Kashf-e hijab

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. The government also banned many types of male traditional clothing.

The ban was enforced for a period of five years (1936–1941); after this, women were free to dress as they wished for forty years until the Iranian Revolution of 1979, when the reverse ban against unveiling was introduced. One of the enduring legacies of Reza Shah is turning dress into an integral problem of Iranian politics.

In 1936, Reza Shah banned the veil and encouraged Iranians to adopt European dress in an effort to promote nation-building in a country with many tribal, regional, religious, and class-based variations in clothing.

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. 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.

The reform was long in the making. In the second half of the 19th-century, Iranian upper-class men started to visit Western Europe and started to adopt Western clothing for themselves, which made Western fashion become considered as a sign of progress and modernism in Iran among parts of the elite. Prior to this, during the era of slavery in Iran, female slaves (kaniz) were allowed to move about alone in public outside of the sex segregation of the harem unveiled, which separated them from free women, but slave women had not been seen as respectable women.

From the 1920s, the Iranian women's movement supported unveiling, and a few individual Iranian women started to appear unveiled. In 1924, the singer Qamar-ol-Moluk Vaziri broke gender segregation and seclusion by performing unveiled in gender-mixed company at the Grand Hotel in Tehran and at the Royal Palace Theater. Iranian women's rights activists supported unveiling, and the feminist Sediqeh Dowlatabadi is believed to have been the first woman in Iran to have appeared in public without the veil in 1928. To appear without a veil or even favor it in public debate was very controversial, and women's rights activists who spoke in favor of unveiling sometimes had to be protected by the police. In 1926, the Shah specifically provided police protection for individual women who appeared unveiled but with a scarf or a hat to cover the hair.

In 1928, the queen of Afghanistan, Soraya Tarzi, appeared unveiled in public with the Shah during her official visit in Iran. The clergy protested and asked the Shah to tell the foreign queen to cover up, but he refused. His refusal caused rumours that the Shah planned to abolish the veil in Iran. Later that year the Shah's wife, Queen Tadj ol-Molouk, attended the Fatima Masumeh Shrine during her pilgrimage in Qom wearing a veil which did not cover her completely, as well as showing her face, for which she was harshly criticized by a cleric. As a response, Reza Shah publicly beat the cleric who had criticized the queen the next day.

The unveiling of women had a huge symbolic importance to achieve women's emancipation and participation in society, and the shah introduced the reform gradually so as not to cause unrest. In the mid-1930s, only four thousand out of 6.5 million Iranian women ventured into public places without veils, almost all in Tehran and consisting mainly of Western-educated daughters of the upper class, foreign wives of recent returnees from Europe, and middle-class women from the minorities.