IRAN: The Rhythm Recurs

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And Fawzia, Too. The old Shah saw to it that Mohamed Reza on his return to Teheran had a plentiful supply of mistresses. When the time came for the Crown Prince to marry, nothing was too good for him. His bride was Fawzia, 17-year-old sister of Egypt's King Farouk, as beautiful a princess as a prince could wish. They had only one child, a daughter called Shahnaz ("the pet of the Shah"), born in October 1940. Thereafter, it became apparent that the Shah's tastes were quantitative rather than qualitative Fawzia, whose family with a century of rule be hind it looked upon the Iranian dynasty as an upstart, was enraged when her husband publicly brought other women into the Gulistan Palace. She consulted an American psychiatrist in Bagdad, and then came back to Teheran with a stern message for her husband. Things were better for a little while, but the young Shah soon relapsed. Last May Fawzia went home to Egypt on the pretext of ill health; last week she was still there. Court circles gossiped that an Egyptian divorce had been secretly granted. But the Iranian marriage was yet to be dissolved.

King in Crisis. Preoccupied by these personal problems and pleasures, the Shah, Mohamed Reza, was scarcely the man to steer his country through a crisis. His Majlis (Parliament) of feudal landlords was not much help. Many of the abler members were instruments either of Britain or Russia, both of which continued to encourage the corruption of Iranian life. Both, too, disrupted Iran's economic life throughout the war. The British (with the Americans) monopolized the country's inadequate transportation system for Lend-Lease shipments to Russia; the Russians prevented shipment of grain from food-rich Azerbaijan to Teheran and other deficient areas. In the capital there were food riots that lasted three days. Inflation soared. By last year the cost of living had risen tenfold, preparing the way for Communist agitation.

As for the Iranian Army, a story gives its quality. Not many years ago a battalion refused to obey orders. The commander disbanded it, sent the men to their homes. They came to the Shah to request an escort with the plea, "there are bandits on the roads and we are only a hundred men."

So the Shah, Mohamed Reza had to do his diplomatic best. In occasional interviews he spoke hopefully to British and U.S. correspondents of democracy and postwar progress. When cabinets fell (a not infrequent occurrence), he labored dutifully to find a premier who would satisfy the conflicting requirements of the outspoken, hardheaded Russian ambassador, Mikhail A. Maximov, and the reticent, equally hardheaded British ambassador, Sir Reader William Bullard. At palace parties the balance was preserved with similar delicacy. U.S. Ambassador Wallace Murray would be invited to hear an American soprano, the Soviet ambassador, a Russian pianist, the British ambassador, a British actress.

The Politics of Oil. But the niceties of palace protocol were surface symptoms. Beneath them stirred the tides of history. As a well-read Iranian, the Shah doubtless recalled the words of the Arabian Poet Abul Ala al Ma'arri: "History is a poem in which the words change, but the rhythm recurs." For Iran the rhythm of history was almost metronomic.