I. The Problem of Self-Censorship as Epistemological Collapse

The Iranian historian who writes under the shadow of Western authority does not merely produce bad scholarship; he produces a form of intellectual surrender that replicates the very colonial subordination he pretends merely to describe. Shapour Suren-Pahlav opens his account of the eightieth anniversary of the expulsion of the British militia from Iran with an observation that must be sharpened rather than merely noted (Suren-Pahlav, 2001, updated 2010). The problem is not "blind imitation" of foreign historians, as if this were a matter of academic naivety or insufficient rigour. It is the internalisation of a hierarchy in which the Iranian voice is structurally permitted only to confirm, never to originate, and never to accuse.

 

When Iranian historians retreat at the slightest expression of disagreement from Western colleagues, when they apologise for expressing their own views, when they avoid the suffix "the Great" for Cyrus but apply it to Alexander of Macedon, they are not making stylistic errors. They are performing the ritual of submission that colonial power requires of its periphery (Suren-Pahlav, 2013). And this performance has been so thoroughly naturalised that it now operates as common sense, as professionalism, as the very condition of being taken seriously.

 

This argument proceeds from a position that will not be obscured: the contemporary historiography of Iran's twentieth century, particularly the period of Reza Shah's rise and rule, has been structured by a double operation of erasure. First, the British and Russian empires wrote the initial drafts, encoding their own territorial ambitions as the natural order of great power competition. Second, successive generations of Iranian historians, whether through fear, careerism, or genuine epistemological capture, reproduced these drafts as if they were neutral records. What appears as scholarship is, on closer inspection, the continuation of colonial administration by other means. And what appears as the "controversial" legacy of Reza Shah is, in fact, the site of a suppressed truth: that between the collapse of the Qajar regime and the forced abdication of 1941, an Iranian commander did what no Qajar had done, what no Islamic regime has done, and what the present clerical regime is actively undoing. He expelled a foreign occupying army, annulled a colonial treaty, and prevented the formal partition of Iran into a British colony named "South Persia."

 

This cannot be sustained as a neutral claim. It must be named for what it is: the recovery of a national liberation struggle that has been systematically minimised, relativised, or reframed as authoritarian overreach by a historiography that prefers the comfortable fictions of Qajar incompetence and Pahlavi tyranny to the uncomfortable fact of anti-colonial action.

 

 

II. The Great Game as the Long Partition: From Central Asia to the Saint Petersburg Treaty

The diplomatic history of Iran's dismemberment is not a story of gradual border adjustments or the natural evolution of state boundaries. It is the story of a protracted surgical operation performed on a living body, conducted by two empires that understood the Iranian plateau as a prey animal to be divided. The formal opening of this operation can be dated to 12 January 1830, when the British and Tsarist Russian empires commenced what they called "the Great Game" (Wynn, 2003). But this naming is itself a form of ideological camouflage. To call imperial competition a "game" is to domesticate violence, to aestheticise predation, and to erase the people whose lands were the board and whose lives were the counters. The Great Game was not a game; it was the progressive dismemberment of a civilisation.

 

The Pamir Treaty of 10 September 1895 formalised what decades of military pressure and diplomatic coercion had already achieved: the separation of Iranian lands in Central Asia, including what is today Afghanistan and the Pakistani province of Balochistan, from Iran (Wynn, 2003). The Qajar regime, by this point, had ceased to function as a state capable of defending its borders. It had become a transmission belt for foreign demands, a courtly apparatus that survived by administering its own obsolescence. But even this was insufficient for British imperial strategy. The fear that Russia might reach the Persian Gulf, that Russian influence might threaten India, and that the East India Company's interests might be jeopardised, drove the British to propose a formal partition of the remainder of Iran (Hurewitz, 1975-79). The Treaty of Saint Petersburg, concluded on 31 August 1907, divided Iran into a Russian sphere in the north, a British sphere in the south-east (including Sistan, Balochistan, and parts of Kerman and Hormozgan), and a neutral zone in the centre and south-west (Olson, 1984; Skrine, 1962).

