The contemporary history of comparing Türkiye and Iran begins in the post-World War I era, specifically with the nation-building efforts of two authoritarian leaders with military backgrounds: Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878–1944) of Iran and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938) of Türkiye. Comparing Reza Shah and Atatürk is a typical scholarly move.Footnote ¹ Already manifest in early twentieth-century analyses, comparisons between the two leaders became common in the mid-century with the rise of modernization theory and area studies. Since then, popular and academic sources have continued juxtaposing the two men and extrapolating their findings to the two states.

This chapter examines the historiography of the comparisons made between the two leaders in scholarship published in the three main languages connected to the United States (English), Türkiye (Turkish), and Iran (Persian). I focus on two events that Anglophone history has identified as sites of salient difference. First is the fact that Atatürk instituted a republic in Türkiye (1923), whereas Reza Shah continued monarchical rule in Iran under a new dynasty (1925). Second is the contrast between a harshly enforced nationwide ban on women’s veiling in Iran under Reza Shah and the absence of such a law in early republican Türkiye. Comparativist texts sharpen and teleologically link these differences to contemporary political structures, often drawing connections between the classed and gendered personality traits of the two father figures and their countries’ divergent developments.

The scholarly consensus in both Anglophone and Turkish analyses is that Reza Khan (known as Reza Shah after 1925) wanted to become “Iran’s Atatürk” but failed. As I demonstrate in this chapter, Turkish scholars idealize Atatürk as the unmatched and unmatchable model for modern leadership. English-language comparativism also praises Atatürk in comparison to Reza Shah, but sometimes uses subtle condescension toward Türkiye to sharpen the point about Iran. In such instances, Reza Shah’s choosing “half-westernized” Türkiye as a development model contributes to his failures. On the other hand, Iranian scholars are much more likely to equate Atatürk and Reza Shah instead of comparing them to the former’s advantage. Pro-revolutionary texts undermine model-copy designations by arguing that both men worked to realize British designs for the region. Conversely, monarchists use social media to promote deeply nostalgic readings of Reza Shah and Atatürk’s modernizing rule and “brotherhood.”

This chapter uses the language of publication as an organizational scheme. However, contemporary knowledge-making practices are transnational: Scholars I cite have moved between countries; most of the primary documents needed to tell this story are available online and via university libraries. The databases Noormags and Ensani, based in Iran, and DergiPark, based in Türkiye, offer nearly unlimited access to peer-reviewed scholarship published in Turkish and Persian. Multiple works have been translated, although most commonly from English into Turkish and Persian, due to the global domination of the English language and the modern disconnect in Turkish–Iranian academic communication. Ultimately, differences in the historiography of Atatürk and Reza Shah in Turkish, Persian, and Anglophone scholarship do not come down to any essential nationality traits but to questions of ideological bent, the availability of sources, and the rhetorical impact of comparison. In the realm of international history writing, as elsewhere, power and knowledge remain intertwined.

Deconstructing the foundational myth of founding father comparativism requires thinking against the Türkiye–Iran binary, the reductionist West-to-East model of modernization, and patriarchal perceptions of agency. As such, this chapter examines how the two different regimes took root after World War I and offers a transnational feminist history of the 1936 Pahlavi ban on veiling (kashf-i hijāb), often claimed to have been inspired by Reza Shah’s 1934 trip to Türkiye. My analysis brings in the larger international context as well as local contentions. I argue that dominant ideologies connecting nation-state consolidation, modernization, and gendered reform were transnational – manifesting in context-specific ways under conditions of international inequality. The legibility of political ideologies and policies across state borders allowed local stakeholders to use comparison strategically: They could emphasize similarities or differences to the neighboring country and other nation-states to fit their political agenda. The chapter thus highlights the strategic uses of comparison, particularly by Iranian women activists, to decenter comparativism’s personalized emphasis on Reza Shah as a too-brutish, too-Eastern “failed copy” of Atatürk. The staying power of personified model-copy designations in scholarship, textbooks, and popular texts, in turn, speaks to the close connection between personification and comparison.

A Failed Atatürk?: Reza Shah in the Western Imagination

The “Reza Shah wanted to be like Atatürk but failed” trope is likely familiar to anyone with a passing interest in West Asian history. Perhaps the most well-known depiction of this concept appears in diasporic Iranian author Marjane Satrapi’s critically acclaimed graphic memoir series Persepolis, which was made into an award-winning movie in 2007. In the book, young Marjane’s father explains to his daughter that Reza Shah had the idea of instituting a republic, but he “wasn’t educated like Gandhi, who was a lawyer … Nor was he a leader of men like Ataturk, who was a general.”Footnote ² Instead, Reza Shah “was an illiterate, low-ranking officer” easily duped by the British, who coveted Iran’s oil. The cartoon movie based on the memoirs depicts Reza Shah as a literal marionette who suddenly appears on stage yelling he will become “Iran’s Atatürk” and declaring, “I will modernize this country and create a republic.” When the British hear about his plans, they convince him to become a king instead.Footnote ³ The film is unequivocally critical of imperialism; however, the visual personification of failure in Reza Shah’s person undermines this structural argument. Throughout the scene, the shah’s flailing limbs and confused expression mark him as a hapless dupe with good intentions who is tricked by the sneaky, sinuous British figure.

This account is not altogether false – just simplified, as becomes a popular cartoon. Reza Khan did come to power with British support: Great Britain was involved in the coup of 1921, which helped pro-British journalist Sayyid Ziya Tabatabai become prime minister. Reza Khan, then a Cossack officer, provided military force for the coup with the aid and approval of Britain. Becoming minister of war in 1921, Reza Khan then rose to the position of prime minister in 1923 and took the title of shah in 1925.Footnote ⁴ There is solid evidence that Reza Khan considered implementing a republic before deciding to continue the monarchy. However, despite dominant popular depictions of him as a mindless British puppet, the leader’s comments to the Turkish ambassador in Tehran on November 29, 1925 demonstrate that he was deeply conscious of British propaganda against the republic: “If they [the British] find any way to cause chaos and corruption (fesad),” he reported, “they do not hesitate.”Footnote ⁵

The construction of the shah as an ignoramus dates back to the early twentieth century. Even when interpreted with begrudging respect, the shah’s humble origins, particularly his background as a “stable boy,” played as a sort of joke in the mainstream Western press of the era, occasionally precipitating diplomatic crises.Footnote ⁶ This overlap between the supposed backwardness of Persia and the shah also appeared in US diplomatic reports. Charles Calmer Hart, who was assigned Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary to Persia in 1930 after serving in Albania from 1925 to 1929, wrote how comparison to other Muslim-majority countries, specifically to Albania and Türkiye, shaped his views:

In his dispatches, Hart highlighted the shah’s penchant for physical punishment as a type of brutal masculinity connected to the ruler’s “crudity” of mind. Ironically, as a country boy from Indiana, Hart himself had humble origins. In an interview with the Indianapolis Star, he credited his rustic roots with helping him understand “oriental mentality.”Footnote ⁸ However, the Jacksonian American ideal of rising from humble origins seemingly did not apply to Middle Eastern leaders, whose class histories became racialized in US analyses.Footnote ⁹ Predictably, Hart’s reports also erased US brutality – manifest in Jim Crow, settler colonialism, and imperialism – casting physical aggression as an atavistically masculine, Eastern trait. His Orientalist comparisons thus obscured how empire-and nation-building, authoritarian development, and militarism could intersect worldwide.

Like Hart, Western observers generally depicted Reza Khan as a representative of primitive “masculinity” instead of civilized “manliness.” As Gail Bederman explains in her influential book Manliness and Civilization, by the turn of the twentieth century, dominant US gender ideology differentiated manliness, constructed as a matter of moral fortitude and self-control, from masculinity, constructed as a matter of physical strength and virility.Footnote ¹⁰ Elite discourses on civilization associated Black and working-class men with beast-like masculinity while remaining concerned that upper-middle-class white men might be experiencing a crisis of masculinity due to their “civilized” lifestyles that limited physical violence.Footnote ¹¹

Some positive Western analyses of Reza Khan as a leader hinged on the discursive complexities that constructed masculinity as atavistic but still worthy of retaining or reclaiming to counter the feminizing influence of civilization. Since Reza Khan was an “Eastern” leader, his military-style masculinity was also seen as tempering the supposed Oriental tendency for sloth, decadence, and fatalism. For example, in 1934, while discussing the shah’s ongoing trip to Türkiye, The Manchester Guardian noted the similarities and differences between the shah and Mustafa Kemal (i.e., Ghazi), connecting class and gender:

The Manchester Guardian thus compared both leaders favorably to the sultans and shahs they ousted, who were presumably lacking in masculine “soldier’s virtues.” Reza Khan’s rustic roots supposedly made him more pragmatic and action-oriented than a stereotypical, decadent Oriental prince out to sample foreign delights.Footnote ¹³ In visiting Türkiye, the piece argued, Reza Khan sought solid policy outcomes, as opposed to mere sightseeing and cultural exchange.

In his 1946 book Iran, German-born US scholar William Haas found the shah perfectly suited for the modernization of Iran precisely due to his limited educational and life experience, which included being “uncultured.” These differences, according to Haas, paralleled the differences between Türkiye and Iran: “The two countries, then, required different types of men to achieve modernization.”Footnote ¹⁴ In such assessments, the shah’s lack of refinement fit his position and allowed him some measure of political success. Iran was so unruly and backward that unapologetic, brutal masculinity was needed for authoritarian modernization to succeed. As one scholar put it dramatically much later, “a more refined and sophisticated man would have been driven to insanity or suicide.”Footnote ¹⁵

Contemporary English-language sources, however, are more likely to teleologically link Reza Shah’s educational deficiencies to Iranian failures. This scholarly consensus dates back to the period after World War II, when US-led capitalist modernization theory, with its signature comparativism, became the dominant ideology in multiple fields. Area studies was institutionalized as a legitimate academic field connecting “the world of power” and “the world of knowledge.”Footnote ¹⁶ At the same time, development-oriented social science used personality analyses of leaders in the decolonizing world in the service of predicting and managing political change.Footnote ¹⁷ These trends provided fertile intellectual grounds for explaining postwar Türkiye and Iran via personified comparisons of the two founding fathers.

The United States and Turkey and Iran (1951) by Lewis V. Thomas and Richard N. Frye became the key text entrenching model-copy perceptions of Atatürk and Reza Shah during this period. Thomas and Frye, scholars teaching at Princeton and Harvard, respectively, were architects of the rising field of Middle East Studies in the United States. At a time when few resources were available for the study of contemporary Southwest Asia and North Africa, their Reza Shah–Atatürk comparisons became foundational.

