Reza Afshar

Reza Afshar
Personal details
Born	October 10, 1887 Urmia, Iran
Died	February 05, 1964
Resting place	Emamzadeh Abdullah, Rey
Nationality	Iranian
Spouse(s)	Sariyeh Azarbegui
Education	American Memorial School of Urmia; Traditional schooling, Arabic and Islamic studies; American College of Tehran; Wooster College, Ohio; Valparaiso University, Indiana; and Columbia University, New York

Reza Afshar (Persian: رضا افشار) (10 October 1887 - 5 February 1964), also known as Mirza Reza Khan Afshar, was an Iranian statesman during the Pahlavi era. In 1915, he helped Hasan Taqizadeh form the Nationalist Iranian Committee in Berlin. In 1922, he served as deputy to Arthur C. Millspaugh, Iran’s Administrator of Finance. He was elected to the Majles as the first deputy from Urmia in 1922 and subsequently appointed minister of roads and transportation and governor of Gilan, Kerman, and Esfahan. In 1944, he co-founded Iranian Airways (Iran Air), the first commercial airline in the country, and served as chairman and CEO until 1962, when it was nationalized.

Background and Education

Reza Afshar was born in Urmia (later Rezaieh) in Iranian Azerbaijan on 10 October 1887. His mother hailed from the Afshar tribe, the name he ultimately adopted for himself. His father Mirza Shafiʿ Khan, Mosteshar ol-Molk, a landowner and government functionary, came from the Qarib clan in Garakan near Ashtian; he was the son of Mirza Hasan Khan Ashtiani and the nephew and son-in-law of Mirza Nasrollah Khan Mostofi (“Chancellor”), a descendant of Lotf Ali Khan Zand. As recorded in Tarikh-e Beyhaqi, the Qarib ancestry traces back to Hajeb Ali Qarib, also called Khīshavand in Persian, a “relative” of Sultan Mahmoud Ghaznavi and commander-in-chief of his army in the 11th c. The Qaribs migrated to central Iran in the 13th c. In the process, some adopted the name Mostofi after their generational profession, and others Ashtiani after the town where they had settled.

Reza Afshar attended the American Memorial School of Urmia and pursued Arabic and Islamic studies under Sheikh Jalil Adib ul-Ulama. He graduated from the American College of Tehran (Alborz) and pursued his studies in the United States in 1909. Afshar attended Wooster College in Ohio and Valparaiso University in Indiana before enrolling at Columbia University in New York, where he shifted his field from medicine to political economy and public finance.

In New York, he reconnected with the exiled Iranian constitutionalist Seyyed Hasan Taqizadeh. Both moved into the summer house of the Iranian Chargé d’Affaires Ali-Qoli Khan Nabil ed-Dowleh and his American wife in the Catskills where Afshar tutored his host’s children in Persian. A staunch nationalist, Afshar also published articles in the New York American decrying imperialism, beginning with a response to an Assyrian from Urmia who had expressed support for the brutal 1911 Tsarist campaign in Azerbaijan.

Political Activism: Berlin

Afshar’s criticisms, especially of the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention that had divided Iran into spheres of influence, attracted the attention of the German embassy in New York. When World War I erupted in 1914, he was approached by the German consul and, following meetings with Ambassador Count Johann von Bernstorff and naval attaché Karl Boy-Ed, agreed to travel to Berlin together with Taqizadeh to support Germany’s war efforts to help drive the Anglo-Russian occupiers from Persia.

On 31 December 1914, funded by the German Foreign Office, Afshar and Taqizadeh sailed from New York to Rotterdam en route to Berlin. Among the passengers were sixty German nationals traveling under Persian passports issued by the Honorary Consul to avoid British scrutiny.

Upon arrival, Afshar and Taqizadeh were assigned by their German sponsors to facilitate the movement of Muslim and Hindu prisoners of war through Iran to instigate rebellion against British rule in India. They declined, arguing that the task did not align with the interests of Persia, and instead proposed forming an organization similar to the Berlin Indian Independence Committee. The Germans agreed and further pledged to recognize Persia’s territorial integrity in the event of victory in war.

Afshar traveled to Geneva and recruited Ebrahim Pourdavoud, Hossein Kazemzadeh Iranshahr, Mohammad-Ali Jamalzadeh, and other Iranian intellectuals living in exile in Europe, while Taqizadeh invited others. The Iranian National Independence Committee was thus formed in 1915. His next task was to engage other Axis powers on behalf of Persia.

Afshar went to Vienna, where he secured Austria’s commitment to Persia’s independence, then met with Enver Pasha in Istanbul and compelled him to recognize Persia as a sovereign nation detached from Ottoman Pan-Islamism. He also obtained a pledge that news of Azerbaijan would henceforth be reported in the press under Persia, not the Ottoman Empire.

