HOVEYDA, AMIR ABBAS

Iranian politician, and prime minister continuously from 1965 to 1977.

Amir Abbas Hoveyda was born in Tehran in 1919 and attended high school in Beirut. With a bachelor's degree in political science from Brussels, he returned to Iran in 1942 and was hired at the ministry of foreign affairs. In the 1950s he became a high administrator in the National Iranian Oil Company. In the early 1960s Hoveyda joined Hasan-Ali Mansur's Iran-e Novin Party, a new political grouping charged with implementing the shah's reform program known as the White Revolution. When Mansur was assassinated in 1965, Hoveyda replaced him as prime minister. As Iran's second most powerful man during the two prerevolutionary decades, he presided over a crucial period marked by rising oil income and various development projects, as well as widespread corruption and repression. In 1977, facing mounting economic and political problems, the shah demoted Hoveyda to court minister and later placed him under house arrest, as a scapegoat, when revolution loomed on the horizon in 1978. Left behind after the shah's January 1979 departure from Iran, Hoveyda was captured by Ayatollah Khomeini's provisional revolutionary government and executed quickly following a show trial in April 1979.

Bibliography

Hoveyda, Fereydoun. The Fall of the Shah. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980.

Milani, Abbas. The Persian Sphinx: Amir Abbas Hoveyda and the Riddle of the Iranian Revolution: A Biography. Washington, DC: Mage Publishers, 2000.

Pakravan, Saïdeh. The Arrest of Hoveyda: Stories of the Iranian Revolution. Costa Mesa, CA: Blind Owl Press, 1998.

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updated by afshin matin-asgari