{"id":558785,"date":"2026-07-25T10:23:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-25T10:23:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/558785\/"},"modified":"2026-07-25T10:23:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-25T10:23:11","slug":"how-the-son-of-an-anti-shah-revolutionary-came-to-support-irans-crown-prince","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/558785\/","title":{"rendered":"How the son of an anti-shah revolutionary came to support Iran’s crown prince"},"content":{"rendered":"

Mazyar Maximilien Jazani was six months old when his father was arrested by the SAVAK, the shah\u2019s security services, seven when his father was killed in custody, and 13 when the Islamic Republic\u2019s pursuit of his mother forced the family to flee Iran.<\/p>\n

Now an Iranian-French lawyer living in Europe, Jazani has taken a step that would once have seemed almost inconceivable: He has publicly endorsed Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi<\/a>, the son of the monarch his father fought to overthrow, and joined the legal work surrounding Pahlavi\u2019s movement for political change in Iran.<\/p>\n

For Jazani, this represents a rejection of the ideological inheritance that has divided Iran\u2019s opposition for nearly half a century, without denying the abuses committed under the previous monarchy or the circumstances of his father\u2019s death.<\/p>\n

Jazani\u2019s father, Bijan Jazani, was one of the leading theorists of Iran\u2019s revolutionary Left. Born in 1938, he emerged from the socialist wing of the National Front associated with former prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh.<\/p>\n

Although the Organization of Iranian People\u2019s Fedai Guerrillas later claimed his legacy, it was founded in 1971 by other Marxist militants, including Masoud Ahmadzadeh and Amir Parviz Pouyan, whose conception of guerrilla warfare differed from Jazani\u2019s.<\/p>\n

According to Mazyar, only a small remaining faction of the organization adopted Jazani\u2019s theories in 1977, nearly six years after its founding.<\/p>\n

\"BIJANBIJAN JAZANI, a leading theorist of Iran\u2019s revolutionary Left, was killed in custody during the Pahlavi dynasty era in 1975. Nearly half a century later, his son, Mazyar Maximilien, has publicly backed exiled Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, calling for a reconciliation without erasing the past. (credit: Wikimedia Commons)Bijan Jazani assassinated among political prisoners<\/p>\n

Arrested in 1968 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, Bijan Jazani was killed alongside another reported eight political prisoners near Tehran\u2019s Evin Prison on April 19, 1975.<\/p>\n

The authorities said the men had been shot while attempting to escape. Their deaths have since been widely regarded as extrajudicial executions carried out by SAVAK personnel.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere is no other word for this,\u201d Jazani told The Jerusalem Post. \u201cThey were assassinated.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jazani said his father was nearing the end of his sentence when he and his fellow prisoners were taken from Evin Prison<\/a> and killed.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father was arrested when I was only six months old,\u201d he said. \u201cI was seven years old when he was killed without any due process while he was serving his 15-year prison sentence.\u201d<\/p>\n

The killing created a legacy that Mazyar Jazani would carry throughout his childhood. Within several years, the revolution that his father\u2019s few remaining followers had welcomed had produced another system of persecution.<\/p>\n

Jazani was around 13 when the Islamic Republic<\/a> truly consolidated its power in 1981, two years after the revolution, and began eliminating political forces that would not submit to the clerical state.<\/p>\n

His mother, a political activist who had participated in the early struggle against compulsory veiling, became one of those targeted.<\/p>\n

The first major women\u2019s demonstrations against the new order took place only weeks after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979.<\/p>\n

Jazani recalled that the authorities initially retreated from their attempt to impose the hijab<\/a>, only to return with an expanding campaign against women, secular activists, leftists, and other opponents.<\/p>\n

When prosecutors sought his mother, he said, they detained members of the extended family in an attempt to force her to surrender.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey arrested many of our cousins, members of our family, my aunt, many people, for the sole purpose of forcing my mother to deliver herself to death,\u201d he explained.<\/p>\n

