Reza Shah's Secular Reforms

Reza Shah Pahlavi, an army officer who rose to power and founded the Pahlavi dynasty in Iran in 1925, drove through in the following years a sweeping programme of secular, nationalist modernisation on a Western and partly Turkish-republican model. He built a conscript army, railways and roads, secular state schools and a modern university, and a centralised bureaucracy, and he asserted a Persian nationalism that looked back past the Islamic centuries to the country's pre-Islamic empires, an outlook expressed in the national emblem of the lion and sun. The reforms reached deep into daily life and into religion. The power, courts, endowments and schools of the Shia clergy were curtailed, and dress was changed by law: men were ordered into European suits and brimmed hats, and in January 1936 the state decreed the kashf-e hijab, the forced unveiling of women, with police compelling women to appear in public without the veil. Tehran itself was remade, its old quarters cut through with broad boulevards, civic squares and monumental ministries beneath the Alborz mountains. Modernising though it was, the programme was imposed by force from above and was widely and deeply resented, above all the assault on religious dress and on the clergy; protest was met with repression, as in the killing of demonstrators at the Goharshad shrine in Mashhad in 1935. This scene depicts Tehran around 1936 in the midst of this transformation, the new boulevards, trams and Western dress beneath the mountains, the visible face of forced secular reform.