 

This is not a treaty; it is an autopsy performed on a still-living patient. The Saint Petersburg agreement did not recognise pre-existing realities; it produced new ones. It declared that the north belonged to Russia, the south-east to Britain, and the centre to no one in particular, thereby inviting further penetration. And the discovery of oil at Masjed Soleyman on 26 May 1908, which lay in the neutral zone, transformed British interest into British obsession. The founding of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company in London, with its deliberately deceptive Persian translation as the "Iran and England Oil Company," was not a commercial venture. It was the incorporation of Iranian sovereignty into a British corporate form. The small share granted to Iran was not a concession; it was a bribe designed to legitimise a theft.

 

 

III. The South Persia Rifles: Occupation Disguised as Policing

The British government's dispatch of Brigadier Percy Sykes to Iran on 16 March 1916 (Ward, 2009a) must be understood as the arrival of a colonial governor, not a security consultant. The "South Persia Rifles" militia, assembled one year before Sykes's arrival (The National Archives, 1912), was a modern, well-equipped force of eight thousand British and Indian officers (Sykes, 1921), supplemented by Iranian mercenaries. Its bases in Bandar Abbas, Shiraz, Isfahan and Kerman were not police stations; they were garrison posts of an army of occupation. But the British, in a gesture of propaganda that has proven remarkably durable, falsely translated "South Persia Rifles" as Polise-e Jonub (the Police of South), claiming that this was a force operating to establish order and security.

 

This translation is not a harmless linguistic choice; it is a weapon. To call an occupying army a police force is to perform a discursive operation that transforms invasion into assistance, coercion into consent, and colonial administration into public service. And the fact that this false name is still used by the Iranian nation nearly a century later, as Suren-Pahlav observes, is not a matter of linguistic inertia. It is evidence of the success of British propaganda and the depth of what he calls "herd mentality" among Iranian historians who have reproduced the term without interrogation.

 

The Qajar regime's recognition of the British occupying force a few months after Sykes's arrival (Ward, 2009b) and the signing of the 1919 treaty by Vosough al-Dowleh and several Qajar princes, who received a bribe of 400,000 tomans, are not merely acts of collaboration. They are acts of treason against the territorial integrity of Iran. And the opposition to this treason came not from the Qajar court, not from the constitutionalists who had been co-opted, and certainly not from the figure of Mosaddeq al-Saltaneh (later known as Dr Mosaddeq), who as governor of Fars province defended the British occupying forces, insulted the Tangestani resistance fighters as "troublemakers," and collaborated with the British in suppressing one of Iran's greatest national movements against colonialism (Suren-Pahlav, 2002). Mosaddeq's own words, reveal a governor who understood perfectly well that the British wished to punish the Tangestanis, who admitted that some Tangestanis had committed "troublemaking" and "banditry," but who framed his intervention not as opposition to British occupation but as tactical advice on how to avoid turning the Tangestanis into "martyrs and patriots" (Suren-Pahlav, 2002).

 

This is not a defence of Iranian national interest; it is the performance of collaboration as statesmanship. Rais Ali Delvari, assassinated on 2 September 1915 at the age of thirty-three by a fellow fighter who received payment from the British, did not die in a random act of violence. He was murdered by the coordinated action of British intelligence and Qajar collaboration. And this murder must be named for what it was: the elimination of anti-colonial resistance by a regime that had placed itself in the service of an external force.

 

 

IV. The Cairo Conference and the Blueprint for South Persia

The British government's convening of a meeting in Cairo on 12 March 1921, at which Winston Churchill as Secretary of State for the Colonies announced the creation of several new British colonial states including Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Jordan (Fromkin, 1989), is not a footnote to the history of the region. It is the moment at which the partition of the Ottoman Empire and the partition of Iran converged into a single project. The presence at that meeting of Percy Sykes, T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and Gertrude Bell, all prominent officers of British intelligence and experts on Iran and the Arab world, confirms that the creation of "South Persia" as a British colony was not a speculation but an operational blueprint. The fact that the majority of the documents and discussions of the Cairo Conference remain classified as top secret is not evidence of routine bureaucratic procedure. It is evidence that the British government knows that what it planned in 1921 would not withstand the light of public disclosure.