As Thomas and Frye explained in the introduction, The United States and Turkey and Iran was published to educate the US public on the two countries in light of the US Cold War policy. The book cast Türkiye as a model modernizing state and Iran as a culturally impressive behemoth that had fallen on hard times. Thomas’s section on Türkiye, which opened the book and dominated about two-thirds of it, described the country as a relatively stable bastion of republican progress and pro-Western sentiment, giving much credit to Atatürk. Thomas’s analysis of the Atatürk period did not mention Reza Shah once. In Frye’s section on Reza Shah, however, Atatürk and Türkiye appeared seven times within the span of six pages.Footnote ¹⁸ Here, Frye compared the two leaders to Reza Shah’s detriment and also noted Turks were “better prepared to accept reforms and westernization” than Iranians due to their proximity to Europe.Footnote ¹⁹

The authors’ comparative valorization of Atatürk and Türkiye fit in with the politics of the time. As a glowing Washington Post review put it, the book appeared just as Türkiye’s NATO membership was being confirmed, while the Anglo-Iranian oil dispute appeared to make Iran “a source of danger to us all.”Footnote ²⁰ The reviewer, Ferdinand Kuhn, praised the collection for its simple language and distinction from Orientalist monographs that “make their readers wade through” chapters on ancient glories and minute linguistic details. With “just enough” historical background, he felt, the authors had managed to relate “why both nations are what they are today.” Atatürk and Reza Shah constituted much of that “just enough” background. The personification of modernization via the two fathers made for colorful reading and offered applicable knowledge.

Based on the ground established by Thomas and Frye, Türkiye–Iran comparativism, regularly personified via Atatürk–Reza Shah comparisons, came to saturate much US knowledge- and policymaking on the region throughout the century and beyond, with rubrics and rankings shifting in line with US goals. The earliest Middle East studies textbooks produced in the 1960s echoed Thomas and Frye’s framing of Reza Shah as “a Persian Ataturk” limited by personal and cultural constraints.Footnote ²¹ Modernization theory classics like Daniel Lerner’s The Passing of Traditional Society: Modernizing the Middle East (1958) and Bernard Lewis’s The Emergence of Modern Turkey (1961) also contributed to framing Türkiye as the first among equals.

Since then, enriched by new scholarship and modified by the ascendant ideologies of each era, Reza Shah–Atatürk comparisons generated in the service of the Cold War have transformed but not disappeared. The next section explores how personified comparisons between the two founding leaders continue to color the Türkiye and Iran sections of contemporary college-level Middle East studies textbooks produced in the United States.

A Republic If You Can Make It: From Scholarship to Textbooks

Findings from peer-reviewed scholarship often manifest in a simplified form in US-based college textbooks. Reza Shah–Atatürk comparisons, which feed the comparative analysis of Turkish and Iranian political systems, are no exception. A republic or at least a parliamentary monarchy with robust popular representation (mashrūtiyyat) was the ideal for many progressive-minded patriots in West Asia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Iranian constitutional revolution (1906) predated the Turkish one (1908) by a couple of years, with deep connections between the two developments and the overall global context in terms of actors and ascendant ideologies.Footnote ²² Both movements, however, were suppressed by reactionary rulers. After coming to power in 1923, Atatürk established a republic under a single-party regime and experimented with switching to a multiparty system. Reza Shah, on the other hand, ruled Iran via the parliament he controlled.

Of course, constructing the formation of a new dynasty as opposed to a republic as a “failure” itself requires comparison against a model, mobilizing “the republic” as the ideal (or at least, the preferable) political norm. However, given the evidence that Reza Khan did consider instituting a republic, many historians have speculated on why Iran ended up with a new dynasty instead of a republic.

Current peer-reviewed scholarship offers multiple answers to this question, demonstrating the overdetermination of historical events. Personified comparison appears alongside other explanations in the influential edited collection Men of Order: Authoritarian Modernization under Reza Shah and Ataturk, by Touraj Atabaki and Erik J. Zürcher, for example. In their introduction, Atabaki and Zürcher argue that, in comparison to Atatürk, Reza Shah was “fascinated by technological aspects of modernization,” which “left no room for society or for his own supporters to enjoy practicing rationalism, critical reasoning, and individualism.”Footnote ²³ Of course, it is difficult to measure how much Turkish citizens versus the citizens of Iran got to “practice” rationalism, critical reasoning, or individualism amid feverish nation-building. But, here and elsewhere, Atabaki implies Reza Khan lacked the strategic vision and proper planning to achieve a successful campaign.Footnote ²⁴ In contrast, Ali Ansari has argued he was not committed enough to the idea in the first place.Footnote ²⁵

Scholars mobilizing Persian-language sources, including Atabaki and Ansari, transcend comparativism by highlighting transnational connections and the strategic use of comparison. As Afsanah Najmabadi has observed, between the Ottoman Empire and Iran, there had long been a tradition of contact and transculturation as well as of strategic comparison.Footnote ²⁶ Therefore, the declaration of the republic in Türkiye in 1923 encouraged proponents of the republican cause in Iran. Iranian opponents of republicanism, on the other hand, referenced Türkiye’s secularizing moves in agitating against the proposed measure.Footnote ²⁷ News of the Kemalist abolition of the caliphate in 1924 and other anticlerical measures circulated in Iran and fueled the campaign against the republic. By 1925, a robust coalition had formed against the idea of the republic; conservative religious scholars (ʿulamā) were joined by constitutionalists such as Hasan Modarres and liberal journalists who feared Reza Khan’s dictatorial tendencies.Footnote ²⁸ Concerned by Turkish anticlericalism and using comparison as a political tactic, high-ranking ulema organized a series of protests in conjunction with the merchant class (bāzārī). Ultimately, this collective opposition and British pressure seemed to have led to Reza Khan’s backtracking on the republic.Footnote ²⁹

Although peer-reviewed scholarship in the English language is not immune to personalized comparison, these works also have the bandwidth, the primary sources, and the literature reviews to clarify that the differences between the contemporary Turkish and Iranian political systems cannot be reduced to the personality traits of Reza Shah and Atatürk. On the other hand, non-specialist works are more likely to emphasize the personified and comparative aspects of the analysis. This is a matter of genre. In popular trade books, where colorful personalities rule bestseller lists, the claim that Reza Shah was too fascinated by the material aspects of modernization makes for exciting reading. Textbook authors, who need to cover broad swaths of regional history while keeping the attention of exhausted undergraduates, are also compelled to offer students a more easily digestible narrative. Despite these genre restrictions, textbooks have some advantages over academic monographs. Their broad popularity means new editions appear often, bringing opportunities for revision. As I note later, some popular textbooks have tempered their comparative modeling in the last decade, reflecting an increased scholarly concern for “the tyrannies of comparison.”Footnote ³⁰

US coursebooks commonly mobilize Atatürk–Reza Shah comparisons in chapters that focus on the reordering of West Asian and North African polities after World War I. Having already categorized the Ottoman Empire, Safavid Iran, and the Mughal Empire together as Islamic “gunpowder empires,” the textbooks then offer new categorizations that set Türkiye and Iran apart from Arab-majority states such as Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon, which became British or French mandates after the war.Footnote ³¹ This contrast (Arab–non-Arab; colonized–independent) allows for the establishment of similitude between Türkiye and Iran as nation-states that did not experience direct colonization but instead launched efforts to centralize and modernize under authoritarian leaders. The principle of comparability then allows the authors to highlight “telling” differences between Atatürk–Reza Shah and Türkiye–Iran. Atatürk’s Türkiye and Reza Shah’s Iran, in other words, become “comparable” under specific parameters.

The categorization of Türkiye and Iran as “uncolonized” makes sense when we compare the two countries to a foil (e.g., official European mandates such as Iraq). However, the designation evades significant differences in the intensity and quality of imperialist influence on the two nation-states’ politics and development. The discovery of oil in Iran and the founding of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company in 1909 clearly played a key role in increased European meddling in that state. Consider how the two leaders began and ended their reigns. As noted, Britain played a significant role in Reza Shah’s rise to power. Atatürk, then known as Mustafa Kemal, rose to prominence as the result of the Ottoman resistance against Britain in World War I. The Gallipoli campaign, in particular, boosted his star. He then led a war of independence (1919–1922) against the occupying allied powers, including the British-backed Greek army. Atatürk died in office in 1938. Reza Shah had no such luck. Britain and the USSR invaded Iran in 1941 and removed him from power.

Even though textbooks almost always provide these facts separately, the “uncolonized” categorization effaces considerable differences regarding the parameters of foreign intervention in each country. This, in turn, makes the analysis more likely to focus on personality traits and/or a country’s culture as the telling differences that can explain Iranian “failures.” An analysis tracking “the directionality of power,” as required by transnational feminist analysis, on the other hand, would place more emphasis on these larger international, transnational, and global forces.Footnote ³²

Contemporary US textbooks either make Atatürk–Reza Shah comparisons that echo the trope of the shah as a failed Atatürk or set up other comparative frames to avoid the cliche. A History of the Modern Middle East by William L. Cleveland and Martin Bunton is an example of the former approach. The textbook examines the two countries in tandem in several sections, including in a chapter titled “Authoritarian Reform in Turkey and Iran.” Here, the authors describe Atatürk as “an established member of the Ottoman ruling elite” whose presidential rule through the single-party system “sowed the seeds from which a popular democratic system took root.”Footnote ³³ (That he was “an established member of the Ottoman ruling elite” would likely come as a surprise to Mustafa Kemal himself, the son of a customs officer.) The authors describe Reza Shah, who was the leader of the Persian Cossack brigade, as a “military usurper” who ruled via “coercion rather than consensus.” Dismissing any likeness between Atatürk and Reza Shah, they note that, although the latter “borrowed” from the former, “Reza Shah’s background and political attitudes were more akin to those of Muhammad Ali of nineteenth-century Egypt than to Atatürk’s.”Footnote ³⁴ Whatever else this comparison denotes, it clearly constructs Reza Shah as backward for his era.

