The Pahlavi century and after

In 1921 Reza Khan, an officer of the Persian Cossack Brigade, took part in a coup in Tehran. He became minister of war and then prime minister, and in 1925 the Majles deposed the Qajars and made him shah. He took the dynastic name Pahlavi, the name of the Middle Persian language of the pre-Islamic era. Reza Shah built a centralised state at speed. The Trans-Iranian Railway, completed in 1938, linked the Caspian Sea to the Persian Gulf through the Alborz and Zagros mountains. The University of Tehran opened in 1934. In 1935 the government asked foreign states to call the country Iran, the name Iranians themselves used, rather than Persia. Many reforms were imposed from above, among them a 1936 decree banning the veil in public. In 1941 British and Soviet forces occupied Iran, and Reza Shah abdicated in favour of his son, Mohammad Reza.

Oil and the second shah

Oil had been struck in Khuzestan in 1908, and control of it became the central political question of the next reign. In 1951 parliament nationalised the industry, then run by the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, and Mohammad Mosaddegh, its leading advocate, became prime minister. In 1953 he was overthrown in a coup backed by the United States and Britain. The shah's power grew in the decades that followed. His White Revolution of 1963 included land reform and votes for women, and his government faced growing opposition from both religious and secular groups.

The century's cultural story is as striking as its politics. In 1922 Nima Yushij composed 'Afsaneh' ('Myth'), and went on to loosen the classical rules of rhyme and metre, founding she'r-e now, 'new poetry'. Sadegh Hedayat's novel The Blind Owl (Buf-e Kur), first printed in Bombay in the 1930s, is widely regarded as the masterpiece of modern Persian fiction. Forough Farrokhzad wrote frank, personal poems in a woman's voice, and in 1962 made The House Is Black, a short film about a leper colony near Tabriz, now seen as a landmark of Iranian cinema.

Tehran grew into a sprawling modern capital. The Shahyad Tower, now the Azadi Tower, was completed in 1971, the year of a lavish celebration at Persepolis marking 2,500 years of Iranian monarchy. The Shiraz Arts Festival, held each year from 1967 to 1977, brought avant-garde performers from around the world to the city and its ruins, and the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art opened in 1977. In 1978 mass protests spread across the country. The shah left Iran in January 1979, and after a referendum that spring the country became the Islamic Republic of Iran, which has governed it since.