-Editorial-
On Jan. 8, 1936, Reza Shah Pahlavi of Iran banned women’s veils and headscarves in public, including schools, universities and offices. The ban sparked a social rift that continues today. More than 80 years later, the Islamic Republic’s radical Shia regime, which replaced the monarchy in 1979 and has reversed its Westernizing drive, is doing everything to ensure women never leave home without a headscarf.
The obligatory hijab once symbolized the social backwardness that Reza Shah sought to banish by diktat. But for the Islamic Republic, it is a standard of public decency and family values to be defended at the cost of inflicting pain, if not death, on a sullen population. The 33-year-old Roya Heshmati, a recent victim of this dogma, was reportedly whipped 74 times for refusing to cover her head. In 2022, violent enforcement practices provoked a death in police custody and a nationwide revolt.
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In the early 20th century, many educated Iranians believed the country could not progress without the participation of half of its population. This meant bringing women out of the house and into social activities, a move inevitably opposed by many men and the Shia clergy. Iran’s Shia clerics had already turned on the Constitutional Revolution of 1905-06 after initially supporting it, seeing it as a prelude to secularization, and social and moral anarchy.
It would have been complicated and time-consuming to enhance the position of women through proselytism, education or encouraging families to loosen controls. And that may not have yielded the desired socio-cultural results. The hijab ban was thus a bold, symbolic move to break a physical barrier. Reza Shah, a soldier who took power by force and who suppressed banditry, was perhaps the only man daring enough to order the ban in such a conservative country.
Yet his move was not as novel or shocking as one might imagine; the push to free women from the veil predated the monarch’s order. A women’s liberation movement had developed alongside the constitutional movement of the early 20th century. While constitutionalists formed societies to push for political change and limits to the monarch’s powers, women began forming their own associations or joining mixed-sex societies to debate Iran’s future. Examples included the Association for the Freedom of Women (Anjoman-e horriyat-e nesvan) in Tehran and the Women’s Committee (Comité-ye zanan) in Tabriz.
So before the constitutional revolution and before Reza Shah, women were already discussing their emancipation, even if it was a restricted debate among a limited number of women.
Not surprisingly, these women were from a privileged background. A prominent feminist of the time, Sadiqeh Dowlatabadi, was perhaps one of the first women to flout the hijab rules of her time, before the royal edict.
The green light would soon come from the monarch, leading to social changes, and whole new perspectives.
Seething reaction
For years, clerics, conservatives and communists blinded by hatred of the Pahlavi monarchs, derided the ban as an injustice to women. Because a dictator had ordered it, many said it could not be defended. Yet as the preceding decades indicated, this was no hat trick. In contrast with Islamic Republic laws, it was not restrictive in principle. Already in 1931, a Marriage Law cited and sought to safeguard rights for wives, including the right not to be abused or beaten. It also set a minimum marriage age.
In the 40 years following the ban, women were not only graduating from university but also sitting in parliament, forming political parties and working as senior civil servants and judges. Today, we’re back to catching families marrying off their daughters as child brides for money. Many feminists critical of the Pahlavi period have defended, in recent decades, a gradualist approach to winning women’s rights in a broader framework of “reformism” within the Islamic Republic. One wonders how much progress they have made with that approach, 40 years or so after the Khomeini revolution.
The social changes following the hijab ban show it was the right decision.
In many ways, it followed a zeitgeist, illustrated by the mobilization of women and society’s acceptance of it. Today’s rejection of the obligatory hijab is, at the very least, a sign of its invalidity.
Iranian women are now not only trying to recover these rights, but they have turned their hijab struggle into a political tool. Refusing to wear a headscarf is to reject dictatorial injustice. This has continued despite the violent suppression of the 2022 revolt, the threat of beatings and worse. Women are standing up to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who has excoriated the hijab ban and rightly seen it as a brazen sign of secularism. One of his mouthpieces, the conservative pressman Hussein Shariatmadari, has urged pious Iranians to attack the girls and women who dare spurn the hijab in public.
The regime has sought to push Iranians as far as it can, without reaching the limit once again. With the Middle East in turmoil, this really isn’t the time for another national revolt.