 

The British assumption that they had successfully built for themselves a new colony named "South Persia" was reasonable given the trajectory of Qajar rule. The regime had already ceded effective control of the south, had recognised the British occupying force, had signed away the remaining fragments of sovereignty in the 1919 treaty, and had demonstrated no capacity for military or political resistance. By March 1921, the only remaining question was not whether southern Iran would become a British colony, but when the formalities would be completed. And then Reza Shah intervened.

 

 

V. 4 June 1921: The Expulsion That Reunified Iran

The coup of 22 February 1921, which brought Sardar Sepah (later Reza Shah the Great) to power, is conventionally narrated as a military seizure that ended the Qajar dynasty and inaugurated the Pahlavi period. This narration, while factually correct, misses the decisive political content of the event. Reza Shah did not merely replace one ruling family with another; he inherited a state that had been partitioned de facto and was about to be partitioned de jure. The 1919 treaty, which effectively sold the southern half of Iran to Britain, was still in force. The South Persia Rifles militia was still occupying Iranian territory. Percy Sykes was still commanding British and Indian officers on Iranian soil. And the Cairo Conference had just announced the creation of new colonial states, with "South Persia" understood as the next item on the agenda.

 

Reza Shah's unilateral annulment of the 1919 treaty on 4 June 1921, over the fierce opposition of Zia ul-Din Tabatabaee, was not a diplomatic gesture. It was a declaration of war against the colonial order. And his expulsion of Percy Sykes together with the South Persia Rifles militia and all British and Indian officers from Iran in December 1921 was not a military operation; it was the surgical removal of a colonial tumour that had been growing for decades. The British plan for the formal partition of Iran did not fail because of changing international circumstances or shifting imperial priorities. It failed because an Iranian commander did what no Qajar had done: he said no and enforced that no with force.

 

The consequences of this expulsion extended beyond the south. The northern part of Iran, while formally within the Russian sphere, had been destabilised by Tsarist Russian forces that refused to return to Russia after the Bolshevik victory. The British government, in a characteristically cynical manoeuvre, had hired these Russians and their Iranian mercenaries, not only to divert public opinion away from Britain's partition of the south but also to allow separatist ideas to spread to other parts of Iran. The expulsion of Sykes and the British militia cut off the salaries of these Russian mercenaries, thereby paving the way for Reza Shah to liberate the northern part of the country from their control. The day of 4 June 1921, therefore, is not merely the date of a treaty annulment. It is the day on which the first stone was laid for the reunification of Iran after decades of partition and occupation.

 

 

VI. The Quantitative Restoration: What Was Saved and What Was Lost

The Qajar regime, over 127 years of rule (or 131 years by the official count), presided over the reduction of Iran's area from approximately four million square kilometres to below six hundred thousand square kilometres. This is not a matter of natural border evolution or the inevitable outcome of great power pressure. It is the record of a regime that lacked the capacity, the will, and perhaps the interest to defend the territorial integrity of the country it nominally governed. The Qajars themselves, as Suren-Pahlav notes, are of Mongol origin, belonging to the Ghaz (Oghuz) tribal confederation and brought to the region with the army of Genghis Khan (Pirnia, 1985). This is not offered as a racial judgment but as a historical fact about the composition of a ruling house that never fully integrated into Iranian political culture and never developed the national project that a dynasty claiming to rule Iran would be expected to pursue.

 

With the emergence of Sardar Sepah, over one million square kilometres of lost lands and waters were restored to Iran, including sovereignty over the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf. The restoration of the three islands of Gap Sabzu/Bumusu (falsely renamed "Abu Musa" by Britain), Greater Tonb, and Lesser Tonb by Mohammad Reza Shah brought the total area of Iran to one million six hundred and forty-eight thousand square kilometres. This is not a minor adjustment; it is the recovery of more territory than the present area of France and Germany combined.

 

And the claim that Suren-Pahlav advances, that if the Imperial government had not been overthrown in 1979 by Britain, America and Israel (Suren-Pahlav, 2010), Iran would today be witnessing the return of other lost lands including Sistan of Afghanistan and Nakhchivan and the Republic of Baku, must be taken seriously rather than dismissed as monarchist nostalgia. The logic is straightforward: a regime that had demonstrated the capacity to restore territory through a combination of military force and diplomatic negotiation, and that had established a precedent of annulling colonial treaties, would have continued to press claims that the Qajars had abandoned. The Islamic regime, by contrast, has not only failed to restore any lost territory but has presided over a continuous erosion of Iranian sovereignty through its subordination to foreign powers, its inability to defend its borders, and its active collaboration with the very forces of fragmentation that Reza Shah defeated.