Political Activism: Tehran and Gilan

Reza Afshar next headed to the seat of Hossein-Qoli Nezam ol-Saltaneh Mafi’s Provisional Government in Kermanshah. Near Qasr-e Shirin, the Ottoman commander Rauf Orbay captured Afshar, accused him of being an Armenian spy, confiscated his belongings, jailed, and sentenced him to be hanged the next day. But he escaped and after returning to Baghdad and lodging a complaint against his treatment by the Ottomans, returned to Kermanshah where his belongings were restored to him. By late 1915, he reached Tehran and submitted the Central Powers’ formal pledges to Prime Minister Mostowfi ol-Mamalek. He then left for Azerbaijan to manage family lands and, in 1916, married Sariyeh Azarbegui.

In 1919, Afshar joined the nationalist Jangali militia formed by Mirza Kouchak Khan in Gilan in 1915 to resist Tsarist and British armies, and became their financial officer. After the 1917 Russian Revolution, however, Mirza’s chief allies Haydar Khan Amoqli and Ehsanollah Khan became doctrinaire communists and he himself, though a devout Muslim, grew increasingly beholden to the Kremlin. In early 1920, Afshar and Mirza participated in a meeting in which the central government offered to recognize Kouchak Khan’s autonomy in Gilan, provided he cut his ties with the Bolsheviks. When Mirza rejected the offer, Afshar broke with him and left the movement, becoming “a target of Russian terror” where they spread a rumor that he had fled Gilan with Jangali funds.

In May 1920, Kouchak Khan established the Iranian Soviet Socialist Republic in Gilan. The movement soon ruptured into an internecine fight when the Red Army spread a rumor that Haydar Amoqli had fled Baku with stolen Russian jewels and was heading for Gilan. Mirza suspected a coup, and on 29 Sept 1921, set the building where Haydar Amogli and his group had assembled for a meeting on fire. Ehsanollah Khan reacted by storming Mirza’s militia. By late 1921, the Persian Cossack Brigade led by Reza Khan routed and dispersed the surviving Jangalis. Kouchak Khan, isolated, fled into the snow-capped mountains where, on December 2, he froze to death.

The Russian rumors against Afshar were echoed and embellished in print, starting with a book by the British spy Ardeshir Ji Reporter, who also falsely labeled him a Baha’i. Another source, the controversial memoir of the SAVAK chief Hossein Fardoust, edited by Abdollah Shahbazi, adds that after leaving Gilan, Afshar went to the U.S. and became a carpet merchant; In fact, Afshar went to Tehran, where he helped Ali-Akbar Davar form the Radical Party, which advocated for modernization, centralization, and legal reforms, and became its leader. Other historians, such as Ebrahim Fakhra’i and Cosroe Chaqueri repeated the rumors, without any evidence. Janet Afary notes that in the incohesive Jangali historiography, all such statements “reflect the political sentiments and ideological allegiances of the historians themselves.”

Public Service

In November 1922, Afshar was introduced by the War Minister Reza Khan (later, Reza Shah) to Arthur C. Millspaugh, Iran’s new Administrator of Finance, who hired him as his chief interpreter and deputy. In 1923, he was elected to the fifth Majles as the first deputy from Urmia and again in the next two elections. In the seventh, he was appointed deputy of the parliament in the Constitutional Assembly that on 15 December 1925 abolished the Qajar dynasty and installed Reza Shah Pahlavi as monarch. Afshar supported the Shah’s centralization agenda and brought bills to the floor that included establishing Persian as a state language to promote solidarity across the country’s diverse tribal and multi-ethnic populations.

In 1926, Reza Afshar became the chancellor and, later, governor of Gilan and, in 1930, governor of Kerman. In February 1932, Prime Minister Medi-Qoli Hedayat appointed him minister of roads but in July, asked him to serve as governor of Esfahan. Afshar played a transformative role in the industrial development of Esfahan, particularly in the textile industry, and improved infrastructure, healthcare, and social services. His next major initiative, which was to direct water from Kuhrang to Zayanderud to allow exponential growth in the region, collided with British shipping interests in Karun River. To preclude its implementation, Afshar was summoned to Tehran in January 1936 and imprisoned without cause. In May, he was charged with a 320 Tomans petty bribery backdated to 1932, a device commonly used to remove high-ranking political opponents, among them, Tadayyon, Teymourtash, Firouz Mirza, and Ali Soheili. Following his conviction, Afshar was suspended from government service for life. He abandoned politics and amassed considerable wealth by cultivating his lands in Azerbaijan.

