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this post was submitted on 06 Sep 2026
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If outlets were to be believed, major cities like Tehran featured a cosmopolitan atmosphere with active café culture, Western fashion, and mixed-gender socialization.
Women gained the right to vote in 1963, pursued higher education in large numbers, and worked in professional fields like law, medicine, and government without any mandatory dress codes.
In contrast to the current situation IMO you can call that wholesome and secular.
It's important to bear in mind that those pictures show well-off urban people, who were by no means the majority.
During the first half of the 20th Century, even up to the 70s maybe, there was a growing sentiment amongst well-educated people throughout the Islamic world that secular societies like those of Europe and the US would be the way forward for their own countries.
Egypt for instance made great progress towards a more modern society under President Nasser. Before the 2 world wars, Turkey famously had Ataturk. These leaders framed religion as a personal matter while positioning the secular state as the vehicle for modernization, anti-imperialism, and economic progress.
Things were not all sunshine and rainbows of course, and there was terrible inequality and governments tended to be authoritarian. Rather than working tirelessly to foster more fair and open societies, the US and European govts were quite happy to exploit the nascent regimes for economic gain (typically access to oil) and political advantage (over the USSR).
Shitty behavior by US and European govts went a long way to destroying any good reputation and moral standing they may have had in the Middle East. Examples include, but are not limited to, the CIA coup that installed the Shah in the 50s and the 1956 Suez Crisis, where Britain and France held secret meetings with Israel and devised a plot where Israel would attack Egypt across the Sinai Peninsula, giving Britain and France a pretext to intervene militarily as "neutral peacemakers" to secure the canal zone.
And how much if at all did that change in the meantime? With a source please.
Still do on all counts, dress code aside, though I have to question how important the right to vote is under either brutal dictatorship. For instance here's how the women's tertiary education graph looks like, noting that the Shah was overthrown in 1979. This is Iran, not Afghanistan. Also in general "modernity" under the Shah only penetrated into the upper class of society; ironically the vast majority of women saw more improvement in hallmarks of women's rights (education and such) under the Ayatollahs.
Women's education is quite literally the only improvement in terms of women's rights.
Women are forbidden from divorcing their husbands without cause, their testimony is worth less in court, married women have to leave their job if the husband deems this necessary, they can only have one husband (men can have 4 wives and up to 95 additional temporary wives), premarital sex has more grave consequences for women than for men etc. Most egregiously, if a woman is murdered, it's up to their next male living relative, if the murderer gets prosecuted. And if they decide on a blood money settlement, women are worth half as much as man.
Women are legally considered second class citizens in Iran. No amount of education fixes this.
Why aside?
And about education it's worth noting, that the UNESCO Institute for Statistics does not deploy it's own researchers to count students. Instead, its global database relies on states self-reporting their national figures.
https://uis.unesco.org/sites/default/files/medias/fichiers/2025/08/WG_EMIS_2_Dynamic-Templates.pdf
Because this is something that changed after the Shah. The other things didn't, that's my point.
And do we have reason to doubt Iran's figures? They have no reason to fake them, and in any case the decline from 2014 isn't something you'd find in doctored data. Besides, again this isn't Afghanistan; the Iranian regime has no problem with women's education.
As well as my government (Russia) have no reason to hide or skew the number of casualties our bloody "leader" caused. Right?
I'm sorry I'm resorting to sarcasm, but I don't believe in the honesty of the tyrannical regimes.
Except it does have a reason to skew the number of casualties.
Without a concrete reason to doubt them in this case, or evidence that they're lying, what you believe in is frankly irrelevant. If they're reliable enough for the UN, they're reliable enough for me; what's your evidence that they're lying?