This debate on the role of women in the Islamic Republic of Iran was conducted early in 2001 as part of the Gulf/2000 project at Columbia University, directed by Gary Sick. Normally these online discussions are reserved for members, but this topic is of such general interest and aroused such intense emotions that two of the participants were asked to edit the discussion for a wider audience. The final version was edited by Nikki R. Keddie, professor emerita of history at the University of California, Los Angeles, based on the selection and organization of the texts by co-editor Azita Karimkhany, alumna of Columbia University and researcher in Middle Eastern studies. For additional information on Gulf/ 2000, see the project website at http://gulf2000.columbia.edu/.
INTRODUCTION
Nikki R. Keddie:
The modern history of Iranian governmental acts regarding women is both contradictory and controversial. Reza Shah (r. 1925-41) encouraged the earliest public education, including university and physical education, for girls and women, and in 1935-36 took strong measures against head-to-toe veiling and encouraged Western dress and mixed socializing for women and men. Forbidding the chador, which was traumatic for many, was in practice abandoned when Mohammad Reza Shah (r. 1941-79) took the throne. This shah responded to the pressures of many women and men when he initiated voting for women in 1963 and a new Family Protection Law in 1967, revised in 1975. The latter, given an Islamic framework by its inclusion in traditional marriage contracts, gave women more nearly equal rights in marriage, divorce and child custody. This law was opposed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who led the coalition that overthrew the shah in 1979. In the next few years the Khomeini forces ousted the liberals and leftists in the coalition and very early enacted a number of “Islamic” measures, including the abrogation of the Family Protection Law and the institution of a rule that women must cover their heads, necks and hair and wear either a chador or loose clothing over their entire bodies.
In the years since, many women and men have fought against these restrictions and have succeeded in reinstating some of the Family Protection Law’s provisions, though only those safeguards in marriage contracts that are signed by both bride and groom are operative. Women have also entered education, business, the arts, the professions and (sex-segregated) sports in unprecedented numbers. On the other hand, women are subject to many legal and customary forms of discrimination, including sporadic brutal punishments. The debate below reflects different ways in which people see this situation, ranging from William Beeman’s original op-ed piece, which emphasizes the positive, to Ann Elizabeth Mayer’s reminder of how short Iran falls of international human-rights standards. The debate also reflects different views on whether it is useful to work within the Islamic Republic for further reforms or if only a radical change in form of rule can achieve significant equality for women. The debate also deals with the crackdown on free speech in 2000-01.
In several places in the text, there are references to the “Berlin conference,” a conclave on “Iran after the Parliamentarian Elections,” held in Berlin in April 2000, following the victory of Iranian reformists in the February elections. Many prominent Iranian intellectuals and activists were panelists. The conference was disrupted by Iranian opposition elements in exile, whose provocative dancing and partial disrobing were filmed and shown on TV by conservatives in Iran to discredit reformist participants. Ten reformists were charged with “acting against the internal security of the state and disparaging the holy order of the Islamic Republic.” They were punished with severe prison sentences, exile and in one case condemnation to death. Two leading women’s-rights activists – Mehrangiz Kar and Shahla Lahiji – were imprisoned. Kar, a lawyer, writer and women’s-rights advocate, and Lahiji, director of Roshangaran, a prominent publishing house of women’s books, had participated in the conference at the Heinrich Boell foundation in Berlin along with 15 other activists and intellectuals, all of whom faced criminal charges.
Kar and Lahiji spent two months in prison, one in solitary confinement. They were the only defendants to undergo a closed-door trial, confirming suspicions of harsher standards being applied to secular women activists. Both have appealed for reconsideration of their prison sentences made by the Revolutionary Court and are awaiting the final decision of the court of appeal. Kar is to face additional charges in a regular court. Another conference attendee, Shahla Sherkat, editor of Zanan, and often called an Islamic feminist, was fined and faces further charges for her denial that the chador is mandated by the Quran. In a case separate from the Berlin Conference, the lawyer Shirin Ebadi has been banned from practicing law for five years and faces a 15-month suspended sentence. Kar, Lahiji and Ebadi have appealed. Lahiji’s appeal was heard in early November, while the other two women are now traveling abroad; their appeals will come up later. (For summaries on women since 1979, see Nikki R. Keddie, “Women in Iran since 1979” and Elham Gheytanchi, “Appendix: Chronology of Events Regarding Women in Iran since the Revolution of 1979,” Social Research, Vol. 67, No. 2, Summer 2000, pp. 405-52.)
