With the revival and restoration of the former system...

With the revival and restoration of the former system, this time masquerading as the Islamic caliphate, women’s standing once again lapsed and gradually with the passage of time fossilised misinterpretations of Islam imposed crippling restrictions and limitations on women, such that even in the last few decades veins of these ossified views expressing disdain for women and belittling their position could still be clearly seen among the contemporary petrified religious traditionalists.

It was in such circumstances that the imperialists and their henchmen, in keeping with their hegemonic tendencies, began to seek suitable ways and means of infiltrating the cultural and political life of Iran, and to this end they availed themselves of the position of women in our society.

With the slogans of freedom and equality, they promoted the culture of nakedness and libertinism, in the process making use of the most draconian of despotic measures as seen in Riza Khan’s policy of forcing women to remove their Islamic veils ( kashf-i hijab ).[^1] This ambition, which at the time of Riza Khan’s son - a son truly worthy of such a father - took on a more subtle and clever form, was described in the imperial literature as turning women into beguiling creatures.

In the Shah’s logic, the modern woman, the woman free of religious restraints, has as her mission beguilement, and all obstacles to the realisation of this mission must be removed. Thus it was that not only women, but the other half of society too, i.e. the men, fell under the spell of beguilement.

We ourselves witnessed how, in addition to the cabarets and dance halls and the formal and informal gatherings, the streets, city squares, parks, recreational centres, swimming pools and beaches, as showplaces of this imperial policy, were in practice changed into something akin to houses of pleasure in the service of degenerating, corrupting and narcotising the young generation. The model of the beguiling woman is one borrowed from Western society.

Unfortunately, in the original model too, woman’s true greatness and identity have been sacrificed at the altar of the Western materialist philosophy in worship of the two gods of Western man: the economy and the pursuit of pleasure. Consequently, in the Western civilisation too, women are to a great extent either used to promote and sell goods or to promote and sell themselves.