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Rich wrote:Yeah you sure wouldn't have seen a picture like that in the fifties. Obviously leaving aside the small detail that they didn't have cameras back then, no you wouldn't have seen a woman dressed like that in the 1650s whether it was Old England or New England. There's no denying Islam's backwardness. The Islamic world in the 1970s started experiencing what we experienced in the sixteenth and seventeen centuries, but worse. To some extent we have to let Muslims work things out themselves. Iran is actually one of the best examples of deslamification. However their are two caveats.
No Infidel should have to live under the Muslim jackboot.
No Shia or semi Muslim, such as Druze or Alawite should have to live under the Sunni jackboot.
litwin wrote:How the Muslim World Lost the Freedom to Choose
A brave new book describes how Pakistan unraveled — and provides a blueprint for understanding declining pluralism across the Middle East.
https://foreignpolicy.com/2017/10/20/ho ... to-choose/
Ali M. Latifi, a freelance journalist based in Kabul, told Buzzfeed News that this image showed a very small slice of life in Afghanistan, and did not represent how the majority of the country dressed in the 1970s. Latifi said:As for Iran , the dress code under Reza Shah restricted more religiously strict dress , as part of the "Kash-e hijab" edict .
"That was a very small percentage of privileged people in a few cities ... Nowadays you see a lot of people (including once the US embassy) use pictures of the communist era (not even the kingdom or the republic) to talk about 'miniskirts' as if that in itself is some kind of progress because it's not. There was mass disenfranchisement at that time." https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/women-skirts-kabul-70s/
On 8 January 1936, Reza Shah of Iran (Persia) issued a decree known as Kashf-e hijab (also Romanized as "Kashf-e hijāb" and "Kashf-e hejāb", Persian: کشف حجاب, lit. 'Unveiling') banning all Islamic veils (including hijab and chador), an edict that was swiftly and forcefully implemented.[1][2][3][4][5] The government also banned many types of male traditional clothing.[6][7][8] The ban was only enforced for a period of five (5) years (1936-1941), however, since then, the hijab in Iran has been a mandatory hallmark of the Islamic Republic for 44 years. One of the enduring legacies of Reza Shah has been turning dress into an integral problem of Iranian politics. In 1936, Reza Shah banned the veil and encouraged Iranians to adopt European dress[10] in an effort to promote nation-building in a country with many tribal, regional, religious, and class-based variations in clothing.[11]
It was the policy of the Shah to increase women's participation in society as a method of the modernization of the country, in accordance with the example of Turkey.[12] The Queen and the other women of the royal family assisted in this when they started to perform public representational duties as role models for women participating in public society, and they also played an active part as role models in the Kashf-e hijab... To enforce this decree, the police were ordered to physically remove the veil from any woman who wore it in public. Women who refused were beaten, their headscarves and chadors torn off, and their homes forcibly searched.[1][2][3][6][7][8][9][22][23][excessive citations]
Until Reza Shah's abdication in 1941, many conservative women simply chose not leave their houses in order to avoid confrontations,[1][6][7][8][22] and a few even committed suicide to avoid removing their hijabs due to the decree.[6][7][8] A far larger escalation of violence occurred in the summer of 1935, when Reza Shah ordered all men to wear European-style bowler hats. This provoked massive non-violent demonstrations in July in the city of Mashhad, which were brutally suppressed by the Imperial Iranian army, resulting in the deaths of an estimated 100 to 500 people (including women and children..... The Iranian women's rights activists and feminists were mainly from the educated elite, and some had appeared unveiled even before the Kashf-e hijab: Sediqeh Dowlatabadi is believed to have been the first woman in Iran to have done so,[16] appearing in public in 1928 completely unveilied.[17] However, there were also some feminists who opposed the reform; because while they supported unveiling, they did not support a mandatory unveiling, but rather women's right to choose. Some Western historians have stated that the reform would have been a progressive step if women had initiated it themselves, but that the method of banning it humiliated and alienated many Iranian women,[3][9][22][29] since its effect was, because of the effect of traditional beliefs, comparable to a hypothetical situation in which European women were suddenly ordered to go out topless into the street.[6][7][8][9] Some historians have pointed out that Reza Shah's ban on veiling and his policies were unseen in Atatürk's Turkey,[9][22] which succeeded in unveiling without introducing a ban...Despite all legal pressures and obstacles, a large proportion of Iranian women continued to wear veils or chadors.[1][6][7][8][22][20][31][excessive citations]