 

 

VII. Al-Ahwazi and the Return of the South Persia Plan

The Arab terrorist groups in Iran that call themselves "Al-Ahwazi" and seek to separate the gas- and oil-rich lands comprising Khuzestan, Bushehr, Lorestan, Ilam, Kohgiluyeh and Boyer-Ahmad, and parts of Kermanshah, Kurdistan, Hamadan, Markazi, Qom, Isfahan, Chaharmahal and Bakhtiari, Fars, and Hormozgan, are not spontaneous expressions of ethnic grievance. They are precisely seeking the separation of those same parts of Iran that Britain had under occupation in 1908 and for which it nurtured the plan to create the country of "South Persia." As Suren-Pahlav argues, this cannot be coincidental. The main brain behind these groups is a British national, a member of those same think tanks that played a role in the overthrow of the Imperial government in 1979 (Suren-Pahlav, 2010).

 

This is not a conspiracy theory; it is a continuity of personnel and doctrine that can be traced through declassified documents, open-source intelligence, and the observable behaviour of the groups themselves. The argument that the overthrow of the Imperial government and the installation of the fundamentalist Islamic regime, which Suren-Pahlav accurately characterises as resembling the incompetence and abjectness of the Qajar regime, is in line with reviving and ultimately implementing that same hundred-year plan that was thwarted by Reza Shah the Great, is not speculation. It is the only explanation that accounts for the convergence of interests between the Islamic regime's catastrophic governance and the long-term strategic objectives of British expansionism.

 

The Islamic regime, which Suren-Pahlav names a "Neo-Qajar" regime, has presided over the same combination of foreign subordination, internal fragmentation, and incapacity for national defence that characterised the Qajar period. The indifference and silence of Iranians towards the crimes and betrayals that the regime has inflicted over the past forty-five years, and their love for foreigners including Arabs, the West, and Russia, is not a matter of popular will. It is the result of a systematic education in dependency, a political economy that privileges foreign alliances over national development, and a cultural production that has systematically delegitimised the very idea of Iranian sovereignty. The conclusion that not only will Britain finally realise its long-cherished desire for the partition of Iran, but that Iran will become "Iranistan" (balkanised Iran), is not pessimism. It is a diagnosis of a trajectory that remains in motion unless interrupted.

 

 

VIII. The Revenge: Abdication as Colonial Retribution

The forced abdication of Reza Shah following the Anglo-Soviet invasion of Iran in 1941 must be understood as an act of colonial revenge. Basil Nikitin, the Russian consul in Iran at the time, described the abdication as "a kind of revenge of British diplomacy, because this diplomacy repeatedly encountered failure during the 20-year reign of Reza Shah". The British did not invade Iran in 1941 because Reza Shah was a Nazi sympathiser, a claim that has been thoroughly debunked by the documentary record. They invaded because Reza Shah had done what no Iranian sovereign had done before and what no Iranian sovereign has done since: he had expelled a British occupying army, annulled a colonial treaty, and prevented the partition of the country. The invasion of 1941 and the forced abdication that followed were not responses to wartime necessity; they were the settling of accounts.

 

And the Islamic regime, which came to power in 1979 with the active support of British and American intelligence (Suren-Pahlav, 2010), has completed the work that Reza Shah interrupted. The Al-Ahwazi separatists operate with imprecision. The Iranian state cannot defend its borders against foreign incursions. The economy is structured to serve foreign interests. And the ruling clerics have systematically dismantled the institutions of national sovereignty that Reza Shah built, replacing them with a theocratic apparatus that derives its legitimacy from a foreign (Arab) religious tradition and its material base from foreign (Western and Russian) patronage. The distinction between the Qajar regime and the Islamic regime collapses upon inspection into a single pattern: foreign-dominated, internally fragmented, incapable of national defence, and actively collaborating with the forces of partition.

 

This is not a comparison; it is an identification. The Islamic regime is the Qajar regime with a clerical costume. And the prognosis is the same: disintegration, balkanisation, and the final realisation of the South Persia plan that Reza Shah defeated in 1921.

