Mazyar Maximilien Jazani was only six months old at the time of his father's arrest by SAVAK, the security force under the shah. He reached age seven when his father died while held, and turned thirteen as the Islamic Republic's actions against his mother pushed the family out of Iran.

Today an Iranian-French attorney based in Europe, Jazani has made a choice once viewed as nearly impossible. He has openly backed Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, the son of the ruler his father sought to remove, and taken part in legal efforts tied to Pahlavi's push for change in Iran.

This step for Jazani marks a break from the ideological splits that have split Iran's opposition for nearly fifty years. It comes without ignoring wrongs under the prior monarchy or the details around his father's end.

His father, Bijan Jazani, ranked among the top thinkers in Iran's revolutionary Left. Born in 1938, he rose from the socialist side of the National Front linked to former prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh.

Though the Organization of Iranian People's Fedai Guerrillas later took up his name, the group started in 1971 under other Marxist fighters such as Masoud Ahmadzadeh and Amir Parviz Pouyan, whose view on guerrilla action differed from Bijan's.

Per Mazyar, just one small remaining part of the group took on Bijan's ideas in 1977, almost six years after the start.

Bijan Jazani killed among political prisoners

Taken in 1968 and given a fifteen-year term, Bijan Jazani died with eight other political prisoners near Tehran's Evin Prison on April 19, 1975.

Officials claimed the men were shot while trying to flee. Their ends have long been seen as killings outside the law by SAVAK agents.

"No other term fits this," Jazani told The Jerusalem Post. "They were killed outright."

Jazani noted his father was close to finishing his term when he and the others were removed from Evin and slain.

"My father was taken when I was just six months old," he said. "I was seven when he was slain without any fair process while serving his fifteen-year term."

The death built a legacy Mazyar carried through his youth. Within years, the revolution welcomed by his father's few remaining supporters had led to a fresh system of oppression.

Jazani was near thirteen when the Islamic Republic tightened its hold in 1981, two years after the revolution, and began wiping out political groups that would not bow to clerical rule.

His mother, a political activist who joined early efforts against forced veiling, became a target.

The first big women's protests against the new order came weeks after Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini returned to Iran in February 1979.

Jazani recalled that officials first pulled back from forcing the hijab, only to launch a wider drive against women, secular voices, leftists, and other foes.

When prosecutors came for his mother, they held extended family members to pressure her into giving up.

"They took many cousins, family members, my aunt, and others, just to force my mother to turn herself in for death," he said.

The relatives were freed once officials learned Jazani's mother and children had reached France.

He arrived without French. English had been his second language at Tehran's Alborz High School, so he dove into French literature and thought before law school.

His time with France's legal system left him unhappy.

As a young lawyer, Jazani offered help to defendants without means. He grew troubled by what he saw as an uneven balance between investigating judges and the weak role of defense lawyers against the state's case.

He recalled prosecutors and judges talking cases over privately before hearings and defendants blocked from bringing clearing witnesses.

"If I defend an innocent person, I cannot promise a not-guilty finding," he told the Post of that time. "But I should at least make sure the jury or judge hears the truth."

Jazani later joined pushes to change French criminal rules, including calls for defense lawyers to gain more power to seek investigative steps.

One idea entered French law before, he said, only to be undone by a later government. He left criminal work and built a practice advising musicians, composers, producers, and arts figures.

The move, he said, came from a personal need to know where client funds originated and if he could ethically aid their work.

"I do not judge other lawyers," he stressed. "Defense is a core right. It was only my own choice."

A warning from prison

In a broad talk with the Post, Jazani rejected the notion that fifty years on, his father's views could be summed up as Soviet-style communism or simple hate for the monarchy.

Bijan Jazani was a Marxist, his son said, but also a nationalist and patriot, shown by his defense paper in his trial before the special military court that convicted him.

More key, he had spotted the threat from political Islam before many on the Iranian Left would admit it. His writings have held up as foretelling.

While jailed, Bijan Jazani penned a brief work on the attempted union of Marxism and Islam. The text warned that yielding to religious revolutionaries could boost clerical forces aiming to lead the opposition.

It was smuggled from prison, his son said, but some left-wing activists first refused to print it for fear that criticism of political Islam would split the anti-shah push, led from abroad by Khomeini in exile.