“IRANIAN WOMEN’S SITUATION HAS IMPROVED UNDER ISLAMIC REPUBLIC”
William Beeman, anthropologist, Brown University (distributed January 2001, copyright 2001):
Contrary to American belief, women in Iran are better off today under the Islamic Republic than they were under the regime of the shah of Iran. I was able to see this surprising development on a recent trip to Iran, my first in many years. Women have always had a strong role in Iranian life. Their prominent and often decisive participation in public political movements has been especially noteworthy. Brave and often ruthlessly pragmatic, women are more than willing to take to the streets in a good public cause. The Islamic Republic has made a special point of emphasizing women’s equality in education, employment and politics as a matter of national pride. Although women have served in the Iranian legislature and as government ministers since the 1950s, there are more women in the current parliament than ever served under the regime of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and his father Reza Pahlavi. Today’s Iran finds a civil reform movement led by elected President Mohammed Khatami held in check by Islamic clerics.
The average marriage age for women before the 1979 Islamic revolution was 18; it has increased to 21 today. Education for women is obligatory and universal. More than 75 percent of the nation is under 25 years of age, and for this population, literacy for both men and women is well over 90 percent even in rural areas. University enrollment is nearly equal for men and women. As women’s education has increased, Iran’s birth rate has fallen steadily and is now estimated at a respectable 2.45 percent.
Female employment is the one area where women have suffered a decline since the years immediately preceding the revolution. However, the statistics are difficult to assess since unemployment is extremely high for both men and women (30 percent). Under the Islamic Republic, virtually all professions are theoretically open to women. A class of female religious leaders has even emerged. They have attended religious training schools and have the title mujtahedeh, the female form of the word mujtahed, or religious judge.
The sole limitation on female employment is that women must maintain modest dress or hejab in the workplace. Islam requires that both women and men adopt modest dress that does not inflame carnal desire. For men this means eschewing tight pants, shorts, short-sleeved shirts and open collars. Iranians view women’s hair as erotic, so covering both the hair and the female form are the basic requirements of modesty. This precludes women from some physically active professions. In earlier years, revolutionary guards accosted women who violated the dress codes in public, including wearing makeup. Today these attacks are rare.
For many centuries women in Iran have practiced modesty by wearing the chador, a semicircular piece of dark cloth that is wrapped expertly around the body and head and gathered at the chin. This garment is both wonderfully convenient, since it affords a degree of privacy and lets one wear virtually anything underneath, and restricting, since it must be held shut with one hand (some women cleverly use their teeth in awkward moments).
Since the revolution, an alternate form of acceptable dress has emerged – a long dress with full-length opaque stockings, a long-sleeved coat and a headscarf covering the hair. The dress has gradually evolved into a thin shoulder-to-ankle smock called a manteau after the French word for overcoat. The headscarf has been transformed into a hood modeled after a similar garment in North Africa called a maghnaeh.
In adopting this dress, women have been wonderfully inventive. The manteau, though dark in color, is often made of silk or other fine fabric, embroidered, finely tailored, with elegant closures. Women wear it over jeans or other Western fashions. The maghnaeh may also be of satin and turned out in fashionable colors like eggplant or dark teal. In short, the Iranian women have made a virtue out of necessity and created high fashion from their concealing garments. Many older Westernized women decry any restrictions on their dress, but younger women who grew up in the Islamic Republic take it in stride. “I view it as a kind of work uniform,” claimed one female journalist. “I’m far more concerned about press restrictions than about dress codes.” Indeed, the universal modest dress code may have helped women from conservative families. “Before the revolution, religious parents would not let their girls even go to school for fear they would be dishonored,” said Parvaneh Rashidi, a Tehran schoolteacher. “Now they have no trouble letting their daughters go anywhere.” Judging from the large number of women one sees today on the streets, in retail management, in offices and on university campuses, Ms. Rashidi appears to be more than correct in her assessment.
GULF/2000 DISCUSSION
Ann Elizabeth Mayer, associate professor of legal studies, Wharton School. February 4, 2001:
Since William Beeman’s glowing report on the happy situation of Iranian women under the Islamic Republic has been posted so close to Mehrangiz Kar’s searing account of her imprisonment, this is an opportune moment for Gulf/2000 members to read the two pieces in conjunction, compare them and draw the appropriate conclusions about which author offers more realistic insight into the regime’s policies on women.
Although ostensibly being arrested and imprisoned for her participation in the notorious Berlin Conference, Kar has in all likelihood been punished for repeatedly pointing out disparities between Iran’s discriminatory laws affecting women and international human-rights standards. As she says in her account, her imprisonment was for an addiction – the addiction that led her to say that there is something wrong with this or that legal article and clause. She has been bold and uncompromising in her calls for an end to women’s second-class status. Now she faces imprisonment for four years, in addition to a second prosecution for failing to accept Iran’s rules on hejab. The regime has shown no inclination to grant her clemency, which could enable her to leave prison to obtain the medical care that she urgently needs for her advanced cancer. Thus, her sentence may well turn out to be a death sentence.
