The Persian Night: Iran Under the Khomeinist Revolution Page 13
Khomeini and other reactionary mullahs never forgave the shah for it. When they eventually seized power in 1979, they realized that the enfranchisement of women was perhaps the most difficult of the shah’s reforms to undo. This particular genie would not return to the bottle. Iranian women were strongly attached to their newly won right and would not give it up without a fight. While the shah’s reforms did not remove all discrimination against Iranian women, they did open the way for a massive influx of women into the labor market. In 1977, the last year for which data are available before the mullahs took power, over 160,000 women worked in public service, nearly half of them in education. Women were present in all sections of the administration as well as the army and the police. There were 317 woman judges and advocates, the first in the Muslim world; 107 woman diplomats up to ambassadorial level; several woman mayors of cities; and woman members of parliament and senators. One of the nine justices of the Supreme Court was a woman.2 And every government since 1968 had included at least one woman cabinet minister.3
The first demonstration against the Khomeinist regime was held in Tehran on March 8, 1979, less than a month after the ayatollah had seized power. Marking the International Women’s Day, the demonstration attracted over half a million people, both men and women, who wished to warn the new regime that canceling the shah’s reforms would be resisted. The Khomeinists tried to crush the demonstration by sending Hezballah shock troops, armed with chains, knives, and baseball bats, to hit the protestors and if necessary kill them. The attackers, however, were beaten back by groups of young men who had come to protect the women. Then the Khomeinists decided to postpone efforts to undo the reforms. In the new constitution drafted for the Islamic Republic, the right of women to vote and seek election to the unicameral parliament was maintained, although women were implicitly barred from seeking the highest positions of state, including that of Supreme Guide and president of the republic.4 Women were also purged from some professions.
Having failed to cancel the rights won by women over decades of struggle, the new regime tried to contain what it saw as a strategic threat to its vision of a “pure Muhammadan Islam” (Islam naab Muhammadi). School textbooks were revised to propagate the theme of women’s subservience to men. Primary school textbooks under the shah featured illustrations of two children, one girl and one boy, in a series of events designed to help teach important lessons. Both children had pure Persian, non-Islamic names, Dara and Azar, and they were depicted wearing the kind of clothes that Iranian children typically wore at the time, sometimes in jeans with matching T-shirts. The new Islamic textbooks changed the children’s names to Ali and Fatima, after the Prophet’s son-in-law and daughter. The new illustrations show Fatima wearing the mandatory hijab, and never in short dresses or trousers. She is scripted out of activities, including sports, that are supposed to be “un-Islamic” for the female of the species. Whereas Dara and Azar were neighbors attending the same mixed school, the regime of gender apartheid required that a boy and a girl not be seen together under any circumstances unless they were recast as brother and sister. Fatima appears always deferential towards her brother, while the text urges sisters to adopt her example. There is no mention of duties that Ali might have towards his sister.
Ayatollah Abdul-Karim Mussavi Ardebili, who acted as the Khomeinist regime’s chief justice for years, put the new regime’s view of the whole issue in his usual stark terms: “A woman’s basic duty is to be a slave to her husband.” Iranian women, however, never bowed to the agenda of gender apartheid. In 1980, less than a year after the establishment of fascist rule, women held a series of seminars and conferences—often in universities that had been shut down on Khomeini’s orders—to campaign for women’s rights. These conferences provoked violent reactions, not only from Hezballah militants who beat up the women and disfigured some by throwing acid at them, but also from some female members of the new establishment. One such woman said: “Opening a debate over women’s rights is a Western phenomenon and sign of antimonotheist views, which sadly have permeated our society as well. This phenomenon is the effect of the illness of the antimonotheist culture.”5 The dean of the Alzahra University, an institution for women, went further, saying: “Women should avoid thinking about matters [related to] the rights of women and men. This is the task of the clergy and religious scholars, not of women.”6
Under Khomeinism, tens of thousands of women were fired from their posts in the public sector on a variety of pretexts. All women judges were expelled on the ground that Islam forbids a woman to sit in judgment over cases that involve men. The purge of women from the public sector did particular damage to the nation’s educational system. Under the shah, women had accounted for more than 40 percent of teachers in primary schools. now, however, women were not allowed to teach boys on the pretext that they would “feminize” the future warriors of Islam, who needed manly qualities to face the infidels in battle. Having closed down mixed schools and many girls’ schools, the new regime had no need of so many woman teachers. Women were also thrown out of the army and the police. In a regime claiming that any physical contact between a man and a woman not related by blood or marriage would be an attack on Islam, there was no place for policewomen or female soldiers.7
In the end, however, it was the hijab that represented the new regime’s most potent instrument for enforcing its view of women’s place in society. Like women in most societies, Muslim women over the centuries had worn a variety of head coverings, with such names as chador, rusari, ruband, chaqchur, maqne’a, burqah, and picheh, These had tribal, ethnic, and generally folkloric origins, and were never associated with religion. In Senegal, Muslim women wore colorful headgear but went topless.
