The Islamic Revolution was fundamentally a poor people’s revolution

Evidence

To Nafisi’s upper-bourgeois, Swiss-boarding-school-sensitive nose, everything about Iran and Iranians is pungent and contemptible. Living comfortably in the midst of a misery for which her class was chiefly responsible, she roamed the streets of Tehran with a certain Jeff (an American journalist) at a time when thousands of poor Iranian students of a myriad of ideological persuasions were being slaughtered by one faction or another. The Islamic Revolution was and remains a poor people’s revolution—with all the banalities, brutalities, stupidities, and yet unsurpassed hopes of a poor people’s revolution. No human being ought to be forced to wear a garment she does not want to wear. But reading Nafisi it is impossible not to conclude that she and her class of whitewashed bourgeoisie hated the veil because it hid their class privileges from their poor compatriots. — Hamid Dabashi, Brown Skin, White Masks, 398

Categorization

• XREF: Class-based reading of the veil contrasts with the immodesty moral panics in the ‘Complaints About Immodesty Go Way Back’ article.