When Iran retaliates so savagely against a woman attorney for having publicly demonstrated how its discriminatory treatment of women falls far short of meeting international human-rights standards, does this support Professor Beeman’s assertion that “the Islamic Republic has made a special point of emphasizing women’s equality”? Or, rather, does not the very fact that an advocate of women’s human rights is regarded as a dangerous subversive and winds up incarcerated in a filthy, putrid cell reveal in and of itself that Iran’s system is not only deficient in meeting women’s aspirations to enjoy freedom and equality, but actively hostile to these aspirations?
Gary Sick, executive director, Gulf/ 2000; acting director, Middle East Institute, Columbia University.
February 4, 2001:
Mehrangiz Kar’s article is a catalogue of the lack of egalitarian treatment of women. However, it is worth remembering her last paragraph. As Kar notes, with some evident pride, as a writer and intellectual she is being treated the same as a man – even when that means prison. It is one of the sad ironies of Iran’s current political situation:
Despite all that, our era is a good era. The taboos are breaking one after the other. Do you remember the days when they said “prison is the place of men”? Do you remember the time when men turned the hair of their moustache and talked proudly about their prison remembrances? Now people like me, although we have no moustache or beard to boast, have hidden an ocean of mental findings in our chest, in just a short period of imprisonment. This is a drop of that ocean put on paper.
[Kar’s letter from prison was originally published in www.payvand.com, a site devoted to Iranian news and culture. A similar letter from prison by Shahla Lahiji was later republished under the title “As Long as There are Poppies,” in Harper’s Magazine, August 2001, p. 22. Both were translated by Roya Monajem.]
Mehrdad Khonsari, former Iranian diplomat; leader of the Constitutionalist Movement of Iran. February 5, 2001:
Mr. Beeman should be commended for his courage in sticking his neck out over a contentious issue. But, while some of his observations may be correct, the overall thrust of his message concerning the status of women in contemporary Iran is very misleading. The following is a sample of critical omissions in his article, all of which are part of the “improvements” bequeathed to Iranian women in the interest of “gender egalitarianism” since the advent of the IRI, notwithstanding the progress made in removing all barriers to sexual equality in imprisonment and torture:
- The age of marriage has been lowered to nine, tantamount to legalizing pedophilia.
- The rates of prostitution and drug abuse by women are high and rising.
- Women are being stoned to death.
- A woman’s testimony is worth half that of a man’s.
- Women are not allowed to go abroad to study.
- A widow cannot become the legal guardian of her children (i.e., custody is given to her deceased husband’s family).
It is also possible to present alternative reasons why, for example, there are more women in universities: with a declining economy, men have to go to work, while attending university is one way for women to get out of their suffocating environments.
Ann Mayer. February 7, 2001:
Other Berlin conference attendees may have been given longer sentences than Mehrangiz Kar. However, since she is battling advanced cancer, her four-year term amounts to capital punishment, in that it prevents her from getting urgently needed medical care. Classifying her case as just one of a host of prosecutions brought pursuant to the Berlin conference serves the regime’s goals. The Islamic Republic’s propaganda machine works overtime to portray its policies on women as fair and enlightened, and it has every reason to deny that it persecutes women like Kar for advocating women’s rights.
However, the regime has clearly targeted critics of its discriminatory rules on women. Well before the Berlin conference, Iran’s hardliners had zeroed in on Kar and other women’s-rights activists, trying to deter them from speaking out against discrimination. We do, for example, have the menacing public threat by Marzieh Dastjerdi directed at Kar and other feminists who published criticisms of Iran’s gender discrimination: “We are going to deal with these people.” And we have incidents like Mohsen Saidzadeh’s being arrested and stripped of his clerical credentials in response to his endorsement of strong feminist positions contradicting the regime’s official version of Islamic requirements. We have the law enacted in 1998 barring anyone from creating divisions between men and women by defending women’s rights outside Iran’s Islamic and legal frameworks – criminalizing challenges to the official laws and policies on women’s rights. And we have the closure of the feminist publication Zan, well before the recent draconian attacks on the opposition press. Yes, feminists are targets of repression in situations that have nothing to do with attending a conference in Berlin.
Regarding cultural self-determination under the Islamic Republic, we need to bear in mind that the Islamic Republic is a country whose rulers require all persons to adhere to official cultural standards, under threat of criminal sanctions. Since Iran’s government routinely resorts to intrusive policing, arrests and jailing, fines, floggings, censorship, confiscations and terror tactics to deter any deviations from the official “cultural” line, Iran can hardly be classified as a country whose citizens are benefiting from cultural self-determination! We need to distinguish between true expressions of popular culture and cultural difference, on the one hand, and sclerotic, ideological, government-imposed versions of culture, on the other. When and if Iranians are allowed self-determination in cultural matters, they will be unlikely to endorse an official culture that has long depended on coercion and intimidation for its survival.