The relatives were eventually released after the authorities learned that Jazani\u2019s mother and her children had escaped to France.<\/p>\n

He arrived unable to speak French. English had been his second language at Tehran\u2019s Alborz High School, so he quickly immersed himself in French literature and philosophy before entering law school.<\/p>\n

His encounters with France\u2019s legal system also left him dissatisfied.<\/p>\n

As a young lawyer, Jazani volunteered to represent defendants who could not afford legal assistance. He became increasingly disturbed by what he viewed as the imbalance between the powers of investigating judges and the limited ability of defense lawyers to challenge the prosecution\u2019s case.<\/p>\n

He recollected seeing prosecutors and judges discuss cases privately before hearings and encountering defendants whose attempts to present exculpatory witnesses had been restricted.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf I am defending an innocent person, I cannot promise that he will be found not guilty,\u201d he told the Post, recalling this period. \u201cBut I should at least be able to ensure that the jury or the judge hears the truth.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jazani later participated in efforts to reform French criminal procedure, including proposing that defense lawyers be granted greater power to request investigative measures.<\/p>\n

One of his proposals had entered French law before, he said, only to be reversed by a subsequent government. He eventually left criminal litigation and built a practice advising musicians, composers, producers, and other figures in the arts.<\/p>\n

The choice, he said, reflected a personal insistence on understanding where his clients\u2019 money came from and whether he could ethically contribute to their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cI do not judge other lawyers,\u201d he stressed. \u201cThe defense is a fundamental right. It was only my personal choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

A warning from prison<\/p>\n

In an open and wide-ranging discussion with the Post, Jazani rejected the idea that 50 years on, his father\u2019s politics could be reduced to Soviet-aligned communism or blind hostility toward the monarchy.<\/p>\n

Bijan Jazani was a Marxist, his son said, but also a nationalist and patriot, as proven by his defense memorandum during his trial before the special military court, which convicted him.<\/p>\n

More importantly, he had identified the danger posed by political Islam before many others on the Iranian Left were willing to acknowledge it. His writings have proven to be prophetic.<\/p>\n

While in prison, Bijan Jazani wrote a short work addressing the attempted marriage of Marxism and Islam. The text warned that accommodating religious revolutionaries could strengthen the clerical forces seeking to dominate the opposition.<\/p>\n

It was smuggled out of prison, his son said, but some left-wing activists initially declined to publish it because they feared criticism of political Islam would divide the anti-shah movement, spearheaded from abroad by Khomeini, who was in exile at the time.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe drew the attention of his comrades to the danger of political Islam,\u201d Jazani said. \u201cIt was a very short book, but it became very well known in Iran.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bijan Jazani\u2019s warning proved prescient. Much of the Iranian Left supported Khomeini, with factions of the Tudeh Party and the Fedai organization backing the Islamic Republic even as it constructed the institutions that would later imprison and execute leftists.<\/p>\n

Mazyar Jazani\u2019s criticism remains scathing about those decisions.<\/p>\n

One of the factors that helped sway part of the Left to clerical rule, beyond a mutual anti-shah feeling, was Cold War politics, which trapped them in notions of \u201canti-imperialism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Because of this, many also adopted hostility toward Israel because of its alliance with the United States, Jazani explained, allowing geopolitical ideologies to take precedence over the nature of the regime emerging inside Iran.<\/p>\n

A small group of Marxists, based on an analysis of Karl Marx\u2019s pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, advocated that the central conflict was no longer capitalism against socialism or anti-imperialism, Jazani said.<\/p>\n

Instead, they believed it was a struggle against a new clerical caste that was consolidating political and economic power for itself.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe problem was the caste of ayatollahs \u2013 the clerical caste,\u201d he said. \u201cAn oligarchy of mullahs, a kleptocracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jazani nevertheless disputed the claim that the Iranian Left was the decisive force that brought Khomeini to power.<\/p>\n

He placed greater responsibility on Western governments that viewed political Islam as a barrier against Soviet expansion and tolerated Islamist organizations while repressing communists.<\/p>\n

