Until the beginning of World War I, Russia effectively ruled Iran, but, with the outbreak of hostilities, Russian troops withdrew from the north of the country, and Iranians convened the third Majles. Jubilation was short-lived, however, as the country quickly turned into a battlefield between British, German, Russian, and Turkish forces. The landed elite hoped to find in Germany a foil for the British and Russians, but change eventually was to come from the north.

Following the Russian Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, the new Soviet government unilaterally canceled the tsarist concessions in Iran, an action that created tremendous goodwill toward the new Soviet Union and, after the Central Powers were defeated, left Britain the sole Great Power in Iran. In 1919 the Majles, after much internal wrangling, refused a British offer of military and financial aid that effectively would have made Iran into a protectorate of Britain. The British were initially loath to withdraw from Iran but caved to international pressure and removed their advisers by 1921. In that same year British diplomats lent their support to an Iranian officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade, Reza Khan, who in the previous year had been instrumental in putting down a rebellion led by Mīrzā Kūchak Khan, who had sought to form an independent Soviet-style republic in Iran’s northern province of Gīlān. In collaboration with a political writer, Sayyid Ziya al-Din Tabatabaʾi, Reza Khan staged a coup in 1921 and took control of all military forces in Iran. Between 1921 and 1925 Reza Khan—first as war minister and later as prime minister under Aḥmad Shah—built an army that was loyal solely to him. He also managed to forge political order in a country that for years had known nothing but turmoil. Initially Reza Khan wished to declare himself president in the style of Turkey’s secular nationalist president, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk—a move fiercely opposed by the Shiʿi ulama—but instead he deposed the weak Aḥmad Shah in 1925 and had himself crowned Reza Shah Pahlavi.

Reza Shah

During the reign of Reza Shah Pahlavi, educational and judicial reforms were effected that laid the basis of a modern state and reduced the influence of the religious classes. A wide range of legal affairs that had previously been the purview of Shiʿi religious courts were now either administered by secular courts or overseen by state bureaucracies, and, as a result, the status of women improved. The custom of women wearing veils was banned, the minimum age for marriage was raised, and strict religious divorce laws (which invariably favored the husband) were made more equitable. The number and availability of secular schools increased for both boys and girls, and the University of Tehrān was established in 1934, further eroding what had once been a clerical monopoly on education. Nonetheless, Reza Shah was selective on what forms of modernization and secularization he would adopt. He banned trade unions and political parties and firmly muzzled the press. Oil concessions were first granted in 1901, during the Qājār period, and the first commercially exploitable petroleum deposits were found in 1908. Reza Shah renegotiated a number of these concessions, despite the ire these agreements raised among the Iranian people. The concessions were to remain a violent point of contention in Iran for decades to come.

Reza Shah’s need to expand trade, his fear of Soviet control over Iran’s overland routes to Europe, and his apprehension at renewed Soviet and continued British presence in Iran drove him to expand trade with Nazi Germany in the 1930s. His refusal to abandon what he considered to be obligations to numerous Germans in Iran served as a pretext for an Anglo-Soviet invasion of his country in 1941. Intent on ensuring the safe passage of U.S. war matériel to the Soviet Union through Iran, the Allies forced Reza Shah to abdicate, placing his young son Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi on the throne.