In 1944, the communist Tudeh Party of Iran, then at the height of its power, had engineered turmoil and a workers' strike in Esfahan. Prime Minister Mohammad Saʿed appointed Afshar governor of the province. Afshar quelled the unrest but the Majles deputy from Tehran, Gholam-Ali Farivar, contested the appointment citing Afshar’s prior suspension. Farivar was a member of the central committee of the Comrades Party, which was founded in 1942 by the deputy director of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company Mostafa Fateh whose newspaper, Mardom, was an organ of the Tudeh Party. Fateh also headed the Anti-Fascist Society, a British-Tudeh Party cooperative set up to serve their mutual interests, in this case, to block Afshar’s governorship of Esfahan. In the discussions that followed, Saʿed defended his decision and reiterated that the citizens of Esfahan had petitioned Afshar’s appointment. Other officials, including Minister of Justice Sheikh Asadullah Mameqani and jurist Seyyed Ahmad Shariatzadeh argued that Afshar’s prior suspension had been illegal and that he had also served time. But the British-Tudeh alliance in the Majles prevailed, and Afshar was ultimately barred from serving.

In 1955, Afshar was elected as a deputy from Tabriz and appointed to serve on the Oil Consortium Committee. On May 5, as recorded in the minutes of the 117th Majles session, he took the opportunity to set his record straight and pointed out the British conspiracy that had led to his 1936 conviction.

Private Enterprise

In December 1944, Reza Afshar co-founded Iranian Airways, the first commercial airline in Iran. The private company was formed with an investment of fifty million Rials by twenty individuals and registered with the International Air Transport Association (IATA) under the name Iran Air. Afshar served as board chairman, Gholam-Hossein Ebtehaj as executive director, Afshar’s oldest son Houshang Afshar as VP Technical Operations, and Houshang Tajaddod as VP Administration. Afshar who by 1949 took 70% ownership of Iran Air was also a founding partner of Irantour, the first Iranian travel and tour agency.

Afshar contracted Trans World Airlines (TWA) to conduct operations and began training Iranian co-pilots and other staff under Captain John Waterman. In 1946, Iran Air launched its domestic flights, and in early 1947 added service to the Middle East and Europe. In 1954, Afshar dismissed Ebtehaj who had unilaterally replaced TWA with the French CGT and took on the CEO role himself. He contracted American Transocean Airlines to train Iranian pilots and supporting services. In 1956, fully staffed by Iranians, Iran Air moved its operations and seventeen aircraft—Douglas DC-3, DC-4, DC-6, DC-6B, and 4-engined turboprop British Vickers Viscounts—to the new facilities at Mehrabad Airport.

Iranian Airways Nationalized

In 1960, the Iranian government proposed to merge Iranian Airways with Pars Air, a small airline headed by Princess Ashraf’s husband Ahmad Shafiq that flew rental cargo planes and had no aircraft or property of its own. Afshar declined the merger as inequitable. On January 20, 1962, Prime Minister Ali Amini sent a confidential draft letter to the Ministry of Roads in which he proposed the state purchase 49% of Iranian Airways. The finalized version allocated 50% of the shares to the government, 20% each to Iran Air and Pars, and the remaining 10% to the public. Afshar rejected the terms, after which the state moved to nationalize Iranian Airways.

In an official valuation of Iran Air, British airline BOAC and the Belgian SABENA apprised the company at $20 million. The state unilaterally reduced the price to $3 million, which it paid over twelve years and taxed at 50%, a rate that by law applied exclusively to “accidental income,” such as winnings in lottery. Afshar and later his son tried but failed to persuade the prime minister and other authorities to lower the tax rate.

The nationalized airline, renamed "Homa" while retaining "Iran Air" as its international designation as required by IATA, began operations on April 21, 1962. Afshar formally resigned four days later.

Personal life

Reza Afshar was married to Sariyeh, daughter of Abolqassem Azarbegui, Seraj ul-Mamalek, a learned and progressive overseer of the Qajar crown prince’s education in Tabriz. She had attended the American Memorial School of Tabriz, which counted Ahmad Kasravi and Hasan Taqizadeh among its graduates. She also studied French and music and graduated from Iran Bethel School for Girls (1874-1968), the precursor of Damavand College (1968), and supported the school up to 1979 when the principal, Jane E. Doolittle, left Iran after more than fifty years of service.

Afshar was a consummate reader and a published poet and essayist. He translated Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors and H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds.

The couple had five children: Maliheh, Houshang, Sudabeh, Azar, and Kambiz.

External links

Add External links

This article "Reza Afshar" is from Wikipedia. The list of its authors can be seen in its historical. Articles taken from Draft Namespace on Wikipedia could be accessed on Wikipedia's Draft Namespace.