William Beeman. February 8, 2001:
I would like to thank everyone who contributed to this lively discussion of my article. It was intended to provoke commentary, and it has exceeded my expectations. The op-ed format is, of course, very restrictive. It is really only possible to make a single point; “on the one hand, on the other hand” discourse is abhorred by editors, a guarantee that the piece will not be published. The general improvement in the condition of women in Iran was the big news, and that is what had to come out in the piece.
I freely acknowledge that the overall human-rights situation in Iran remains dismal. All of the stonings, imprisonment and continued public harassment are real. However, the point of the article, which seems to have escaped most readers, is that women in Iran have progressed in spite of these difficult conditions. One can read my piece as veiled praise for the government, if one wishes, but that was not my intent at all. What progress has been made is a tribute to Iranian women themselves. As in the past, they have forged ahead on many fronts through their own efforts.
The conservative clerics have really been hoisted by their own petard. In loudly espousing (if not always honoring) the egalitarianism of Islam, they have opened the door just far enough for many women to push their way through. Many conservatives absolutely hate what is happening. They grumble about the fashionable manteau and maghnaeh. They curse under their breath when they see female students in medical and engineering courses. They deride women at computer terminals. They drag their feet at sending their daughters to elementary school. But in the end, they have to go along with the program because they have made such a big public issue of the equality offered to women by the Islamic Republic. Women are in this way creating a progressive wedge in a very conservative society. They are, in my view, launching the next wave of revolution.
I am sorry so few people decrying the conclusions of the article are not able to see women as active agents on their own behalf. In continuing to cast them as helpless victims of a hegemonic, male-dominated, reactionary patriarchy, these critics do little to ameliorate their image and even less to help them improve their condition.
Bijan Khajehpour, managing director, Atieh Bahar Management Consultancy, Tehran. February 9, 2001:
The fact that the age of marriage for girls is nine years is a traditional religious decree. However, the technocrats of this same Islamic Republic have for the past four years issued IDs for newborn babies that do not have a page for marriage. The actual ID, which includes the page for marriage coordinates, will only be issued at the age of 15, when the photograph is put into the ID. In other words, newborn children in Iran cannot legally get married before the age of 15. This is a gradual process, but it is important to underline that, when the time is right, many religious decrees can be modernized, as Iran has witnessed regarding the issue of birth control.
Also, Mr. Khonsari’s comment that we have more female students as a result of men’s having to work is most interesting. There are about 1.5 million applicants (men and women) for university placement who take the entry exam every year. Some 190,000 get accepted. For the past few years, the majority of these new entrants (about 53-55 percent) have been female. The bulk of the 1.5 million not only do not work, but they spend a lot of money on pre-exam classes and courses. There has been no attempt by any of the constituencies in Iran to undermine female dominance in higher education.
The recent law on higher education for single women abroad, which was rejected by the Guardian Council, is a reflection of realities. There is a push from reformist elements (in society and politics) to modernize a number of laws and views, but there is also resistance from more conservative elements. At the end of the day, the conservative elements are also part of Iranian society. The key fact is that there is debate, and that a lot of taboos are being broken. In fact, a number of current realities can only be changed once perceptions change, and perceptions and values change with education, increased social and political awareness, increased economic activity and interaction etc. – all phenomena that one can identify in today’s Iran. To be fruitful, sustainable and tangible, these processes need time, and the majority of the Iranians seem to be prepared to go through an evolutionary process. Some Western observers seem to have forgotten what processes they had to go through to modernize their own societies.
Finally, we should avoid the imposition of “right” and “wrong” on evolving social conditions. Iranian realities are a product of social, historic, cultural, economic and political parameters. A number of key parameters are transforming rapidly. This transformation will be accompanied by tense encounters of various forces; therefore, the only way to analyze it objectively is to look at trends and not isolated events. Sustainable change and reform can only be achieved if we continue to debate and to think about approaches that are appropriate for Iran’s current and emerging realities.
Nikki Keddie. February 9, 2001:
The current debate is a healthy reminder of what very different opinions people have about the same complex and emotionally charged phenomena, especially if they involve women in the Middle East. A number of advances have been made since the 1980s that in some cases put more women in stronger positions than ever: the increase in education, especially for girls and young women, and the entrance of women into various professions. Although it was not undertaken in order to help women, the very good birth-control program, with its extensive educational component, is being tied to women’s health and education and will lead to healthier women and children, more choices for women, as well as fewer overpopulation problems.
I don’t think those who criticize the government’s political and legal acts regarding women should deny such areas of progress. By the same token, those who are positive about changes since the 1980s should pay more attention than your correspondents do to the role of women’s struggles in bringing about such progress and the need to encourage, not suppress, more such women’s struggles, in which the now-muzzled press has played a key role. The area of dress should not be dismissed by saying that men must also dress modestly, which is quite a different thing in practice, or by the almost rhapsodic attitude of Beeman regarding current dress. It is true, as he says, that most women do not regard dress as the major issue and very sensibly opt to leave it in the background while they work for reform of the many laws that still discriminate against women. It is not enough to say that these reforms must be slow in a conservative country; with struggle many things are achieved much more quickly than anyone could have predicted.
