From Miniskirt to Hijab: A Girl in Revolutionary Iran

I heard no one, earlier in the streets or later on TV, declaring that he was opposed to the Islamic Republic. No one truly understood how this dawn of a new era was going to change their lives for the worse.

The two-week celebration of Nowruz, the Persian New Year, had begun. Nowruz is celebrated at the exact moment of the spring equinox.

The news on the radio crushed all my hopes for the future. The government announced that from this day forward, all universities and higher education institutions in the country were to shut down. (The closures lasted three years.) Anyone who was already enrolled had to stay home, and no new students would be admitted to any higher education institution.

Our plan was for Ebi to complete his residency training and for me to continue my education at the Shiraz University, as Pahlavi University was now known. The revolutionary days were behind us, and I did not expect much more turmoil in our lives. I was eager to begin the next chapter of my life with Ebi.

The class division between the wealthy and educated living in northern Tehran neighborhoods and the conservatives living in southern Tehran districts was getting deeper and more profound. Tehran had become a city of people divided by lifestyle and ideals, which gave way to an undercurrent of instability.

The extent to which women covered themselves at that time was a choice. Iranian women had been emancipated from wearing the hijab in 1936 by order of Reza Shah, the first Pahlavi monarch. The leader during my childhood, Mohammad Reza Shah, had eased the ban of hijab imposed by his father, and had left veiling as a personal choice for women to consider. Some women covered up to varying degrees, while others appeared in public like the women in the West.

The sun was setting when we finally arrived at the seaside town of Ramsar. In my opinion, Ramsar is the most beautiful town on the Caspian coast. The last time I had been there was the summer of 1977, during a ten-day overnight camp. I still had the photograph of me standing in the water, posing in my orange polka-dot bikini. The memories seemed to have been from another lifetime, but in reality, it had only been a few years.

As was customary in every Iranian household during the war, all windows were crisscrossed with duct tape to prevent glass from shattering in the event of a bombing. We had heard many stories of how the glass fragments could dance through the air, acting like shrapnel, and penetrate every muscle of the body. The floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the backyard had been taped. The ivory lace drapes of the past had been replaced with thick
curtains.

One day, she told us that the teacher had drawn some bottles on the chalkboard and asked the girls if anyone had them in their houses. Apparently, the state officials, through the teachers, were using children to investigate which parents had any banned alcoholic beverages.

The schools, beaches, and hair salons had already been segregated by gender, so why was I surprised by the new seating arrangements on public transportation? I recalled my father’s advice to not challenge the authorities.