🇮🇷 Iran: Before the Ayatollah | Part II What you’re seeing: The rise and fall of Reza Shah Pahlavi. In 1925, an ambitious general seized power and rebuilt Iran from the ground up. He financed the Trans-Iranian Railroad entirely with Iranian tax revenue, founded the University of Tehran in 1934, made education compulsory, and renamed the country from Persia to Iran. But he ruled as a dictator who denied the Iranian people any share in political life. Where is this? Tehran, the Alborz Mountains, the Zagros Mountains (Paltak Pass near Kermanshah), the Abadan oil refinery in southwestern Iran, and the port waters off Abadan. Why did this happen? When World War II began, Reza Shah declared Iran neutral. But nearly half of Iran’s trade was with Germany by 1941. Iran’s oil fields supplied fuel for the Royal Navy, and Britain could not risk losing the Abadan refinery. On August 25, 1941, Britain and the Soviet Union invaded. What happened next? The invasion lasted six days. Soviet tanks ...