One of the enduring legacies of Reza Shah has been turning dress into an integral issue of Iranian politics.[9] When Reza Shah was deposed in 1941, there were attempts made by conservatives such as the Devotees of Islam (Fedāʾīān-e Eslām; q.v.) who demanded mandatory veiling and a ban on unveiled women, but they did not succeed.[27] Under next ruler Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, wearing of the veil or chador was no longer an offence, and women were able to dress as they wished.[32]
However, under his regime, the chador became a significant hindrance to climbing the social ladder, as it was considered a badge of backwardness and an indicator of being a member of the lower class.[9] Veiled women were assumed to be from conservative religious families with limited education, while unveiled women were assumed to be from the educated and professional upper- or middle class.[32] The veil became a class marker; while the lower classes started to wear the veil again, the upper classes no longer wore the veil at all, while professional middle-class women such as teachers and nurses appeared unveiled in their work place, but sometimes veiled when they returned home to their families.[12]
Discrimination against the women wearing the headscarf or chador still occurred, with public institutions actively discouraging their use, and even some restaurants refusing to admit women who wore them.[1][31] This period is characterized by the dichotomy between a minority who considered wearing the veil as a sign of backwardness and the majority who did not.[2][3]
Until 1979, the anniversary of the introduction of Kashf-e hijab was officially celebrated as Women’s Liberation Day in Iran. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kashf-e_hijab
Istanbuller wrote:Iran was like Assad's Syria, Saddam Hussein's Iraq and Mubarek/Sisi's Egypt. It was a brutal dictatorship back then. Millions of Muslims were enslaved for decades by a tiny minority of people you showed in photos.
Potemkin wrote:To a large extent, 20th century history is the history of forced modernisation implemented by brutal dictatorships. And not just in the Middle East, but in Europe too.
Wellsy wrote:Was it also simultaneously one of forced creation markets and participation within global
markets like an IMF structural adjustment plans? Or was it mostly a focus on industrialization and a shift in views and values?
I see it hard to be a modern as independent of becoming a groundless mass individual of consumption with traditional ties like religion being declawed.
Potemkin wrote:Until about 1980, it was mostly the latter, even in nations like the USA or the UK. Neoliberalism only became the dominant paradigm in the last couple of decades of the 20th century. Before then, central planning or Keynesianism were fashionable.
That’s what modernisation is, @Wellsy - the dissolution of traditional social bonds in favour of the market nexus (possibly mediated through the state, possibly not), and joining an “international system” of culture such as the consumption of Hollywood movies, McDonalds burgers and Coca-Cola. Marx described the beginnings of this process in the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto. It should be noted that this process of modernisation and globalisation is usually profoundly undemocratic, especially in its early stages.
And now Russia! During the Revolution of 1848-9, not only the European princes, but the European bourgeois as well, found their only salvation from the proletariat just beginning to awaken in Russian intervention. The Tsar was proclaimed the chief of European reaction. Today, he is a prisoner of war of the revolution in Gatchina , and Russia forms the vanguard of revolutionary action in Europe.
The Communist Manifesto had, as its object, the proclamation of the inevitable impending dissolution of modern bourgeois property. But in Russia we find, face-to-face with the rapidly flowering capitalist swindle and bourgeois property, just beginning to develop, more than half the land owned in common by the peasants. [b]Now the question is: can the Russian obshchina, though greatly undermined, yet a form of primeval common ownership of land, pass directly to the higher form of Communist common ownership? Or, on the contrary, must it first pass through the same process of dissolution such as constitutes the historical evolution of the West?