Other textbooks set out to avoid the pitfalls of personalized comparison between Atatürk and Reza Shah. A Concise History of the Middle East (2016) by Goldschmidt and Boum, for example, breaks down the Arab–non-Arab binary to include King Abdulaziz’s Saudi Arabia alongside Türkiye and Iran in its analysis of independent nation-building and praises all three leaders for their “inspiration, ingenuity, and industry.”Footnote ³⁵ Among the three named leaders, only Mustafa Kemal Atatürk gets an entire framed page for his biography, marking him as the archetypal modernizer. However, the book undermines this apotheosis somewhat by critiquing how “the two leaders have often been compared, usually to Reza’s disadvantage.”Footnote ³⁶ Instead, the authors choose to highlight the different conditions in each country to explain different outcomes. While this approach can be productive, the authors de-emphasize transnational connections and international pressures and seem set on the idea that an excess of Islam can best explain the problems of Iran. Even as Reza Shah worked to implement reforms, “his people,” we learn, “remained loyal to Shi’ite mujtahids and mollahs.” Here, the textbook’s use of Persian words in italics signals the inscrutable quality of devout Iranians. While Reza Shah was able to “follow Atatürk’s example” in many ways, the authors lament, “Muslims did block what might have been a useful reform: romanizing the Latin alphabet.”Footnote ³⁷ “Muslims” is surely a broad group to blame here, considering how Reza Shah himself identified as Muslim. Yet, in this construction, the term means more than a professed follower of Islam and comes with Orientalist connotations of backwardness, stubbornness, and irrationality. In order to avoid making Reza Shah a failed copy of Atatürk, the authors contrast the Great Man Reza Shah to the Iranian population, furthering the long-established myth that his opponents were all “reactionary and obscurantist or entirely marginal.”Footnote ³⁸

Goldschmidt and Boum’s approach in this edition of the text amounts to comparing Iranians to Türkiye’s people, with the end result that the former came out as illogically resistant to change, unable to realize the gifts of their benevolent father, Reza Shah, due to their fanatical adherence to Islam. This line of comparativism erases the work of reformist Iranian intellectuals and works against longitudinal intellectual and cultural connection, not just between “the West,” “the East,” and Iran, but also between Türkiye and Iran. One of the strongest advocates of Persian alphabet reform, after all, was the Iranian intellectual Mirza Fatali Akhundzade, whose Azeri Turkish mother tongue and connections with the Russian and Ottoman empires influenced his advocacy for reform.Footnote ³⁹ Akhundzade was also a strong supporter of Persian-language-focused nationalism, which identified a primary role for Persian in the formation of Iranian identity and became state dogma under Reza Shah. Perhaps in recognition of such complexities, the revised edition of the textbook (2019), by Goldschmidt and Ibrahim Al-Marashi, excised these claims about a potential Persian alphabet reform.Footnote ⁴⁰

The Modern Middle East: A History (2020) by James Gelvin is perhaps the most widely assigned introductory textbook on the subject and its reputation is well deserved. Not only does the book contain primary documents, which allow students a look into the process of history writing, it also encourages a critical attitude toward mythmaking. Gelvin’s sections on Atatürk’s Türkiye and Reza Shah’s Iran appear in a chapter titled “State-Building by Revolution and Conquest,” in which the author broadens the binary to contrast European mandate states in the Levant and Mesopotamia with Türkiye, Iran, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt as “independent states” formed via “an anti-imperialist struggle (Turkey), coup d’etat (Iran), revolution (Egypt), and conquest (Saudi Arabia).”Footnote ⁴¹ Türkiye and Iran are grouped together at various sections in the chapter, yet a nuanced picture emerges from the author’s world-historical analysis. Reza Shah “self-consciously modeled himself and his Iranian experiment on Mustafa Kemal and Turkey,” notes Gelvin.Footnote ⁴² However, he avoids projecting Iran’s political troubles onto the person of Reza Shah. Instead, in examining authoritarian modernization, he highlights the dominant ideologies, discourses, and state-building practices worldwide, including in Europe, where uniformed dictators were on the rise. Equally impressive is the author’s focus on economic conditions, from the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company to the ascendance of “import substitution industrialization” as an anti-imperialist measure.Footnote ⁴³

Gelvin has noted “something of a cult” among foreign observers who “admire Ataturk as an icon of modernization and promote him as a model for the rest of the region.”Footnote ⁴⁴ In countering this valorization, however, he brings in another common trope of Türkiye–Iran comparativism: that of over-westernization or westoxication (gharbzadegī). I explain gharbzadegi discourse and its variants in depth in the later chapters, but the term basically operates as an accusation of being too taken in by the West and losing one’s authenticity. While Goldschmidt and Baum praise Atatürk and Reza Shah for their “inspiration, ingenuity, and industry,” Gelvin critiques both leaders for what he sees as their penchant for indiscriminate westernization. Specifically, he compares them to intellectuals identified as “Islamic modernists,” who, we are told, “sought to find a compromise between local and Western ideas.Footnote ⁴⁵ The book takes a whole paragraph to speculate on why Atatürk and Reza Shah “borrowed directly from Western experience” instead of taking a more critical approach to modernization. Gelvin starts by suggesting maybe they found it “easier to borrow from the West hook, line, and sinker” instead of sorting out the “essential” from the trivial. “Whatever the case,” he concludes, the two leaders “looked at Western modernity and instead of seeing a source of inspiration, they saw a source from which to draw.”Footnote ⁴⁶

The notion that both Atatürk and Reza Shah might have taken from the West without using much critical thinking not only furthers the image of Reza Shah as a baffled copier but also contains echoes of official US reports about Türkiye from the early twentieth century, which snidely commented that “immature minds always take to ready-made systems.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Certainly, the pragmatism both Atatürk and Reza Shah demonstrated in many of the reforms they initiated, their balance-of-power foreign policy, their utilization of Islam for state-building, and their search for “authentic” Turkishness and Iranianness via cultural production easily belie the “hook, line, and sinker” claim. Turkish scholarship has long rejected the image of Atatürk as an immoderate westernizer, and the leader’s concern with “the limits of westernization” has been reflected in English-language scholarship as well.Footnote ⁴⁸

Depicting Atatürk and/or Reza Shah as immoderate westernizers who misunderstood the essentials of modernization offers a helpful framing device for authors who want to avoid the Eurocentric pitfalls of modernization theory. However, as I explore in depth in Chapter 5, the idea of “over-westernization” is no less dependent on comparativism and Orientalism. Over-westernization discourse suggests that certain, often Islamic, forms of traditionalism constitute the authentic core of any Muslim-majority society and must be maintained, regardless of other historical changes. The idea that “Islam” constitutes the essence of Middle Easternness elides the thoroughly transnational and modern genealogy of traditionalism and religious reaction in West Asia and North Africa. This has the effect of gatekeeping Islam and racializing Muslims by casting secularizing reforms as always already suspect foreign impositions. Over-westernization rhetoric thus underplays the local agitation and buy-in for West-facing development, some of which I delineate in the section on clothing reform. It implies the scholar can simultaneously be an arbiter of modernization and ethnoreligious authenticity.

The paragraph about borrowing “hook, line, and sinker” from the West has remained largely unchanged between the 2011 and 2020 editions of the textbook, but there is no reason to assume it will remain so. In 2011, writing at a high point of what many observers called the Justice and Development Party (JDP)’s “Islamic liberalism,” Gelvin may have been simply summarizing the common comparative critiques regarding Atatürk-era secularization. A couple of pages later, for example, we read that both Atatürk and Reza Shah, earlier designated “unabashed Westernizers,” can also be classified as “defensive developmentalists.”Footnote ⁴⁹ Gelvin’s emphasis on international factors, including imperialist pressures, also complicates the over-westernization trope.Footnote ⁵⁰ The 2020 edition contains these elements, as well as an additional report on “creeping Islamization” in the next era of JDP rule. This, too, is reflective of the moment of revision and publication.Footnote ⁵¹

Textbook authors have a tricky balancing act since comparison can be rhetorically compelling. The sharp contrast between the westernizing autocrats and the “Islamic modernists” and the long speculative paragraph pondering why the two leaders were so indiscriminate in borrowing from the West will likely stick to the readers’ minds over and above the rest of the information. It would be difficult for a student to read that paragraph and leave without thinking Middle Eastern leaders must prioritize Islam more extensively if they wish to be seen as strategic thinkers, just as a student who reads Goldschmidt and Boum will come to the opposite conclusion: Less Islam is needed in the public sphere for “useful” reforms to take root.Footnote ⁵² Although these arguments clash with one another, they both benefit from the unearned persuasiveness of comparison.

Gelvin was correct in noting that there is something iconic about Atatürk the modernizer. The consensus view of Türkiye-as-model and Iran-as-copy, built in the golden years of modernization theory, is still with us. In the title of most comparative works, Türkiye appears ahead of Iran, with the English phrase rolling off the tongue with easy catenation: “TurkeyanIran.” Even in noncomparative histories of Iran, authors mention Türkiye and Atatürk when explaining the reforms initiated under Reza Shah. Consider the widely read histories of Zürcher (2017) on Türkiye and Nikki Keddie on Iran (2006): Reza Shah is absent from Zürcher’s recounting of the Atatürk era; however, Atatürk appears twice in reference to Reza Shah’s reforms in the latter book.Footnote ⁵³

The direct impact of Atatürk’s example on Reza Shah’s reforms is debated, as I explain in depth in the section on veiling. However, it is important to emphasize here that the chronology of centralizing and modernizing reform between Atatürk’s Türkiye and Reza Shah’s Iran did not always go in a West-to-East order. The Turkish Parliament, for example, passed a law requiring all Turkish citizens to take on surnames during Reza Shah’s 1934 visit to the country, in the shah’s presence, and while referencing the precedent set in Iran.Footnote ⁵⁴ Reza Shah has long been described as the “Ataturk of Persia,” but not vice versa.Footnote ⁵⁵ However, Atatürk came to be called Atatürk due to the Turkish surname reform, which was inspired by the Iranian example.

As a manifestation of the implicit assumption that progress is transferred from West to East, and perhaps as a result of Afghanistan’s lack of fit within “Middle Eastern” history, Amanullah Khan (ruled 1919–1929) is often omitted from the story of authoritarian modernization as a point of comparison in English-language textbooks.Footnote ⁵⁶ This is despite his extensive travels within Europe and Asia and his connections with both Atatürk and Reza Shah.Footnote ⁵⁷ Similarly, the long histories of Iranian transculturation and intellectual exchange with the Caucus, Central Asia, and South Asia are eclipsed by all too many accounts.Footnote ⁵⁸ Given Bolshevik outreach to the Middle East and the long list of illustrious West Asian intellectuals who trained in the USSR, the USSR itself proved to be a significant model and point of reference for development for Turkish and Iranian policymakers, as well as a geopolitical force to be balanced by the two states.Footnote ⁵⁹

Mentioning Türkiye when speaking of Iran, therefore, is not merely reflective of the realities of bilateral exchange but also telling of what the authors assume will be familiar to English-speaking readers. Atatürk is introduced as a more familiar example of modernization, a supposedly stable point of comparison – “a known” that can allow the reader access to the “unknown.” A parallel move since the Iranian revolution has been referencing Iran when expressing concerns about Islamism in the Turkish political sphere (see Chapters 4 and 5). In these analyses, Iran becomes the iconic Islamist state, paralleling Türkiye’s position as the iconic “modernizing” state. Such rhetorical maneuvers can allow the readers to feel confident as they get ready to understand a new topic. Unfortunately, the strategy is fraught with intellectual risk. The reference point is stabilized and stripped of nuance to serve as a well-known “example,” and the subject under consideration becomes marginalized as a “copy” even in its role as the primary topic.

