Mazyar Maximilien Jazani was six months old when his father was arrested by the SAVAK, the shah’s security services, seven when his father was killed in custody, and 13 when the Islamic Republic’s pursuit of his mother forced the family to flee Iran.
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, the son of the monarch his father fought to overthrow, and joined the legal work surrounding Pahlavi’s movement for political change in Iran.
For Jazani, this represents a rejection of the ideological inheritance that has divided Iran’s opposition for nearly half a century, without denying the abuses committed under the previous monarchy or the circumstances of his father’s death.
Jazani’s father, Bijan Jazani, was one of the leading theorists of Iran’s revolutionary Left. Born in 1938, he emerged from the socialist wing of the National Front associated with former prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh.
Although the Organization of Iranian People’s 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’s.
According to Mazyar, only a small remaining faction of the organization adopted Jazani’s theories in 1977, nearly six years after its founding.
Bijan Jazani assassinated among political prisoners
Arrested in 1968 and sentenced to 15 years in prison, Bijan Jazani was killed alongside another reported eight political prisoners near Tehran’s Evin Prison on April 19, 1975.
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.
“There is no other word for this,” Jazani told The Jerusalem Post. “They were assassinated.”
Jazani said his father was nearing the end of his sentence when he and his fellow prisoners were taken from Evin Prison and killed.
“My father was arrested when I was only six months old,” he said. “I was seven years old when he was killed without any due process while he was serving his 15-year prison sentence.”
The killing created a legacy that Mazyar Jazani would carry throughout his childhood. Within several years, the revolution that his father’s few remaining followers had welcomed had produced another system of persecution.
Jazani was around 13 when the Islamic Republic truly consolidated its power in 1981, two years after the revolution, and began eliminating political forces that would not submit to the clerical state.
His mother, a political activist who had participated in the early struggle against compulsory veiling, became one of those targeted.
The first major women’s demonstrations against the new order took place only weeks after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979.
Jazani recalled that the authorities initially retreated from their attempt to impose the hijab, only to return with an expanding campaign against women, secular activists, leftists, and other opponents.
When prosecutors sought his mother, he said, they detained members of the extended family in an attempt to force her to surrender.
“They 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,” he explained.
The relatives were eventually released after the authorities learned that Jazani’s mother and her children had escaped to France.
He arrived unable to speak French. English had been his second language at Tehran’s Alborz High School, so he quickly immersed himself in French literature and philosophy before entering law school.
His encounters with France’s legal system also left him dissatisfied.
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’s case.
He recollected seeing prosecutors and judges discuss cases privately before hearings and encountering defendants whose attempts to present exculpatory witnesses had been restricted.
“If I am defending an innocent person, I cannot promise that he will be found not guilty,” he told the Post, recalling this period. “But I should at least be able to ensure that the jury or the judge hears the truth.”
Jazani later participated in efforts to reform French criminal procedure, including proposing that defense lawyers be granted greater power to request investigative measures.
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.
The choice, he said, reflected a personal insistence on understanding where his clients’ money came from and whether he could ethically contribute to their work.
“I do not judge other lawyers,” he stressed. “The defense is a fundamental right. It was only my personal choice.”
A warning from prison
In an open and wide-ranging discussion with the Post, Jazani rejected the idea that 50 years on, his father’s politics could be reduced to Soviet-aligned communism or blind hostility toward the monarchy.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“He drew the attention of his comrades to the danger of political Islam,” Jazani said. “It was a very short book, but it became very well known in Iran.”
Bijan Jazani’s 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.
Mazyar Jazani’s criticism remains scathing about those decisions.
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 “anti-imperialism.”
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.
A small group of Marxists, based on an analysis of Karl Marx’s pamphlet, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, advocated that the central conflict was no longer capitalism against socialism or anti-imperialism, Jazani said.
Instead, they believed it was a struggle against a new clerical caste that was consolidating political and economic power for itself.
“The problem was the caste of ayatollahs – the clerical caste,” he said. “An oligarchy of mullahs, a kleptocracy.”
Jazani nevertheless disputed the claim that the Iranian Left was the decisive force that brought Khomeini to power.
He placed greater responsibility on Western governments that viewed political Islam as a barrier against Soviet expansion and tolerated Islamist organizations while repressing communists.
As evidence, Jazani highlighted that Khomeini was hosted in France in Neauphle-le-Château while in exile.
Further, in the Guadeloupe Conference of January 1979, former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, US president Jimmy Carter, and British prime minister James Callaghan, along with former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt, agreed to accept the shah’s downfall, proven by their initial continued working relationship with the ayatollahs in the early days of the Islamic Republic.