On the current case of Mehrangiz Kar, it may be that her arrest was formally on the same grounds as others. But her role as a leading fighter for women’s rights and the denial of permission for her to travel for cancer treatment mean that she is being singled out for her activism, and that campaigns focusing on her are justified and can be productive. I would, however, argue that some of those protesting this case should acknowledge that advances regarding women have occurred under the IRI and not write as if they were addressing, say, the government of Afghanistan.
I am glad to have Bill Beeman’s clarification and additional points. His op-ed did not highlight women’s struggles, including the women’s press, as key elements in women’s advances in the IRI. Nor did his piece give even one sentence to the darker side. The points in his response on the attitudes of the ulama to the results of their own claims of equality are interesting, but they would not have had to make good on any of these claims had many women and some men not been pushing them.
Hossein Partovi, professor of physics, California State University, Sacramento. February 12, 2001:
I would like to relate my first encounter with the paradoxical rise of women in the public arena subsequent to the 1979 revolution. While visiting Iran in 1989, I gave a short course of lectures on chaos theory at Sharif University. Upon entering the lecture hall, I was stunned to find a large number of female students in attendance, all dressed according to the prevailing code and seated apart from the male students. This was a most unexpected change compared to pre-revolutionary days, when I would have expected an audience of mostly men with a few women sprinkled here and there. In retrospect, what was astonishing was how rapidly the presence and participation of women in the public arena had gained universal acceptance and legitimacy among the citizenry, a feat that half a century of government decreed modernization measures by the Pahlavi regimes had failed to achieve. It seems obvious in retrospect that the breathtaking speed of this transformation was in no small measure a consequence of one fact: the icons of moral authority and religious piety that in pre-revolutionary times had cautioned parents against allowing their daughters into Western style “dens of corruption” were now the custodians of those same institutions. By its very nature, and perhaps in spite of it, the new regime removed a major religious-cultural impediment to the participation of women in public affairs. The women, it appears, did the rest.
Charles Kurzman, assistant professor of sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; editor of the anthologies Liberal Islam (1998) and Modernist Islam, circa 1840-1940 (forthcoming, 2002). February 19,
2001:
This is not my area of expertise, but on my brief trips to Iran in 1999, I was curious about hejab practices and asked a variety of women in Tehran and Tabriz about them. They were unanimous, young and old, in telling me that customs had gelled, at least for the moment, into three distinct sets of practices, each representing a different level of piety or piety-display:
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- The standard uniform at that time was the maghnaeh (wimple). Everyone I spoke with seemed to know the word, including college-age women. This was what a woman wore if she didn’t want to make a political statement with her garb. These could vary in color from light blue or gray, solid or patterned through any dark color, as I saw when I went wimple shopping at a modern-style shopping passage in central Tehran. This (and the rusari or headscarf) is worn with the manteau, which could be tan, gray, blue, brown or black. In the summer, manteaus were of such thin material as to be almost translucent.
- Women who wished to express greater piety would wear the chador, usually (but not necessarily) with a maghnaeh underneath. The two chador wearing women I spoke with about this, in separate conversations, both stressed to me that it was not required of them and that they adopted the chador out of a personal religious commitment. (Though one of them would pull the chador over her mouth, neurotically I thought, when her very devout male co-workers were in the room.)
- Women who wished to display their support for reforms or their opposition towards hejab requirements would wear the rusari. These women said they were usually left alone but that people in the street would occasionally make rude comments, and devout shopkeepers or office personnel might not always serve them willingly. (At least one of the rusari wearers I spoke with said she carried a maghnaeh folded up in her purse so that she could get her business taken care of more efficiently in government offices.) These women had to be careful to make sure that the scarf was tied tightly under their chin with a large knot that would cover most of their neck. The amount of hair shown above the forehead was a matter of constant but silent negotiation, depending on the circumstances. Rusaris could be almost any color, including bright floral patterns.
All of these observations came from big-city women. Rural, tribal and gypsy women I saw in the streets and at shrines seem to have their own distinct forms of hejab. For example, gypsy women sitting with their children on the sidewalks of Tehran (other Iranians told me these were gypsies) wore chadors covered with polka dots and other eye-catching patterns.
Nikki Keddie. February 20, 2001:
While I am interested in the discussion of dress, we should be reminded that such a focus is mainly a Western preoccupation. Those who have interviewed women in Iran find them far more concerned about legal disabilities, including inequalities in marriage, divorce and child custody, sanctions on contact with men, low incomes, health problems, de facto difficulties in entering and being respected in certain fields, and the like. Some of them indeed defend rules on dress; others find them a real problem but not the major one. I recognize that things have improved since the 1980s, but there is still a long way to go, including educating men in new attitudes.
