and intersectionality, that is, the recognition that
Muslim women have suffered historical disad-
vantage based on both their gender and religious
identity.
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1929.
Ratna KapurIranGender has worked as a key category in defining
the secularism of Iranian modernity. Iranian poli-
tics of modernity, since the mid-nineteenth century,
has been marked by the emergence of a spectrum of
nationalist and Islamist discourses. Within that
spectrum, one notion of Iranian modernity took
Europe as its model of progress and civilization
(taraqqìva tamaddun) – the two central terms of
that discourse – and increasingly combined that
urge with recovery of pre-Islamic Iranianism.
Other trends sought to combine their nationalism
with Islam, by projecting Shi≠ism as Iranianization
of Islam in its early centuries (Tavakoli-Targhi
2001). Later twentieth-century developments largely
led to ejection/abandonment of what may be called
an Islamist nationalist trend from the complex
hybridity of Iranian modernity – until its re-emer-
gence in new configurations from the late 1980s.
Until recently, it had become a commonly accepted
notion that Iranian politics is and has been a battle-
ground, since the nineteenth century, between
modernity and tradition, with Islam always in the
latter camp. Similarly, the beginning of Iranian
feminism was not marked by a boundary, setting
Islam to its beyond. Women’s rights activists made
rhetorical use of any available position to invent a
female-friendly discourse.
Though there were debates among women on
iran 727certain issues, these differences were not consoli-
dated as incompatible and contradictory positions.
Nor was Islam viewed as inherently anti-women.
While anti-Constitutionalist forces grounded their
political opposition to the constitution (1906–9)
and to the reforms advocated by modernists, such
as women’s education, in their interpretations of
Islamic precepts, the advocates of these reforms
also drew from the same sources to argue their
case.
The conflation of modernist with non-Islamic
and Islamic with tradition and anti-modern took
shape in the course of the twentieth century
through a series of gendered conflicts.
A critical period was the reign of Reza Shah
Pahlavì(1926–41), and more specifically the un-
veiling campaign initiated in winter 1936. As
Tavakoli-Targhi has argued, in the nineteenth cen-
tury European and Iranian/Islamic women (per-
ceived as radically different) emerged as “terrain[s]
of political and cultural contestations” (1990, 74).
These contestations “resulted in the valorization of
the veil (™ijàb) as a visible marker of the self and the
other” (2001, 54). Despite this mid-nineteenth-
century preoccupation, during the early decades of
the twentieth century unveiling was not on the
agenda of reformers, who were more concerned
with women’s education and reform of family laws.
A changing social context later in the twentieth
century, however, began to bring the issue to the
fore. Women began to be more visibly part of the
social scene, through their participation in Con-
stitutionalist activities, forming associations and
holding meetings, establishing schools and holding
public graduation ceremonies for students, and
writing in the press and publishing women’s jour-
nals. They also began to circulate more openly in
the streets. Urban middle- and upper-class women
began to slowly challenge and expand their very
restrictive gender spaces – a space much more
restricted than that of lower middle- and working-
class women who had a claim to streets and mov-
ing around the city.
By the early 1920s, in certain neighborhoods,
mostly “north” Tehran, women had begun to go
out on the street without a face veil. Some women
began to venture out without the chador, replacing
it with loose long tunics. From the very beginning,
unlike issues such as women’s education or reform
of family laws, unveiling was a contested issue
among reforming women themselves (Hoodfar
1997, Najmabadi 2000).
After the official ban on the chador was imposed
in 1936, state violence entered into the picture and