by Brian Griffith.
In 1895, Bibi Khanoom Astarabadi, a tutor for the children of Iran’s shah, published the nation’s first ideologically feminist book, The Vices of Men. It was innovative partly because of how it dealt with gender bias. The bigger novelty was that a book launched a public debate spanning the nation. Astarabadi wrote it as a reasoned reply to an earlier book, namely The Edification of Women (1891), which had ridiculed the notion of women’s rights. This earlier book seemed to address literate women, aiming to remind them of their proper places. For example, the male author advised that the “salvation of women is conditional upon her absolute obedience to her husband.” It was rather like the lesson offered by Juan Luis Valdez during the 1500s, in his book The Education of the Christian Woman, which explained that “human laws do not require the same chastity of the man as the woman … men have to look after many more things; women are responsible only for their chastity” (MacCulloch, 612). The man who wrote The Edification of Women did not give his name, but most readers felt he was obviously one of Iran’s numerous Qajar-dynasty princes. The fact that he felt it necessary to attack pro-feminist ideas suggests that these ideas were gaining favor, at least among the women in his social circles. The fact that he feared to disclose his identity proves it.
The First Feminist Best-seller
Astarabadi took several years to compose her reply in The Vices of Men. And unlike the anonymous author of the previous book, she openly identified herself as the writer. Rather than lecturing men on how they should behave, she adopted a slightly more modest strategy: “To sum, yours truly does not believe that she is able to edify men so I wrote [this book] to disclose their shortcomings so that perhaps they would stop trying to educate women and instead edify themselves.” This book stated what women had no doubt always said in private, offering detailed ridicule of the privileges and vices that men reserved for themselves. That in itself was ground-breaking, or perhaps ice-breaking. But Astarabadi’s book was old-fashioned in another way, because it still called upon men to serve as proper guardians for women. She argued that Islam made female submission to men conditional on the man’s piety. The commonly indulged “privileges” of men, such as infidelity, gambling, or drinking, invalidated any claims to authority (Amin, 35). Apparently, Astarabadi still accepted that men deserved guardian status if they played their roles faithfully. Otherwise, women had the right to reject their so-called guardians. And that logic had just been applied to the Qajar shah himself.
The Tobacco Revolt Women’s Strike
It’s possible that The Edification of Women was written in reaction to a protest movement involving women across the nation, namely the Tobacco Rebellion of 1891–92. This movement was basically a boycott of tobacco products, conducted as an act of defiance against government corruption and foreign intervention. The Qajar dynasty was already corrupt in its regular operations, but it seems the shah crossed a red line when he attempted to meet his debts by selling monopoly rights over the entire Persian tobacco market to a British consortium. In exchange for an upfront payment and 25% of future profits, the shah gave a British company exclusive rights to all production, sale, and export of Iranian tobacco for the next 50 years, supposedly up to 1940. This was the first occasion for ordinary Iranians to directly feel the squeeze of British economic intervention in their country. In most homes and teahouses across the land, friends and families sat around tables sharing a smoke on their ubiquitous water pipes. Granting a monopoly on this product was roughly like selling all rights to coffee in the USA to the Russians.
As protests by farmers and merchants spread, the issue quickly evolved into something more important than the profits of Iranian businessmen. This was a matter of government corruption, foreign arrogance, economic freedom, and the burning issue of who owned Iran. At this point, the Shia clergy weighed in, and made the cause of farmers and merchants into a matter of religion. In one of the few such cases in Iranian history, the business community and the clergy moved into an alliance against the central government. The foremost Shia cleric of the day, Mirza Hasan Shirazi, made it a fatwa: “As from today, consumption of tobacco and smoking the waterpipe is forbidden and tantamount to waging war against the Imam of the time” (Katouzian, 84–85).
Before this point, the people most greatly concerned over the monopoly were producers or sellers of tobacco. The consumers were less concerned, and many men just wanted to continue having their daily smoke. This is where the women came in. Although the women also commonly enjoyed smoking, in village after village or town, it was the women who renounced the habit and enforced the tobacco ban. Word got around. Women were refusing to prepare the pipes and light the charcoal. If the men smoked anyway, women would destroy the household supply of tobacco. If the men found ways to continue smoking, women broke the water pipes. If tobacco shops remained open, groups of women demanded they close. When the shah ordered them to reopen, Zainab Pasha’s bands of armed women came around, reminding the shop owners of Tabriz to stay closed at gunpoint. In December of 1891, a leader of Friday prayers tried to denounce the boycott as treason against a God-appointed ruler. The women in the audience physically drove him from the podium. One of these outraged women announced, “If today our men have to sit like women in the home, we women will come into the square wearing men’s clothes to risk our lives” (Ahmadi Khorasani, 2008, Dec. 2). Women surrounded the shah’s carriage, taunting him with claims that he should dress as a female: “O wearer of a scarf, you irreligious fellow, we don’t want you!” (Najmabadi, 2005, 212). One way or another, the women made their men uphold the strike. Even the shah’s wives, such as Anis al-Dowleh, refused to let him smoke. Within a year, the strike forced the shah to cancel the concession, although the British imposed a daunting financial penalty for breaching a contract.
The tobacco revolt broke new ground in several ways. For the first time, women across Iran organized through the social grapevine for a common action. They performed that action regardless of support or opposition from their husbands or fathers. They defied their ruler, and successfully stood up to a foreign colonial superpower. They did all this almost entirely without violence, through the power of peaceful non-cooperation (Katouzian, 84–85). This was the approach later applied by Gandhi in his fight to end British power in India without launching an anti-colonial war. Similar tactics would be used again by Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq in the early 1950s, as he sought to take back the British monopoly over Iran’s oil.
From the upcoming Exterminating Angel Press book, Mother Persia.
Sources:
Ahmadi Khorasani, Noushin (2008) “Iranian Women’s Equality Calendar.” One Million Signatures Campaign Demanding Changes to Discriminatory Laws, Tehran.
Amin, Camron Michael (2002) The Making of the Modern Iranian Woman. University Press of Florida, Gainsville. FL.
Katouzian, Homa (2013) Iran. Oneworld, London.
MacCulloch, Dairmaid (2005) Reformation: Europe’s House Divided. Penguin Books, London.
Najmabadi, Afsaneh (2005) Women with Mustaches and Men without Beards: Gender and Sexual Anxieties of Iranian Modernity. University of California Press, Berkeley.