She was considered the "power behind her brother" and was instrumental in the 1953 coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh in favour of strengthening the monarchical rule of the Shah.

[4] In the early 1930s, Ashraf Pahlavi, her older sister Shams, and their mother were among the first significant Iranian women to cease wearing the traditional veil.

[4] On 8 January 1936, she and her mother and sister played a major symbolic role in the Kashf-e hijab (the abolition of the veil) which was a part of the shah's effort to include women in public society, by participating in the graduation ceremony of the Tehran Teacher's College unveiled.

[6] Ashraf Pahlavi was not permitted to attend university and instead was married in 1937, at the age of 18, to Mirza Khan Ghavam, whose family was politically allied with her father.

As historian Stephen Kinzer's book All the Shah's Men recounts, "Ashraf was enjoying life in French casinos and nightclubs when one of Kermit Roosevelt's best Iranian agents, Assadollah Rashidian, paid her a call.

The leader of the delegation, a senior British operative named Norman Darbyshire, had the foresight to bring a mink coat and a packet of cash.

"[12] By her own account, she was a strong supporter of the rights of women to basic life necessities such as "food, education, and health"[13] and was not a radical reformist.

In a March 1976 article in The Nation, writer Kay Boyle criticized Ashraf for her touting of International Women's Year as succeeding in widening the global vision of sisterhood, while approximately 4,000 of the Princess's own "sisters" were political prisoners in Iran with virtually no hope of a military trial.

She was an advocate for the international spread of literacy, especially in Iran, where her brother Mohammad Reza Shah was a major proponent of the anti-illiteracy movement.

[16][2][17][18] After the 1979 revolution, Ashraf Pahlavi asked David Rockefeller to support her brother Mohammad Reza's attempts to find asylum.

[19] She also attacked U.S. President Jimmy Carter and the United Nations Secretary General Kurt Waldheim for not giving their support to her late brother the Shah during the start of the Revolution.

[4] Nevertheless, it has been purported that part of the story behind the build up of her fortune may have been that during the Iranian industrial boom, which was driven by a surge in oil prices, Pahlavi and her son Shahram took 10% or more of a new company's stock gratis in return for ensuring the delivery of a license to operate, to import, to export, or to deal with the government.

[23] In 1979, The New York Times reported that a document dated 17 September 1978 from Ashraf's office requested a transfer of $708,000 from her Bank Melli account to her account at the Union Bank of Switzerland in Geneva under the code name 'SAIPA', which, in French, her preferred foreign language, stands for: S-on, A-ltesse, I-mperiale, P-rincesse, A-shraf.

In the article, she argued that her wealth was not accumulated through "ill-gotten gains" and attributed her fortune to inherited land, which "drastically increased in value with the development of Iran and the new prosperity that was there for all".

[18] She asserted that many other Iranians profited from the sale of their own real estate, but were not accused of financial misconduct because of close ties to the clergy and Khomeini.

He was the director-general of Civil Aviation and fourth son of (Hazrat Sahib ul-Sa'ada) Ahmad Shafiq Pasha, the minister of the Khedivial Court of Egypt.

Armao related that Princess Ashraf died in her sleep at home in Europe, but declined to name the country, citing concern for the safety of her family.

In accordance with her promise to fight the "slanders" about her and her family, her books are largely concerned with clearing up what she viewed as misconceptions about the Pahlavi dynasty.

She again addressed questions about her personal financial situation, writing in her most widely read book, her memoir Faces in a Mirror, "I had inherited about $300,000 when my father died (and about 1 million square meters of land near the Caspian Sea, as well as properties in Gorgan and Kermanshah, which would later become extremely valuable).