Why Are Iranians So Polarized Over the Pahlavis?

Few subjects divide Iranians today as quickly as the Pahlavis.

To some, the Pahlavi name represents an Iran that was modernizing, increasingly secular, internationally respected, economically ambitious, and socially more open. To others, it represents authoritarianism, inequality, corruption, political repression, and a ruling class disconnected from much of the population.

This divide has become even more visible around Reza Pahlavi. Some Iranians see him as a natural symbol of a post-Islamic Republic Iran; others react strongly against the very idea of restoring political importance to the Pahlavi name.

Why is the reaction so polarized?

Part of the answer may lie much deeper than today's opposition politics.

Iranian society was already deeply divided in its experience of the Pahlavi era.

The remarkable transformation of Iran during the 1960s and 1970s did not produce one shared experience of modernization. It produced very different experiences depending on where people lived, their economic position, education, occupation, and relationship to the rapidly changing urban culture.

In a sense, there were already two Irans.

The Iran That Was Rapidly Modernizing

There is no serious reason to deny the scale of Iran's transformation under Mohammad Reza Shah.

Oil revenues financed enormous public investment. Industry expanded. Infrastructure developed. Cities grew. Universities expanded. A professional and technical middle class emerged. Women gained new educational, professional, and legal opportunities. Iran became increasingly integrated into the international economy and pursued extraordinarily ambitious development programs [1,2].

For many urban middle- and upper-middle-class Iranians, modernization was not propaganda.

They lived it.

Their families moved into modern neighborhoods, attended universities, entered professional careers, traveled internationally, purchased automobiles and consumer goods, and participated in a society that appeared to be moving rapidly toward the developed world.

For these Iranians, the 1960s and 1970s could reasonably be remembered as decades of extraordinary progress.

That memory becomes even more understandable when viewed through what happened afterward.

The Islamic Republic brought political repression of its own, compulsory religious rules, restrictions on women, war, sanctions, economic instability, mass emigration, and decades of confrontation with much of the outside world.

For someone whose family experienced upward mobility and increasing social freedom before 1979, the contrast can be enormous.

Their nostalgia is therefore not necessarily invented.

They may be remembering the Iran they actually experienced.

But Another Iran Existed Beside It

The problem is that millions of other Iranians experienced the same modernization very differently.

Ervand Abrahamian describes the development strategy of the period as relying heavily on what amounted to a “trickle-down” model. Oil wealth flowed through the state and disproportionately toward politically connected elites and businesses, with the expectation that investment and economic expansion would eventually spread prosperity throughout society [2].

Much of the wealth remained concentrated near the top.

Iran already had severe inequality before the great oil boom, and the rapid economic expansion of the final decades of Pahlavi rule deepened important class and regional disparities [2,3].

The rural-urban divide was particularly striking. Historical development data show major differences between rural and urban household incomes, even as the country experienced extraordinarily rapid urbanization [1,4].

At the same time, migration was transforming Iranian cities.

Millions of people moved from villages and smaller communities toward urban centers during the decades preceding the Revolution. Tehran expanded particularly rapidly. Rural migrants arrived in cities expecting to participate in the new prosperity but frequently encountered inadequate housing, insecure employment, congestion, and rapidly rising living costs [2,4].

Informal settlements expanded around major cities.

So while one Iranian family might look around Tehran and see evidence that Iran was becoming a modern country, another family could look at precisely the same city and see spectacular wealth from which it remained excluded.

Both were observing something real.

When Prosperity Becomes Visible but Unequal

This distinction matters because political dissatisfaction is not produced by poverty alone.

It can also emerge from relative deprivation: the gap between what people believe should be possible and what they actually experience.

The oil boom made Iran's national wealth extraordinarily visible.

Luxury automobiles appeared on Tehran's streets. Modern buildings rose. Wealthy neighborhoods expanded. Foreign companies arrived. The state announced increasingly ambitious development projects.

But prosperity was distributed very unevenly.

Historical studies of Pahlavi-era social structure describe substantial disparities between urban and rural populations and among social classes [2,3].

Imagine the psychological effect.

The government tells you that your country is becoming enormously wealthy.

You can see the wealth.