What about Turkish and Iranian texts comparing Reza Shah and Atatürk? As I explain later, neither is immune to the copy-model trope nor the influence of Anglophone scholarship. Still, the authors employ different rhetorical maneuvers based on their presumed “local” readers and make strategic choices according to their political commitments.

Atatürk the Incomparable?: The Failed Republic in Turkish and Iranian Scholarship

It should come as no surprise that the “Atatürk, the exceptional model” trope dominates published Turkish scholarship. In addition to a 2012 translation of Zürcher and Atabaki’s 2004 volume, two monographs focus on comparing Turkish and Iranian authoritarian modernization in the Turkish language as of this writing: Celal Metin’s 2011 Emperyalist Çağda Modernleşme: Türk Modernleşmesi ve İran, 1800–1941 (Modernization in the Imperialist Age: Turkish Modernization and Iran, 1800–1941); Tolga Gürakar’s 2012 Türkiye ve İran: Gelenek, Çağdaşlaşma, Devrim (Türkiye and Iran: Tradition, Modernization, Revolution). In addition, two essays in a 2020 edited collection on Türkiye and Iran consider the reforms and foreign policy of the era.Footnote ⁶⁰ All of these sources venerate Atatürk and Türkiye explicitly through comparison to Reza Shah and Iran.

Celal Metin’s 2011 book, developed from a Ph.D. thesis, emphasizes factors underlying authoritarian modernization, including pre-twentieth-century Ottoman–Iranian interactions and the role of prominent intellectuals. The title references imperialism, promising an intellectual history synthesis informed by political context, balancing comparison with transnational analysis. Metin’s section on Atatürk and Reza Shah groups the two men as “leaders of modernization,” yet the analysis soon crowns Atatürk as “an unmatched model.”Footnote ⁶¹ Metin agrees with the general bend of Zürcher and Atabaki’s book, crediting Kemalist reforms with institutionalizing responsible citizenship, and criticizes Pahlavi reforms as faits accomplis enforced with harshness, “lacking convincing and conviction.” This comparative framework necessitates underplaying instances of resistance to Kemalism, such as the 1925 Sheikh Said rebellion and underplaying local buy-in to Reza Shah’s projects.

Ultimately, the narrative identifies Reza Shah/Iran as failed copies of Atatürk/Türkiye due to Reza Shah’s personal “inadequacies,” which parallel the supposedly “primitive” aspects of Iran:

Multiple instances of comparison and personification operate here alongside the reference to imperialism (e.g., “the processes surrounding his rise”). As in dominant Anglophone analyses, Reza Shah’s “inadequacies” match his homeland’s “primitive” traits.

Other Turkish texts choose to group Reza Shah and Atatürk together as venerable leaders but compare Turkish and Iranian populations to the latter’s detriment. Saygı’s Atatürk ve Şah (Atatürk and the Shah, 2012), for example, focuses on the shah’s 1934 trip to Türkiye and summarizes the events associated with the visit. Saygı emphasizes the “friendship” between the two men (and the two countries) and notes that Reza Shah took developments in Türkiye as a model. His normative comparison is not necessarily directed at the shah but at Iran’s people. The book mainly cites Turkish- and English-language secondary sources, referencing the “intransigence of the Shia ulema” to explain why “unlike Atatürk, Reza Shah could not implement the principle of secularism into the state’s regime” or declare a republic.Footnote ⁶³

In addition to these monographs, two relatively recent peer-reviewed articles written in Turkish focus on Reza Shah’s Türkiye visit and compare Turkish and Iranian modernizations through that pivotal moment. Acknowledging different beginnings and manifestations of modernization and reform efforts in the two countries, Hilal Akgül argues Türkiye and Iran nevertheless entered into a relationship that can be defined as “serving as a model” and “exporting a model” in the Atatürk era.Footnote ⁶⁴ In his introduction, M. Volkan Atuk references Akgül’s article, noting his goals are different in that his study will emphasize differences over similarities.Footnote ⁶⁵ Perhaps, ironically, his piece ends up with a similar conclusion, setting up Atatürk as the primary model and echoing not only Akgül but also Atabaki and Zürcher in depicting Reza Shah as an intellectually deficient, failed copy:

In sum, contemporary Turkish-language scholarship on the topic era does not differ much from dominant English-language analyses, valorizing Türkiye and Atatürk in comparison to Iran and the shah. Consider the tight overlap between the Turkish sources examined previously in this chapter and the views of retired senior CIA analyst and influential US expert on political Islam, Graham Fuller: “The model for Reza Shah in implementing his own reform program of imposed westernization was Atatürk himself, although Reza’s reforms were executed with far less brilliance, skill, understanding or lasting effect.”Footnote ⁶⁷

Shared cross-cultural assumptions regarding modernization and leadership clearly play a role in this overlap between Turkish- and English-language analyses. Another contributing factor may be the professional tendency of scholars to valorize formal education. As traditional intellectuals in the Gramscian sense, historians from any country are simply more liable to interpret Reza Shah’s relative dearth of formal education as an unforgivable failing that set Iran on the wrong course. Limited education transforms into limited intellectual prowess all too easily in a range of scholarly texts. Operating as a civilizational cue, comparisons that hinge on education locate in Reza Shah a harsh, masculine, Oriental despotism, as opposed to manly leadership.

Citational practices are also influential. Despite the geographic nearness of Türkiye and Iran and the deep history of transculturation between the two countries, contemporary Turkish scholarship almost exclusively uses Turkish and English primary sources, with some Persian-language secondary sources in English or Turkish translation.Footnote ⁶⁸ Sometimes, books published on Iran in Türkiye do not prioritize primary documents in any relevant language, mostly offering syntheses of English- and Turkish-language secondary sources.Footnote ⁶⁹ However, primary documents in Persian are most likely to be left out.

This exclusion of Persian-language sources in Turkish works about Iran may come as a surprise to readers who expect geographic and cultural proximity to influence intellectual life. Unfortunately, except for work produced by diasporic Iranian authors living in Türkiye, Turkish scholarship on Iran is resolutely bilingual in a way that prioritizes English over Persian.Footnote ⁷⁰ In addition to marking the hegemony of Britain and, later, the United States in knowledge production, the Turkish–English bilingualism that dominates Turkish-language scholarship on Iran is an outcome of Kemalist education policy. The contemporary dearth of familiarity with Persian in Türkiye, after all, is the direct result of the Turkish alphabet and language reforms initiated in the service of ensuring a “contemporary” education for the new Turkish youth.Footnote ⁷¹ This is a version of the alphabet reform Goldschmidt and Boum once faulted “Muslims” in Iran for blocking.

I should note that Persian-language scholarship rarely incorporates Turkish sources any better, even though approximately a quarter of Iranian citizens speak some type of Turkic as their mother tongue. The widespread unawareness of the neighboring country’s intellectual output is part of a larger post-World War I “rapture” between Turkish, Persian, and Arabic literary and scholarly worlds that still needs bridging.Footnote ⁷²

While citational practices follow the lines of power in each case, post and pro-revolutionary Iranian sources differ radically from dominant Turkish and English-language analyses of the “failed” republic and Reza Shah. Most obviously, they expand the comparative references to include other Muslim-majority countries (particularly Afghanistan), emphasize the role played by Britain, and refuse to deify Atatürk. An Iranian middle school history textbook epitomizes this approach, claiming that Reza Shah, Atatürk, and Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan all came to power as a result of covert British policies to dominate the Middle East.Footnote ⁷³

Whereas US-based “over-westernization” discourse blames West Asian leaders for misunderstanding the proper rubrics of modernization, the dominant Iranian ideology on westoxication constructs Reza Shah’s initiatives as the flawless implementation of British plots to weaken Islam. A twelfth-grade book for students specializing in the humanities, for example, argues Reza Khan imitated Atatürk. However, the framing of the chapter introduces Reza Khan as an agent of Britain who believed progress would only be possible by copying Western mores.Footnote ⁷⁴ According to this line of thinking, the establishment of a republic in Türkiye was hardly to be lauded in comparison to Reza Shah’s establishment of the Pahlavi dynasty, ultimately serving the same aim.

As I explore in Chapter 3, the strategic designation of Atatürk and Reza Shah as pro-Western agents became foundational to Iranian revolutionary thought with Ayatollah Khomeini’s sermons and Ali Shariati’s lectures. Of course, to claim such a substantial overlap, pro-revolutionary Iranian history ends up underplaying significant differences regarding the scope and depth of imperialist influence in how the two leaders rose to power and how they ruled. After all, the idea that the resolute leader of the independence war against “the West” was acting in line with British goals would be sacrilegious to mainstream Turkish history.

In sum, due to shared ideologies regarding modernization, class bias, and uneven citation practices, Reza Shah’s rustic upbringing codes for political failure in bodies of scholarship published in the United States and in Türkiye. Moreover, there is remarkable continuity between early twentieth-century English-language accounts and contemporary US and Turkish publications in connecting the failed republic to the shah’s uncultured masculinity. The official pro-revolutionary Iranian history of the era, on the other hand, pushes Türkiye and Iran together and highlights the role of the British hegemon in a way that severely clashes with mainstream Turkish narratives as well as with English-language scholarship. This casual overlap between Reza Shah, Amanullah Khan, and Atatürk, and the denial of evaluative comparison, is particularly true of proregime works, which dominate formal education but do not constitute all published Persian-language scholarship on the era. I delve closer into the different Iranian scholarly approaches to authoritarian modernization in Iran and Türkiye in the next section on the Pahlavi ban on veiling (kashf-i hijāb) – another key topic for scholarly and popular comparativism.

The Hijab Ban: A Souvenir from Türkiye?

Did Reza Shah “copy” the idea of unveiling Iranian women from Atatürk but failed to implement the program properly? In his highly acclaimed Iran between the Two Revolutions, Ervand Abrahamian does some bet-hedging, implying but not directly claiming influence: “The drive to raise the status of women began in 1934, immediately after Reza Shah’s visit to Turkey, where Mustafa Kemal was waging a similar campaign.”Footnote ⁷⁵ In her widely assigned history of Iran, Nikki Keddie also notes the influence of the trip to Türkiye while arguing Reza Shah’s ban was unique in its starkness: “More problematic was Reza Shah’s unique absolutist approach to changing women’s dress which, following a trip to Turkey, he saw as a hallmark of modernization.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Keddie’s phrasing approximates the main line of comparison on this subject, which can be summarized as follows: Reza Shah was inspired to unveil Iranian women after visiting Atatürk’s Türkiye in 1934 but implemented an overtly harsh, nationwide ban causing significant backlash. Scholars often teleologically connect Reza Shah’s implementation of unveiling to the institutionalization of forced hijab under the Islamic Republic. Once again, the shah is too uncultured and, therefore, too focused on appearances when it comes to modernization in comparison to Atatürk. In such formulations, his civilizational failings explain not only the ills Iran faced during his reign but reverberate decades after as daddy issues.