The only answer to that possible today is this: If the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West, so that both complement each other, the present Russian common ownership of land may serve as the starting point for a communist development.
Indigenous people know very well characteristics of the various plants and animals in their country. They know this intimately. But they don’t erect a taxonomy on this knowledge and do not see the various features of creatures as their essential reality. Taxonomy is foreign to the indigenous way of thinking. Like scientific biology, they understand the creatures populating their world in terms of the origins stories which lie behind their phenomenal forms. Every people have their own stories, and Science is no different. Science has its own stories. But what Science has in common with Indigenous knowledge is that they see the truth of the world lying behind appearances. The bureaucracy, with their Artificial Intelligence and their technology for managing human beings, do not see it this way. The truth is what appears, what is entered into the giant data stores which are used to control every aspect of human activity.
…
own backhanded way his French critics like Foucault, Derrida and Lacan.
There are only two ways of organising the world: the first is taxonomy, and the second is dialectic: the view that behind appearances there is a principle which is not given in appearances, but which nonetheless is their truth. Indigenous knowledge and true Science follow Hegel; bureaucratic management of the world is governed by taxonomy. The reconciliation between the settler communities currently governed by bureaucracy and indigenous communities which reject bureaucracy in favour of a truly human understanding of the world, is possible only if bureaucratic taxonomy is rejected in favour of Hegelian dialectics. Dialectics does not have any rival story of the truth behind appearances, but is a logical view, a view which can make sense of stories insofar as they give meaning to human experience.
Modern day Hegelian revolutionaries can embrace their allies amongst indigenous peoples. They have a common enemy, an enemy which I have chosen not to characterise as “bourgeois” or “colonial” or “Western,” but as bureaucracy.
Wellsy wrote:The industrialization being driven by a capitalist class in many or states that aspire to such and this creates the material conditions for the whole of society to become modernized. Can’t have the ideology without the relations other than a subjective attitude and not yet a manner of life.
Primitive accumulation and all.
Would you say that once one comes i to conflict with such forces, indigenous cultures are changed by the challenge even in struggling to resist and preserve themselves and have capacity as a radical force?
https://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/357k/357ksg26.html
See section under ‘ Extensions: Capitalism Can Not Eliminate the Alternatives’
https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1848/communist-manifesto/preface.htm#preface-1882
https://www.ethicalpolitics.org/ablunden/pdfs/Hegel_and_the_Ancients.pdf
According to all the available literature the starting point of the current regime in Iran was the 1979 Revolution which created the Islamic Republic. And if you were to judge this revolution from press reports in the West you probably believe that this was a revolution led by clerics who roused the masses and imposed a conservative theocracy. But if you were there or if you looked more closely, you would know that the people who made the Revolution were an alliance of Marxists of various stripes and progressive Islamic students. What was meant by “Islamic Republic” at that time was what could be called the uniquely Persian road to socialism – neither Moscow nor Washington, if you will. It was an urban movement led by young people. But how could these urban intellectuals neutralise the rural poor, who had favoured the Shah and were reluctant to support the revolution? So delegates from the various revolutionary groups went to Paris and put Khomenei and his coterie on a plane and flew him back and used him to win the rural poor to the side of the Revolution.
Nowhere in this Revolution can we see a germ cell for the current regime in Iran. Having studied the political economy of Iran and its social structure and traditions through the literature of that time, we can then move forward.
The 1979 Revolution unleashed an uprising amongst the industrial working class in Iran; they formed shuras, traditional Islamic communes, and took control of their factories. But they lacked the cultural level to run the factories, so they allowed the bosses back, but under workers’ control. The capitalists appealed to the mullahs, and the mullahs mobilised terror groups, not only from rural Iran, but from the Ummat, the Shia empire outside of Iran, to terrorise the workers into submission and put the bosses back in control. But now the bourgeois also were at the mercy of the mullahs with their terror squads. This transition was complete by about 1981. And this is the germ cell of the present day Islamic Republic.
