Gender has worked as a key category in defining the secularism of Iranian modernity. Iranian politics of modernity, since the mid-nineteenth century, has been marked by the emergence of a spectrum of nationalist and Islamist discourses. Within that spectrum, one notion of Iranian modernity took Europe as its model of progress and civilization ( taraqqī va tamaddun ) – the two central terms of that discourse – and increasingly combined that urge with recovery of pre-Islamic Iranianism. Other trends sought to combine their nationalism with Islam, by pro…