The son of Iran’s last shah bids to regain the throne

called himself Shahenshah (King of Kings), Aryamehr (Light of the Aryans) and Sovereign of the Order of the Lion and Sun. When the shah died in 1980, a year after being by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, his son, a student aged 20, proclaimed himself king with similar grandeur. “I’ll leave it up to you to call me whatever you want,” Reza Pahlavi says nowadays, modestly.It is for the Iranian people to decide whether the peacock throne should have a new royal incumbent, he says. If they were to opt for a secular democratic republic, he would consider it his duty to back it. He merely hopes to help steer his people peacefully out of the current rotten religious dictatorship.