As evidence, Jazani highlighted that Khomeini was hosted in France in Neauphle-le-Ch\u00e2teau while in exile.<\/p>\n

Further, in the Guadeloupe Conference of January 1979, former French president Val\u00e9ry Giscard d\u2019Estaing, US president Jimmy Carter, and British prime minister James Callaghan, along with former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, agreed to accept the shah\u2019s downfall, proven by their initial continued working relationship with the ayatollahs in the early days of the Islamic Republic.<\/p>\n

What the Left did after the monarchy\u2019s fall was \u201cdespicable,\u201d Jazani said, but it was not the determining factor in Khomeini\u2019s rise.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Left in Iran was a problem,\u201d he said. \u201cBut the determining factor was the fear of communism and the belief that Islam could be used as a solution against it.\u201d<\/p>\n

That strategy, he argued, failed to understand that communist and Islamist totalitarianism could find common cause against democracy, individual freedom, and the rule of law.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was not worthwhile to create the monster of Islamism to combat an enemy that was communism,\u201d he said. \u201cThat was the great mistake of the 20th century.\u201d<\/p>\n

The photograph of Pahlavi<\/p>\n

Jazani\u2019s own movement toward Reza Pahlavi did not happen through monarchist nostalgia.<\/p>\n

For years, he told the Post, the Iranian opposition lacked an alternative capable of attracting broad support inside the country.<\/p>\n

Successive protest movements \u2013 the Green Movement, the gasoline protests, and Woman, Life, Freedom \u2013 helped create the foundations for a larger national uprising. Nevertheless, none persuaded him to devote himself fully to an organized political project.<\/p>\n

That changed following the mass killing of protesters in Iran in January of this year, when an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 people were shot by the regime. Human rights groups have documented massacres across the country, including the executions of wounded protesters lying in hospital beds.<\/p>\n

Overcome by reports and testimonies emerging from the country, Jazani joined a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in Lisbon carrying a photograph of Pahlavi.
\u201cI couldn\u2019t do anything,\u201d he said. \u201cSo I went with the photograph of the crown prince.\u201d<\/p>\n

The image attracted immediate attention because of his family heritage and who Jazani is. An interview he gave at the protest was seen by people close to Pahlavi, and contact followed. Eventually, Jazani was invited to meet him.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was an honor and a pleasure,\u201d he said of the meeting. \u201cWhen you meet Pahlavi, he is somebody very human and simple, and very smart. You see the light of intelligence in his eyes.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cHe is not somebody who lies,\u201d Jazani said. \u201cHe speaks his mind and does what he says.\u201d<\/p>\n

The meeting carried an historical irony. Pahlavi\u2019s father had ruled the state whose security apparatus imprisoned and killed Bijan Jazani. The son of that prisoner was now offering his support to the former monarch\u2019s son.<\/p>\n

\u201cA revolution needs two conditions to succeed,\u201d he told the exiled royal at their meeting.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe first, which is necessary, is that the people need to reject the government. The second, which is sufficient, is that rulers must no longer be able to govern,\u201d Jazani continued.<\/p>\n

\u201cHere, the people did not see this as just a fight over the hijab or gasoline prices,\u201d he noted. \u201cHere, they say, \u2018We don\u2019t want the regime at all. We don\u2019t want it. We don\u2019t want the Islamic Republic. So what do we want instead? We want Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has spent all these years working and presenting his vision.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet Jazani does not view his endorsement as approval of every act committed during Shah Mohammad Reza\u2019s reign.<\/p>\n

Instead, he distinguishes between the monarchy\u2019s historical record and Reza Pahlavi\u2019s stated commitment to secular government, individual rights, territorial integrity, and the Iranian people\u2019s right to choose their political system.<\/p>\n