The Islamic Republic reproduces itself by the expropriation of the proceeds of industry, especially oil money, which is extorted from the industrial bourgeois of Iran and pocketed by the mullahs and used to establish a hegemony consolidated by terror. Economic factors have led to a decline in the economic efficiency of this system because of sanctions and because the clergy are merely parasites. They are no longer in a position to buy the support of the poor who had supported their coup d’état. They now mainly rely on their supporters in the surrounding Shia world. But as these countries gradually overcome the havoc of civil war foisted on them by the US and the Islamic Republic, the conditions for maintenance of this system is becoming exhausted. With the failure of the Islamic Republic to meet their needs, the poor in Iran, at this point, favour the return of the Shah ...
will leave my analysis at this point. Analysis determined that the germ cell of the regime was not 1979, but 1981 – the defeat of the workers’ shuras by religious terror squads, providing the religious leaders with the proceeds of industry to purchase support from the poor. 1981 provided a self-reproducing formation because exploitation of wage labour had been given a specifically Iranian form. It is true that the 1979 Revolution, at a time when the industrial working class was too small and weak to run the country on its own behalf created the conditions for 1981. But it is not the same thing.
Potemkin wrote:To a large extent, 20th century history is the history of forced modernisation implemented by brutal dictatorships. And not just in the Middle East, but in Europe too.
Upon the revolutionary Tsar’s return from his formative European tour, Peter the Great set about implementing reform that he believed would modernise his nation. He brought about educational, economic and social overhauls that would steer Russia away from its bucolic past and towards a more Westernised future. As part of this make-over, one of the first things to go was the beard.
When Peter the Great introduced a beard tax in 1698, he challenged Russia’s long standing bond with facial hair, which remains a contentious relationship even in current times. The nation’s tricky attitude towards beards extends far beyond factors of kissability and personal style. How men wear their mutton chops directly correlates with notions of masculinity and godliness, which is a lot of pressure for a bit of stubble. Here’s a bit of insight into the history of the Russian beard and the trouble it has gotten into.
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Upon the revolutionary Tsar’s return from his formative European tour, Peter the Great set about implementing reform that he believed would modernise his nation. He brought about educational, economic and social overhauls that would steer Russia away from its bucolic past and towards a more Westernised future. As part of this make-over, one of the first things to go was the beard.
As the story goes, the ruler came to believe beardless men were in line with a more European, modern society. So he personally cut off the beards of those men closest to him during a gathering. Soon after the hair cutting party, Peter the Great declared a ban on facial hair. Unsurprisingly, men protested.
Up until this point, beards were so revered by their wearers and the community that men could be fined for damaging another man’s beard. Long facial hair reflected the widely held conservative representation of manhood, which was shared by the opinion of the Orthodox Church. Apparently, Ivan the Terrible (Tsar between 1533 and 1547) declared that ‘shaving the beard was a sin’, and doing so ‘would mean blemishing the image of man as God had created him’.
And so Peter the Great changed the ban to a tax that permitted men to keep their beloved fuzz for a price. Clergymen were exempt and peasants were able to keep their whiskers unless they were visiting a city. The tax remained in place until 1772, despite the Tsar passing away in 1725.... https://theculturetrip.com/europe/russia/articles/the-controversial-history-of-russian-beards
Potemkin wrote:Until about 1980, it was mostly the latter, even in nations like the USA or the UK. Neoliberalism only became the dominant paradigm in the last couple of decades of the 20th century. Before then, central planning or Keynesianism were fashionable.
That’s what modernisation is, @Wellsy - the dissolution of traditional social bonds in favour of the market nexus (possibly mediated through the state, possibly not), and joining an “international system” of culture such as the consumption of Hollywood movies, McDonalds burgers and Coca-Cola. Marx described the beginnings of this process in the opening pages of the Communist Manifesto. It should be noted that this process of modernisation and globalisation is usually profoundly undemocratic, especially in its early stages.
Deutschmania wrote:Such is the prevalence of McWorld . And such imperialism is subsequently being contested by tribalist jihad , post-Cold War. It remains to be seen what resulting synthesis will develop from such material conditions , as events unfold .
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