaijani origin, being born in Baku, Russian Empire (now Azerbaijan).
Nevertheless, Reza Khan was always convinced that his sudden quirk of good fortune had commenced in 1919 with the birth of his son, who was dubbed khoshghadam ("bird of good omen"). Like most Iranians at the time, Reza Khan did not have a surname. After the 1921 Persian coup d'état which saw the deposal of Ahmad Shah Qajar, Reza Khan was informed that he would need a surname for his house. This led him to pass a law ordering all Iranians to take a surname; he chose for himself the surname Pahlavi, which is the name for the Middle Persian language, itself derived from Old Persian. At his father's coronation on 24 April 1926, Mohammad Reza was proclaimed Crown Prince.
Mohammad Reza described his father in his book Mission for My Country as "one of the most frightening men" he had ever known, depicting Reza Shah as a dominating man with a violent temper. A tough, fierce, and very ambitious soldier who became the first Persian to command the elite Russian-trained Cossack Brigade, Reza Khan liked to kick subordinates in the groin who failed to follow his orders. Growing up under his shadow, Mohammad Reza was a deeply scared and insecure boy who lacked self-confidence, according to Iranian-American historian Abbas Milani.
Reza Khan believed if fathers showed love for their sons, it caused homosexuality later in life, so to ensure his favourite son was heterosexual, he denied him love and affection when he was young, though he later became more affectionate toward the Crown Prince when he was a teenager. Reza Khan always addressed his son as shoma ("sir") and refused to use the more informal tow ("you"), and in turn was addressed by his son using the same formality. The Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński observed in his book Shah of Shahs that looking at old photographs of Reza Khan and his son, he was struck by how self-confident and assured Reza Khan appeared in his uniform, while Mohammad Reza appeared nervous and jittery in his uniform standing next to his father.
In the 1930s, Reza Khan was an outspoken admirer of Adolf Hitler, less because of Hitler's racism and anti-Semitism and more because he had risen from an undistinguished background, much like Reza Khan, to become a notable leader of the 20th century. Reza Khan often impressed on his son his belief that history was made by great men such as himself, and that a real leader is an autocrat. Throughout his life, Mohammad Reza was obsessed with height and stature, wearing elevator shoes to make himself look taller than he really was, often boasting that Iran's highest mountain Mount Damavand was higher than any peak in Europe or Japan, and proclaiming that he was always most attracted to tall women. As Shah, Mohammad Reza constantly disparaged his father in private, calling him a thuggish Cossack who achieved nothing as Shah. In fact, he almost airbrushed his father out of history during his reign, to the point of implying the House of Pahlavi began its rule in 1941 rather than 1925.
Mohammad Reza's mother, Tadj ol-Molouk, was an assertive woman who was also very superstitious. She believed that dreams were messages from another world, sacrificed lambs to bring good fortune and scare away evil spirits, and clad her children with protective amulets to ward off the power of the evil eye. Tadj ol-Molouk was the main emotional support to her son, and she cultivated a belief in him that destiny had chosen him for great things, which the soothsayers she consulted had interpreted her dreams as proving. Mohammad Reza grew up surrounded by women, as the main influences on him were his mother, his older sister Shams, and his twin sister Ashraf, leading the American psychoanalyst and political economist Marvin Zonis to conclude that it was "from women, and apparently from women alone" that the future Shah "received whatever psychological nourishment he was able to get as a child". Traditionally, male children were considered preferable to females, and as a boy, Mohammad Reza was often spoiled by his mother and sisters. Mohammad Reza was very close to his twin sister Ashraf, who commented, "It was this twinship and this relationship with my brother that would nourish and sustain me throughout my childhood ... No matter how I would reach out in the years to come—sometimes even desperately—to find an identity and a purpose of my own, I would remain inextricably tied to my brother ... always, the center of my existence was, and is, Mohammad Reza".
After becoming Crown Prince, Mohammad Reza was taken away from his mother and sisters to be given a "manly education" by officers selected by his father, who also ordered that everyone, including his mother and siblings, were to address the Crown Prince as "Your Highness". According to Zonis, the result of his contradictory upbringing by a loving, if possessive and superstitious, mother and an overbearing martinet father was to make Mohammad Reza "a young man of low self-esteem who masked his lack of self-confidence, his indecisiveness, his passivity, his dependency and his shyness with masculine bravado, impulsiveness, and arrogance". This made him into a person of marked contradictions, Zonis claims, as the Crown Prince was "both gentle and cruel, withdrawn and active, dependent and assertive, weak and powerful".
