Her Imperial Majesty Farah Pahlavi, Shahbanou of Iran was born in Tehran on October 14, 1938, the only child of Mr. Sohrab Diba and Farideh Diba Ghotbi .
Following the death of her father in 1947, Farah Pahlavi was educated at the Italian School and later the Jeanne D鈥橝rc School. She obtained her baccalaureate from the Lycee Razi, a secular Persian and French High School in Tehran.
Farah Pahlavi was studying architecture in Paris in 1959 when she was introduced to Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran at an embassy reception. The couple鈥檚 engagement was announced on December 1 and they were married three weeks later. Empress Farah gave birth to Crown Prince Reza in 1960, Princess Farahnaz in 1963, Prince Alireza in 1966 and Princess Leila in 1970.
In the 1960s and 鈥�70s Empress Farah traveled widely within Iran to support her husband鈥檚 social and economic reforms to advance the rights of women and children, the disabled and the handicapped, culture and the arts, science and medicine, and architecture and the environment. Under the patronage of the Farah Pahlavi Foundation she financially supported a network of museums, art centers and dozens of charities. She worked tirelessly to champion Iranian culture and the arts and to encourage community-based village enterprises to revitalize traditional handicrafts. She established a series of landmark events to celebrate contemporary and modern Iranian art and culture including the Shiraz Festival of Arts, the Isfahan Festival of Popular Traditions, the Kerman Traditional Music Festival, the Tehran International Film Festival and the Children鈥檚 Film Festival. Empress Farah spearheaded an effort to promote children鈥檚 literacy by establishing children鈥檚 libraries in the cities and the countryside. She put her training as an architect to good use when she lobbied to save mosques and historic buildings from demolition, and by preserving open land from development so that parks and green spaces became a feature of crowded urban centers. She headed up the South Tehran Redevelopment Corporation which aimed to alleviate poverty and improve living conditions in Tehran鈥檚 southern suburbs.
Empress Farah broke many barriers during her two decades on the throne. She was Iran鈥檚 first crowned female sovereign and the first woman crowned anywhere in the Muslim world. She was the first woman in a Muslim country to publicly donate blood. As her husband鈥檚 ambassador abroad, Empress Farah represented Iran in countries as varied as China, the United States and Senegal, delivering major policy addresses and attending international conferences. Empress Farah is most proud of her ground-breaking work on behalf of Iran鈥檚 lepers who had previously been subjected to discrimination. The Empress visited leper colonies in the late sixties and persuaded her husband to donate a parcel of land so that the lepers could be housed in a model community, receive an education and earn a working wage. She invited medical specialists from around the world to come to Iran to work with the lepers and advocated community-based methods to help them. Empress Farah鈥檚 efforts to change popular perceptions about leprosy were recognized internationally as a force for progressive change.
On January 16, 1979, Empress Farah and the Shah left Iran for exile. Today she divides her time between France and the United States where her children and grandchildren live. She continues to work and speak out on behalf of her signature causes and is an enthusiastic supporter of Iranian artists and writers. She closely follows events back in Iran and is in daily contact with compatriots who write and express their support and friendship. Empress Farah has received numerous honorary doctorates and diplomas by many international institutions. She is also the recipient of numerous awards for her humanitarian efforts.
An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah, Farah Pahlavi, Patricia Clancy (Translator)
An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah (ISBN 1-4013-5961-2) is a book written in 2004 by Farah Pahlavi, the former Shahbanu (Empress) of Iran, who has been living in exile since the Iranian Revolution in 1979 which saw overthrow of the Pahlavi Dynasty.
It is a memoir about Farah, her life before she met the Shah and how she married him and became the Queen and later Empress of Iran. The book is also about her husband, Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, his personality, his family and how he reigned over the country of Iran for 37 years. 賻And ...
This was an extremely emotional and heartrending read for me.
In her memoir, Empress Farah Pahlavi recounts her childhood, her adolescence and her later years as a student in Paris, her first meeting Shah, falling in love with him, marrying him and becoming the Queen of the people.
She not only talks about her life with Shah, but also his personality, his love for his country, his children and his wife. We get to know the events from her perspective; we are privy to her dreams, her fears and worries and her opinion on certain occasions and on some noted individuals.
I am so greatful for reading this book. It gave me a fresh and great perspective of the Iran I thought I knew. It changed my understanding of the Pahlavi Dynasti. I now regret believing all the garbage they made up about these people. All I can say to this person is THANK YOU for your services to our country, and SORRY this country betrayed you.
I would not say that An Enduring Love is written with as flowery and beautiful language as Daughter of Persia that I read some years ago, but I do like Farah Pahlavi's effort and her life story.
The Iranian hostage crisis and the question of what would become of the extremely ill Shah of Iran, the author's husband, and his family was all over the news when I was seventeen years old and finishing up high school. It was the first political crisis I really paid any attention to, and the first Middle Eastern crisis of my lifetime which the US media presented. When I was in school we were not taught anything about the world outside of US. We only got the Spanish explorers and the conquest of central and South America (the fall of the Aztec & Inca Empires) and European history (mainly England, Spain, Rome, Greece, and a tiny bit of France). I had never heard of Iran and did not know it was the same place as the Persian Empire mentioned in the Bible. We were kept in the dark. The news was not much help. It did was it still does best, present and blow up a crisis without giving any in-depth details or accurate background history. Long story...
What impressed me the most about An Enduring Love: My Life with the Shah was the respect Farah Pahlavi and her husband had for each other. I loved some of her stories about their family life and also her tale of the quiet romance that developed between her and the shah after their first meeting. There was mutual admiration there. The Shah treated his wife as an equal partner and had confidence in her. Farah Pahlavi writes of how much they both loved their country and the efforts they put into moving Iran into the modern world. Their opponents and the US media, once the Shah and his family were thrown around and shut out during exile, tell a different story. I vaguely remember the news demonizing the Shah almost as much as Ayatollah Khomeini. Both were presented as different sides of an evil and exotic coin. Whereas the author of the book tells a different story.
To get different sides of the story of modern Iran, besides this book I highly recommend Daughter of Persia which I have read: /book/show/1...
I also plan to read these books at some point to get a broader perspective:
The Arabic version of the book is well translated, which allowed me to enjoy reading the book and the empress's account of her life.
The book is well written, and gives you insight on Iran since beginning of last century until the Islamic Revolution, for a change, reading her side of the story on Iran pre-revolution, and all projects and efforts the Shah and herself made to the development and growth of Iran, and her narrative of the years before the revolution can give the reader insight on the growth of Khomeni's reach inside Iran with the help of certain foreign powers.
I would strongly recommend this book to anyone interested in the history of the region and the live of the Shah & Shahbano.