Two years after these photos were made, the district was burned to the ground; reports said not all the women escaped alive. The fire was set by religious militants seeking to purify the city before the return of Grand Ayatollah. From exile in France, the cleric urged to overthrow the monarchy of the U.S.-backed, and with it the secular modernity that had unsettled millions of devout who had moved to cities from the countryside, a migration that also amounted to a dislocation, one scholars later understood as a significant contributor to what came to be known as the Revolution.
