I'm not an expert but I think your prof is full of it.

From what I remember all those pictures we see of women in Tehran from the Shah's era are wild outliers. Most Persian women lived in rural areas where they lived extremely restricted lives. The Ayatollah and his followers won the Revolution because there were lots of them and they were much better organized than any other faction. Iirc after the Islamic Revolution women's lives did improve in some ways - More access to education, more literacy, more university graduates. The regime goes back and forth on the hijab thing and Iranian women are always pushing the limit on what they can get away with without setting off the morality police.

A lot of western Feminist discourse portrays Iranian women as helpless victims of the regime and it's restrictive laws but that's BS. There are a number of feminist tendencies in Iran, both ones that recognizable to Western Feminists and some Islamic Feminisms that are very different from what the West considers Feminism.

The Shah was a vicious bastard. The SAVAK intelligence agency was one of the most violent and horrific in the world. The Shah was installed in a coup after the democratically elected Mosadegh was thrown out by the Americans and British in 53. The Shah worked closely with British and US forces. Life under the Shah was very repressive. Sure, women didn't have to cover their hair, but it was a western backed monarchy and just as shitty as any other western backed monarchy.

The idea that there was no national religion is silly. Even if it wasn't legislated Persian has been heavily Shi'a for centuries and centuries.

Kurds in Iran are pretty hostile to the government and afaik kind of do their own thing.

In general, you should be deeply suspicious of any westerner who starts talking about the rights of women under oppressive regimes. A lot of the time "The rights of women" are used as an excuse to justify violent intervention, sanctions, coups, and invasions. Westerners meddling in foreign women's rights struggles often turn the matter from an internal disgreement to Western political aggression, causing the regime to re-trench in order to prevent Western forces from exploiting a civil rights movement to attack the foreign nation.

Look at how The West is slaughtering Palestinians, or how useless America's invasion of Afghanistan was, and so forth. Look back at the rights women lost when the Fourth Reich seized control of the GDR and dismantled all it's progressive gains. Abortion isn't even legal in German y, it's against the law but mostly unenforced. Abortion is illegal in much of the US, women don't get parental leave. Western commitment to Women's Rights is mostly a bad joke, so when they start telling you we need to intervene in some other country for the sake of women treat them as sus.

Fact: Iran has better maternity benefits than the first world, progressive United States and Australia

Fact: Iran is a much safer country (and especially for women) compared to most American cities.

Source: Many Iranian friends who have lived in both Iran and Western countries. My friend (Iranian, to be clear) told me that she had traveled all across Iran by herself and never once felt unsafe, unlike when she was other Western countries. It’s anecdotal but I can believe that.

Of course, Iran is ruled by a conservative regime with religious restrictions. However, I get the sense that enforcement is not as strict as many would think. For example, Islam forbids the drinking of alcohol, but every Iranian I know of told me that everyone back home knew where to get alcoholic drinks. And yes, people do drink alcohol in Iran even though it is explicitly forbidden.

I also don’t think there is strict enforcement for hijab wearing, even though there are definitely a lot of rooms for improvement - I have seen Iranian instagrammers (my friends showed them to me, though admittedly they are the more educated/upper middle class types), they look no different than your average Western instagram accounts, no traces of hijab or anything, though I do have a couple friends who choose to wear them.

The lecturer said the revolution happened because people disliked the Shah having more than others, but she did not elaborate this in any way.

The revolution happened because the Shah was an imperialist dog ruining the lives of the people and his agents disappeared and murdered anyone who opposed this.

Now my understanding is that the social democratic movement there was destroyed by the West in the 50s and the following twenty+ years under the Shah led to a sort of pseudorevolution that wasn't entirely progressive in nature. Is this correct or wrong?

As far as I know, your understanding is generally correct.

The CIA imposed the Shah on Iran, and when it was clear he was on the way out, the assisted the Ayatollahs. Both political systems were imposed on Iran by outside pressure - in the first case entirely, and in the second case only partly.

Edit: removed some text, had misread your comment.

Some other information you might be interested in:

• The Shah represented the imperialist order. He was literally installed by the West in a coup. His policies served the West and were very unpopular in Iran.

• The revolution had many groups and they all tried to become the leaders. There was a very strong socialist contingent as well but it was preferentially targeted for destruction by the West and the Ayatollahs were funded. This was after it was clear the revolution would succeed. The West preferred a religious group to socialists. Now they complain that the religious group does the things it said it would. The reality is that the West opposes Iran on imperialist grounds, not moral.

Re: external influence: if you're in the US you're in the external influence. That's not something to worry about right now. The conditions under which there's revolution in the US will look very strange to us and we would cross that bridge when it arrived.