Though references to the female body do exist in pre-Islamic texts, thus providing us with some background to the historical synthesis of beliefs shaping the constitution of the female body under Islam, the aesthetic rituals associated with women's bodies are more pronounced in texts written by Iranian women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Most documents that elaborate on the Zoroastrian belief system, for example, produce women's bodies as ritually unclean, requiring the strict observation of complex laws governing eating, bath…