The diamond known as the Mountain of Light, wearing a blue cloak heavy with pearls, the Shah advanced towards the Peacock Throne,” recorded the traveller Victoria Sackville-West. “European women curtsied to the ground; the men inclined themselves low on his passage; the mullahs shambled forward in a rapacious, propriety wave.”

“With his own hands he removed the cap from his head,” she wrote, “with his own hands he raised and assumed the crown”.

Eleven years after he coronated himself in December 1924, Iran’s King of Kings Reza Shah Pahlavi, the son of a conservative small landowner, ordered his women subjects to remove the hijab. The Kashf-e hijab decree was a critical moment in his effort to remake the country into a modern nation with a modern military, modern railways, modern banks, modern schools—and men in European-style caps.

Through the past week, the world has watched as dancing young women have tossed their veils into bonfires, while others defiantly cut their hair in public—a rebellion against the theocratic regime that forced women back into the hijab in 1979. At least 17 protestors have reportedly been shot dead in clashes with police while pro-hijab vigilantes have heckled and intimidated unveiled women.

Events in Iran aren’t, however, just driven by the desire for personal freedoms. The hijab is, instead, a metaphor for a bitter struggle that involves identity, the State, and social class. Although it is easy to claim Reza’s decree abolishing the veil was a moment of liberation for Iran’s women, their experience of Westernisation was unequal—and often traumatic.

The secret wars of women

Like many modernising societies, late 19th-century Iran depended on the unseen labour of women. Elite women might have lived in secluded polygamous families surrounded by children, eunuchs, and servants, but others supported their families as seamstresses, carpet weavers, domestic labourers, and even sex-workers. These two worlds were united, political scientist Hamideh Sedghi has observed in her superb history of women in Iranian politics, in seclusion: Women’s work was walled away.

To read more:

https://theprint.in/opinion/security-code/the-many-shades-of-grey-in-irans-hijab-war-show-its-not-just-personal-freedom-vs-theocracy/1141168/