Keddie cites Houchand E. Chehabi’s “Staging the Emperor’s New Clothes,” which, to date, stands as one of the most informative articles on the Pahlavi hijab ban published in the English language due to the author’s thorough use of Persian-language primary documents.Footnote ⁷⁷ In this succinct and rich piece, Chehabi emphasizes the pre-Pahlavi associations of unveiling with modernity, nation-building, and women’s civic inclusion, and lists the trip to Türkiye as an accelerating factor. Chehabi also discusses the cultural and structural strategies the Iranian government used to prepare the ground for kashf-i hijāb. Chehabi does compare Türkiye–Iran and Atatürk–Reza Shah along the lines Keddie summarizes in this article and elsewhere.Footnote ⁷⁸ The Pahlavi hijab ban, he argues, followed the general lines of “modernization” in the reign of Reza Shah in so far as it was unilaterally decreed and enforced without proper consideration: “Modernization was literally staged, with directors who had not fully understood the play and actors who had not volunteered for their parts.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Challenging this widely accepted notion of a telling difference between Turkish and Iranian anti-veiling campaigns is a more recent essay by Jasamin Rostam-Kolayi and Afshin Matin-Asgari. The authors use many of the same Persian-language primary sources but reach a different conclusion: “Unveiling campaigns in Iran and Turkey, both in terms of intent and implementations, had more in common than previously appreciated.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In addition to referencing scholarship on the more tyrannical local implementations of the Turkish campaign, this argument requires the authors to emphasize the fluidity of Iran’s kashf-i hijāb. My summary of the history of the Pahlavi hijab ban below weaves between these two threads, which respectively emphasize difference and similarity. Following the lines of power, I highlight the transnational circulation of ascendant ideologies regarding gendered modernization. Taking a cue from the work of feminist Iranian scholars such as Hamideh Sedghi and Asfanah Najmabadi, I also emphasize the role played by women intellectuals and activists who clashed and collaborated with the state. Finally, in line with the book’s goals, I draw special attention to the strategic use of Türkiye–Iran comparisons in both the primary documents and secondary scholarship.

As Rostam-Kolayi and Matin-Asgari have convincingly argued, the study of Iran’s kashf-i hijāb is filled with ambiguities, starting with the dearth of information on preexisting clothing practices, which any ban would have targeted.Footnote ⁸¹ The practice of veiling in West Asia and North Africa predates the rise of Islam and was particularly common as a marker of urban class status.Footnote ⁸² With the advent of Islam, a consensus emerged among Islamic jurists that modest clothing and comportment for all genders was mandated by the Qur’an (24:31; 33:59). Of course, the shape such modest clothing may take has varied from region to region. It is safe to state that, for much of Iran’s history, traditional Islamic clothing included some form of head covering for women interacting with men outside the immediate family. This commonsense was challenged in the nineteenth century due to a congruence of international, transnational, national, and local factors.

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Iranian travelers to Europe reported on the unveiled women and the public mixing of the sexes they encountered, with modernists and traditionalists taking roughly opposite views regarding the desirability of unveiling and heterosocialization.Footnote ⁸³ The late Qajar shahs found that moving with ease in courtly European settings, where mixed-gender interactions were common, boosted their cosmopolitan credentials and signaled their nation’s independence and modernity.Footnote ⁸⁴

The first Iranian woman known to have cast off her face veil in public was the poet and Bábí religious leader Tāhiri Qurrat al-ʿAyn in 1848.Footnote ⁸⁵ She rose to an exalted status within the faith and received praise from Western suffragists such as Carrie Chapman Catt.Footnote ⁸⁶ However, the Qajar state accused her of collaborating with would-be assassins and executed her. In line with Bahaism’s outcast status within Iran, she has come to personify the controversy on unveiling.Footnote ⁸⁷

The nineteenth century saw the development of transnational modernist ideologies that linked women’s clothing, comportment, and education with nation-building. Camron Michael Amin locates the beginnings of a discourse connecting women’s progress with the fate of Iran with the publication of Mirza Fatali Akhundzade’s Three Letters in 1865.Footnote ⁸⁸ In the lead up to the Constitutional period (1905–1911), gendered reform became clearly yoked to visions of national progress and patriotism.Footnote ⁸⁹ Modernist Iranian poets popularized the metaphor describing hijab, which refers to practices of gender segregation as well as women’s Islamic clothing, as a dark shroud (kafan), associating it with backwardness.Footnote ⁹⁰

Calls for unveiling across West Asia largely focused on face covering (picheh or peçe), which was more common among the urban classes, and sometimes targeted the loose outer garment known as chador in Persian and çarşaf in Turkish.Footnote ⁹¹ In practice, however, full Western-style dress remained limited to royal and elite women who had regular contact with Europeans or US missionaries.Footnote ⁹²

Local critiques of veiling and women’s seclusion from public life became ascendant after World War I as nationalist leaders in several Muslim-majority countries considered improving women’s status a part of their nation-building projects.Footnote ⁹³ In 1919, Amanullah Khan rose to power in Afghanistan and began to initiate gendered reforms focused on education. Along with his progressive, unveiled wife, Queen Soraya, he advocated for women’s inclusion in civic life.Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1921, Reza Khan (later Reza Shah) took power in Iran with a military coup. Following a war of independence (1919–1923), Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) was elected president of Türkiye in 1923. Kemal’s wife, Latife Hanım, was a strong advocate for women’s rights and a proponent of gradual reform in the arena of women’s clothing. She played a significant role in shaping Kemalist gender policies. As a newlywed, Atatürk toured the nation with Latife Hanım, and photos of her wearing riding breeches and a simple headscarf or cap were disseminated as a part of Kemalist propaganda regarding gendered modernization.Footnote ⁹⁵ The Turkish Hat reform (1925) banned the fez for men. The Kemalists did not introduce nationwide laws regarding veiling; instead, state cadres promoted mixed-gender gatherings, and regime propaganda discouraged the veiling of women, with a particular focus on the face veil (peçe). These efforts gained the new regime international recognition. Türkiye became a reference point in Afghanistan and Iran, as well as in other Muslim-majority contexts.Footnote ⁹⁶

According to Yahya Dowlatabadi, who served as a member of the Iranian Parliament at the time, Reza Khan was hesitant to target the practice of veiling early in his political career.Footnote ⁹⁷ In 1927–1928, Afghanistan’s King Amanullah Khan undertook an extensive tour of Europe, North Africa, and West Asia, including visits to Türkiye and Iran.Footnote ⁹⁸ In both countries, Queen Soraya participated freely in meetings and appeared in European-style clothes. Reza Shah’s wife, however, did not face Amanullah Khan in the same manner.Footnote ⁹⁹

Although the Pahlavi government had not yet developed any consensus on the issue of veiling, cultural developments of the 1920s brought noticeable changes in women’s clothing practices. Alongside face veils disappearing and chadors becoming shorter, women’s public presence increased enough to be reflected in memoirs dating from the period.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When the shah’s female relatives wore light chadors to the holy shrine in Qom, where they had gone to observe the Iranian New Year and the Shia commemoration of Imam ‘Ali’s martyrdom, some clergymen vocally objected to their attire. In response, the shah reportedly drove to Qum, entered the shrine without taking his boots off, and “had the cleric who had criticized the queen whipped.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This mythologized incident, however, does not imply Reza Shah was ready to push for additional reform on women’s clothing options.

Before the 1930s, Iranian clothing reform only targeted men’s traditional and local clothing practices. In 1928, European-style suits and brimmed Pahlavi caps were made mandatory across the country, with government-issued exemptions available for religious officials and trainees.Footnote ¹⁰² High-ranking government figures in Iran disagreed on the issue of veiling.Footnote ¹⁰³ Scholars suggest the 1928–1929 coup against Amanullah Khan also caused Reza Shah to be cautious about further sartorial reforms that might offend religious sensitivities.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Throughout the 1920s and early 1930s, pioneering Iranian feminists played significant roles in advocating against women’s seclusion from public life and sometimes connected the issue to veiling. Rawshanak Naw’dust, whose journal may have been the first to publish the word “feminism” in Persian, was a socialist advocate for reform, marking the influence of the USSR on the Iranian women’s movement.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Fakhr-Afaq Parsa was another prominent figure who advocated for women’s education, the revision of marriage laws, and against veiling from the pages of her journal, Jahān-i Zanān. Her views were controversial enough to lead to a ban on the magazine and her own exile in 1921.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

In 1922, Mohtaram Eskandari led the founding of the Patriotic Women’s League (Anjuman-i Nisvān-i Vaṭankhāh). The League propagandized for the right to appear unveiled in public and even petitioned the shah for his support.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ Sediqeh Dowlatabadi, the founder of the progressive women’s magazine Zabān-i Zanān (f. 1919), and Mastoureh Afshar, the daughter of a prominent intellectual who had lived in Russia and the Ottoman Empire, were active members. Dowlatabadi was among a handful of Iranian women who appeared unveiled in public in the late 1920s.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Throughout 1931 and 1932, women’s magazine ʿĀlam-i Nisvān hosted discussions on veiling and women’s seclusion and regularly editorialized against the practice.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Iranian feminist discourses had already established similitude between Ottoman and Iranian gendered reform movements.Footnote ¹¹⁰ During the early republican era, Türkiye became a point of strategic comparison as well. In 1933, for example, an opinion piece in the magazine declared, “It would be better for the Iranian women, like Turkish women, to come out of this shroud, which is nothing more than a heresy [or, harmful innovation] in Islam and is called hijab.”Footnote ¹¹¹ Iranian conservative discourse in favor of gender segregation and veiling was also influenced by transnational developments and translated texts.Footnote ¹¹²

Toward the end of 1932, the Patriotic Women’s League, under the leadership of Mastoureh Afshar, chaired an international Eastern women’s congress in Tehran. The congress demonstrated how much Iranian women disagreed on the compatibility of unveiling with women’s advancement, education, and work outside the home. The activists also disagreed on the role the Pahlavi state should play in the movement. The government, however, was able to penetrate the organization to a large extent. Princess Shams Pahlavi was declared honorary president, and the opening speech from Afshār credited Reza Shah with improving women’s opportunities in comparison to “other women of the East.”Footnote ¹¹³ This became a turning point, alienating many active members. The Pahlavi state soon took over independent women’s movements, institutionalizing an official state feminism.Footnote ¹¹⁴ It was this state feminism – the result of a compromise between some Iranian feminists and the regime – that would promote kashf-i hijāb.

