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In his bare room at Teheran, where he had taken refuge in fear of the bullets of Moslem extremists—to whose minds even he was not extreme enough—Mossadeq sat in his pajamas and pondered. Occasionally he wandered into the next room and wearily reclined on a couch while a parliamentary committee tried to decide how to tackle the gigantic task of taking over and running the oilfields. U.S. and British diplomats were anxiously trying to guess what was going on inside the Parliament's yellow walls, and inside Mossadeq's eagle-bald head. Sighed one Briton: "We could deal with a reliable blackguard. But how can you deal with an honest fanatic?"
The Faith of Mohammed. Westerners are apt to call anyone a fanatic whose convictions are stronger and whose behavior is stranger than their own. To call Mossadeq a fanatic may be correct, but it explains almost nothing. Mossadeq is a far more complex character than the most baffling men the West has yet had to deal with, including misty yogis like Nehru and notably unmisty commissars like Joseph Stalin. The biggest single factor that makes Mossadeq different is a religion that the West knows little about: Islam. Mossadeq is not devout, rarely goes to a mosque. But at home, as in his Parliament hideout, he lives almost as austerely as the founder of his faith (he eats little, owns only two suits, likes to dress no better than his chauffeur). Nowhere but in a Moslem country would the phenomenon of Mossadeq be possible.
In the 1,300 years since its founding, the faith of Islam has been relatively successful in defying progress as well as secularization—in large measure because it manages, more than most other religions, to avoid the troubling conflict between body and spirit, temporal power and divine aim. To millions of Moslems, to kill for the greater glory of the true faith is right and blessed. Together with a new consciousness on the part of Asia's "backward" peoples that poverty is not a law of nature but a condition that can and should be abolished, Mohammedanism can be formidable.
In Iran the militant faith of Mohammed grew into a violent, mystic evangelism, complete with its own saints, rituals and miracles. Through the centuries Iran became the home of the Sufi mystics and the whirling dervishes, wild-eyed ascetics who fascinated the marketplace in Teheran and Isfahan with their homemade trances and visions.
Mohammed Mossadeq, with his faints, his tears and wild-eyed dreams, is a whirling dervish with a college education and a first-rate mind.
Tried, Tested & Worthy. Mohammed Mossadeq spent most of his life as a fighter for his conception of the right. In the sad history of modern Iran, a history of corruption, ignorance and greed, he usually fought on the side of the angels—the more militant angels.
He grew up in Teheran, at the declining but still magnificent court of the Kajar Shahs (who had ruled the country for more than a century, were deposed in 1925). His father, Mirza Hedayat, was for 30 years the Shah's Finance Minister. His mother, Najmos Saltaneh, was a Kajar princess, the cousin of the Shah Nasr-ed-Din, an uxorious monarch (he had 50 wives) who hated foreigners.*