by Brian Griffith.
Like most nations in the post-WWII world, Iran had a “baby boom” generation, which arrived at young adulthood about a decade later than the West’s post-war boom. By the mid-1970s, half of Iran’s population was under 16, and two-thirds were under 30. And as in many nations of the Southern world, vast numbers of these young people grew frustrated, morally indignant, or furiously contemptuous toward “the system.” Although Iran had its “silent majority,” the more vocal city youth tended to combine personal ambition, self-righteous idealism, and strong anti-colonial sentiment. We might expect that the improvements in health care and education since the 1960s, the vote for women, and the vast infusion of oil wealth after 1973, would lift all boats toward an ever more prosperous future. Eventually it might. But first there had to be a culture war, in which women were involved as never before.
The Inferno of Sin and Possibility
As Iran’s villagers increasingly fled rural poverty, the slums of south Tehran expanded exponentially. Vast numbers of these migrants were single young men, hoping to gain enough cash to get married. And there in the city streets, they beheld a rapidly changing world of glaring inequality. Where women in their home villages had always dressed modestly, here rising numbers of educated, professional, or well-connected women adopted a cosmopolitan lifestyle. The more affluent women were increasingly visible in public, and commonly dressed to make a fashion statement. A slum dweller named Parviz reported that during the miniskirt craze of the 1960s, “one hour on a principal shopping street … provided him with enough thoughts to repent for a month” (Axworthy, 2013, 80). For many traditional people, the Western-style bars seemed almost astonishingly decadent.
As in most brewing culture wars, a rapidly shifting economy brought social division into high relief. The contrast was most obvious in Tehran, where upper-class society occupied the cool hill slopes of the north, and the sweltering plains below filled with shantytowns of the poor, several million strong. As oil money poured in for the well-connected or highly educated, the shah’s regime seemed to represent an elevated aspiration for wealth and success on the world stage. Serving as role models for the nation, the royal family displayed Western tastes. Where in previous centuries it was high-class Iranian women who were the most strictly veiled and secluded from outsiders, now the most wealthy and powerful women wore jet set fashions, and it seemed to be the poor and backward who still wore hijab. The cultural contrast between north and south Tehran was obvious, and even a British diplomat could sympathize with the slum dwellers:
“… in the slums the spurious blessings of Pepsi Cola civilization have not yet destroyed the old way of life, where every man’s comfort and security depend on the spontaneous, un-policed observation of a traditional code. Down in the southern part of the city manners and morals are better and stricter than in the villas of Tajrish: an injury to a neighbor, a pass at another man’s wife, a brutality to a child evoke spontaneous retribution without the benefit of bar or bench.” (Axworthy, 2008, 241)
The village women who migrated to the cities generally faced increased levels of anxiety. About a third of these women came alone. All of them encountered a world requiring new skills for survival, and far higher expenses. The jobs that “unskilled” former farm women could get usually had no security, and constant exposure to sexual harassment. In reaction, their husbands or fathers typically grew more controlling. Beyond that, newly urbanized women were commonly cut off from their old social worlds. As Zoreh Sullivan explains, “Outside the village a woman faced the multiple unknown threats of the city, whose effect was to alienate the villager from her community, leaving nothing to fill the void” (p. 225). There was cheap entertainment from Persian films and TV, mostly delivering the most profitable mix of sex, violence, and ribald comedy. Otherwise, women could attend religious gatherings and visit shrines, looking for some moral support.
In the mosques where ordinary workers gathered, talk of traditional morality merged with resentment of government corruption, and of the “1,000 families” who lionized Iran’s wealth. The prayer leaders spoke of lost Islamic purity, anti-colonial patriotism, and resistance to cultural imperialism. In 1962, at the height of the Southern world’s wave of anti-colonial revolutions, Jalal Al-e-Ahmad published his book Westoxification: A Plague from the West, articulating an outrage akin to that of Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth. Speaking as a patriotic academic rather than a religious preacher, Al-e-Ahmad argued that rebellion against Iran’s semi-colonial status required political, economic, and most importantly cultural liberation: “The poisonous culture of imperialism [is] penetrating to the depths of towns and villages throughout the Muslim world, displacing the culture of the Qur’an, recruiting our youth en-masse to the service of foreigners and imperialists” (1981, 192). In the light of such patriotic judgment, Westernized Iranian women appeared to be a prime example of West-toxicated depravity. As Al-e-Ahmad put it, such women were devoted empire loyalists, their lives centered around consumption of Western fashions—an “army of lipstick and powder aficionados,” set on treason against their homeland (Ansary, 96). In response to that harsh judgment, many liberal-minded women wished to show that they too were patriots.
