Ashraf Pahlavi, Twin Sister of Iran’s Last Shah, Dies at 96

Ashraf Pahlavi, the twin sister of the last shah of Iran, known equally for her work with the United Nations on behalf of women’s causes and her opulent lifestyle, died on Thursday at her home. She was 96.

Her death was confirmed by Robert F. Armao, a former assistant to Nelson A. Rockefeller who is the Pahlavi family’s attaché in New York. He did not specify where she lived, but Iranian state television reported that she died in Monte Carlo.

Princess Ashraf was a glamorous and divisive figure. As a teenager in 1934, she and her older sister, Shams, along with their mother, appeared at a public ceremony not wearing the veils that were a part of traditional dress in Iran.

This public display, part of her father’s program to bring Iran into the 20th century, helped establish her public image: Western-oriented, modern, fashionably dressed, fluent in French and English, with a taste for the high life.

She used her privileged position as a princess to plead the cause of women in a variety of ways, most visibly as the president of the Organization of Iranian Women, the chairwoman of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women, the Iranian delegate to the United Nations Human Rights Commission and an adviser to the World Conference on Women in 1975.

At the same time, Princess Ashraf gained a reputation as a steely political operator, an unashamed apologist for the despotic regime of her brother, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and a mink-draped sybarite, well known at the casinos of the French Riviera, who amassed a considerable fortune during her brother’s years in power and lived in luxurious exile after he was overthrown in 1979.

“Her supporters will celebrate her as a champion of women’s rights, a patron of the arts and a beacon of social modernity, while her detractors will dismiss her as a monstrous power monger who played a key role in reinstalling her brother’s dictatorial reign and benefited lucratively under his tyrannical rule,” Hamid Dabashi, a professor of Iranian studies and comparative literature at Columbia University, wrote in an article for Al Jazeera’s website on Friday.

Ashraf ol-Molouk Pahlavi was born in Tehran on Oct. 26, 1919, two years before her father, Reza Shah Pahlavi, seized Tehran at the head of a Cossack brigade and overthrew the Qajar dynasty. He became shah in 1925.

In “Faces in a Mirror: Memoirs from Exile” (1980), Princess Ashraf described herself as volatile, quick-tempered and rebellious, a sharp contrast to her shy, diffident twin brother.

She was also lonely. Her sister, as the firstborn of the family, basked in her parents’ attention, as did her brother, destined for the throne.

“I realized very early that I was an outsider, that I would have to create a place for myself,” she wrote. “In later years my critics would say I had overdone this somewhat, that my presence was everywhere. But as a child I was scarcely noticed at all.”

Her deepest desire, to study at a European university, was thwarted by her father, who forced her into marriage at 18. “I have never been a good mother,” she told The New York Times in 1980. “Because of my way of life, I was not with my children very much. But I am a good mother in the sense that I always insisted that they get a good education, which I didn’t have because I was born a female.”

Princess Ashraf was married three times. Her son from her second marriage, Shahriar Shafiq, was assassinated in front of her home in Paris in 1979 by gunmen dispatched by the new regime. She is survived by her son from her first marriage, Shahram Pahlavi; five grandchildren; and several great-grandchildren.

In 1953, when the C.I.A., working with the British, plotted the overthrow of Mohammad Mossadegh, Iran’s left-wing, anticolonialist prime minister, it turned to Princess Ashraf to intercede with her reluctant brother, who had become shah in 1941. Kermit Roosevelt, the C.I.A. officer in charge of what was known as Operation Ajax, described his stance as one of “stubborn irresolution.”

“Ashraf’s tongue-lashings of her brother were legendary, including one in the presence of foreign diplomats where she demanded that he prove he was a man or be revealed to all as a mouse,” Stephen Kinzer wrote in “All the Shah’s Men” (2003), a history of the Iranian revolution. When agents turned up at her apartment bearing a mink coat and a stack of cash, she overcame her initial coolness to the idea and flew to Tehran for a stirring tête-à-tête.

With power came danger, as she became a highly visible symbol of the regime’s corruption. In 1977, two men with semiautomatic pistols opened fire on her Rolls-Royce when she was returning from a night at the casino in Cannes, killing her lady in waiting and wounding her driver.

After the revolution, Princess Ashraf settled into a life of discontented exile, dividing her time between a Park Avenue triplex in New York, a townhouse in Paris and a villa in Juan-les-Pins, on the Riviera. She received enemies of the new regime and helped her daughter, Azadeh Shafiq, organize opposition forces from her home in Paris.

She excoriated the mullahs, and she lamented the plight of Iran’s women, dressed in chadors. “I remember how fantastic our women were, how exactly like the European women they were, so well educated, and now they are becoming so backward again,” she told The Times in 1980. “The Iranian woman is back in the home, and it makes me really unhappy.”

When critics accused her of enriching herself on the backs of the Iranian people, she responded scornfully. In an Op-Ed article for The Times, under the headline “I Will Fight These Slanders,” she wrote that her money came from inherited land and businesses.

“After the death of my brother, if we had had the $65 billion some people said we had, we would have retaken Iran just like that,” she told The Associated Press in 1983.

More than a few Iran experts offered a different explanation: A hefty portion of the money came from a 10 percent tax extorted by members of her family on exports, imports and government contracts. Her first memoir was devoted in large part to defending herself and her brother’s rule. Two more, in the same vein, followed: “Jamais Résignée” (“Never Resigned”), published in 1981, and “Time for Truth,” published in 1995.

She professed to harbor no regrets.

“I would want to do the same thing,” she told The Associated Press when asked what she might like to do over. “It’s passed, now, only memories. But there were 50 years of grandeur, of glory.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/08/world/middleeast/ashraf-pahlavi-sister-of-irans-last-shah-defender-and-diplomat-dies-at-96.html?_r=0