by Brian Griffith.
In 1936, the dictator of Iran, Reza Shah Pahlavi, banned women from wearing veils, or head-covering scarves. For all of us interested in liberating women, it might be helpful to recall how that went.
Like several other modernizing dictators of the Middle East from Ataturk to Nasser, Reza Shah wished to liberate his nation’s women from their supposedly ignorant ways. He would raise women up, and beat anyone who stood in the way. With that attitude, a great clash of egos grew inevitable, over which male guardians should guide mother Iran. Should it be the socialist revolutionaries for universal equality, the Islamic clergy, or the commander in chief? The first rather explosive collision came over who would supervise the shah’s mother, Noush-Afarin Ayromlou. In March of 1928, she went on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Fatima Masumeh in Qom, and as it was very hot, she replaced her heavy veil with a lighter cloth. As she changed the cloth, the mullah presiding at prayers briefly saw her exposed head, and took it upon himself to publicly correct her for immodesty.
Hearing of this rebuke to his mother, Reza Shah came the next day from Tehran. He showed up at the shrine in Qom with two armored cars and 400 troops. Taking his horse-riding crop in hand, the shah strode into the shrine without removing his army boots. He seized the offending mullah, beat him like an animal with the riding crop, and ordered his officers to shave off the man’s beard.
In his shifting attitude towards women’s clothing, Reza Shah was driven by a desire for respect from Westerners. And in Western eyes, the hijab (or veil) was the most obvious symbol of Islam’s inferiority. Although Western women had generally worn modest head coverings down to the 1700s or 1800s, and although voting for women was still a controversial novelty in the West, the Westerners were now boasting that their Christian civilization stood for women’s liberation. Reza Shah complained, “Because of our women’s custom to wear the veil, due to this ignorance and illiteracy, the Europeans have always taunted and despised us. Discarding the veil and educating women would change that” (Ansary, 43).
To be fair, we should mention that Reza Shah was almost as deeply concerned to Westernize his male subjects’ clothing. Starting in the late 1920s, he began requiring conformity to a new national identity, with a law-backed dress code. All adult males (except registered clergymen) had to give up their old-fashioned robes and start wearing trousers and coats. Also, since going without a head covering was traditionally associated with madness, a replacement had to be decreed for the traditional turbans or Qajar-era fez hats. Men were now supposed to wear military-style “Pahlavi” caps with a rim in front. Where men had dressed in many styles according to tribe, region, or profession, now they were supposed to have one basic style, as if it was the national uniform. Furthermore, wearing beards was increasingly treated like a sign of backwardness. Men who aspired to advance in government service needed to be clean-shaven—although beardlessness was traditionally a sign of immaturity or effeminacy. Later, as Western fashions changed, the shah ordered men to wear European-style bowler hats. As he admitted, his goal was to stop Westerners from “ridiculing us.”
These impositions on men met serious resistance. In 1935, a preacher in the holy city of Mashhad denounced the un-Islamic clothing reforms, and his followers killed a government official. The protesters occupied the Goharshad mosque, demanding an end to the shah’s impositions. In response, Reza Shah sent troops to surround the mosque and ordered the protesters to surrender. When they refused, the soldiers opened fire, reportedly massacring over 100 and wounding up to 300 more. After that, people got the idea that Reza Shah was deadly serious about modernized clothing. He met little organized resistance in the following year when he moved on to change what women wore.
Already for the previous several decades, women’s fashions had been shifting toward less protection in public. Since the Constitutional Revolution (of 1906), women had increasing abandoned Arabian-style facial veils, and just wore scarves to cover their hair. At first, the shah simply defended their right to do that, ordering the police to stop harassing women who wore only a headscarf. If a business refused to serve “improperly” veiled women, a 1934 law threatened the owners with fines. By 1935, head counters estimated that over 4,000 women were going about the streets of Tehran completely unveiled. Of course, as Sattareh Farman Farmaian pointed out, the shah was far less concerned about giving women the right to vote, run for office, divorce their husbands, get custody of their children, or get a passport without a man’s approval (p. 95). It was the look of modernity he wanted. And for some reason, far from sufficient numbers of women were assuming the look he desired.
In 1935, the shah decided to end the problem. He would simply order women what to wear—no facial veils or headscarves period. He announced the decree in January 1936, at the diploma awards ceremony for a women’s teacher training college. The point of the announcement was clearly demonstrated, because the shah’s queen and two daughters stood onstage completely unveiled. As princess Ashraf recalled, Reza Shah had told them the night before: “This is the hardest thing I have ever had to do, but I must ask you to serve as an example for other Persian women” (Ansary, 44). At the ceremony, the shah gave a characteristically blunt explanation: “The women of our country, because of their exclusion from society, have been unable to display their talent and ability. I might say they have been unable to do their duty towards their beloved country and people” (Buchan, 34).
Now, women were officially free to eliminate the cloth walls protecting them from men’s attention. Actually, they were banned from having that protection. To enforce the new law, the police were ordered to rip veils off women’s heads and confiscate their scarves. Instead of facing fines for refusing to serve “unveiled” women, now the operators of movie houses, public baths, or buses faced fines if they admitted female customers who were wearing veils. Clinics were ordered to stop serving veiled women. Schoolgirls whose parents would not let them come unveiled were barred from attending classes. Somehow, most of the punishments for failure to uplift women fell on women.
