Beyond The Chador

Sahar

When I began writing my chapter for my thesis on Iran, I was immensely curious  of women’s situation  in  both pre-revolution Iran and post.  Images of chador-wearing women and angry protests on the streets of Tehran are how I visualised the Iranian revolution. Of course I was aware there was  more to it than that.  Though my focus was on the hijab, the hijab debate touched upon various issues affecting Iranian women and allowed me to explore women’s diverse experiences in the past century.  During what was called the ‘modernizing’ period of Iran, Iranian women became a centerpiece for Iranian modernizers (led by the Pahlavis) who saw her as the catalyst for change. Women were encouraged to wear Western dress, remove hijab, and mimic the Western woman. This strategy was employed because modernism had become synonymous with Westernism and Westernism with freedom.  Critics of the revolution have often compared this period to that of the post-revolution, in which they argue the Shah’s efforts to modernise Iran fostered the success of women’s rights and the public participation of women. The revolution, they claim, eroded these achievements. The chador is often deployed as a metaphoric description of the smothering of women’s achievements.  Western media has conveniently depicted the Iranian woman shrouded in a depressing dark chador– the symbol of Iran’s deprivation and women’s subjugation. Anything said in defense of the revolution, is immediately silenced by the ‘sinister’ presence of the chador.

However, after 30 years of the 1979 revolution, recent scholarship on Iranian women has shifted away from what I believe is a flawed dichotomy and looked at how women’s situation has changed dramatically in post-revolution Iran today.

One of such scholars is Janet Afary who will be visiting UCLA to talk about Sexual Politics in Modern Iran. Afary joins the voices of observers like Ziba Mir-Hosseini and Louise Halper who point out that there has been considerable improvement of Iranian women’s experiences since the revolution.

Little is said about the achievements  made by women in Iran.  The criticisms of the revolution are beginning to be unraveled.  Women’s role in the revolution politicized them in ways never seen before. The mass presence of Iranian women in the public streets of Tehran in the late 1970s was a break away from not only the Shah and SAVAK’s despotism and repression, but from the construction of the domesticated traditional Iranian woman.  The women who fought for the success of the revolution could not be told to get back in the kitchen. Ayatollah Khomeini himself was aware of this and encouraged women to join political organizations and encouraged their public participation. What must also be noted is during the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq war, while Iran’s millions of men fought against Saddam’s forces, it was Iranian women who ran the country. This added to the importance of women’s historical role in Iran.  It changed the ‘traditional’ view of the Iranian woman who had ‘earned’ the right to have a place in serving Iran in multiple ways that went beyond domestic contributions.  During this period Khomeini stated,

Islam urges women to strive and reach perfection which has no limits, nor does it stop at any point and therefore has granted them the right to serve society as a scholar, inventor, philosopher, teacher, physician, or even an active politician. (quoted by Eniz Sanasarian, 1990)

As pointed out by Afary, the Shah’s policies towards women lacked real benefits for women who did not belong to the elite class.  Life for women in rural and traditional sectors of society did not change dramatically. For instance, literacy rates remained quite low; by 1976 around thirty five percent of women were literate. Further, by the 1970s, the labour force showed only real improvement in the upper classes.   So it was women of the upper classes who identified more with the Western world than the majority of Iranian society who were the receivers of the ‘modernising’ reforms. Considering the impressive efforts to transform Iran, such trends seem low and exclusive, an indication of an unsuccessful program.

As I argued in my thesis, under the ‘Islamic’ government, there has been a more productive focus on gender in ways that the Pahlavi regime had failed to achieve because of its inability to engage with grass root voices.  Since the revolution, there have been interesting improvements in the political, economic and social role of women. In 2004, twenty percent of Iranian labour force was women, which has increased by twenty percent since 1980 and more class inclusive.  The literacy rate in Iran has risen to seventy percent for female adults, compared to under fifty percent in the 1970s. In 2006 reports show well over half of Iranian university students were women. A third of all doctors, 60% of civil servants and 80% of all teachers are women. (see Zahedi, 2007 and Halper, 2005).

Those figures don’t exactly fit in with the negative impression Western media gives us of Iranian women.

Armed with the understanding that comes with higher education, contributing to the economy and a history of being part of the revolution, women have driven a reformist discourse in order to influence the state’s interpretation of Islamic gender roles. For example, Maryam Gorji, a representative in the Islamic Parliament is engaged in writing a woman-centered (re)interpretation of women’s images in the Qur’an. Women like Gorji now seek what they call ‘gender fairness’ in the new state.  The achievements of women like Zahra Rahnavard, who has a Ph.D in political science and became the first women to hold the position of university chancellor in post-revolution Iran demonstrates the kind of success that women are achieving in Iran.

This is not to say there haven’t been disadvantages for women in post-revolution Iran.  However, my point is in line with Afary, who sees the importance in shedding light on some positive effects of the revolution. To suggest that the revolution has brought on nothing but catastrophic consequences for women is misleading and dangerous. Such a simplistic analysis contributes to not only the demonisation of Iran, but reinforces the orientalist stereotypes of Muslim women lacking agency against the brute force of Islam’s supposed misogyny.

In reality, Iranian women from all classes have been politicized. Women’s mass contribution in Iranian society in the past two decades has legitimized their role in the future of Iran.  They have founded their own organizations, study groups; associations and publications. They have marked their own space in politics and contribute to the country in ways that women under the Pahlavi regime could not possibly have done so. This is because the Shah’s policies  openly called for a westernisation of Iran and discredited.

So contrary to how they are perceived in mainstream media and even academic scholarship, Iranian women are far from the silent victims of a religious establishment.