The Khomeinists encouraged the wearing of a special form of hijab from 1977 onwards as their revolutionary movement gained momentum. Styled like a hood, it covers the woman’s ears so that she does not hear things properly, and it prevents the woman from having full vision of her surroundings. This form of hijab was invented in the early 1970s by Musa Sadr, an Iranian mullah who won the leadership of the Shiite community in Lebanon. Being totally new to Iranians, this hood-like hijab served to identify the wearer with Khomeinist Islam. Initially, a few hundred militant women wore the neo-hijab of Islamist fascism; but by 1979, when the mullahs seized power, the number wearing it had multiplied by the thousands.
Persian literature over the centuries is full of anti-hijab sentiments. The twelfth-century poet Suzani believed that Caliph Omar invented the tradition of covering women because he had several ugly daughters he hoped to marry off without letting potential husbands see them in advance:
Blessed is Omar, the great Caliph
Who ordained that the ugly be covered;
Saving us, lovers of beauty,
from eye-sores in city bazaars.
Similarly, the novelist Javad Fazel writes that Atossa, a dowager queen in the pre-Islamic Persian Empire and known as a nymphomaniac, invented the hijab. Realizing with horror that she was growing a beard while going bald, Atossa launched the fashion of wearing the veil.
One of medieval Persia’s greatest poets, Saadi, claimed that only ugly women wished to cover up:
Beauty cannot bear to be covered,
Shut the door on her,
she sticks her head out of the window!
Saadi also claimed that a woman’s concealment could drive a man to distraction:
Do not cover yourself, oh housebound moon,
[Your cove] could lead me to madness.
I dream of melting in you,
Others I hold with horror and alienation.
The modern poet Iraj Mirza (d. 1926) offers a verse tableau in which a man pursues and propositions a fully covered female believing she is a prostitute, only to discover that she is his own sister.
Radical Islam’s obsession with covering women’s hair is a new phenomenon. In 1981, Abol-Hassan Banisadr, the first president of the Islamic Republic, announced that scientific
research had shown that women’s hair emits rays that drive men insane with lust. To protect the public, the new regime passed legislation in 1982 making the new form of hijab mandatory for all females above six years of age, regardless of religious faith. Violating the hijab code is punishable by one hundred lashes of the cane and six months imprisonment. By the mid-1980s, a form of hijab never seen in Islam before the 1970s had become standard headgear for millions of Muslim women all over the world, including Europe and north America. Many younger Muslim women, especially Western converts, were duped into believing that the neo-hijab is an essential part of the Islamic faith.
The 1982 dress code also imposed dark colors as the only ones authorized for the hijab. This produced a semiotic scheme in which the color of a woman’s hijab indicated her political leanings. Hard-line Khomeinists chose black or dark blue. Islamist-Marxists, who broke with Khomeini in 1981, preferred brown or light blue. Those who hated Khomeinism manifested their hatred by wearing white, yellow, or green, thus technically breaking the law. Shirin Ebadi tried to distance herself from the Khomeinists by wearing a red hijab soon after being awarded the nobel Peace Prize.