Under this new arrangement, the Pahlavi state sutured unveiling to girls’ education and public heterosocialization, putting its weight on one interpretation of gendered modernity. As Rostam-Kolayi and Matin-Asgari convincingly demonstrate, “legal and institution-building projects” preparing the ground for women’s clothing reform began before the shah set foot on Turkish ground.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The Ministry of Education led the way as teacher training colleges did away with the hijab in the assigned uniforms for young girls and teachers. Iranian women, who had long pushed the boundaries of self-styling, and feminist activists also played a role in constructing as well as promoting the new order.

If a large part of the story includes a convergence between several prominent women’s activists and the Pahlavi state toward the end of 1932, how do we explain the significance that secondary literature assigns to Reza Shah’s 1934 trip to Türkiye? As Chehabi notes, the shah’s Türkiye visit seems to have accelerated the developments already underway in Iran.

Although the visit ostensibly prioritized military infrastructure as recommended by the Turkish ambassador to Iran in a 1933 notice, the publicity-savvy Kemalist regime did not miss too many opportunities to perform gendered modernity for this high-profile event.Footnote ¹¹⁶ When The Sunday Express wrote in anticipation that “for the first time in history, Moslem women unveiled will curtsy at social functions before a visiting Moslem king,” the Turkish ambassador in London included an excerpt of the piece in his dispatch back to Ankara.Footnote ¹¹⁷

The Kemalists made sure to choreograph modern Turkish women into the itinerary. The shah visited a model girl’s occupational school (İsmet Paşa Kız Enstitüsü), shaking the unveiled teachers’ hands and observing the students’ work.Footnote ¹¹⁸ Uniformed girl scouts formed a centerpiece of the parade at the Hippodrome in Ankara. Wives of senior officials were occasionally in attendance in “modern” clothing, and mixed-gender evening galas often included women singing and joining in European-style dances.Footnote ¹¹⁹ According to prominent politician Isa Sedigh, the participation of women in the economic, social, and political spheres impressed the shah even more than the military and agricultural developments he observed.Footnote ¹²⁰

Turkish propaganda regarding men’s clothing reform could be even less subtle. According to General Arfa, who accompanied the shah during the visit, during one stop, Mustafa Kemal harshly berated a turbaned “molla” for his attire, and the man, abandoning his white turban, disappeared into the crowd.Footnote ¹²¹ Soon after, the Kemalist regime forbade men of religion from wearing their occupational outfits outside of work environments. Reza Shah also began issuing orders about men’s clothing policy while still in Türkiye. Dowlatabadi notes that he sent a telegraph ordering fieldworkers to start wearing full-brimmed hats to protect themselves from the sun during his trip.Footnote ¹²² This would mark the beginning of a renewed emphasis on clothing reform, with an increasing focus on women’s public appearance.

Upon his return, the shah made multiple comparative remarks referencing Türkiye to government officials. According to Mohsen Sadr, then President of the High Court of Justice in Tehran, the shah was motivated by the need to demonstrate Iran’s progress visibly by the time of Atatürk’s planned visit to Iran.Footnote ¹²³ The shah reportedly told his Prime Minister Mahmoud Jam that, since he went to Türkiye and saw the Turkish women unveiled and working shoulder to shoulder with the men, he had been bothered by the sight of women in chador.Footnote ¹²⁴ In a meeting with his ministers about veiling policy, Reza Shah asked, “are not millions of unveiled non-Iranian women honorable?,” likely in reference to the Muslim women of Türkiye.Footnote ¹²⁵

Reza Shah thus compared Türkiye to Iran and anticipated Atatürk comparing the two countries as well. In addition, he constructed a racialized theory to explain Türkiye’s development, arguing Turks were simply more obedient than the supposedly more free-willed Persians: “It is easier to control Turks than Iranians,” he told confidantes.Footnote ¹²⁶ This theory allowed him to explain away what he saw as the more progressive aspects of Atatürk’s Türkiye while maintaining an ethnonationalist belief in Aryan superiority. The Türkiye visit was partially prompted by Reza Shah’s wish to counterbalance British and Russian pressures by strengthening regional ties.Footnote ¹²⁷ In the midst of idealistic talk of brotherhood and anti-imperialist political strategizing, comparativism introduced an element of competition with masculinist, racial, and civilizational undertones to Türkiye–Iran relations. Although the comparison was ostensibly between Türkiye and Iran, “the West” loomed large in local visions of modernity and nation-building projects, making any comparison implicitly triangular.

In May 1935, an organization called Jamʿı̄yat-i Zanān-i Āzādı̄khāh-i Īrānı̄ (Organization of Freedom-Seeking Iranian Women), later known as the Women’s Center was founded under the honorary leadership of Princess Shams to advocate against veiling and seclusion.Footnote ¹²⁸ Women’s activists such as Dowlatabadi and Hajir Tarbiat played significant roles in the organization and influenced government policy and strategy.Footnote ¹²⁹ Around the same time, the European-style brimmed hat replaced the Pahlavi hat as the standard headdress in Iran by decree, bringing Turkish and Iranian sartorial practices in alignment.Footnote ¹³⁰ These developments sparked gossip that a nationwide women’s unveiling was in the offing, and occasioned widespread protests, which the Iranian military violently suppressed.Footnote ¹³¹

The much celebrated and maligned “launch” of kashf-i hijāb came on January 7, 1936, at a celebration at the Tehran Teacher’s College. At this ceremony, Reza Shah gave a general speech about women’s advancement and integration into society while standing next to his wife and the two princesses, who were wearing hats, jackets, and long skirts. The newspapers disseminated the speech and the pictures, demonstrating the royal will behind European-style dress for women. Reza Shah’s eldest daughter Ashraf Pahlavi, who was present at the event, recalled his father’s reluctance to showcase them as models of modern Iranian womanhood. She also described the general understanding that followed the event: “After this ceremony, all women were required to remove their veils, and those who refused were forced to do so.”Footnote ¹³² The princess’s comment is in line with Chehabi’s argument that, by this point, “Reza Shah’s regime had become so autocratic that his remaining dress reforms were promulgated not as laws but as decrees.”Footnote ¹³³

Rostam-Kolayi and Matin-Asgari, on the other hand, argue that this speech did not constitute a “decree” but was, instead, the continuation of a multipronged anti-veiling campaign. For this argument, they use the memoirs of the Minister of Education Ali-Asghar Hekmat, in which Hikmat took credit for suggesting a royal demonstration in support of the campaign. According to the memoirs, in the fall of 1935, the shah asked him about progress on the kashf-i hijāb. After noting the ground had been prepared by the actions of the ministry, particularly with girl students, Hikmat suggested more would be needed to convince older women. He requested that the shah – who had been reluctant to see his family members unveiled – set an example for the population. This would, Hikmat believed, increase support for the unveiling campaign already underway under the auspices of his ministry because “people follow the religion of their kings.”Footnote ¹³⁴

In working to nuance the “decree” argument, Rostam-Kolayi and Matin-Asgari demonstrate that the legal framing for kashf-i hijāb occurred via administrative directives issued by the Ministry of Education and the Ministry of Interior.Footnote ¹³⁵ A series of preliminary reforms targeted girls’ schools; civic and military officials were encouraged to organize and attend mixed-gender social events.Footnote ¹³⁶ The girl scout program also promoted new habits of dress and comportment.Footnote ¹³⁷ Because practices of veiling differed across Iran, the state’s unveiling campaign manifested differently in various provinces, with exceptions being made for some rural practices.Footnote ¹³⁸ The primary record also demonstrates that the government frowned on overzealous enforcement and urged caution and understanding.Footnote ¹³⁹

For Rostam-Kolayi and Matin-Asgari, these details imply similitude to Türkiye, where anti-veiling campaigns occurred as local initiatives, “leaving a space for the negotiation of the regime ideals at the local level as well as for the involvement of various local actors in the shaping of campaigns.”Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Ultimately, whether one emphasizes the role of Reza Shah or a larger national elite in conceiving of and implementing kashf-i hijāb, it is clear that traditionally inclined women resented the campaign, and many families still recall the difficulties it caused.

Mokhber-ol Saltaneh, who had been the shah’s prime minister (1927–1933) and was against clothing reform, called kashf-i hijāb “the Shah’s souvenir from Turkey” in his 1950 memoirs.Footnote ¹⁴¹ This colorful metaphor, which depicted the shah casually shopping for radical reforms as if they were cheap trinkets, has stuck. However, few world leaders considered such changes superficial or superfluous in the early twentieth century. Western colonial powers had long enforced sartorial standardization over conquered populations. In the case of the United States, for example, clothing reform was forced upon Indigenous children in American Indian Schools, promoted heavily for European immigrants, and institutionalized in new overseas colonies such as the Philippines. As newly independent nation-states that had been the target of imperialism, Türkiye and Iran mobilized sartorial reform as a part of their centralization efforts to strengthen the state, inculcate “modern” habits of comportment, and represent themselves as equal members of “international” civilization.Footnote ¹⁴²

Türkiye certainly formed a reference point for Iranian proponents of unveiling. However, international modernist discourses about gendered progress circulated in more ways than West to East. In revising Mokhber-ol Saltaneh’s declaration, we can say kashf-i hijāb was a souvenir to Iran, not merely from Türkiye, but from an Iran operating in a global context. While likely accelerated by the Türkiye visit, kashf-i hijāb built on past internal and transnational developments and followed a gradual pattern.Footnote ¹⁴³ Women’s civic presence and modernization had become linked in Iranian elite discourses long before the shah’s decision. Although women’s activists disagreed on unveiling, feminist nationalism, the state’s focus on gendered modernization, and a wish to gain public diplomacy dividends overlapped in Iran’s kashf-i hijāb.

Critiques of harsh enforcement cannot be dismissed. However, clearly, some segments of the population supported clothing reform and helped prepare the ground for it. Wearing European-style clothes in public remained common, especially in wealthier neighborhoods, even as enforcement dropped with the forced abdication of Reza Shah in 1941. In fact, by then, Western-style clothing had become habitual for city dwellers across West Asia and North Africa regardless of legislation or lack thereof.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

Kashf-i Hijāb in Iranian Scholarship: Ideology, Sources, and Style

Iranian clothing reform under Reza Shah has not received extensive scholarly engagement in Türkiye. In Iran, on the other hand, secondary sources are abundant and divided in their approach. Works aligned with the regime’s official stance read kashf-i hijāb and the entire rule of Reza Shah as an imperialist ploy to undermine Islam. The introduction to the collection of primary documents on the veil ban, published by the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance in 1999, epitomizes the official stance.Footnote ¹⁴⁵ According to the authors, after the failure of the 1919 Anglo-Iranian agreement, Britain began to follow a policy of “invisible penetration” in the region and brought Reza Shah to power as a result of this policy.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Reza Shah was selected to implement an insidious British “anti-Islam” program, and kashf-i hijāb was part and parcel of a plan to weaken Islam and demoralize the country’s population. Multiple Persian-language articles offer slight variations on this argument.Footnote ¹⁴⁷ Even when the authors mention Türkiye, the influence of Atatürk is largely irrelevant in these accounts that prioritize Western machinations.

