tory laborers and consumers. The acceleration of
migration to the cities generated ideological and
material tensions for the young generation of the
popular classes, exposing them to new, public
Westernized roles of women in mass media, higher
education, and the professions. In the 1970s, in-
tellectual, Islamic, and leftist responses to the
monarchy’s constructed metaphor of the modern
nationhood addressed the regime’s dominant “lip-
sticked” image of the modern emancipated (and
sexualized) women as a threat to the moral fabric
of society. Jalàl âl A™mad’s socially committed
female characters in his literary works, ≠AlìSharì≠atì’s
formulation of the linkages between women’s
oppression and “cultural imperialism,” his eleva-
tion of an Islamic role model for women within
family and nation, and Fidà±iyìn-i Khalq’s “mascu-
linization” of women offered alternative identities.
âl A™mad’s notion of gharbzadigì(Westoxification)
pitted a nation of good and authentic Iranian men
and women against a corrupt autocracy and its
alien consumer-capitalist and neocolonialist agenda.
An “innovative” language of Shi≠ism, elevating
the militant sister and wife of shàhid (martyr)
Imàm £usayn (grandson of the Prophet) in the
“Tragedy of Karbala” (680 C.E.), and various
female-specific symbols idealizing the cultural
spectacle of the Islamization of gender – scarves,
segregation of sexes in university classrooms, and
female-led religious gathering – emerged as an
indigenous, yet modern and progressive politics
of the Islamic Revolution’s identity, to mobilize
women in the name of national unity. Despite a
constitutional ban on the commercial use of the
images of women, ideal images of veiled mothers,
who raise “pious children for the Prophet’s
Kingdom,” were used on posters, billboards, and
stamps during the Iran-Iraq War, not only to elevate
the concept of Iran’s national identity but also to
distinguish Shì≠ìIran from SunnìIraq. In the midst
of crushing the country’s workers’ movement dur-
ing the 1980s, valorizing “good ™ijàb” versus “bad
™ijàb,” family over profession, the government
used an invented tradition to create a sharp iden-
tity division between secular middle-class urban
women and the Islamist provincial women of the
popular class, asserting the future direction of Iran
as well as controlling and making women conform
to an idealized construct of womanhood. Since the
emergence of a moderate state in the 1990s, and
pressured by the Islamist and secular feminists who
have found common ground to claim a counter-
culture to the politicization of gender identities,
the government has adopted a policy of Islamic/
Shì≠ìmodernization that attempts to reconcile the
iran and afghanistan 285images of women as mothers and housewives with
Iranian women’s aspirations and achievements in
public and professional life.
Kabul’s Nixon Market shopping center symbol-
ized modernist Westernization in the 1960s and
early 1970s. However, mini-skirts, beauty pageants,
co-education, and women’s presence at nightclubs
and rock concerts bore little relation to the experi-
ence of rural women. The 1978 Saur Revolution,
the 1979 invasion by the Soviet Union, the 1992
seizure of power by the Mujàhidìn, and the 1996
takeover by the Taliban linked the major dicho-
tomy between modernity and tradition with a
politicized, gendered demarcation of Afghan’s
national identity. The PDPA’s (People’s Democratic
Party of Afghanistan) support for Soviet occupa-
tion produced a split between secular, pro-Soviet
women’s organizations and feminist, anti-Soviet
women’s movements (for example, RAWA, the Rev-
olutionary Association of the Women of Afghan-
istan). The subjugated women under the culturally
and politically loaded symbol of the burqa≠replaced
the socialist image of women, ranging from urban
educators in the countryside to singers and stage
performers, and marked the nation’s identification
with a political yet conflictive tribal Islam, clearly
expressed in Sebghatullah Mojaddadi’s election
speech, which, while claiming the equality of men
and women under Islam, called the election of a
woman president as a sign of a “nation in decline.”
In Iran and Afghanistan, the search for a post-
colonial modernity – Western, socialist, and Islamic –
with its metaphorical association of new woman-
hood with new nationhood, has failed to subsume
traditional and subnational identities within a
hegemonic national culture. In both countries, the
struggles over the nation and its “fragments”
(women, ethnic and religious communities, popu-
lar classes) have always been strongly gendered.
Women, though included like men as citizens, were
given a limited space – as mothers and symbols of
national and cultural identity – in the project of the
national process. At the crossroads of moderniza-
tion and the globalizing discourse of consumerism,
human rights, and identity politics, women in Iran
and Afghanistan will continue to contribute to
the shaping of the meanings of “woman” and
“nation.”Bibliography
J. Afary, Shi±i narratives of Karbala and Christian rites of
penance. Michel Foucault and the culture of the Iranian
Revolution, 1978–1979, in Radical History86 (2003),
7–35.
B. Anderson, Imagined communities, New York 1991.
C. M. Amin, The making of the modern Iranian woman.