an unbridgeable chasm opened up among women
themselves. Girls were withdrawn from schools
and kept at home. Women teachers who did not
want to unveil resigned from their jobs or were dis-
missed. Girls’ schools that had been the site for
women’s public togetherness, with women acting
not only as students and teachers but also as citi-
zens, now became the site of a division. The unveil-
ing campaign as enforced by the government now
expelled some from this common site. As with
other measures taken by Reza Shah’s government,
increasingly modernization became conflated with
only that modernity in which becoming modern
was disaffiliated from Islam and made to coincide
with pre-Islamic Iranianism. Those who had
sought to combine their quest for modernity with a
reconfiguration of Islam were unmistakably marked
as traditional and anti-modern – an identification
that has only in recent decades been reshaped.
This process changed the meaning of modernity,
Iranianism, and Islam. Iranian modernity took
increasingly a non-Islamic (though not necessarily
anti-Islamic) meaning. Iranian secularism and
nationalism were critically reshaped through the
expulsion of a different kind of modernity, one that
had attempted to produce a different hybrid made
of grafting Iranian nationalism onto Shi≠ism.
In the 1960s, the contests over women’s suffrage
(1963) and the introduction of the Family Protec-
tion Act (1967) similarly consolidated secularism of
modernity with the modernization program of the
Pahlavìstate which was opposed by the clerical estab-
lishment. Once again women’s rights issues served
as a marker of the Islamic and the secular. Perhaps
more than any other sociopolitical and cultural
issue of contention, women’s rights issues became
markers of secularism of modernity. This historical
legacy lies behind the current fears of contamina-
tion of secularism and feminism by religion.
The emergence of a vocal feminist position from
within the ranks of the Islamist movement over the
past decades in Iran constitutes an important break
from the past positioning of all Islam to the beyond
of the modern and the secular. By opening up the
domain of Islamic interpretation to non-believers
and non-Muslims, by insisting on the equality of
women and men in all areas, by disconnecting the
presumed natural or God-given differences between
women and men from the cultural and social con-
structions of gender, these currents have opened up
a space for dialogue and alliance between Islamist
women activists and secular feminists, reversing a
60-year-old rift in which each treated the other as
antagonist.728 secularism
Bibliography
F. Adelkhah, Being modern in Iran, trans. J. Derrick,
London 1999.
H. Hoodfar, The veil in their minds and on our heads.
Veiling practices and Muslim women, in L. Lowe and
D. Lloyd (eds.), The politics of culture in the shadow of
capital, Durham, N.C. 1997, 248–79.
A. Najmabadi, (Un)veiling feminism, in Social Text 64
(2000), 29–45.
P. Paidar, Gender of democracy. The encounter between
feminism and reformism in contemporary Iran, Geneva
2001.
M. Tavakoli-Targhi, Imagining Western women. Occi-
dentalism and Euro-eroticism, in Radical America 24:3
(1990), 73–87.
——,Refashioning Iran. Orientalism, occidentalism and
historiography, New York 2001.
N. Tohidi, Fiminìzm, dimukràsìva islàmgarayì, Los
Angeles 1996.Afsaneh NajmabadiPakistanAs in other parts of South Asia, the Woman
Question in Pakistan has long been mired in a com-
munitarian mode of analysis that privileges religion
over other forms of collective identity. This is in no
small part the legacy of a colonial sociology of
knowledge that treated Indian society as an aggre-
gation of religious communities, and created notions
of majority and minority communities that ignored
internal differentiations along lines of gender as
well as class, caste, region, and language. Because
Pakistan came to justify its creation on the basis of
Islam, an emphasis on religion as the organizing
principle of society has been a leitmotif of state poli-
cies in the postcolonial period as well. The fractur-
ing of gender by religion has allowed the Pakistani
state to continue to skirt the specific problems of its
female citizens, the vast majority of whom live in
conditions of abject poverty and disease.
Although extending control over virtually every
aspect of life, the colonial state vowed not to inter-
fere in the religion and culture of Indians. This pol-
icy was accomplished by removing the personal law
of India’s main religious communities from the
purview of British colonial law. Sharì≠a law was
shorn of public content – civil and criminal – and
privatized to apply only to issues of marriage,
divorce, and inheritance; cases pertaining to Mus-
lim personal law, however, were heard in British
law courts, an important appendage of the public
sphere. Customary practices were allowed to over-
rule the personal laws of religious communities in
regions that today constitute Pakistan.
The policy of non-interference in religion created
an artificial separation between a political public