Why Iranians Have Unified Around Reza Pahlavi Are Iranians done with clerical rule?
Why Iranians Have Unified Around Reza Pahlavi Are Iranians done with clerical rule?
On the morning of Oct. 31, 1978, Iran’s 19-year-old crown prince, Reza Pahlavi, stood beside President Jimmy Carter in the Oval Office. Officially, he was the heir to one of America’s closest allies in the Middle East. Unofficially, the Carter administration was already preparing for his father’s possible downfall.
Thousands of miles away, Iran was unraveling. Protesters flooded the streets, chanting “Death to the Shah!” Nationwide strikes shut down factories, schools, and oil fields, threatening vital Western interests. Before the cameras, Carter projected calm and reaffirmed the U.S.–Iran alliance. Behind the scenes, the White House was quietly planning for the collapse of the Pahlavi monarchy.
In the weeks that followed, contingency planning gave way to quiet disengagement. Carter urged the Shah toward exile while opening secret channels to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, hoping to reach an accommodation with the exiled cleric. The double game backfired. The United States lost Iran, endured the longest hostage crisis in its history, and would go on to spend trillions of dollars fighting wars across the Middle East to protect oil routes and strategic interests. (RELATED: Jimmy Carter’s Iran)
As Iranians unwittingly traded progress for a brutal theocracy, Crown Prince Reza faded from view, seemingly consigned to history. (RELATED: The Prince and the Protests)
But now, to the frustration of the Islamic Republic, Pahlavi has reemerged as the most prominent opposition figure in exile. Regime mouthpieces in the West continue to criticize him, but developments inside the country tell a different story. (RELATED: Time to Stand With the People of Iran)
Reza Pahlavi’s name is being chanted across Iran, alongside the names and images of his father and grandfather, and other pre-Islamic Iranian symbols, including the Pahlavi-era flag. They are spray-painted on walls, raised at protests, and even tattooed onto bodies. Protesters chant “Javid Shah” (long live the Shah) and “This is the final battle, Pahlavi will return.” No other individual or faction commands a comparable level of visible support. (RELATED: It’s Now or Never in Iran)
Portions of the Western policy establishment have yet to catch up, or prefer not to. Some commentators criticize him, urging engagement with regime insiders instead. Such prescriptions, often framed as realism, reveal more about Western assumptions than about Iran’s political reality.
Yet again, the picture is clearer inside the country. Iranians are not only fed up with the Islamic Republic. They are increasingly explicit about what they want instead, and whom they are rallying behind. The reemergence of monarchist slogans, unthinkable just a few years ago, reflects not simple nostalgia, but hope after nearly half a century of clerical rule.
That collapse is economic, social, and political. People are battered by repression, corruption, and runaway inflation. In the resulting vacuum, many are searching for a unifying national figure: a secular modernizer with the stature to dismantle the theocratic system. For now, no name carries that weight like Pahlavi’s. (RELATED: The Objective Should Be a Secular and Moderate Iran)
His grandfather, Reza Shah, is remembered as the architect of modern Iran. When he came to power in 1921, the country was near disintegration. Over two decades, he built the foundations of a centralized state: the first public schools, the first university, a standing national army, a modern judiciary, and sharp curbs on clerical power. He abolished hereditary titles once auctioned by the Qajar kings, mandated surnames, and adopted the name “Pahlavi” in a deliberate nod to Iran’s pre-Islamic past. His social reforms included the emancipation of women and expanded access to higher education.
Forced from power after the joint Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941, Reza Shah chose not to resist militarily. Instead, he abdicated in favor of his son and went into exile, seeking to preserve the state he had built.
Because of that sacrifice, Iranians today remember Reza Shah as a nation-builder. In protest after protest, his name has returned to the streets: “Reza Shah, roh-at shad” (may your soul be at peace).
His successor, Mohammad Reza Shah, inherited a country of roughly 16 million people, where more than two-thirds of the population lived in rural areas under a feudal-esque system little changed for centuries, and over 85 percent of Iranians remained illiterate.
It took him some two decades to consolidate power and create a truly centralized modern state, but when he did, he resumed his father’s modernization project. Beginning in the 1960s, sweeping reforms dismantled feudal landholding, expanded women’s rights, and fueled the growth of a substantial middle class. By the 1970s, Iran had entered the ranks of the world’s top 20 economies.
“A tireless worker,” a U.S. ambassador observed, “the Shah invested virtually every waking moment in his country’s economic progress and security.” When, a decade later, in 1973, Iran’s oil revenues quadrupled in under three months, from $5 billion to nearly $20 billion, his immediate priority was education. He made schooling free through the eighth grade and extended free higher education to those entering public service.
In a private conversation with U.S. Ambassador William Sullivan in November 1978, the Shah addressed critics who questioned his resolve. He wanted them to know, he said, that he had “guts,” but also “a heart and a brain.” He would not “murder the youth of his nation in order to rule it.”
When the final crisis came in 1978–79, the Shah chose restraint. He liberalized, eased repression, and refused to unleash mass violence. It satisfied no one. He soon left the country.
Iran’s current ruler, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has shown no such restraint. In early January 2026, he presided over the deadliest crackdown on dissent the world has seen in the 21st century, intensifying a fury toward the clerical class that may ultimately consume not only the ruling elite, but the place of Islam itself in Iran’s public life.
Reza Pahlavi may never sit on the Peacock Throne, as he has said he does not seek it, but he has inherited something more durable: a name that, for tens of millions of Iranians, still signifies order, dignity, and the hope of a better future.
History, it seems, is not yet finished with the House of Pahlavi.
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