You simply cannot participate in much of it.

The politically dangerous question becomes inevitable:

If Iran is becoming so rich, why am I still struggling?

Then Oil Money Accelerated Everything

After the dramatic rise in oil prices in 1973, Iran suddenly had access to financial resources far beyond what its economy could easily absorb.

Money could enter the economy much faster than housing, transportation, domestic production, skilled labor, and administrative capacity could expand.

The economy overheated.

Inflation accelerated. Housing costs increased. Shortages appeared. Infrastructure struggled to keep pace with urban growth. The government's attempt to compress decades of development into a few years created enormous economic and social pressures [5].

Andrew Scott Cooper, in The Fall of Heaven, describes how the oil boom simultaneously produced extraordinary wealth and serious economic distortions, contributing to a growing disconnect between the monarchy's ambitions and the daily experiences of many Iranians [5].

The problem was therefore not that Iran was failing to develop.

Paradoxically, some of the instability resulted from the extraordinary speed of development itself.

Economic systems can absorb only so much change at once.

Societies can too.

The Divide Was Cultural as Well as Economic

Something else was happening at the same time.

Parts of urban Iran were becoming increasingly secular, cosmopolitan, Western-oriented, and socially liberal.

For educated urban families, this could represent freedom and progress.

But imagine arriving from a traditional village into 1970s Tehran.

You might encounter not only extreme differences in wealth but a cultural environment fundamentally different from the society you knew.

The result was not simply economic exclusion.

It could become cultural alienation [6].

Modernization therefore divided Iranian society along several dimensions simultaneously: wealthy and poor, urban and rural, secular and religious, cosmopolitan and traditional, educated professionals and recent migrants.

These divisions overlapped, although never perfectly.

And then politics made the situation more dangerous.

Modernization Without Political Inclusion

Economic modernization was occurring much faster than political modernization.

Iran was producing more university graduates, professionals, managers, engineers, physicians, writers, and increasingly sophisticated urban citizens.

Yet meaningful political competition remained highly restricted.

The monarchy concentrated power, opposition groups were suppressed, SAVAK became a symbol of political repression, and in 1975 the Shah went even further by replacing the existing party structure with the single Rastakhiz Party [2].

This created another contradiction.

The state was helping produce a more educated, complex, modern society while maintaining a political system poorly designed to accommodate its growing diversity.

Economic expectations were rising.

Social expectations were rising.

Educational attainment was rising.

But channels for political participation remained narrow.

That combination can be unstable.

Persepolis Became a Perfect Symbol

Economic inequality becomes particularly powerful politically when it acquires symbols.

The 1971 celebration marking 2,500 years of Persian monarchy at Persepolis became one of them.

To supporters of the monarchy, the celebration represented something legitimate and even inspiring: Iran publicly reclaiming its ancient civilization and presenting itself as a rising international power.

To critics, its extravagance represented an elite celebrating itself while many Iranians still lacked adequate housing and public services [5].

Again, notice what happened.

The same event could mean national pride to one Iranian and elite arrogance to another.

Neither interpretation can be understood simply by looking at photographs of the celebration.

You have to know who was looking at them.

The Revolution Did Not Eliminate the Two Irans

Then came 1979.

The monarchy disappeared.

But the social memories did not.

And over the next four decades something extremely important happened: the Islamic Republic transformed how both groups remembered the Pahlavi era.

For many secular and middle-class Iranians, what followed made the previous era look progressively better.

Women lost freedoms they had previously exercised. Religious rules became compulsory. Political repression continued under a new ideology. Large numbers of Iranians emigrated. The country experienced war, sanctions, isolation, inflation, and repeated political crises.

A generation born after the Revolution began asking an understandable question:

What exactly did we overthrow?

Old photographs began circulating.

Women at universities.

Nightlife in Tehran.

Modern architecture.

International tourists.

Ski resorts.

Airlines flying around the world.

Young people dressed however they wanted.

For people living under the Islamic Republic, these images became extraordinarily powerful.

The Pahlavi era was no longer being compared with an imaginary ideal society.

It was being compared with the Islamic Republic.

That dramatically changed the comparison.

But Family Memory Works in Both Directions

Other families inherited a completely different history.

