Farah Pahlavi

Memoirs

Author's name: Farah Pahlavi

"When I remember that morning in January 1979, the same sense of aching sadness comes back to me in all its intensity. Tehran had been suffering under a brutal attack for months, but now a tense silence hung over the city, as if our nation's capital were suddenly holding its breath.

Today is the sixteenth of the month, and we are about to leave our country....."

Her story begins like a fairytale. At the age of twenty-one, Farah Diba, the Shah of Iran, married Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. Within days, her quiet life was turned upside down: the world's press covered her coronation as Empress of Iran, and overnight she became an international celebrity. The early years of their marriage were marked by a marriage of love, the raising of four children, and a dedication to social and cultural causes, despite looming signs of serious national divisions.

Twenty years later, the dream turned into a nightmare. Protests and riots rocked the country, and Farah and the Shah decided to leave to avoid further bloodshed. The exiled Shah, gravely ill, never saw his homeland again. Together, they sought refuge in Morocco, the Bahamas, Mexico, and Panama. They hid from public view in a New York hospital where the Shah received treatment, until Egyptian President Anwar Sadat finally granted them refuge. He himself was assassinated by fundamentalists just eighteen months later. The story of the Shah's final years is one of the most moving and disturbing episodes of the late 20th century, as America's strained relationship with the Middle East began to reveal its flimsy foundations. For the first time, Farah Diba, the Shahbano, wife of Iran's last emperor, breaks her silence and tells the heartbreaking story of her love for a man and his country. "Enduring Love" offers an intimate view of an era of turmoil, but most importantly, it remains a powerful human document of a figure whose life was caught between the epic and the tragedy of the national struggle.