By the time Mohammad Reza turned 11, his father deferred to the recommendation of Abdolhossein Teymourtash, the Minister of Court, to dispatch his son to Institut Le Rosey, a Swiss boarding school, for further studies. Mohammad Reza left Iran for Switzerland on 7 September 1931. On his first day as a student at Le Rosey, the Crown Prince antagonised a group of his fellow students by demanding that they all stand to attention as he walked past, just as everybody did back in Iran. In response, one of the American students beat him up, and he swiftly learned to accept that people would not respect him in Switzerland in the way he was accustomed to at home. As a student, Mohammad Reza played competitive football, but school records indicate that his principal problem as a player was his "timidity", as the Crown Prince was afraid to take risks. He was educated in French at Le Rosey, and his time there left Mohammad Reza with a lifelong love of all things French. In articles he wrote in French for the student newspaper in 1935 and 1936, Mohammad Reza praised Le Rosey for broadening his mind and introducing him to European civilisation.
During his time in Switzerland, Mohammad Reza befriended his teacher Ernest Perron, who introduced him to French poetry, and under his influence, Chateaubriand and Rabelais became his "favorite French authors". The Crown Prince liked Perron so much that when he returned to Iran in 1936, he brought Perron back with him, installing his best friend in the Marble Palace. Perron lived in Iran until his death in 1961, and as the best friend of Mohammad Reza, was a man of considerable behind-the-scenes power. After the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979, a best-selling book was published by the new regime, Ernest Perron, the Husband of the Shah of Iran, by Mohammad Pourkian, alleging a homosexual relationship between the Shah and Perron. Even today, this remains the official interpretation of their relationship by the Islamic Republic of Iran. Marvin Zonis described the book as long on assertions and short on evidence of a homosexual relationship between the two, noting that all of the Shah's courtiers rejected the claim that Perron was the Shah's lover. He argued that the strong-willed Reza Khan, who was very homophobic, would not have allowed Perron to move into the Marble Palace in 1936 if he believed Perron was his son's lover.
Mohammad Reza's marriage to Fawzia produced one child, Princess Shahnaz Pahlavi (born 27 October 1940). Their marriage was not a happy one, as the Crown Prince was openly unfaithful, often being seen driving around Tehran in one of his expensive cars with one of his girlfriends. Additionally, Mohammad Reza's dominating and possessive mother saw her daughter-in-law as a rival to her son's love, and took to humiliating Princess Fawzia, whose husband sided with his mother. A quiet, shy woman, Fawzia described her marriage as miserable, feeling very much unwanted and unloved by the Pahlavi family and longing to return to Egypt. In his 1961 book Mission for My Country, Mohammad Reza wrote that the "only happy light moment" of his entire marriage to Fawzia was the birth of his daughter.
Meanwhile, in the midst of World War II in 1941, Nazi Germany began Operation Barbarossa and invaded the Soviet Union, breaking the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. This had a major impact on Iran, which had declared neutrality in the conflict. In the summer of 1941, Soviet and British diplomats passed on numerous messages warning that they regarded the presence of Germans administering the Iranian state railroads as a threat, implying war if the Germans were not dismissed. Britain wished to ship arms to the Soviet Union via Iranian railroads, and statements from the German managers of the Iranian railroads that they would not cooperate made both the Soviets and British insistent that the Germans Reza Khan had hired had to be sacked at once. As his father's closest advisor, the Crown Prince Mohammad Reza did not see fit to raise the issue of a possible Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran, blithely assuring his father that nothing would happen. The Iranian-American historian Abbas Milani wrote about the relationship between the Reza Khan and the Crown Prince at the time, noting, "As his father's now constant companion, the two men consulted on virtually every decision".
Later that year, British and Soviet forces occupied Iran in a military invasion, forcing Reza Shah to abdicate. On 25 August 1941, British and Australian naval forces attacked the Persian Gulf while the Soviet Union conducted a land invasion from the north. On the second day of the invasion, with the Soviet air force bombing Tehran, Mohammad Reza was shocked to see the Iranian military simply collapse, with thousands of terrified officers and men all over Tehran taking off their uniforms in order to desert and run away, despite having not yet seen combat. Reflecting the panic, a group of senior Iranian generals called the Crown Prince to receive his blessing to hold a meeting to discuss how best to surrender. When Reza Khan learned of the meeting, he flew into a rage and attacked one of his generals, Ahmad Nakhjavan, striking him with his riding crop, tearing off his medals, and nearly personally executing him before his son persuaded him to have the general court-martialed instead. The collapse of the Iranian military that his father had worked so hard to build humiliated his son, who vowed that he would never see Iran defeated like that again, foreshadowing the future Shah's later obsession with military spending.