Gelareh Asayesh, journalist; author of Saffron Sky: A Life Between Iran and America. February 26, 2001:
I have to both agree and disagree with Dr. Keddie. The Western fascination with dress says more about us here in the West than about life in Iran. However, there is a symbolic component to the issue that is recognized by everyone who lives in Iran – whether it’s the mother of the martyr who spits in disgust when women with their hair showing pass by, or the young woman from a conservative family who prays every day but recently refused to wear a chador in order to get a promotion at the school where she works. The most orthodox women view erosion in hejab as a symbol of lost ground; a common reference to poor hejab from the orthodox is that the culprit is “stepping in the blood of the martyrs.” The war against Iraq was supposed to have been fought for the sake of an Islamic Republic. That says more than anything about the manner in which Islam is equated with hejab in the current political climate.
Ann Mayer. February 27, 2001:
What many in the West tend to miss when discussing veiling in the context of the contemporary Iranian system is that the hejab is now indelibly associated with the coercive imposition of a uniform dress code on all Iranian women by a nation-state. This mandatory dress code is a symbol – a symbol of Iranian women’s submission to the government-sponsored version of Islamic requirements. Of course, this is why the regime upped the criminal penalties for bad hejab in 1996, when it seemed that women were defying the rules. Little acts of non-conformity with the official rules on Islamic dress were rightly seen as rebellions against the political order, acts that had to be stamped out with the threat of heightened penal sanctions.
Under these circumstances, wearing the hejab signals the clerical domination of the current political scene, turning all Iranian women’s bodies into what are effectively sandwich boards advertising the ascendancy of the official Islamic ideology. Even women who are attracted by the ideal of modest dress may chafe at being ordered to adhere to official rules on hejab in these circumstances. Westerners should not compound their earlier misperceptions of the significance of veiling by depoliticizing the wearing of the veil in the Islamic Republic.
A member of Gulf/2000:
While we’ve had much discussion about the hejab as a symbol of religious gender discrimination and as an issue of individual rights versus state authority, there is another aspect to the matter that hasn’t received as much attention: the hejab as a symbol of class conflict. Under the old regime, the chador and hejab were officially associated with being low-class, provincial and backward. After the revolution, I remember well the vengeful joy in the eyes of the female “comiteh” enforcers patrolling the upper-class northern suburbs of Tehran, browbeating the residents, who usually dressed in fashionable (and risqué, certainly by Iranian standards) Western style clothes, into wiping off their makeup and wearing the same clothes as their former servants.
Nikki Keddie. February 28, 2001:
I agree that hejab was a strong marker of class difference, with each side looking down on the other. I confess that the current continuation of such feelings is an additional reason I am uneasy about campaigns that center on ending enforced hejab, which in the nature of things will take effort away from campaigns on other issues that are more burdensome to women of all classes. Many other issues of legal, job and other discriminations or conditions that are particularly hard on women, have the potential of involving women and many men of different class backgrounds, while the end of compulsory hejab at this point interests some groups and classes but not others. From what I know about Iranian women activists, they seem overwhelmingly to agree on this point and center their demands on such discriminations while trying to moderate the conditions of hejab. To demand its end would of course cause them serious trouble, but I don’t think this is the only reason they are not pushing it.
Ann Mayer. March 1, 2001:
Of course, as Professor Keddie rightly says, attacking the rules on hejab in isolation does not rank as a particularly high-priority item. Should the hejab rules be dropped tonight, tomorrow Iranian women – like Iranian men – would still be struggling with the manifold social, economic and political woes created by Iran’s corrupt and unpopular hard-line theocrats. Compulsory hejab should only be seen as a part of a system, a symptom of the current style of oppressive clerical government. Similarly, any end to the harsh enforcement of criminal laws on bad hejab would also come as part of a general program of democratization and enhanced respect for women’s rights – exactly the kind of program that Khatami ran on and that won him an electoral landslide. Since liberalizing the rules on women’s dress has been closely linked to the general political liberalization that Khatami’s supporters were hoping for, the rules on hejab do have a political significance that should not be overlooked.
It is no coincidence that in 2001 Mehrangiz Kar faces a new criminal prosecution for bad hejab and for challenging the rules on hejab. In these circumstances, the continued policy of coercing conformity with the rigid “Islamic” dress code and prosecuting women who criticize it can serve as a litmus test. It indicates that the hoped-for liberalization has stalled, that Khatami’s foes are in the driver’s seat, and that Iran’s clerical hardliners are intent on crushing any challenges to their domination or to their anti-democratic ideology.
