Existing scholarship narrates Iran’s 1930s unveiling campaign (kashf-i hijab) as a European-inspired ban on traditional and Islamic dress codes, decreed by Reza Shah, and imposed forcibly on all women. Through a reinterpretation of Persian-language primary sources, as well as comparisons with Republican Turkey, this paper calls for a revision to the above narrative. To begin, pre-modern veiling (hijab) referred ambiguously to a set of diverse and at times contradictory discourses and practices. Consequently, the modern discourse critical of “traditional” veiling had at least two basic strands and arguments. One was secular and anti-clerical, while the other advocated a modern Islamic and Iranian hijab. This paper’s reinterpretation of numerous 1930s official documents will demonstrate that, contrary to existing interpretations, Iran’s kashf-i hijab campaign was conceived to be genuinely Islamic and Iranian. Second, it will be shown that kashf-i hijab was neither decreed by Reza Shah nor legislated by the Iranian parliament. Instead, it consisted of a series of directives originating in the Ministry of Education and implemented by the Ministry of the Interior. Third, the project was aimed to be educational, non-coercive, and enforced selectively. It began by requiring female public school teachers and students and the wives of government officials to attend carefully staged gatherings in modern dress and without the chador (head-to-toe covering). Official declarations presented this as a return to ancient Iranian traditions, also in line with the shari’a, which technically allowed women’s faces to remain uncovered. While forcible measures were used against some women, official documents emphasized non-coercive implementation, recommending flexibility and the consideration of diverse regional, social, and religious sensibilities. Finally, the paper will reinterpret contemporary high clerics’ lack of opposition to kashf-i hijab as their tacit acceptance of its core proposal, i.e. the uncovering of women’s faces as Islamic. This became more explicit in the writings of 1960s-1970s Islamic modernists, such as Ayatollah Motahhari. Thus, the core thrust of the 1930s “unveiling” became adopted as Islamic “veiling” in post-revolutionary Iran.

The Turkish single-party period was an extraordinary era marked by modernizing reforms unleashed by the republican regime led by Atatürk. One of the most radical modernizing attempts was clothing reform, which culminated in unveiling campaigns. Unveiling reforms started with women working in government offices in 1925, gaining momentum in the mid-1930s by spreading unveiling to all parts of social life. Although political and ideological standpoints and interpretations differ, both nationalist accounts and critical accounts (especially Islamists) in Turkish historiography see the early republican unveiling campaigns through the prism of the state. Due to the exclusive focus on legal and institutional changes and the acceptance of the representation of the unveiling campaigns presented in official texts as a reality, scholars have generally argued that the unveiling campaigns radically transformed all Turkish women. Non-elite women’s and men’s perceptions of and resistance to the unveiling have not been studied in depth. The few scholarly studies, which deal with the political opposition to unveiling, use a culturalist approach. Nationalist accounts have viewed cases of public protest as the abortive efforts of religious reactionaries, whereas critical accounts have explained a few open protests as desperate expressions of people’s attachment to religious values. Neither everyday forms of social response to unveiling campaigns nor the socio-economic dynamics and gender relations affecting the people’s approach to unveiling have been considered in these studies. This paper, based on new sources such as police, gendarme and court records, politicians’ reports and petitions as well as a history from below approach, examines an ignored aspect of the Turkish unveiling reform, i.e. ordinary people’s perception of it and resistance and adaptation to it in everyday life. Focusing on widespread everyday and covert forms of resistance among Anatolian women and men and their selective adaptation strategies to unveiling campaigns, this paper shows how ordinary women and men coped with the radical state intervention in women’s clothing. Instead of making a culturalist analysis, this paper uncovers the social, economic, and psychological dynamics behind resistance and selective adaptation to unveiling, which outweighed the state’s control and propaganda. Finally, it explores how this active response thwarted the implementation of unveiling campaigns in many Anatolian towns and forced the government to retreat from its radical and coercive measures. In this respect, this paper argues that the early republican regime had to pursue a flexible and moderate secularism rather than a strict and Jacobin one.