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| Husband | Fawzia of Egypt (m. 1939-1948) Soraya Esfandiary-Bakhtiary (m. 1951-1958) Farah Diba (m. 1959) |
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Net Worth and Salary
At the time of his death in 1980, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's net worth was estimated at $2 billion, which is equivalent to approximately $7.2 billion in today's dollars. His wealth was derived from various sources, including oil revenues, investments in foreign companies, and state-owned industries.
In 1963, Mohammad Reza Shah introduced the White Revolution, a series of reforms aimed at transforming Iran into a global power and modernizing the nation by nationalizing key industries and redistributing land. The regime also implemented Iranian nationalist policies establishing numerous popular symbols of Iran relating to Cyrus the Great. The Shah initiated major investments in infrastructure, subsidies and land grants for peasant populations, profit sharing for industrial workers, construction of nuclear facilities, nationalization of Iran's natural resources, and literacy programs which were considered some of the most effective in the world. The Shah also instituted economic policy tariffs and preferential loans to Iranian businesses which sought to create an independent Iranian economy. Manufacturing of cars, appliances, and other goods in Iran increased substantially, creating a new industrialist class insulated from threats of foreign competition. By the 1970s, the Shah was seen as a master statesman and used his growing power to pass the 1973 Sale and Purchase Agreement. The reforms culminated in decades of sustained economic growth that would make Iran one of the fastest-growing economies among both the developed world and the developing world. During his 37-year-long rule, Iran spent billions of dollars' worth on industry, education, health, and military spending. The Iranian national income rose 423 times over, and the country saw an unprecedented rise in per capita income—which reached the highest level of any point in Iran's history—and high levels of urbanization. By 1977, the Shah's focus on defense spending to end foreign powers' intervention in the country had culminated in the Iranian military standing as the world's fifth-strongest armed force.
Business and Investments
Pahlavi's business interests were extensive, with investments in a German steel company and other real estate holdings. The Pahlavi Foundation managed many of these assets, though the exact value of its holdings was never disclosed.
During World War II, the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran forced the abdication of Reza Shah and succession of Mohammad Reza Shah. During his reign, the British-owned oil industry was nationalized by the prime minister Mohammad Mosaddegh, who had support from Iran's national parliament to do so; however, Mosaddegh was overthrown in the 1953 Iranian coup d'état, which was carried out by the Iranian military under the aegis of the United Kingdom and the United States. Subsequently, the Iranian government centralized power under the Shah and brought foreign oil companies back into the country's industry through the Consortium Agreement of 1954.
As political unrest grew throughout Iran in the late 1970s, the Shah's position was made untenable by the Cinema Rex fire and the Jaleh Square massacre. The 1979 Guadeloupe Conference saw his Western allies state that there was no feasible way to save the Iranian monarchy from being overthrown. The Shah ultimately left Iran for exile in January 1979. Although he had told some Western contemporaries that he would rather leave the country than fire on his own people, estimates for the total number of deaths during the Islamic Revolution range from 540 to 2,000 (figures of independent studies) to 60,000 (figures of the Islamic government). After formally abolishing the Iranian monarchy, shia cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini assumed leadership as the Supreme Leader of Iran. Mohammad Reza Shah died in exile in Egypt, where he had been granted political asylum by Egyptian president Anwar Sadat, and his son Reza Pahlavi declared himself the new Shah of Iran in exile.
Social Network
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi did not have a social network in the modern sense, as his reign predated the widespread use of social media platforms. However, during his time, he was a prominent figure in international diplomacy and was well-connected with other world leaders.
Education
Mohammad Reza Pahlavi received his education at the Le Rosey School in Switzerland and later attended the École spéciale militaire de Saint-Cyr in France. His educational background influenced his modernizing policies in Iran.
Mohammad Reza was the first Iranian prince in line for the throne to be sent abroad to attain a foreign education and remained there for the next four years before returning to obtain his high school diploma in Iran in 1936. After returning to the country, the Crown Prince was registered at the local military academy in Tehran where he remained enrolled until 1938, graduating as a Second Lieutenant. Upon graduating, Mohammad Reza was quickly promoted to the rank of Captain, a rank which he kept until he became Shah. During college, the young prince was appointed Inspector of the Army and spent three years travelling across the country, examining both civil and military installations.