Fatemeh E. Moghadam, professor of economics, Hofstra University. March 1, 2001:
With all due respect, I find myself in disagreement with Nikki Keddie, for whose work, insights and innumerable contributions I have a great deal of respect and admiration. First, there is the issue of class. If we define class in relation to private property, under the Pahlavis it was not necessarily poor women who wore chador. Rich women from the traditional bazaar, elite religious, and many landowning families also wore chador. In today’s Iran, wearing several layers of hejab is a sign of being an elite conservative woman. Just as elite women under the Pahlavi regime showed off their fashionable clothes, the new conservative elite women show off their hejab. Ordinary devout Muslim women do not adhere to such elaborate hejab and express resentment when they see these women. I am also puzzled by Nikki’s statement that because of the existence of a class aspect to the campaigns that center on ending enforced hejab, she feels uneasy supporting such campaigns. In other words, since the human rights of only a segment of the female population are violated, then the issue is not important. If we go by this logic, then the human rights of all minority groups should be disregarded.
I also would like to discuss the issue from a different perspective and point at two unintended outcomes of forced hejab. The symbolic and powerful, visual significance of the forced hejab is probably one of the most important contributors to the politicization of women and the development of a strong feminist movement in Iran. During the 1980s, along with being forced to wear the hejab, women lost many rights in marriage, divorce, child custody and higher education. Not to understate the significance of these issues on the politicization of women, the powerful visual impact of the hejab and the related physical and verbal harassment of women (also aimed at many devout Muslim women who were not very strict in covering their hair) were daily reminders that the Islamic Republic intended to control and subjugate women and treat them as inferior to men. This feeling was not exclusive to secular and moderately religious women who did not wish to wear hejab. Many devout Muslim women who would voluntarily wear hejab resented the fact that women were among the first targets of the Islamic Republic. Forced hejab also generated a debate between secular and Islamist women activists, politicizing the women’s issue in Iran.
Another unexpected outcome is that forced hejab has blurred the traditional conventions that placed one gender within the private and one in the public sphere. Prior to the revolution, professional and other white-collar women workers generally did not wear the hejab. The wearing of hejab in urban areas usually symbolized that a woman belonged to the private sphere. Unless forced by basic economic necessity (as were many blue-collar female workers), male family members of women who wore the hejab did not allow them to participate in the public sphere, which was perceived as having a corrupting impact on women. The universal observance of the hejab has relieved these women from constraint and allowed them to participate in the public sphere. As such I believe it has been a liberating factor on women who otherwise would have been prevented by their families from attending universities, working outside the home or participating in political gatherings. Forced hejab has undermined the traditional gender related dividing line between private and public spheres. While hejab has failed to prevent secular and moderate Muslim women from participating in the public sphere, it has opened the public sphere to women from devout Muslim and traditional families. I believe the more than 50-percent share of female students in universities is partly due to the forced hejab.
Ann Mayer. March 2, 2001:
Maybe the relaxation of hejab rules does not rank as the litmus test for the reformers’ success, but it can be seen as one among many – when and if the reformers do make a real breakthrough. Here are some potential others:
- Ending the current draconian press censorship.
- Ending the practice of imprisoning (when not murdering) political dissidents and critics of the hardline faction.
- Allowing the Majles to establish standards for accountability and transparency, so that Iran’s wealth can no longer be controlled by and dispensed at the whim of highly placed clerics and so that charges of official corruption can be investigated.
- Ending the search-and-destroy missions aimed at satellite dishes.
- Ending the savage persecution of Bahais.
- Fostering of a fully independent Bar Association and adopting measures to promote an impartial and professionally trained judiciary.
- Ending restrictions on independent human-rights monitoring.
- Rehabilitating Ayatollah Montazeri and other regime critics.
Nayereh Tohidi, associate professor of women’s studies, California State University, Northridge. March 5, 2001:
Academic analyses, whether anthropological or political, are most helpful when they imply (or are accompanied with) a feasible policy recommendation toward the improvement of women’s status. It is in this regard that I found Nikki Keddie’s approach more realistic than others’. For example, when in high school in central Tehran (during the 1960s under the modernizing secular regime of the shah), I was under constant pressure to wear at least a headscarf if not the whole chador and to get married (when I was 16) instead of pursuing further education. Who was putting such pressures on me and many other girls coming from a traditional middle class background? Not the state, but the family and kin network. In my case, the pressure was coming not from my highly educated father, who had studied philosophy and taken off his turban in rebellion against his own traditional father (a hojjat ul-Islam), but from my grandparents, my aunts, uncles and at times my own dear mother.
The most frightening among my relatives was the husband of an aunt. Not a cleric, not even a bazaari, he was a high school diploma-holding, tie-wearing, government employee (the first Islamist and Khomeini advocate I had ever met), who scolded any girl or young woman in the “family” who did not wear hejab “properly.” (In my generation and class, every older relative monitored our behavior and intervened in disciplining the younger members.) He and another of my father’s brothers-in-law (a wealthy bazaari) kept criticizing my father for his “permissiveness” towards his daughters. This led to a break in their relationship when I entered Tehran University in 1969 as the first female member in the family who not only broke the tradition of hejab but studied at a coed university. While some of my female cousins were prevented from attending coed universities, a number of them succeeded a few years later, but their parents allowed them to go to high school or university only if they wore a headscarf. My cousins were not alone in observing what came to be called hejab-e Islami as the number of modestly dressed (in manteau and headscarf) university students kept increasing in 1970s. Many of whom turned into supporters of Ali Shariati (as did my cousins) and/or Mojahedin and subsequently Khomeini.