Muslim women anywhere in the world could easily see the fraudulent nature of the neo-Islamist hijab by going through their family albums: they will not find a single picture of a female ancestor who wore the cursed headgear now imposed upon them as an absolute “must” of Islam. This fake Islamic hijab is thus nothing but a political prop, a weapon of visual terrorism; it is a symbol of a totalitarian ideology inspired more by nazism and Communism than by Islam, and is designed to promote gender apartheid. And yet this prop of visual terror was presented by Khomeinist ideologues as a fundamental value—as “a pillar of Islamic existence,” in the words of Khatami, and as “our most effective weapon against the enemies of Islam,” according to Rafsanjani. One well-known female Khomeinist wrote, “The superpowers know that hijab is the foundation of Islamic government and that to conquer the Persian Gulf and plunder its oil resources, they must first eliminate hijab.”8
To counter the Islamist claim that the hijab blocks the dangerous, lust-provoking rays emanating from a woman’s hair, some women have proposed other forms of hijab. One Iranian designer came out with a wig made of horsehair, thus ensuring that a woman’s own hair remains hidden while she still “looks like a normal human being.” Some Iranian actresses suggested they be allowed to appear in plays and films wearing wigs made of animal hair. The French cosmetics firm L’Oreal tried to market a transparent hijab that would show a woman’s hair but keep its “dangerous rays” locked in. The Khomeinists would have none of it; they wanted women to be seen in public in a state of submission.
To the new style of Islamic headgear for women was added another mandatory item: a thick, all-covering overcoat in dark colors that women are forced to wear in every kind of weather. That this was a complete invention having nothing to do with Islam is indicated by the fact that the mullahs didn’t even find a Persian or Arabic word for it, so they called it a manto, from the French word manteau. In 2004, President Khatami authorized an experiment under which twelve girls’ colleges with all-female staff in Tehran were to allow their pupils to take off their manto within the school premises. To make sure that the girls and their teachers were not exposed to “stolen gazes” from men, six-foot-high plastic extensions were added to the walls around the buildings. “With the new walls, the school looks like a prison,” commented Ms. Shamloo, the headmistress of one school participating in the experiment. “But inside it we feel free!” Khatami had approved the experiment after a nationwide study showed that the imposition of hijab on girls from the age of six caused “serious depression and, in some cases, suicide.” Three months later, the experiment was abandoned after coming under attack by more hard-line Khomeinists. The newspaper Jumhuri Islami (Islamic Republic), owned by Khamenehi, lashed out against “this slippery slope towards scandal.” “Casting off the hijab encourages the culture of nudity and weakens the sacred values of Islam,” the paper warned.9 Rafsanjani went further, telling a Friday prayer gathering in Tehran that “a strand of woman’s hair emerging from under the hijab is a dagger drawn towards the heart of Islam.”
The harm that Islamism is doing to Muslim women is not limited to the evil headgear. Under the Khomeinist regime, as in every other Muslim country, the number of women out of work is at least twice that of men. Women’s wages are less than a quarter of men’s. In Iran under Khomeinism, as in most Muslim countries, women cannot travel without the written permission of a male guardian. And yet Tehran has been the venue for numerous seminars and conferences on women and Islam, designed to prove that Western women have become “objects” to be used as props in commerce and pornography. One constant tune of these seminars is that girls need to be educated, but the fact is that Muslim girls have already kept their end of the bargain as far as education is concerned. They have all the degrees they need, but are not allowed to leave home without a chaperon or wear the clothes they like. They cannot get the jobs they merit or choose whom to marry. The Tehran seminars are a far cry from the first congress of Muslim women held in Kazan, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1875, at which over eight hundred women delegates unanimously voted for “full equality of sexes, and the abolition of all discrimination.”
