As the wind blew off the snow-capped Alborz mountains on the morning of 16 January 1979, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the Shah of Iran, piloted his own plane into exile. A popular revolution had toppled the Shah and rejected his authoritarian modernisation. Now, 47 years later, it seems the Shah’s son and heir, Prince Reza Pahlavi, has emerged as a leading voice in the opposition to the Islamic Republic and has declared himself ready to lead a transition to democracy after the fall of the clerical regime. Protestors on the streets of Iran’s cities have been calling for the return of the Shahzadeh (prince). Surveys conducted by GAMAN, a group of Iranian academics in the Netherlands, indicate that about a third of Iranians support Prince Reza, one third strongly oppose him, and another third have no strong views. As Iranians contemplate a future beyond the Islamic Republic and a possible Pahlavi restoration, debates about Iran’s Pahlavi past have become a barometer of its future. While Iranians are right to admire the social, economic, and diplomatic achievements of Mohammad Reza Shah, their amnesia about his record on civil and political rights bodes ill for what a Pahlavi restoration might mean for Iran.

More than half of Iranians were born after 1979 and have no living memory of the Pahlavi era. However, their parents and grandparents tell them of the economic prosperity, social mobility, national power, and individual freedom they enjoyed in the modern and secular society cultivated by the Shah. Between 1963 and 1977, Iran experienced the largest growth in GDP in the country’s recorded history, averaging 10.5 per cent per year in real terms, making Iran one of the world’s fastest-growing economies, alongside the likes of Brazil, Mexico, Taiwan and South Korea. Land reform, universal suffrage, literacy programmes, profit sharing for workers, and an import-substitution policy that encouraged the creation of private industrial conglomerates, transformed Iran from a feudal rural society into a modern urban powerhouse.

The ticket to social mobility in Pahlavi Iran was education. The Shah lavished money on creating new universities and sending Iranians to study abroad. He created a new middle class of technocrats who provided the manpower for Iran’s burgeoning public and private sectors. The University of Pennsylvania helped to transform Pahlavi University in Shiraz into an American-style institution. The Iranian Centre for Management Studies in Tehran was created in 1971 with the help of Harvard Business School. By 1978, roughly 32,000 Iranians were going to study in the United States each year, the largest single group of foreign students from any country. One of the Shah’s pet projects, the Aryamehr University of Technology in Tehran, was established in 1966 as Iran’s answer to MIT. Renamed Sharif University after the 1979 Revolution, one of its graduates was the late Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, who won the Fields Medal for Mathematics in 2014, while other alumni occupy the C-suites of countless Silicon Valley companies.

The greatest beneficiaries of Pahlavi rule were Iranian women. Within a generation, their lives were dramatically transformed by changes to Iran’s family laws governing divorce, child custody, and abortion. The Shah himself was as patriarchal as most men of his generation, yet he understood that the emancipation of women was the very definition of modernity. The number of women enrolled in tertiary education increased nearly 12-fold between 1961 and 1976, while marriage rates declined and an impressive national family planning programme reduced the country’s projected birth rate from 48 per 1,000 in 1967-72 to 38.1 per 1,000 in 1972-77. Compared to their mothers’ generation, young Iranian women in the 1970s were, on average, better educated, were getting married later in life, and were having fewer children as their social roles were changing, much to the fury of Ayatollah Khomeini and religious conservatives. Not surprisingly, the first to protest Khomeini’s theocracy were Iranian women, angry at the loss of the freedoms they had gained under the Shah.

With the passage of time, the more unsavoury aspects of the Pahlavi monarchy have now faded from memory. For Iranian millennials or Gen Z, accounts of torture, political prisoners, and corruption under the Shah seem almost quaint in comparison with the horrific record of the Islamic Republic over the last 47 years. According to figures from the Islamic Republic’s own Martyrs’ Foundation, a total of 3,164 Iranians were killed at the hands of the Shah’s regime between 1963 and 1979. That is roughly half the number killed by the Islamic Republic in the last week alone.

Far from being a global pariah like the Islamic Republic, Pahlavi Iran was a country to be reckoned with on the global stage. The leading military power of the Persian Gulf, Iran enjoyed good relations with the capitalist West, the communist East, and the post-colonial South. In an era before hostage-taking and state-sponsored terrorism defined Iran’s relations with the world, Iranians could travel the world freely with their Iranian passports and spend their valuable Iranian rials in London, Paris and New York. What was so bad about the Shah’s Iran, Iranians ask their parents and grandparents, that it needed to be toppled?

This selective memory about the Shah’s record is nowhere more apparent than when it comes to the 1953 royalist coup against Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. The Shah colluded with Britain and the United States to topple Mosaddeq, who had nationalised Iran’s British-owned oil industry and demanded that the Shah should reign but not rule. After 1953, the Shah concentrated all power in his own hands, ending any constitutional constraints on the crown. Elections were rigged, the press was censored, and the opposition was jailed. The Shah’s decision to support an Anglo-American-orchestrated military coup against a popular, nationalist, and constitutional government generated a crisis of legitimacy for the monarchy that he never recovered from. Mosaddeq became the Shah’s bête noire, his name never to be mentioned. This is why monarchists are now so desperate to denigrate Mosaddeq, in order to rehabilitate the tarnished nationalist credentials of the Shah.

Prince Reza and his army of online followers have seized on revisionist histories that downplay the role of the US Central Intelligence Agency and Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service in orchestrating Mosaddeq’s downfall, despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. The Shahzadeh has joined in muddying historical waters in several public appearances, for example at the Hudson Institute in 2020 and on Patrick Bet-David’s podcast in 2023, by claiming that Mosaddeq was not ‘democratically elected’. Royalists make the spurious argument that because Mosaddeq won a vote of confidence in parliament, rather than being directly elected, he had no democratic mandate. By that logic, neither Mark Carney, Giorgia Meloni, Friedrich Merz, nor Keir Starmer are democratically elected. One wonders how long the British monarchy would survive if the British public discovered that King Charles had dismissed the ‘unelected’ Prime Minister Starmer because of a covert operation by a foreign intelligence service.

Prince Reza’s unwillingness to confront inconvenient truths about his father and the 1953 coup undermines his repeated professions of support for democracy in Iran. Ironically, in the last years of his reign, the Shah indicated that he wanted to see a transition to a constitutional monarchy under his son. Yet, the Shahzadeh has been reluctant to distance himself from the unconstitutional rule of his father. Instead, he and his coterie of advisers have embraced a polarising royalist populism that is dividing Iranians between those who want a liberal democratic future for Iran and those who yearn for a strongman to sweep away the Islamic Republic. According to a GAMAN survey, 43 per cent of Iranians agree with having ‘a strong leader who does not have to bother with parliament and elections’. The figure rises to 49 per cent among those who identify as monarchists.

Historical debates about a coup that happened more than 70 years ago might seem irrelevant at a time when Iranians are fighting a life-and-death struggle with the Islamic Republic. Nonetheless, history remains a battleground for Iran’s future. If Reza Pahlavi wants to broaden his appeal to encompass the two thirds of Iranians who are either opposed to, or sceptical of, his leadership, then embracing both the successes and failures of his father would be a good start. Acknowledging the truth about the 1953 coup would give Iranians confidence that the Shahzadeh wants to be a different kind of leader than his father. By embracing Mosaddeq’s brand of civic nationalism, with its emphasis on constitutionalism and patriotism, Reza Pahlavi could help to end the polarisation of the Iranian opposition and unify Iranians behind a vision of a future Iran that is not only powerful and prosperous, but also tolerant and free.