This indicates the paradoxical impact of hejab in the current context of Iran. While the universal observance of hejab is oppressive to many women, especially members of the new/modern middle class, it has, as perceptively noted by Fatemeh Moghadam, helped many women who otherwise would have been prevented by their families from attending universities and participating in social and professional activities in the public sphere. Contrary to the traditional and conservative purpose of hejab (for women’s seclusion), many educated and socially active women (especially the young) have changed its traditional implications. Women have also negotiated the terms, forms, extent and color of hejab. Having both experienced and closely observed this gradual, painful, yet creative and clever process of “bargaining with patriarchy” and “negotiating with modernity” on the part of many women in Iran, I see how an authoritarian state adds to the contradictions and complexity of this sociocultural process through mandatory unveiling or veiling. This process did not begin with the Islamic Republic. It began with the constitutional movement, when women kept demanding access to education and pushed for legal reforms and public presence without making hejab a major issue.
Ann Mayer correctly emphasizes the politicized nature of current veiling in Iran and correctly argues that “what many in the West tend to miss when discussing veiling is that the hejab is now indelibly associated with the coercive imposition of a uniform dress code on all Iranian women by a nation state. This mandatory dress code is a symbol – a symbol of Iranian women’s submission to the government sponsored version of Islamic requirements.” I suppose Professor Mayer would agree with me that another thing many in the West tend to miss when discussing veiling is that such a coercive, government sponsored dress code began to be imposed on all Iranian women and men long before the Islamists took power in Iran. In 1936, Reza Shah’s coercive unveiling (kashfehejab), besides dress codes for men, symbolized his project of nation-state building. While some welcomed his compulsory dress code as a symbol of modernization, many others (including many women) resented it as a symbol of submission to an authoritarian Westernizing power. Reza Shah used women’s bodies and dress code as a symbol of Westernization/modernization; Khomeini used women’s bodies and dress code as a symbol of anti-West Islamization. Both governments (one “modern” and secular and the other Islamist and “traditional”) used women as identity markers, as symbols of the ascendancy of the official ideology, and neither cared what women themselves wanted in this regard. Both repressed women’s collective agency, banning all independent women’s associations. Yet, as I mentioned earlier, women have not passively let their bodies be used as “sandwich boards” [Mayer’s word] for the advertisement of the ideology of repressive male elites.
Nuredin Gharavi. March 9, 2001:
I would like to clarify that all Iranian women have the right to travel abroad. Only married women need their husbands’ permission. Prior to yesterday there was a ban on travel by unmarried women who were seeking governmental aid in order to pursue scientific studies outside the country and needed hard currency at the official rate (dramatically lower than the free market rate). They had to give up that right and finance their own travel. Recently the parliament approved a bill in which all young women and men had the right to leave the country unconditionally. Regrettably, the Council of Guardians, which is dominated by conservatives, rejected that bill. In addition, it pressured lawmakers to include conditions requiring unmarried women to obtain their fathers’ permission. The ban was lifted yesterday by the approval of the bill by the Council of Guardians. The following is the Associated Press report on the matter:
TEHRAN, Iran (AP) – Unmarried Iranian women can study abroad under a bill passed by the reformist parliament and approved by a hardline oversight council, the official Islamic Republic News Agency reported, in a victory for reformists seeking greater political and social freedoms in Iran. The Guardian Council, which decides whether legislation conforms to the constitution and Islam, approved the bill only after lawmakers included a condition requiring unmarried women to obtain permission from their fathers before leaving the country, IRNA reported late Wednesday. The bill had prompted heated discussions in the 290-seat parliament. Reformist lawmakers, who supported the bill, had said they were seeking to fulfill promises of greater political and social freedoms as well as allowing single women to gain access to scientific studies not available in Iran.
Gelareh Asayesh. March 12, 2001:
As a woman who has repeatedly suffered the indignity of being chastised over inadequate hejab, sometimes quite offensively, I feel very strongly that it is no one’s business to police my chastity. On the other hand, all cultures have their definitions of nudity; most cultures do not tolerate it in public. In much of the Muslim world, nudity begins with a bare head. Devout Muslims react with the same discomfort to a bare head and arms that we here in the west feel when a woman has exposed her breasts. Different definitions of topless, different parameters of the “community standard” we here in the West accept when it comes to such matters as defining pornography. That said, I totally agree that the means currently used to enforce hejab in Iran are unacceptable and unjust.
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