This conspiracy view of kashf-i hijāb is well grounded in Iranian revolutionary ideology. Ayatollah Khomeini’s anti-Pahlavi speeches, for example, argued Reza Shah had used the “pretext” of imitating “the incompetent Atatürk” to tear “the veil of humanity.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ Iranian sociologist Ali Shariati, known as the ideological father of the Iranian revolution for his synthesis of Shia symbolism with Third Worldist and Marxist tenets, also argued that both Atatürk and Reza Shah had come to power through Western plots, attacking Islam from the inside.Footnote ¹⁴⁹ He claimed that at the height of the Ottoman Empire’s position as “the center of manifestation of Islamic power,” Iran was “the shining center of Islamic thought.” This, of course, repeated the Persophilic trope of warlike Turks and cultured Persians, but Shariati did not emphasize difference with his comparison. Instead, he noted that it could not be an accident that Reza Khan came to power at the same time as Atatürk, “following a very similar prescription.” With these two implants, the West was able to “paralyze” two key Islamic centers.

Many proregime Iranian scholars cite an interesting source with transnational connections to Türkiye to argue that the veil ban was part of a British plot: The Memoirs of Mr. Hempher, The British Spy to the Middle East. Initially published in Turkish in the late nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, this controversial pamphlet claims to be the memoirs of a British spy, one of many assigned to the region. According to the memoir, Hempher is charged with pretending to convert to Islam and sowing discord among Muslim populations by promoting various vices and sectarian separatism.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ Hempher’s memoirs have not received much attention in Western scholarship, where they are largely considered an Ottoman forgery used to besmirch the Salafi movement.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Indeed, Hempher claims credit for starting Salafism in Arabia but also mentions fueling Ottoman–Iranian enmity as one of the key methods for imperialist success.Footnote ¹⁵² Despite its disputed authenticity, referencing the book helps Iranian proregime authors claim Reza Shah was the continuation of a longstanding imperialist plan to weaken Islam across the region. This approach not only underplays any local Iranian support for unveiling but also makes any role the Türkiye visit played irrelevant.

Pro-Pahlavi memoirs also represent the visit as limited in its effects. Arfa, Sedigh, and Dowlatabadi all wrote at length about the Türkiye trip but ultimately credited the shah for Iran’s progress. Diplomat Fathullah Nuri Isfandiari’s 1944 memoirs ignored the Türkiye trip entirely while praising the shah’s reforms, including kashf-i hijāb.Footnote ¹⁵³ The shah’s children epitomized this veneration. Princess Ashraf and Mohammad Reza Shah both praised kashf-i hijāb and assigned all the credit to their late father.Footnote ¹⁵⁴ For these memoirists, kashf-i hijāb was thoroughly interlinked with women’s education and participation in civic life, and the shah deserved credit for it.

Türkiye plays a much larger role in the canonical eight-volume history series Tārīkh-i bīst sāli-yi Īrān, published by Iranian politician and historian Hussain Makkı̄ in the 1980s and 1990s. In volume 6, dedicated in part to Reza Shah’s Türkiye visit, Makkı̄ notes the precedent of Amanullah Khan. However, he also places great emphasis on Mustafa Kemal’s reforms, claiming, “clothing and hat reform and some other reforms were imitated from Turkey.”Footnote ¹⁵⁵ The book cites and agrees with the memoirs of Mokhber-ol Saltaneh, that kashf-i hijāb was indeed “another souvenir from Turkey.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Makkı̄ also references the objections of the religious classes and highlights the violent clashes around the 1935 hat reform. While Britain gets less emphasis in this analysis, Makkı̄ connotes foreign influence by comparing the military’s suppression of antireform protests to the World War II invasion of Iran by Russian forces.Footnote ¹⁵⁷

Some Persian-language scholarship diverges from the official line to offer a multivalent analysis at the intersection of the local and international, citing multiple relevant sources.Footnote ¹⁵⁸ Sadegh Zibakalam, a professor of Political Science at Tehran University, stands furthest from the official Iranian narrative. In the interviews he has given, Zibakalam has openly contested readings that cast kashf-i hijāb as a British ploy against Islam. Pointing to what he believes is a conspiracy theory-oriented reading of the Reza Shah era, Zibakalam explains kashf-i hijāb as simply a part of Reza Shah’s modernization project, urging women toward the civic, public sphere.Footnote ¹⁵⁹ It is clear that Hempher would have no place in such an argument: Britain, according to Zibakalam, did not care about veiling one way or the other and still does not.

In his book on Reza Shah, Zibakalam expands upon these views, arguing kashf-i hijāb had roots unrelated to Britain, which controlled multiple Muslim-majority regions at the time and implemented no such policy elsewhere.Footnote ¹⁶⁰ Zibakalam’s analysis proposes an equivalency between Atatürk and Reza Shah, not in terms of being agents of the British, but as nationalists rising from lower ranks through individual effort.Footnote ¹⁶¹ Zibakalam also uses comparisons that violate established categorizations (e.g., “the Muslim World”) to highlight the transnational ascendance of political ideologies. In critiquing the official view that these two men were under imperialist influence, for example, he notes authoritarian modernization occurred simultaneously in many other countries, including North Korea, Taiwan, and Mexico.

To summarize, the outcomes of Iranian scholarship, even on a subject as thorny as kashf-i hijāb, hinge on ideological approach, sources, and the strategic use of comparativism, much like scholarship elsewhere. In an excellent essay on the history of scholarly comparisons made between Türkiye and Iran, Agah Hazır claims, “social sciences in Turkey and in Iran are very much likely to remain over-politicized when compared to their Western counterparts.”Footnote ¹⁶² Of course, to believe in such a contrast, one will have to ignore too much about Western knowledge production – not just the entire genteel heritage of Orientalism, which Hazır himself critiques, but also the modern history of comparative politics, think tanks, and decades of culture wars. Certainly, proregime Iranian scholarship and Kemalist Turkish history sometimes engage in an obviously political style of nationalism that would be jarring for most peer-reviewed scholarship in English. However, what differentiates the various approaches to kashf-i hijāb in Persian-language scholarship is not their “political” nature but the absence of the pro-Atatürk consensus established within English- and Turkish-language scholarship.

Nostalgia for the Modern Patriarch

While official Iranian history contains little admiration for Reza Shah or Atatürk, social media is another story altogether. On the popular video-sharing site YouTube, segments of the Iranian diaspora join Turkish nationalists, watching, commenting on, and praising videos of the shah’s 1934 visit to Türkiye. A search for “Reza Shah Ataturk” returns countless such videos, including many copies of recorded scenes from the visit. Initially disseminated as state-based propaganda for the Pahlavi and Kemalist regimes, these moving images have gained a new life in the social media age.Footnote ¹⁶³ Liked, shared, and commented on, the clips now serve new political purposes, such as critiquing the two countries’ current regimes and emphasizing Turkish–Iranian bilateral ties.

The contemporary focus on the “friendship” between Atatürk and Reza Shah has gained a boost from what Esra Özyürek has called “nostalgia for the modern.”Footnote ¹⁶⁴ Özyürek describes Turkish nostalgia for the modern as a secularist reaction to the rise of Islamist politics in the 1990s, manifesting in individualized, unofficial performances of adoration for the early Republic and Atatürk. Some scholars of contemporary Iranian culture have found this concept helpful for explaining how members of the Iranian diaspora idealize and celebrate a prerevolutionary Iran associated with modernity.Footnote ¹⁶⁵ Within Iran, as well, many dissidents express dissatisfaction for the current regime by positively reevaluating the Pahlavi shahs.Footnote ¹⁶⁶ These affective investments and popular interest in the two founding fathers repurpose past instances of official propaganda to demonstrate “nostalgia for an imagined era of order and stability.”Footnote ¹⁶⁷

While some comparison between Atatürk and Reza Shah slips into social and popular media commentary about the two men, most posts on the 1934 footage express discontent with contemporary politicians compared to the glorified founding fathers. A March 24, 2017, article in the hardline secularist Turkish newspaper Sözcü demonstrates this discursive bend. Noting the popularity of videos of Reza Shah and Atatürk from the visit on social media, the piece contrasts the exchange between the two leaders with the comportment of the politicians of the day: “The dialogue between the two, the body language, and the respectful discussion offer us clues regarding Türkiye and Iran of the 1930s. And whether we want it or not, this leads to comparisons with today.”Footnote ¹⁶⁸

Titled “Politeness in Foreign Policy,” the piece clearly urges its readers toward a comparison that will find today’s policymakers and representatives lacking in manners (and implicitly in class and modernity) by contrast. The article does reserve a unique place for Atatürk and Türkiye by noting how, before entering a building, the shah asked Atatürk to go first because he is a “great commander,” whereas the shah was “just a soldier.” While there are hints regarding the exceptional status of Atatürk in such recollections, the primary push of comparison is one of nostalgia for both the Turkish and Iranian modern.

Comparisons also appear in YouTube comments. The assessments are not always positive. One post, for example, references the Pahlavis’ nonelite origins, calling them “a peasant family,” and stating the current state of Iran is preferable to that under pro-Western rule.Footnote ¹⁶⁹ Overwhelmingly, however, the prevailing tone of these posts idealizes the early Pahlavi and Kemalist eras and eulogizes the two leaders. A comment from a user named Dariush Tousi epitomizes this approach: “You surprised why Iran n Turkey are falling down into the hell?! these two great countries once had two modernist n nationalist leaders such as Reza-shah n Ataturk! now look what they’ve got: formal mullahs in Iran n mullahs in suit in Turkey!”Footnote ¹⁷⁰

While the parallels between the two leaders operate in strategic comparison to a negative Islamist present in twenty-first-century social media, the comparative foil of the early twentieth century was the past. Propaganda from the early Pahlavi and Kemalist regimes attributed centuries of conflicts between the two states to the deposed Ottoman and Qajar rulers, as well as to imperialist intrigue.Footnote ¹⁷¹ The Iranian and Turkish press covering the visit linked the two countries by constructing the two leaders as symbols of the state. The prevailing metaphors were of masculine friendship and brotherhood in standing against the combined forces of backwardness and colonialism.