 

 

IX. The Unfinished War

The expulsion of the British militia from Iran in December 1921 was not the end of a war; it was the opening of a war that remains unfinished. Reza Shah's achievement was to have restored Iranian sovereignty over approximately one million square kilometres of lost territory, to have annulled a colonial treaty, and to have expelled an occupying army. But the forces that he defeated did not disappear; they regrouped, waited, and eventually found collaborators within Iran who were willing to complete the work that the Qajars had left unfinished. The Islamic regime is the vehicle for that completion.

 

The present moment, therefore, presents the Iranian diaspora, political activists, and journalists with a choice that cannot be evaded. The choice is not between the Islamic regime and a return to the Pahlavi monarchy, a political formation that cannot be restored and whose historical limitations must be acknowledged. The choice is between understanding the continuity of the colonial project from the Qajar period through the Islamic regime, and continuing to reproduce the false binaries that have kept Iranian political thought trapped in a cycle of defeat. The choice is between naming the Islamic regime as a Neo-Qajar regime that is actively dismembering the country, and pretending that it is a legitimate government whose failures are merely administrative or economic. And the choice is between recovering the anti-colonial tradition that Reza Shah embodied in its specific historical form, and abandoning that tradition to the historians who have buried it under layers of Western-derived critique.

 

This argument does not demand uncritical admiration of Reza Shah. It demands that the expulsion of the British militia and the prevention of Iran's disintegration be recognised for what they were: acts of national liberation that remain unprecedented in the modern history of Iran. And it demands that the present regime be recognised for what it is: the instrument through which the colonial partition of Iran, interrupted in 1921, is being resumed. The indictment is not optional. Where the evidence and the argument justify it, the indictment must be spoken.

 

 

References:

• Fromkin, D. (1989) A Peace to End All Peace. New York: Henry Holt, pp. 502-503.

• Hurewitz, J.C. (ed.) (1975-79) The Middle East and North Africa in World Affairs: A Documentary. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, Vol. 1, pp. 538-541.

• Olson, W.J. (1984) Anglo-Iranian Relations during World War I. London: Routledge, pp. 14-20.

• Pirnia, H. (1985) Tarikh-e Iran, az Aghaz ta Enqeraz-e Qajarieh [History of Iran, from the Beginning to the Extinction of the Qajars], ed. by A. Eqbal Ashtiani. Tehran, p. 754.

• The National Archives (1917) South Persia Rifles (Administration Officers), Vol. 28, FO 248/1186. Kew: The National Archives. Available at: http://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/SearchUI/Details?uri=C3615689 (Accessed: 2 June 2001).

• Skrine, C. (1962) World War in Iran. London: Constable, pp. 25-26.

• Sykes, P.M. (1921) A History of Persia. London, Vol. 2, pp. 452-453.

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2002) ‘Mosaddeq and the Politics of Historical Amnesia in Modern Iran: Rethinking the Alleged 1953 Coup’, suren-pahlav.com (12 June). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/mosaddeq-and-the-politics-of-historical-amnesia-in-modern-iran-rethinking-the-alleged-1953-coup.html (Accessed: 10 June 2014).

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2010) ‘Mullahs, the West and Zionism: The Diabolical Triangular Project for the Balkanisation of Iran’, suren-pahlav.com (12 February). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/mullahs-west-zionism-diabolical-triangular-project-for-the-balkanisation-of-iran.html (Accessed: 10 June 2014).

• Suren-Pahlav, S. (2013) ‘The Omission of the Title 'The Great' from 'Cyrus the Great' by Eurocentrists, Iranophobes, and Traitors’, suren-pahlav.com (23 March). Available at: https://www.suren-pahlav.com/en/the-omission-of-the-title-the-great-from-cyrus-the-great-name.html (Accessed: 10 June 2014).

• Ward, S.R. (2009a) Immortal: A Military History of Iran and its Armed Forces. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, p. 209.

• Ward, S.R. (2009b) Immortal: A Military History of Iran and its Armed Forces. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, p. 119.

• Wynn, A. (2003) Persia in the Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes: Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy. London: John Murray, pp. 270-289.