In the past few days hundreds of Iranian women have been bundled off the streets and arrested. Officially, they were breaking the 'correct' Islamic dress code. But, as Simon Tisdall reports, the real aim is to keep women second-class citizens
Wednesday May 2, 2007
The Guardian
The Iranian government's latest act of oppression against the nation's women has taken the form of a high-profile police drive to enforce "correct" Islamic dress codes. In its first few days, last week, the "bad hijab" crackdown netted several thousand young women on the streets of Tehran, with many receiving a warning and several hundred being arrested. Policewomen dressed in black chadors bundled detainees into buses that had been stationed on street corners in advance, before carting them off to police stations. The women were accused of presenting an immodest appearance - allowing their hair to show beneath the obligatory headscarves, wearing manteaus too short to conceal their hips, or wearing tight, revealing jeans and heels.
Those arrested face possible trials and jail sentences. There have even been suggestions that women may be exiled from the city if they reoffend. And it is not only in Tehran that this is happening - the crackdown is being pursued nationwide.
At issue are alleged offences against Islam and sharia law. But the reality is somewhat more complicated. In Iran, the comfort of women is a source of male discomfort.
Sae'ed Mortazavi, Tehran's public prosecutor, made this clear when he told the Etemad newspaper: "These women who appear in public like decadent models, endanger the security and dignity of young men". Mohammad Taqi Rahbar, a fundamentalist MP, agreed, saying, "Men see models in the streets and ignore their own wives at home. This weakens the pillars of family."
A spokesman for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has tried to distance his boss from this politically embarrassing controversy. And the fashion purge has not gone entirely unchallenged. Some academics have been arguing that hijab standards should be maintained by persuasion rather than force. But, as usual in Iran, the police, like other arms of the pervasive security apparatus, do not appear to have taken any notice.
The "bad hijab" crackdown has happened in a country where the historical tendency to treat women as the property of their fathers and husbands has never really gone away. Iranian women's lack of equality is written into law, and, in a thousand customary ways too, they face daily, crushing discrimination.
Bring up the inequalities that Iranian women face, and many Iranians will point out that in some Arab Muslim countries, such as Saudi Arabia, treatment of women is comparatively worse. In Iran women can vote, stand for most public offices, drive, even smoke in public. It is also argued that social boundaries, (relaxed during the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005), have not assumed their former rigour despite fears that they would do so following the fundamentalist victory of two years ago, when Ahmadinejad was elected president.
In pre-Khatami times, and especially during the latter years of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, founding father of the Islamic republic and Supreme Leader of Iran between 1979 and 1989, modern western dress was not tolerated at all, fewer women's sports were allowed, and sentences of stoning to death for adultery were more common.
Life is better for women in Iran now, but inequalities persist. For example, their inheritance and divorce rights are inferior to those of men, so, when a family legacy is divided, the women get less than the men. Women need written authorisation from their father or husband to get a passport; their court testimony is considered half as weighty as a man's; and they may be forced to submit to male polygamous relationships, which are allowable (although increasingly rare) under sharia law.
Women are encouraged to go to university and stay on to do higher degrees, but not, it is widely believed, to actually join the workforce (where, it is claimed, they are often omitted from official unemployment figures). While professional jobs are scarce for men and women alike, there is cultural and social pressure on girls to stay at home or get married once they finish full-time education. A fully qualified female civil engineer, for example, said she had a choice of teaching or getting married when she graduated. The idea of her actually being allowed to go out and build a dam or a bridge was laughable. In the event, she emigrated to the US and got divorced.
And, just in case a woman should forget her place, if she travels on public transport, she must go to the back of the bus. Even on the hottest, busiest days in Tehran, women of all ages can be seen crammed into the back, many wearing full black chadors, mostly standing shoulder to shoulder, burdened with shopping bags, while the less crowded front of the vehicle is occupied by men, apparently oblivious to the situation behind them.
Social rules also demand that a woman must not shake hands with a male acquaintance, in public at least. And, to avoid offence, or worse, she is well advised to look demure and keep her eyes down. To behave differently is to invite disrespect or even harassment and arrest by the ubiquitous Basiji militiamen, a several million-strong officially approved vigilante force that styles itself as the guardian of Islamic mores.
Many women bravely defy these rules where they can. And many Iranian men, especially the younger ones, are aware of the injustices and absurdities and do what they can to forge relationships based on equality.
Talking to Jina (not her real name), a 24-year-old student of English literature at a Tehran university, it is difficult to be optimistic about the prospects for young women.
Jina says she loves her studies. She would like to pursue an MA, then a PhD, and her father is supportive. But her face clouds as she speaks. "I don't know what job I can do, what job they [the government] will allow me to do. There are so few chances for women and so many people are out of work ... But it's no use protesting. All my friends feel the same."
She would like to travel to the west, she says, to visit London and the US, to see for herself where Jane Austen and F Scott Fitzgerald lived. The Great Gatsby is a familiar text for Iranian students, but it is taught not for the beauty of its language but to demonstrate the decadence of western society and morals.
The chances of Jina and most of her generation making such a journey, symbolic or otherwise, are slim to non-existent under the present political dispensation. More enlightened senior clerics, such as Grand Ayatollah Yusef Sa'anei, whose fatwas (religious rulings) argue the case for gender equality, are ignored by the ruling fundamentalists. (In one of his most significant fatwas, Ayatollah Sa'anei ruled that competence and piety outweighed masculinity as criteria in considering appointments. "Islamic law does not allow any discrimination on the basis of race, nor does it condone discrimination on the grounds of sex and ethnicity," he declared.)
Iranian women are still a long way from equality, and fighting for their rights is a perilous task. Last June an estimated 100 women staged an equal rights demonstration in central Tehran. Several dozen were arrested and some were recently jailed, provoking protests from international human rights organisations. They and other activists are being supported by the One Million Signatures Campaign, which was launched last August. Apart from highlighting the plight of those in jail, the campaign seeks to advance the cause of equal legal rights for women in Iran.
"Iranian law considers women to be second class citizens and promotes discrimination against them," say campaign organisers. "Women of lower socio-economic status or women from religious and ethnic minority groups suffer disproportionately from legal discrimination. These unjust laws have promoted unhealthy and unbalanced relationships between men and women and have had negative consequences on the lives of men as well."
Jina's assessment is blunter. Iranians, she says, are living in a "society of lies" where most people, female and male, are disempowered and constantly afraid - afraid to say what they think, wear what they want, and be who they really are. "I can't do anything," she says. "I just try not to let them hurt me
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