Azadeh Fatehrad’s The Poetics and Politics of the Veil in Iran: An Archival and Photographic Adventure promises to offer the reader an adventure in the title, and it does exactly that. Despite much research on the topic of the veil, particularly on the compulsory veiling in Iran, scholarship on the cultural productions relevant to the subject has been limited. In this sense, Fatehrad’s book is a welcome contribution. However, Fatehrad does more than provide an archival view and photographic analysis of the significance of the veil in Iran. Rather, she takes the reader on an adventure—one I would like to call “an experimental journey.” As I began reading the book, my expectation was to engage with historical, ethnographic, sociological, and literary analysis of Iran’s veil-related cultural productions. But my assumption was disrupted by Fatehrad’s stylistic choice of inserting herself, the author, and a collective “we,” all Iranian women, within the analytical framework of the book. Fatehrad pauses here and there within her analysis to offer an “I” or a “we” perspective on the matter. The firsthand experiences not only break away with the traditional academic reader’s assumption of what an academic work should look like, but they also unsettle the euro-centric/western understanding of the veil. As she writes in the introduction, her goal is to examine the veil “through a perspective of ‘indirection’, i.e. from a particular position of fascination and envy” (p. xii). To do so, she unhinges the western orientalist view of the veil as a tool of oppression—which she does not deny or negate—but she moves further “to explore the affective and imaginary dimension of the acts of covering and uncovering” (p. xii). This is, however, one way she disrupts the dominant narrative regarding the veil in Iran—and I applaud her for that.

The book consists of a preface, an introduction, three chapters and one appendix. Chapter 1 describes the history of veiling and unveiling in modern Iran, asking “to what extent can fashion express an oppressive or liberated social condition?” (p. 4). Fatehrad examines the importance of the veil by contextualizing it within the political, social, and cultural discourses of the Pahlavi era and the Islamic Republic. However, trying to cover almost a century of Iran’s history regarding women’s rights and the veil within the first twenty pages of the book lends itself to sweeping comments and overgeneralizations without providing much detail on each topic and with limited critical engagement with the crucial fact of the politicization of the female body in modern Iran and the manipulation of the veil not only by the regimes but by women themselves too—each to their own benefit.

Chapter 2 focuses on the great potential of writing to offer women a public space to voice their thoughts and experiences. Examining Simin Daneshvar’s Suvashun and Forough Farrokhzad’s “Delam barāye bāghcheh misuzad,” Fatehrad discusses the cultural significance of various elements in each work including the symbolism of the garden in Farrokhzad’s poem and the theatrical choir in Daneshvar’s novel. However, Fatehrad’s main purpose analyzing these two works is to illustrate “women’s hidden feelings about women’s lifestyle and their domestic lives inside the home in 1960s and 1970s in Iran” (p. 28). Immediately after this literary analysis, Fatehrad takes the reader on a journey of her personal experiences living in Iran as a young woman and her response to the reforms in modern Iran. She bridges her personal experiences with Daneshvar’s and Farrokhzad’s writings stating that there is “a deeply rooted anxiety at the potential loss of cultural barriers, an anxiety best encapsulated in the ever present concerns about what others might think and consider to be good and bad behavior, and which cultural norms are acceptable and which are not” (p. 28). Here, what Fatehrad is hinting at is women’s awakening at the turn of the century with the legacy of the Pahlavi regime’s modernizing agenda encroaching on Iranian society and a community with traditional beliefs in conflict with these reforms. This was a time of identity crisis for women who desired to embrace western-like modern gender norms but at the same time be considered good Muslim women. This was the dilemma of Iranian womanhood at the time. In the following sections of this chapter, Fatehrad shifts to topics such as the invisibility that the veil offers and how women utilize this invisibility to secure employment in government offices and voice their opinions. She also discusses the new generation’s underground endeavors of subverting the regime’s gender laws. Later, she switches to an analysis of Abbas Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, referencing Forough Farrokhzad’s poem of the same title, examining the scene where Zeynab and Behzad are in the darkness of the dungeon-like milking room. Based on the cultural norms of modesty, Fatehrad reads this scene as Behzad’s intrusion of Zeynab’s private space arousing feelings of shame. In this chapter, Fathrad tries to touch upon the metaphorical interpretation of the veil in the cultural productions of Iran as well as the physical importance of it as an item of clothing. Beginning with literature but disrupted by discussions of veil as a protection, for instance, and then back to a cinematic analysis, Fatehrad breaks away from a coherent stylistic analysis and offers yet another disruption. However, it does not end here. After the endnotes to the chapter, Fatehrad adds a photograph titled, “The View of My City,” and on the next page in italics she reminisces her time in Iran when the wind was wreaking havoc and she was watching her washed clothes on the line on the rooftop dancing to the music of the wind. This is Fatehrad’s method of bringing the chapter full circle, discussing her clothes as a means of veiling and the wind blowing them off. But this is also another disruption of the narrative line within the book as it forces the reader to contemplate the significance of the photograph and the memory after the endnotes and before chapter 3.

In the final chapter, Fatehrad explores spaces such as Iran’s architecture, the private/public split, and the ways that the veil conforms to this architectural divide. Examining a sequence from Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s Kandahar via a few stills where the protagonist Nafas is interacting with a Taliban militant from behind her veil, Fatehrad concludes that “The veil/covering thus enfolds a secret space, creating a lived-in space that is separated from the outside by a piece of fabric” (p. 55). This analysis is perhaps one of the strongest parts of the book. Indeed, when she attends to the analysis of films or photographs, Fatehrad demonstrates robust mastery. She then analyzes the opening scene from Shirin Neshat’s Women Without Men, where the protagonist, cloaked in a black veil, is about to jump from the rooftop while the call to prayer can be heard in the background. Examining this scene in detail, Fatehrad finally suggests “The fluid passage from sky to garden following her sudden leap in the void suggests that a transformation has taken place. The jump from the roof has freed her and brought her a new beginning in this joyful garden” (p. 61). Fatehrad views this garden as a temporary utopia—a sacred space where the woman’s desire is affirmed. Before moving to the next subsection of the chapter, Fatehrad offers another moment of her memories in italics along with two of her own photographs, titled “Falling.” She leaves these sections to the reader’s imagination to work them out; however, some analysis would have made the work much stronger. In the final two subsections, she devotes space to discussing drapery and fabric, including some of her own photographs, which are again provided with no analysis. She ends the chapter by addressing various styles and fashions of veiling in contemporary Iran.

In the appendix, Fatehrad provides the reader with the incentive behind the book’s publication, a showroom she curated, a symposium she organized, and some of the discussions during the various panels of the symposium. This is a great addition to the book’s discussions on the subject of the veil.

Despite the beauty of the adventurous and experimental content of Fatehrad’s analysis, the reader is left questioning her choice of cultural productions for analysis. For better clarity this rationale could have been offered in the introduction. In addition, the historical section in chapter 1 and the literary analysis in chapter 2 are limited and scant, thus making sweeping generalizations which the author could have easily addressed or done without, as the author’s main strength lies in her analysis of photography and cinematic stills. In spite of these, however, this book is a welcome addition to current scholarship on the topic of veiling in Iran as its main contribution is the examination of the cultural productions on the topic of veiling. In that sense, Fatehrad’s book is suitable for adoption in humanities and social science courses dealing with women’s rights and the question of veiling in Iran and the Middle East. Although the book will be of significant interest to students of Iranian studies, it can also be of interest to those concerned with the significance of the veil generally.