ABSTRACT
This chapter demonstrates that women were the loci of observation and gaze for many of the early Persian travelers. It argues that woman's veil was constituted as a marker of identity and that it was a product of cultural and political encounters among the Iranian traditionalists, reformists, and revolutionaries. Since the early nineteenth century, the image of European women has been integrated into Iranian political discourse and has served as a point of reference for modernists and traditionalists, secularists and Islamists, monarchists and anti-monarchists. Persians traveled to Europe as early as 1599 arid kept records of their encounters with the Farangi-Other. With the emergence of a new class of intellectuals educated in Europe and in European style schools, the Farangi ways of life became a serious threat to the position of the ulama. For modernists, women of the West provided an ideal model for the education and unveiling of Iranian women and their participation in the public sphere.
