It’s a big country. There’s corners that are still liberal/secular today and there’s corners that have never been.
But there’s a hagiography around the dictatorship that suggests a few women in bikinis on the beach represented the entire social state of the Shah’s reign. You don’t see pictures of the torture dungeons or the armed insurgents or the clashes between police and civilians published regularly in Western media.
It’s a big country. There’s corners that are still liberal/secular today and there’s corners that have never been.
But there’s a hagiography around the dictatorship that suggests a few women in bikinis on the beach represented the entire social state of the Shah’s reign. You don’t see pictures of the torture dungeons or the armed insurgents or the clashes between police and civilians published regularly in Western media.