The middle east is kind of like that Jetsons meets the Flintstones theory where the Jetsons actually time travelled into the near future after a society destroying war happened and not the distant past but like in all but talking dinosaurs and hover cars.
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I’m sick and tired of seeing these facetious posts that make all of Iran and Afghanistan, hell even Iraq and Syria, look like enlightened bastions of secular life before the scourge of Islam took hold. Spoiler alert: the hijabs, niqabs, chadors, and burqas never “suddenly” appeared. The 1960s and 1970s for the Middle East were tumultuous times. Those pictures of pristine cities, people dressed casually, women in miniskirts? All of that stuff is true… but for a VERY slim minority of people. These are the photos of the upper echelons of society that Western tourists would’ve been most intimately familiar with.
What’s often omitted from the discussion is how forced veilings were preceded by forced
unveilings. The Shah of Iran was hostile toward veils, the Ba’ath Party prioritised Arab nationalism over Islam, and Afghanistan was wedged between US-aligned secular politicians and Soviet-trained armies. Revolutions and civil wars led to reactionary, hardline Islamists almost universally gaining traction. Burqas are a Pashtun article of clothing that became nigh-mandatory under Taliban 1.0-era Afghanistan. Chadors are Iranian, and the same modesty police who enforced the veil during Marjane Satrapi’s childhood are the spiritual successors to SAVAK forcing adult women and children to take off their veils. Niqabs come from the Gulf, but we now live in a world where Bengali women wear a whole ass niqab instead of a simple headscarf like everyone else on the Subcontinent.
Secularism in the Middle East is equated to hostile, authoritarian disregard for religion. Islamism, conversely, is equated to being hostile to everything secular… even the more conventional, non-compulsory forms of secularism we’re accustomed to in America,
