CAIRO — Stylish in tiny black dresses and tailored suits, the mourners gathered in the lobby of an upscale downtown hotel. They filled the air with expensive perfume and cologne, their handbags and sunglasses gilded with the logos of Chanel, Armani and Dolce & Gabbana.
On Wednesday, as they do every year, scores of Iranian monarchists from around the world were visiting the Egyptian capital to pay homage to the late Mohammed Reza Shah Pahlavi and dreamily recall the long-lost Middle Eastern belle epoque he represented -- to them.
Before Al Qaeda and the Taliban and Saddam Hussein, at a time when Sunnis and Shiites intermarried and there were no American warplanes scouring the region, the shah and his wife reigned over a land where, for the well-to-do, local currencies traded as high as skirt hemlines and the future shone brightly.
"It was the greatest era of my life," said Shahareh Shirvani, a Houston real estate agent who left Iran as a teenager but comes to the memorial each year.
Most historians don't share that gauzy view of the shah's reign. He succeeded his father in 1941, but left the country after a democratic and nationalist groundswell in the early 1950s. A U.S.-funded coup d'etat restored him to the throne in 1953.
He surrounded himself with American advisors and military hardware. Flush with oil money, he became Washington's enforcer in the Middle East, a key ally against the Soviet Union. The SAVAK, his secret police, became notorious for torture and domestic espionage targeting the Islamic activists who ultimately took control of the country. But the secret police cracked down even harder on the leftist and liberal dissidents who might have more effectively opposed them.
Revolution of 1979
The shah's decades-long rule ended amid the flames of a revolution in 1979 that set in motion Islamic movements throughout the Middle East and contributed to the start of several wars that changed the region forever. It was part of a wave that redirected the Middle East toward religious fundamentalism at a time when much of the world was increasingly embracing global consumer culture.
"I cannot forget the situation back then," said Farah Diba, the shah's widow, resting her head on her husband's tomb inside the 19th century Rifai mosque.
"There was stability and peace," she said. "Unfortunately, I can say that after what happened 28 years ago in Iran, everything moved in the opposite direction."