"He pointed his comrades to the risk of political Islam," Jazani said. "It was a short book, but it grew well known in Iran."

Bijan Jazani's alert proved right. Much of the Iranian Left backed Khomeini, with parts of the Tudeh Party and the Fedai group supporting the Islamic Republic even as it built the tools that would later jail and kill leftists.

Mazyar Jazani's view stays sharp on those choices.

One factor that drew part of the Left to clerical rule, beyond shared anti-shah views, was Cold War thinking that locked them into "anti-imperialism" ideas.

Because of this, many also took on hostility to Israel due to its US ties, Jazani explained, letting global ideologies override the shape of the regime forming in Iran.

A small set of Marxists, drawing from Karl Marx's pamphlet The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, held that the main clash was no longer capitalism versus socialism or anti-imperialism, Jazani said.

Instead, they saw it as a fight against a new clerical group taking political and economic power for itself.

"The issue was the caste of ayatollahs - the clerical caste," he said. "An oligarchy of mullahs, a kleptocracy."

Jazani still disputed the idea that the Iranian Left was the key force that put Khomeini in power.

He put more blame on Western governments that saw political Islam as a block against Soviet growth and allowed Islamist groups while cracking down on communists.

As proof, Jazani noted Khomeini was hosted in France in Neauphle-le-Chateau while in exile.

Further, at the Guadeloupe Conference of January 1979, former French president Valery Giscard d'Estaing, US president Jimmy Carter, British prime minister James Callaghan, and former West German chancellor Helmut Schmidt agreed to accept the shah's fall, shown by their early ties with the ayatollahs in the Islamic Republic's start.

What the Left did after the monarchy fell was "shameful," Jazani said, but it was not the main cause of Khomeini's rise.

"The Left in Iran was an issue," he said. "But the key factor was the fear of communism and the idea that Islam could serve as a tool against it."

That plan, he argued, failed to see that communist and Islamist totalitarianism could join against democracy, personal freedom, and the rule of law.

"It was not worth building the monster of Islamism to fight an enemy that was communism," he said. "That was the great error of the twentieth century."

The photograph of Pahlavi

Jazani's own shift toward Reza Pahlavi did not come from monarchist longing.

For years, he told the Post, the Iranian opposition lacked an option able to draw wide backing inside the country.

Wave after wave of protests - the Green Movement, the gasoline protests, and Woman, Life, Freedom - laid ground for a bigger national rise. Still, none led him to give himself fully to an organized political effort.

That shifted after the mass killing of protesters in Iran in January of this year, when some 30,000 to 40,000 people were shot by the regime. Human rights groups have recorded mass killings across the country, including executions of wounded protesters in hospital beds.

Overcome by reports and accounts from the country, Jazani joined a protest outside the Iranian embassy in Lisbon holding a photograph of Pahlavi. "I could do nothing," he said. "So I went with the photograph of the crown prince."

The image drew quick notice due to his family background and who Jazani is. An interview he gave at the protest reached people close to Pahlavi, and contact came. In time, Jazani was asked to meet him.

"It was an honor and a pleasure," he said of the meeting. "When you meet Pahlavi, he is very human and plain, and very sharp. You see the light of intelligence in his eyes."

"He is not someone who lies," Jazani said. "He speaks his mind and does what he says."

The meeting held historical irony. Pahlavi's father had led the state whose security arm jailed and killed Bijan Jazani. The son of that prisoner was now giving 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 needed, is that the people must reject the government. The second, which is enough, is that rulers must no longer be able to govern," Jazani went on.

"Here, the people did not see this as just a fight over the hijab or gasoline prices," he noted. "Here, they say, 'We do not want the regime at all. We do not want it. We do not want the Islamic Republic. So what do we want instead? We want Crown Prince Reza Pahlavi, who has spent all these years working and sharing his vision.'"

Yet Jazani does not see his backing as approval of every act under Shah Mohammad Reza's rule.

Instead, he separates the monarchy's past record from Reza Pahlavi's stated pledge to secular rule, personal rights, territorial integrity, and the Iranian people's right to pick their political system.

"[Pahlavi] stressed 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 vote, what kind of government they want."