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In practice, however, many of the reforms were ineptly administered; others were deeply resented. The Shah, like his father before him, soon found himself at odds with the country's powerful Muslim clergy. After a series of violent riots, the Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini, one of the most prominent spiritual leaders in Iran, was arrested and sent into exile, where he laid the groundwork for the overthrow of the Pahlavi regime and eventually became the leader of the revolution.
"Tragically," writes Hoveida in his highly critical book, The Fall of the Shah, "the Shah's reforms were eclipsed within a few years by his increasing authoritarianism. In his consuming passion for what he conceived of as his divine mission, he came to believe in his own in fallibility." Some observers sensed elements of megalomania when, in his long-delayed formal coronation in a lavish 1967 ceremony, he placed the crown upon his own head as a symbol of his absolute supremacy.
Throughout his life, the Shah sometimes seemed to be conducting a kind of psychological battle against what he apparently feared was his own weakness. He became an accomplished pilot, a versatile sportsman, a reputed womanizer — and an insensitive despot before whom even Premiers were expected to bow. "Nobody can influence me, nobody," he once told Italian Journalist Oriana Fallaci, adding contemptuously: "Still less a woman."
In 1975, he dissolved various throne-directed political parties — the only ones allowed to operate — and created the Rastakhiz (National Resurgence) Party. All Iranians were instructed to join it. Those who disagreed with the party's ideology, in essence a civil religion based on Shah worship, were blasted as "traitors" and told to leave Iran and renounce their citizenship. The jails filled with thousands of political prisoners, and SAVAK was universally reviled for its tactics of terror and torture. "No country in the world," concluded Amnesty International in 1975, "has a worse record in human rights than Iran."
The Shah's dreams of glory were fueled by Iran's oil wealth. In 1973, the Shah's voice had been the decisive one at the Tehran conference that vastly increased the price of oil. Over the next year, the country's revenues from its wells and refineries shot up from $2 billion to more than $20 billion a year. Rather like a child who has suddenly won big at Monopoly, the Shah dreamed of transforming Iran into a new industrial power, a kind of West Germany of the Middle East. Western visitors were subjected to stern lectures by the Shah on the profligacy of industrial nations, which wasted "the noble product" on heating homes and fueling factories. As with his early promises of reform, the dream of rapid industrialization went awry. Inflation ran wild, and so did corruption, especially among members of the royal family. Billions of dollars were wasted on misconceived, mismanaged, prestige-oriented development projects.