What the Left did after the monarchy’s fall was “despicable,” Jazani said, but it was not the determining factor in Khomeini’s rise.
“The Left in Iran was a problem,” he said. “But the determining factor was the fear of communism and the belief that Islam could be used as a solution against it.”
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.
“It was not worthwhile to create the monster of Islamism to combat an enemy that was communism,” he said. “That was the great mistake of the 20th century.”
The photograph of Pahlavi
Jazani’s own movement toward Reza Pahlavi did not happen through monarchist nostalgia.
For years, he told the Post, the Iranian opposition lacked an alternative capable of attracting broad support inside the country.
Successive protest movements – the Green Movement, the gasoline protests, and Woman, Life, Freedom – helped create the foundations for a larger national uprising. Nevertheless, none persuaded him to devote himself fully to an organized political project.
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.
Overcome by reports and testimonies emerging from the country, Jazani joined a demonstration outside the Iranian embassy in Lisbon carrying a photograph of Pahlavi.
“I couldn’t do anything,” he said. “So I went with the photograph of the crown prince.”
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.
“It was an honor and a pleasure,” he said of the meeting. “When you meet Pahlavi, he is somebody very human and simple, and very smart. You see the light of intelligence in his eyes.”
“He is not somebody who lies,” Jazani said. “He speaks his mind and does what he says.”
The meeting carried an historical irony. Pahlavi’s 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’s son.
“A revolution needs two conditions to succeed,” he told the exiled royal at their meeting.
“The 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,” Jazani continued.
“Here, the people did not see this as just a fight over the hijab or gasoline prices,” he noted. “Here, they say, ‘We don’t want the regime at all. We don’t want it. We don’t 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.’”
Yet Jazani does not view his endorsement as approval of every act committed during Shah Mohammad Reza’s reign.
Instead, he distinguishes between the monarchy’s historical record and Reza Pahlavi’s stated commitment to secular government, individual rights, territorial integrity, and the Iranian people’s right to choose their political system.
“[Pahlavi] insisted again that he is not seeking to be king,” Jazani said. “He is fighting for the Iranian people to have the right to decide, in a free election, what kind of government they want.”
“Republic or kingdom – it does not matter,” he emphasized. “Only the people should choose the form of government.”
Jazani personally favors a parliamentary kingdom. Iran’s 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.
He pointed to Turkey under Recep Tayyip Erdogan as an example of an elected leader using republican institutions to advance Islamism.
In Jazani’s preferred system, executive authority would rest largely with an elected prime minister, while a king would serve as a constitutional arbiter.
A bicameral legislature, including a senate representing Iran’s regions, would provide an additional restraint on temporary political majorities.
“We need checks and balances everywhere,” he said. “In legislative power, in judicial power, and in executive power.”
He acknowledged that any such model would have to be approved by the Iranians themselves.
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.
But their trials must demonstrate the values of the system replacing the regime rather than reproduce its methods.
“There will be justice, but there will be no death penalty, no executions,” he said. “Everyone involved in the crimes of the Islamic Republic who is captured will be judged, but no death penalty.”
His father was killed outside the law by the previous state, and his mother was pursued by the state that replaced it. Jazani’s response is not to demand retaliatory justice against either camp, but to insist that the next system bind itself to legal restraint.
“We want the rule of law,” he said.
Israel’s role
Jazani was unusually direct about the assistance he believes Israel can provide to those seeking to overthrow the Islamic Republic.
He has met Israel’s ambassador in Lisbon and said many Iranians viewed Israeli action against the regime as support for the Iranian people rather than hostility toward Iran.
“If we even have Israel alone continuing to support us, that would be a very good help,” he told the Post, while insisting that the Iranian movement would continue regardless of what foreign governments decided.
“With or without external help, we will continue our fight,” he said. “The question is the human cost and duration of this fight.”
“The regime is a zombie,” he added. “If we have Israel’s and America’s help, it can reduce the human cost and make it faster.”
Jazani’s 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’s cause.
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.
“They recognize the danger embedded in this kind of meeting,” he said.
For Jazani, there is no conflict in supporting Reza Pahlavi. Nor does preserving his father’s memory require remaining bound to every ideology and alliance that existed in the 1960s and 1970s.
His father’s 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.
“Whatever somebody believed yesterday does not matter,” he said during his meeting with Pahlavi. “What matters is what they choose today.”
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’s future. These will be accompanied by the legal safeguards denied to both his mother and father.
