Abolqasem Najm

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Abolqaasem Nadjm, second from the right, among Iranian senators of the Pahlavi era

Abolqasem Najm (Najm ol-Molk) (Persian: ابولقاسم نجم‎ ), Abolqāsem Najm (1892 – October 19, 1981) was a minister of Iran.

His father was Mirza Mahmoud Shirazi, a merchant. His mother was the daughter of Iran's first modern physicist and astronomern, Mirza Abdulqaffar Nadjm ol-Molk. He received his basic education from his grandfather and later inhereited his grandfather's title of 'Nadjm ol-Molk' (star of the country) after Mirza Abdulqaffar's retirement.

He studied at the Tehran School of Political Sciences. After graduation he entered the service of the ministry of foreign affairs (Iran) in 1912 as an attaché. He was Iran's ambassador to the third Reich, but was appointed to France upon his own request just prior to the second world war.

In 1937 when Nadjm was Iran's ambassador to France, the French journal L'Europe Nouvelle criticized the economic condition of Iran. Reza Shah Pahlavi demanded an apology, received one. A French columnist reopened the wound one month later by rehearsing the incident under the punning headline // n'y avait pas la de quoi fouetter un Shah. This was a parody of the French phrase "There was nothing there with which to beat a cat," suggesting that the King of Kings had made a fuss about nothing. The poor pun was enough to make Reza Shah Pahlavi immediately recall Nadjm to Teheran "for an explanation," and withdraw his promise to lend Iranian art objects to the coming Paris International Exhibition which was planned for May 1937. ^[1]

Nadjm later served as Iran's ambassador to Japan and Afghanistan, the governor of Khuzestan province and later an elected senator. He was the minister of finance in Ebrahim Hakimi's cabinet and tried to fight corruption, but was held back by the interferences by the royal family. This resulted in his resignation.

He was also a member of the Oil Commission, a group of politicians the works of whom eventually resulted in the nationalization of the Iranian oil industry.