In response, many conservative women took to wearing scarves concealed by big hats. Although numerous women celebrated the great unveiling, probably most of them felt violated. For a place to gather without being exposed in public, many women congregated almost daily in their local female bathhouses. In smaller regional cities of Kashan, Kerman, or Khorasan, many or most women defied the scarf ban. Camron Michael Amin estimates that “every family had at least one female relative who simply refused to go out unveiled” (p. 106).
Another problem was that men felt emasculated. Where most family men had felt duty-bound to play guardian, setting and defending the boundaries of “their” women’s lives, now the great big brother had usurped that role for himself. Where most fathers—and mothers—would not allow their daughters go uncovered in public, now the government set the rules for that.
The other group of upstaged men was the clergy. Clerics had always presumed to guide women, but now they found themselves corrected, not just by the shah, but also by the female spokesmen for his new “Women’s Awakening” campaign. Enthusiastic female supporters for the unveiling policy were giving public speeches, and their unveiled pictures appeared in the papers. For at least once, however, the clerics seemed to be defending the feelings of most ordinary women. The mullahs declared that the shah’s policy was a violation that served the male desire for “making women naked.” As Homa Katouzian reasoned, “In Europe it would have been tantamount to a decree declaring that women must go out topless” (p. 120).
Facing growing opposition from the clerics, the government’s spokesmen tried to fight Islam with Islam. They staged a Women’s Awakening celebration in Qom, where wives of clerics appeared onstage unveiled. The speeches at this event proclaimed that true Islam was meant to be a progressive force—part of the universal movement toward social equality. Islam, they said, had arisen to reform the reactionary practices of ancient Arabia. As Voltaire had recognized, Islam defended women’s personal, marital, and property rights (Amin, 97). But what about their right to set their own boundaries? Although the British generally approved of liberalizing Islam, their consul noted that popular resistance “has manifested itself in reluctance of the older generation to go abroad in the streets. It is one thing to forbid women to veil; it is another thing to make them mingle freely with men” (Abrahamian, 95).
The Western world’s controversies over changing gender markers in the 1960s offer some clue as to how traumatic these changes can be. Boys with long hair? Girls in unisex suits? Ridiculing modest girls as “uptight”? For at least 1,000 years, Iranians had been conditioned from childhood to feel that something was seriously abnormal about unrelated men and women sharing the same spaces, unless they were “properly” shielded from direct visual encounter. Outside of family or local farm settings, almost all social environments had been basically homosocial. Suddenly, the social environment was supposed to be heterosocial, and the resulting awkwardness was commonly extreme (Haeri, 108). As Afsaneh Najmabadi explains, “learning a new verbal language, a new language of the body, and new rules of social intercourse suited to a heterosocial space was, of course, not limited to women” (2005, 152–153). It was an acquired taste, and at first only a minority of women felt empowered. Still, for all the brutality of Reza Shah’s tactics, even his critics admitted that he transformed the social landscape. In his egotistical drive to be the top guardian for women, he came close to eliminating organized raiding by nomadic tribes. Then he broke the order of gender apartheid in a way that could never be undone. Nobody—not even the ayatollahs of the Islamic revolution—would be able to re-segregate Iranian society again.
On the front lines of the shah’s Women’s Awakening movement, the newly established Girl Scouts appeared in newspaper photos, proudly marching in their Western-style uniforms, looking somewhat martial but non-threatening, since they carried no weapons. Safiyeh Firuz’s parents didn’t let her join, as they suspected the male organizers. She heard another parent say, “What do you mean we should hand our girls over to this guy to go, I don’t know, go camping?” But Sattareh Farman Farmaian joined up, and recalled loving her “hot green Girl Scout uniform with shiny brass badges” (Amin, 200–201).
In his own praise, Reza Shah commissioned choirs of patriotic girls to sing “The Young Woman’s Anthem”:
Arise from the sleep of shame and neglect!
Take your mind off superstitious thoughts!
Arise from neglect, and this ignorant sleep,
for it is come, the seventeenth of day!
Women’s freedom is victorious
in the shadow of the king today! (Amin, 80)
Actually though, most women were not so devoted to any male leader. Generally, they relied on their own wits to define their interests. After the British and Russians forced Reza Shah into exile in 1941, Sattareh Farman Farmaian reported that “women who had felt humiliated by the Shah’s dress code put on black chadors and flaunted them in the streets, reveling in the freedom to wear what they wished” (p. 128). We may note, however, that the facial veil (or neqab) never again returned to favor, not even after the Islamic revolution.
Sources
Abrahamian, Evand (2008) A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge University Press.
Amin, Camron Michael (2002) The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman. University Press of Florida.
Ansary, Nina (2015) Jewels of Allah. Ravela Press.
Buchan, James (2012) Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences. Simon & Schuster.
Farman Farmaian, Sattareh (1992) Daughter of Persia. Crown Publishers.
Haeri, Shahla (1994) “Temporary Marriage: An Islamic Discourse on Female Sexuality.” In Afkhami, Mahnaz and Friedl, Erika, eds., In the Eye of the Storm. Syracuse University Press.
Katouzian, Homa (2013) Iran. Oneworld.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh (2005) Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. University of California Press.