Khomeini and his followers base their anti-woman position on the Koran and the hadiths. In the ninth century, a Persian scholar named Abdallah al-Bokhari decided to collect and edit the sayings of Muhammad, so he traveled all over the Muslim world and interviewed 1,080 people, mostly in Hejaz on the Red Sea, gathering 600,000 hadiths—a fantastic number. (The Prophet should have lived at least three hundred years to have had time to feature in so many anecdotes.) Mercifully, Bokhari knew the limits of the ridiculous. He decided to keep only 7,275 hadiths, which he published in his magnum opus: Sahih (“The Correct”) or Tariq al-Mostaqeem (“The Right Path”). For the Shiites there were 2.5 million hadiths because they had twelve imams who also had anecdotes related to them. The hadiths have led to the creation of an industry employing tens of thousands of people: the muffasserin (exegetes), the fuqaha (theologians), the experts in Shariah. In many cases, the most enduring impact of the hadiths has been an occultation of the Koran itself, as issues are often discussed in terms of the hadiths rather than through a meticulous reading of the Koran. One cannot calculate all the damage that has been done to Muslims over many centuries as a result of judgments based on apocryphal anecdotes, not to say downright inventions. Every aspect of life has been affected, including the status of women.
Some writers admit that women are discriminated against in Muslim societies but also claim that Islam brought an improvement over the situation of women during the preceding Jahilyah period—the period of darkness, as Muhammad called it. We are told that before Islam, especially in the Arabian Peninsula, women were treated as subhuman and never allowed to attain positions of responsibility. We are also told that the Arabs had a habit of burying newborn baby girls. Islam, we are told, changed all that.
This simplistic view is used to justify discrimination and injustice today, although it lacks a factual foundation. The Arabian Peninsula before Islam had known quite a few woman rulers. Queen Zenobia is still remembered. So is Belqees, the famed Queen of Sheba who charmed the Prophet Solomon. There was also Semiramis, the Mesopotamian temptress, a beautiful but brutal character who would have her lovers put to death once she tired of them. Even at the time of the Prophet Muhammad himself, some women were prominent and powerful figures in Arabia. The notorious Hind—who is said to have devoured the innards of the Prophet’s uncle Hamzah after the battle of Ohud—played a leading political role in Mecca. Muhammad’s first wife, Khadijah, was a successful businesswoman engaged in export-import on a fairly large scale. She gave Muhammad his first and only job, until Allah chose him for the prophetic mission. Some women, for example the mother of the future Caliph Muawyyah, were among the richest individuals in Arabia. Women in Persia and B
yzantium, although never given equal status with men, were nevertheless able to play their part in society. The Sassanid Empire, which was overthrown by the Arab invasion, counted two reigning queens among its monarchs.
In Arabia, there certainly was a barbarous custom of burying newborn baby girls, but it could not have been widespread or the population would not have increased as dramatically as it did in the decades that preceded the coming of Islam. By the same token, the live burial of girls did not stop with Islam; there are fully documented cases of the practice continuing long after the Prophet’s death. In one instance the Caliph Muawyyah buried a girl alive and rode his horse on the burial spot. (Even today in China there are reports of newborn girls being put to death by couples who prefer a boy under the government’s one-child-only policy.)
Pre-Islamic society in Arabia was not as anti-female as it is portrayed by those who try to blacken it so that Islam will appear more brilliant in comparison. Pre-Islamic Arab poetry is full of passion for women. Such folk tales of love and passion as Antar and Ablah, Leyla and Majnun, and Wameq and Azra clearly show that women were something more than breeding machines or de facto slaves of men. The fact that most idols in pre-Islamic Arabia were goddesses is also significant. Mecca’s three principal idols at the time of the Prophet were female: Lat, Manat, and al-Ozza. Even the sun, considered male in Persian mythology, was taken to be female in Arabia and worshipped as a goddess. It is therefore not true that pre-Islamic Arabia was no more than a living hell for women. What Islam did was codify the rules applied to women and define their rights and responsibilities. In some areas, such as marriage and inheritance, the existing tribal customs were adopted with little or no modification.