\u201c[Pahlavi] insisted again that he is not seeking to be king,\u201d Jazani said. \u201cHe is fighting for the Iranian people to have the right to decide, in a free election, what kind of government they want.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cRepublic or kingdom \u2013 it does not matter,\u201d he emphasized. \u201cOnly the people should choose the form of government.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jazani personally favors a parliamentary kingdom. Iran\u2019s history, geographic scale, and diverse population, he argued, make a politically neutral king preferable to a powerful elected presidency that could again be captured by an ideological movement.<\/p>\n

He pointed to Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an example of an elected leader using republican institutions to advance Islamism.<\/p>\n

In Jazani\u2019s preferred system, executive authority would rest largely with an elected prime minister, while a king would serve as a constitutional arbiter.<\/p>\n

A bicameral legislature, including a senate representing Iran\u2019s regions, would provide an additional restraint on temporary political majorities.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe need checks and balances everywhere,\u201d he said. \u201cIn legislative power, in judicial power, and in executive power.\u201d<\/p>\n

He acknowledged that any such model would have to be approved by the Iranians themselves.<\/p>\n

Following any future fall of the Islamic Republic, those responsible for killings, torture, rape, corruption, and other crimes must be arrested and tried, Jazani said, his legal background shining through.<\/p>\n

But their trials must demonstrate the values of the system replacing the regime rather than reproduce its methods.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere will be justice, but there will be no death penalty, no executions,\u201d he said. \u201cEveryone involved in the crimes of the Islamic Republic who is captured will be judged, but no death penalty.\u201d<\/p>\n

His father was killed outside the law by the previous state, and his mother was pursued by the state that replaced it. Jazani\u2019s response is not to demand retaliatory justice against either camp, but to insist that the next system bind itself to legal restraint.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe want the rule of law,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Israel\u2019s role<\/p>\n

Jazani was unusually direct about the assistance he believes Israel can provide to those seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic.<\/p>\n

He has met Israel\u2019s ambassador in Lisbon and said many Iranians viewed Israeli action against the regime as support for the Iranian people rather than hostility toward Iran.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we even have Israel alone continuing to support us, that would be a very good help,\u201d he told the Post, while insisting that the Iranian movement would continue regardless of what foreign governments decided.<\/p>\n

\u201cWith or without external help, we will continue our fight,\u201d he said. \u201cThe question is the human cost and duration of this fight.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThe regime is a zombie,\u201d he added. \u201cIf we have Israel\u2019s and America\u2019s help, it can reduce the human cost and make it faster.\u201d<\/p>\n

Jazani\u2019s public meeting with Pahlavi attracted more than a million views online, with messages of support from Iranians in Iran to the world quickly following. It also produced attacks from people accusing the son of an alleged Fedai leader of betraying his father\u2019s cause.<\/p>\n

Jazani dismissed much of that criticism as an effort by the Islamic Republic and its online network to preserve old divisions within the opposition. The regime, he said, understands the danger posed when Iranians from incompatible historical traditions begin standing together.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey recognize the danger embedded in this kind of meeting,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

For Jazani, there is no conflict in supporting Reza Pahlavi. Nor does preserving his father\u2019s memory require remaining bound to every ideology and alliance that existed in the 1960s and 1970s.<\/p>\n

His father\u2019s generation fought over monarchy, Marxism, nationalism, imperialism, and revolution, while many failed to recognize that the clerical movement gathering around Khomeini intended to destroy them all.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhatever somebody believed yesterday does not matter,\u201d he said during his meeting with Pahlavi. \u201cWhat matters is what they choose today.\u201d<\/p>\n

For Mazyar Maximilien Jazani, that choice is clear. He believes there will be a future Iran built around a secular government, individual freedoms of religion and politics, and a democratic decision on Iran\u2019s future. These will be accompanied by the legal safeguards denied to both his mother and father.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Mazyar Maximilien Jazani was six months old when his father was arrested by the SAVAK, the shah\u2019s security…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":558786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,87,79845,55,21451,43,21454,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-558785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-iran","tag-islamic-regime","tag-islamic-republic","tag-islamic-revolution","tag-news","tag-reza-pahlavi","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=558785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/558785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/558786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=558785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=558785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=558785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}