Turkey’s republican regime of the late 1920s – mid 1940s is renowned for its modernizing and secularizing reforms, many of which targeted women as objects of social transformation. State-sponsored efforts to accord women new rights in the public sphere, sometimes labeled as state feminism, included efforts to encourage women to give up traditional forms of (middle-class) dress and head and body-coverings. While some efforts to ban so-called “traditional” women’s attire did take place at municipal and provincial levels, a national campaign to ban the “veil” (peçe and çar?af) never occurred in the early republic. Officials and social reformers opted to promote a shift in norms among the growing middle class and educated urban elite through education, popular media, and informally enforced norms of western-style women’s dress. This paper outlines how a binary construction of two opposing figures – the backward Ottoman vs. modern Turkish woman – deployed in popular culture, professional journals, publications of the “people’s houses,” and photographs operated to foster new sensibilities in “modern” dress. The debates were less about “covering” in general than about what kinds of head gear or outerwear was appropriate in public. In this arena of contention over social practices and their meanings, radical modernizers sought to supplant women’s dress forms from the late 19th century with those representing the latest fashions of Europe in the 1930s-40s. In the paper I underscore that debates over “unveiling” and depictions of “backward Ottoman” versus “modern Turkish” women centered on a struggle for transformation among middle class and elite townspeople and urbanites. Moreover, the question of how women dressed in this era operated as “shorthand” for contention over women’s roles within all realms of life, both public and private – their access to education, political participation, rights within the workplace, and roles within the household as wives and mothers. And for some women activists of the era, focusing on dress diverted from more important questions of women’s access to an adequate standard of living and recognition within their communities and society as citizens with legitimate claims on the state for support. Sources for the paper are drawn from serial publications, historical photographs, newspapers, memoirs and travelogues, as well as selected archival sources from the Republican Archives (T.C. Ba?bakanl?k Cumhuriyet Ar?ivi).

Although the unveiling policy of the Kemalist single-party regime have been generally discussed as a cautious one because of the lack of a national legislation banning the veil, the anti-veiling campaigns had in fact become country-wide phenomena in Turkey in the mid-1930s. The attempts to change women’s clothing were not based on propaganda and guidance only, but were carried through official decisions taken by provincial administrations. This was in fact precisely what was expected from the administrators and state officials in the provinces. In the issue of unveiling, the Kemalist leadership in Ankara had trusted the modernist visions and ambitions of the local elite and encouraged them to work towards making these visions a reality in their localities. However, it did not hesitate to intervene in the process when some local actors resisted unveiling or tried to carry the measures to extremes, contrary to the approval of the central authority. Based on a variety of sources, including the provincial newspapers, Turkish state and police archives, and the British and American consular reports, this paper aims to discuss the underappreciated and understudied role the local elite played in the anti-veiling campaigns of Kemalist Turkey and to map how the center-periphery dynamics shaped the process in the provinces. It will explore in detail the local variations in interpreting and implementing the policy of unveiling, the mechanisms employed by the provincial administrators, and their selective use of the existing legal frameworks as a base for banning the veil. It will also explore the degree to which the central authority was involved in the process, the various ways in which the Republican People’s Party and the Ministry of Interior tried to coordinate the campaigns, and how the local elite responded to these interventions coming from Ankara. The main argument of the paper is that the lack of a well-formulated central policy of unveiling resulted in a relatively loose and uneven process of change, whose main dynamics were fashioned by the interplay between the initiatives of the local actors and the efforts of the center to control the situation. As such, the paper also aims to contribute to understanding the workings of the Kemalist state in general by underlining the equally important role the provincial elites and societal actors played in the policy-making processes.

Astrakhan, Borqa', Chadari, Dreshi: The Economy of Dress in Early 20th Century Afghanistan In 1929, Amanullah Khan, the ‘modernizing’ young Emir of Afghanistan, was forced to flee his country after a violent uprising erupted in different areas of the country. This uprising has traditionally been viewed as a reactionary conservative reaction to Amanullah’s overly progressive reform project. At the centre of this project was gender reform: equal rights for women in terms of education, jobs, property ownership, and the outlawing of ‘traditional’ practices such as under-age marriage, polygamy, and the veiling of women. The paper returns to this pivotal moment in Afghan history in order to re-appraise the role of “the veil” in the transformations of the 1920s and the uprisings of 1929. It uses an interpretive model one might call Afghanistan’s “economy of dress”, which provides a means to analyze holistically interactions between the “production” and “consumption” of forms of dress amongst Afghans – both women and men - from different socio-economic backgrounds. Such an approach encourages a new interpretation of the period. While it has become commonplace to view the 1920s as marking a radical break with Afghanistan’s past, this paper emphasizes the continuities. Moreover, changes in women’s status and dress must be seen in the context of larger-scale material and cultural changes in the late 19th century and early 20th century rather than as the product of the radical intervention of a few Afghan pioneers. When the paper turns to the uprisings of 1928, its approach again offers a new reading. Using never before studied sources in Turkish, Urdu, Dari, Pashto and Bengali, the paper argues that while there is no doubt that Amanullah did push for an increasingly ideologically-driven and unrealistic reform programme covering many aspects of Afghan life, there was in fact never an implemented “anti-veiling campaign.” At the same time, however, there really was a significant campaign of dress reforms aimed at men in Kabul, which became the source of more practical and less ideological concerns to an increasingly beleaguered population. The paper ends with a reappraisal of opposition to Amanullah’s regime, attempting to solve the riddle of why Amanullah’s promotion of “unveiling” (raf’-e hejab) became one of, perhaps the, most vociferously protested of all Amanullah’s reforms. And this despite the fact that no actual law about “unveiling” was ever implemented.