Their parents or grandparents remembered SAVAK.

They remembered political prisoners.

They remembered inequality.

They remembered poverty beside extraordinary wealth.

They remembered resentment toward the court.

They remembered being culturally marginalized by an elite that seemed increasingly distant from traditional Iranian society.

They may have opposed the Islamic Republic later—but that did not necessarily make them monarchists.

For these families, hearing younger Iranians describe the Shah's Iran as a lost paradise can seem almost incomprehensible.

They remember another Iran.

And here we arrive at perhaps the most important point:

Iranians today are not merely arguing about historical facts. They are often arguing from different inherited memories of the same country.

Social Media Has Turned Memory Into Competing Movies

Most Iranians arguing passionately about the 1970s today were either children at the time or were not yet born.

Their Pahlavi Iran is therefore reconstructed from family stories, political narratives, books, documentaries, photographs, and increasingly social media.

And photographs are particularly deceptive historical evidence.

A photograph of fashionable young women walking through Tehran in 1975 is real.

A photograph of a poor family living without adequate infrastructure is also real.

Show only the first photograph and you can construct one Iran.

Show only the second and you can construct another.

Neither photograph necessarily lies.

Selection creates the distortion.

For four decades, the Islamic Republic constructed its version of Pahlavi Iran around dictatorship, SAVAK, inequality, Western domination, and royal extravagance.

Today, parts of the opposition construct almost the exact photographic negative: social freedom, economic development, beautiful cities, international prestige, powerful armed forces, a strong currency, and women participating freely in public life.

Both narratives select evidence.

And social media algorithms reward precisely this kind of simplified history.

Nuance rarely goes viral.

This Helps Explain Reza Pahlavi

The intense reaction to Reza Pahlavi therefore becomes easier to understand.

He is not merely a contemporary opposition figure.

His surname activates almost half a century of unresolved historical memory.

To one Iranian, “Pahlavi” may represent a country stolen from them in 1979: secular, modernizing, outward-looking, and culturally freer.

To another, it may represent a political system Iran already rejected: centralized, unequal, and authoritarian.

And for many others, neither description is entirely satisfactory.

This is why discussions about Reza Pahlavi so quickly become emotional.

People believe they are debating one man.

Often they are actually debating two different memories of Iran.

Perhaps We Are Asking the Wrong Question

Was Pahlavi Iran modernizing?

Yes.

Was it developing economically and institutionally?

Yes.

Was there genuine social mobility and expansion of a modern middle class?

Yes.

Was it also deeply unequal?

Yes.

Did many Iranians remain economically marginalized?

Yes.

Was political participation severely restricted?

Yes.

Could modernization be liberating for one part of society while destabilizing or alienating another?

Absolutely.

None of these statements requires the others to be false.

In fact, their simultaneous truth helps explain one of the great historical puzzles of modern Iran:

How could a country experiencing such extraordinary modernization produce such an enormous revolution?

Perhaps because there was never one Pahlavi Iran.

There were several.

And Iranians inherited different ones.

That may also explain why, almost half a century after the monarchy disappeared, merely saying the name “Pahlavi” can still divide a room.

The question we usually ask is:

Was Iran better under the Shah?

But historically, that may be the wrong question.

A much more revealing question is:

Better for whom?

And perhaps one more:

Compared with what?

The first question helps us understand 1979.

The second helps us understand why the Pahlavis have returned so powerfully to Iranian political debate today.

References

[1] World Bank. Iran: Current Economic Position and Prospects. Washington, DC: World Bank; 1971.

[2] Abrahamian E. A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 2008.

[3] Encyclopaedia Iranica. “Class System vi. Classes in the Pahlavi Period.” Discussion of class structure, income distribution, and social transformation during the Pahlavi period.

[4] World Bank. World Development Report 2009: Reshaping Economic Geography. Washington, DC: World Bank; 2009. Historical data and discussion concerning Iranian urbanization and rural-urban disparities.

[5] Cooper AS. The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran. New York: Henry Holt and Company; 2016.

[6] The Political History of Modern Iran. Sections addressing the economic boom, income distribution, rural-to-urban migration, and cultural alienation during the 1970s.