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Young Mohammed was educated in the shadow of the Shah's palace. Between assignments in classical Persian and Arabic, he hunted gazelles and wild pigs with the favorites of the Shah's court. His mother, a woman with a strong social conscience, took him with her on her visits to Najmieh Hospital, which she had founded in Teheran (and which Mossadeq still supports today). Outside the palace walls, young Mohammed found a troubled, poverty-stricken land beset by swarms of foreign adventurers and corrupted by the imperial court's mismanagement.
When he was 15, Mohammed was sent to the province of Khurasan as financial agent, for his apprenticeship in public service. When he returned to Teheran ten years later, a shrewd, aloof young official, the Shah granted him the title "Mossadeq" ("One who has been tried, tested and found to be worthy").
But a few months later, young Mossadeq joined an unsuccessful revolution against the Shah's revocation of the new Iranian constitution, made street-corner speeches against the throne. The Shah's men advised that he leave the country.
For three years, Mossadeq studied finance and political science in Paris. He learned about Western ideas, often in precariously oversimplified form. He still remembers a debate from his student days on the question: "What Makes a Man a Socialist?" The conclusion (which he applies to Communism today) : "Poverty."
He was deeply unhappy in Paris; he had been forced to leave his young wife and their two children in Teheran. In his small Left Bank room he became nervous and moody, developed stomach ulcers. When he heard about the ulcers, the Shah allowed his ex-protege to return home.
Letters in Blood. Later, Mossadeq got a law doctorate in Switzerland, and in 1916 the young lawyer was appointed Under Secretary of Finance. With characteristic energy and total lack of tact, he tried summarily to dismiss hundreds of do-nothing officeholders. Some of them wrote him threatening letters in blood. He was fired, but in 1919 Mossadeq jumped up again. He founded his political reputation by attacking the British (who had just forced the Persian government to sign a treaty making the country virtually a protectorate). He was exiled again; in 1920 he was back as governor of a province, promptly threatened to plunge Iran into civil war over a disagreement with the central government at Teheran. In 1922 he became Minister of Finance, and at once proceeded to cut the salaries of all bureaucrats (including Parliament members and himself) in half. Officials howled in anguish. Again Mossadeq was fired—but the Teheran voters elected him to Parliament.
In 1925, Reza Khan, a onetime army sergeant who with British help had become Iran's virtual dictator, proclaimed himself Shah. "I am against it. It is contrary to law," Mossadeq shrieked in Parliament, and he was the only prominent man in Iran with the courage to say so.
With immense, if often misdirected energy, the new Shah tried to modernize an extraordinarily backward country (paper money was not introduced until 1931). But Mossadeq, opposed to his strong-arm methods, fought him at every turn.