ABSTRACT
Jafar Quli Khan Sardar Asad Bakhtiyari was a key supporter of Riza Khan/ Shah and a loyal official in the new post-1921 regime for more than a decade, his occupation of a succession of high government appointments culminating in the post of minister of war between 1927 and 1933. Having attached himself decisively to Riza Khan in the early 1920s, thereby ensuring his own personal ascendancy over the other great khans of the Bakhtiyari, Sardar Asad became a staunch defender of the new order and was instrumental in ensuring the political quiescence of the Bakhtiyari and in extending state power throughout south-central Iran. Yet at the end of 1933, he was arrested, along with a large number of other Bakhtiyari khans, and implicated in a plot against the shah. He was secretly murdered in prison the following March. In the circumstances of Sardar Asad’s disgrace and murder may be discerned certain of the preoccupations, even obsessions, gripping the shah as his new regime entered its second decade: his determination to destroy the remaining tribal leaderships and enforce nomadic settlement; his anxiety for his own safety and the security of the new dynasty; his growing suspicions of his own key supporters and his increasing resort to the methods of political terror with the resulting general demoralization of the wider nationalist elite; his burgeoning mania for land acquisition, sparked off by the land legislation of 1928; his frustration at his failure to establish fuller control over Iran’s oil resources; and his succumbing to a pervasive fear of foreign, especially British, interference coupled with a morbid anxiety about the image Iran presented to the West.