The first Turkish opera, Özsoy (lit. “pure lineage”), written and performed precisely for the shah’s visit, most obviously belabored the rhetoric of brotherhood. The plot of the opera, as proposed by Atatürk, was based on the legendary Persian epic Shahnameh. It represented the people of Türkiye and Iran via the twin brothers Tur (the wolf, representing Turks) and Iraç (the lion, representing Persians), separated by the vagaries of fate. It ended on a note of a peaceful reunion and promise of love and collaboration. During the performance, Atatürk and the shah quite explicitly filled in for the two brothers, as the actors ended the play by pointing in the direction of the two leaders when asked to identify Tur and Iraç.Footnote ¹⁷² According to the composer Adnan Saygun, at this point, the shah exclaimed, “Kardeşim!” (lit. my younger brother) and hugged Atatürk.Footnote ¹⁷³

In such performances of Turkish–Iranian brotherhood, one type of comparativism was momentarily and strategically eclipsed, whereas another – Türkiye and Iran as models of development for the rest of the region – became boosted. The shah echoed the trope of similarity between Iran and Türkiye, claiming to the Turkish ambassador that the eyes of “all Eastern nations” were upon himself and Mustafa Kemal Atatürk.Footnote ¹⁷⁴ In response to the shah’s positive feedback about the Turkish reforms at the end of the visit, Atatürk reportedly said, “We are brothers and neighbors. It would be good for us to resemble each other.”Footnote ¹⁷⁵ This romantic vision of blood brotherhood (i.e., “pure lineage”) and exemplary similitude existed alongside the myriad negative racial and cultural theories Iranians and Turks held of each other.

Aspirations for Turkish–Iranian similarity were not in opposition to but coeval with centralized ethnonationalism. After all, strengthening Türkiye–Iranian relationships had only become possible after Reza Shah agreed Türkiye’s borders would include Mount Ararat, which clarified the boundaries of the two nation-states in 1932.Footnote ¹⁷⁶ The concession of Mount Ararat in exchange for farming land elsewhere limited the movement of Kurdish populations between the two countries. The personification of Turkish–Iranian friendship in two father figures, therefore, was not just patriarchal. It also implied the one-on-one interaction of two homogenous nation-states, eclipsing ethnic, regional, and religious complexity.

In contemporary social media, the trope of brotherhood is furthered by the fact that the two leaders spoke Turkish to each other. In fact, Atatürk spoke Istanbul Turkish, and Reza Shah spoke Azeri Turkic (also known as Azerbaijani), but they were able to communicate without an interpreter most of the time. Ironically, the use of Azeri Turkic relates to one of the few points of comparison where Atatürk comes out “worse” than Reza Shah in Western scholarship: The accommodation of ethnic differences. Like all comparisons, the largely accurate claim that the first Pahlavi regime tolerated internal diversity better than the Kemalists erases some nuance. While, unlike early republican Türkiye, the Iranian regime would not go so far as to deny the very existence of its largest linguistic minorities, Reza Pahlavi did oversee centralization and language reform programs that established “Persian” as the official language of the state.Footnote ¹⁷⁷ As noted in the introduction, the Iranian reevaluation and valorization of Shahnameh, which had inspired Atatürk’s theme for the first Turkish opera, was deeply connected to Persian linguistic nationalism.Footnote ¹⁷⁸ At the same time, intellectuals focusing on language reform in Iran followed and referenced developments in Türkiye, in line with strategic comparativism.Footnote ¹⁷⁹

While benevolent patriarch rhetoric rules contemporary nostalgia. English-language analyses of the shah’s Türkiye visit tend to be subtly patronizing. Central to these constructions is the claim that the trip constituted the first and last time the shah left Iran for a foreign country. In fact, Reza Khan visited the Shia shrines in Iraq in 1924.Footnote ¹⁸⁰ It appears that authors who repeat the first and only trip claim either do not know this (like I did not until conducting research for this chapter), consider those parts of Iraq not foreign enough from Iran to matter, or do not feel the need to specify that the Türkiye trip was the shah’s only foreign excursion while in office. Turkish media posts sometimes construct this as a sign of the country’s status at the time: The shah was choosing Türkiye and Atatürk as exemplary among all other nations. Western analyses, however, overwhelmingly use this fact to reinforce the point that the shah was uncultured and an easily duped novice in terms of modernity. A British diplomatic memorandum exemplified this line of thinking most clearly in 1935: “It must be remembered that for all practical purposes the Shah had never before left his country and the impact on his mind of an intensely nationalist and half-westernised Turkey was inevitably intense.”Footnote ¹⁸¹ Clearly resenting the nationalism manifest in both countries under the two leaders, the author, Sir Douglas L. Busk, thus passed judgments on modernization efforts in both, placing Türkiye barely above Iran, and using the insult to “half-westernised” Türkiye to express further disdain for the shah and Iran. Similarly, the qualifying phrase “for all practical purposes” implies the British were aware of the Iraq visit but did not consider Iran and Iraq to be different enough to warrant commentary.

Although contemporary scholarship is rarely that explicitly condescending, English-language analyses critical of the shah continue to bank on the fact that the reader will recognize Türkiye not as an exemplary modern nation but as an exemplary “modernizing” nation. For example, we learn from one popular book on Iran–US relations that Reza Shah was “part drill sergeant, part action figure,” who “refused to travel abroad,” in willful contrast to Qajar elites. “The lone exception” – the Türkiye trip of 1934 – only helped him force modernity on Iran in a brusque manner.Footnote ¹⁸²

Atatürk and Türkiye do come out as “better” in such evaluations. Yet, better is hardly the best. Reza Shah’s lack of past traveling in Europe proper and Türkiye’s “not enough” status combine to make the shah’s reforms problematic – too hasty, too brutal, too superficial, and so on. The rhetorical force of comparison, in the meantime, obscures the role and the perspective of the comparer on setting the standards and rankings of modernity.

In fact, the oft-repeated “his one and only trip to a foreign country” remark obscures the fact that traveling outside the country was rare for ruling heads of state at the time. Historians often note the unusualness of the sitting US president Woodrow Wilson traveling to Paris to oversee the Peace Conference after World War I. As noted, King Amanullah Khan of Afghanistan did travel extensively across continents in 1928. However, Atatürk himself did not make any official state visits during his years as president.Footnote ¹⁸³ Therefore, Reza Shah’s visit to Türkiye remains an outlier, not because he visited the not-European-enough Türkiye, but because he visited a foreign country for an extensive period while in office. In the consensus scholarship, Woodrow Wilson leaving the United States for Europe signifies his commitment to an internationalist outlook and his willingness to shape the postwar world. Reza Shah’s visit to Türkiye was preceded by and yielded diplomatic dividends, most notably the 1937 Treaty of Saadabad, which confirmed a policy of nonaggression between Türkiye, Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan.Footnote ¹⁸⁴ Despite the faulty belief that Türkiye disengaged from the region during this period, the meeting between the shah and Atatürk also formed a centerpiece in the Kemalist regime’s larger program of outreach to the Middle East.Footnote ¹⁸⁵ Another outcome was the – still operational – railroad linking the two countries. However, the common view of the visit remains that of a rough-hewn Eastern dictator going to the periphery of Europe to return with problematic schemes regarding modernization.

Comparing Comparisons

What can we make of the continuing popularity and explanatory force of the claim that Reza Shah lacked a series of personality characteristics in comparison to Atatürk? Certainly, a glance at Reza Khan’s humble origins alongside Mustafa Kemal’s education “in the Gallic atmosphere of Turkish Salonika” makes for enjoyable reading, putting a human face on history. Perhaps it even allows the reader, clearly in some position of educational privilege to read a history book, to feel superior to a world-famous leader. Yet, these compelling aspects of personalized comparison can be misleading. Focusing on the founding fathers as individuals personalizes policies to the detriment of other local actors, transnational trends, and international pressures. The gendered, classed, and subtly racialized depictions of Atatürk and Reza Shah speak to us powerfully, giving an almost naturalized, teleological bend to history writing. The long-debunked “Great Man” school of history lurks in such analyses. If Daddy can do no wrong in pro-Pahlavi social media posts, Daddy is an uncivilized brute who can be blamed for our current issues, according to others.

Bilateral comparisons between Reza Shah and Atatürk often introduce unnecessary hierarchical assessments into scholarship. In fact, hierarchy attends every comparison. It could not have escaped the readers’ attention that I have juxtaposed academic publications comparing Reza Shah and Atatürk in three languages. My goal was to note how ideological and political context and the primary sources available to the author influence scholarship, but certainly judgment sweeps in. Nationalist Turkish history nearly deifies Atatürk; pro-regime Iranian publications utilize a suspect primary document to advance a conspiracy narrative; English-language materials are especially given to comparing Atatürk and Reza Shah from a position of authority on “modernity.” I have not claimed that one body of scholarship is somehow acontextually “better”; however, comparison inevitably carries the seeds of judging, ordering, and ranking. The construction of knowledge from the primary record is always an exercise in flux where the standpoints of the author and the reader meet.

My own experience while researching for this chapter is proof that a “writerly approach,” highlighting the reader’s role, is necessary to interrupt the brain-lulling effects of proof-by-comparison.Footnote ¹⁸⁶ Reading pro-Atatürk comparisons in Turkish, I felt inclined to roll my eyes since my entire early education had consisted of reading effusive praise for Atatürk in the same language. Similar comments by authors with non-Turkish names written in English, however, seemed more factual. They rang truer, although, of course, these authors simply used the same sources and shared assumptions regarding modernization and leadership. I had become inoculated to Turkish Kemalism but not to its English-language variations. Then, I noticed that my Iranian research assistant for this chapter, herself a Ph.D. in Persian language and literature, was more skeptical of pro-regime Iranian secondary sources. We shared a laugh about our differing points of view and noted how we were both subconsciously taking an antinationalist approach to the body of work we were considering. Surely, we were also being nationalistically inclined in other, unnoted ways. There is no way to automatically “correct” for our standpoints. Yet, critically examining scholarship from multiple contexts is one method of mitigation. As Ann Laura Stoler has argued, postcolonial analysis is perhaps at its most useful when trained on “the political task of comparing as much as – or more than – on what was compared.”Footnote ¹⁸⁷

In her influential critique of comparativism, Lisa Lowe recommends locating and foregrounding the “fragments of mixture and convergence that are ‘lost’ through modern comparative procedures.”Footnote ¹⁸⁸ Transnational ideologies regarding gendered modernization connected the nationalist development projects implemented during the early Pahlavi and Kemalist regimes. After World War II, US-based intellectuals and their local collaborators built modernization theory partially by studying state-led development efforts under the two leaders and by comparing the two countries. The dominant policy discourses examined in the rest of this book, therefore, are not “American” in a pure sense but are instead hegemonic versions of transnational constructs that were disseminated in connection with prevailing US foreign policy doctrines. In the next chapter, I examine the high point of capitalist modernization theory – a time when Türkiye and Iran became US allies, and an elegant queen, instead of a rough-hewn father figure, personified Iranian modernization.