Women’s Religious Duty for Political Action
Under the shah’s foreign-backed dictatorship, both socialist and religious rebels had a common enemy, and women increasingly joined both movements of resistance. For example, Muhammad Sahimi (2010) lists 37 female leaders of left-wing rebel groups who were killed by the secret police during the 1970s. The shah’s security agents also seized and disappeared non-violent female critics, such as literary commentator Atefeh Gorgin or sociologist Dr. Vida Hajebi Tabrizi (Sedghi, 188).
As for the regime’s religious opponents, probably most Westerners assume that these were reactionary males demanding the elimination of women’s rights. But actually, many Islamic rebels, including Khomeini, began calling for women’s engagement in political struggle. In trying to influence Iran’s resistance movement from his exile in Iraq, Khomeini increasingly sought to address, not just fellow clerics, but the general public. He started affirming women as a force for moral change, claiming that Islam would deliver women from oppression: “People say that for instance in Islam women have to go inside the house and lock themselves in. This is a false accusation. … Islam empowers women. It puts them next to men. They are equals” (Milani, 1992, 42). This was the kind of argument that women of the younger generation heard in Khomeini’s tapes during the 1970s, along with his refrain that “the duty of the clergy is to liberate the poor from the clutches of the rich” (Abrahamian, 147–148).
In a comparable way, Ali Shariati’s popular book Fatima Is Fatima (1971) evoked the Prophet’s daughter, not as a symbol of pious womanly obedience, but as a strong leader who defied abusive rulers. Shariati explained that she was not someone’s daughter; she was not someone’s wife, or someone’s mother. Fatima was a hero herself. She was the inspiration for her daughter Zaynab, who dared to rebuke the usurper tyrant of the Islamic empire to his face. In general, Shariati made Shia Islam sound like a pro-feminist liberation theology—“freedom, social justice, spirituality!” Connecting modern protest with the whole heritage of Shia moral rebellion, Shariati compared the shah with the despotic caliph Yazid who had slain the Prophet’s kinfolk. The lower-class women of Iran were Fatimas—victims of neo-colonial domination and sisters in the world struggle for justice. In a similar vein, Ayatollah Morteza Motahari claimed that modern capitalism had violated women, turning them into sex objects for the consumer market, while communism had used women as eternal laborers for the state. A revolution of Islamic morality would honor women’s own priorities of caring for their loved ones. In the logic of anti-colonial revolution which had swept the world from China to Africa, a new patriotic xenophobia glorified indigenous culture and sought to expel “cultural pollution” from the imperialist West.
For young women such as the American-educated poet Tahereh Saffarzadeh, the causes of feminism and moral renewal went together. She gravitated to fellow rebels, due to “my own … non-compromising, justice-seeking stance, the … uncompromising nature of Shi’ism, and the oppressiveness of our time, which invariably provokes a righteous person to rebel and increases religious inclination” (Milani, 1992, 168). With high-minded idealism she wrote,
“On my first pilgrimage to my birthplace
I will wash from the walls
my mother’s look of shame.
And where my heart began to pound,
I will begin to tell the world
that my luminous hands have no lust
to clench in fists,
nor to beat and pound.
I do not yell,
I do not feel proud to kill,
I’ve not been fattened
at the table of male supremacy” (Milani, 1992, 164–165).
As the marches and strikes against autocratic rule gathered steam, women were increasingly prominent, with pro-feminist women in blue jeans from north Tehran, and religiously moralistic ones wearing hijab from south Tehran. Progressive women took to wearing a headscarf with jeans, claiming the scarf as a badge of pride in their native culture. Leftists and nationalists started claiming that the veil was no longer a symbol of female subordination, but a symbol of brave defiance toward Western imperialism (Moghissi, 41). For at least a time, “secular feminists” and “Islamic feminists” seemed to be allies against a common oppressor. But as in previous nationalist or anti-colonial movements, standing up for the nation and culture took priority over standing up for women.
About a third of all participants in the great demonstrations of 1977 to ’78 were women, though it seems they almost never sought the limelight as up-front leaders. Still, in facing real danger from live ammunition, women sometimes took the front rows in marches, hoping that the troops would not fire on females. They put flowers in the soldiers’ guns, inviting them to join the resistance. When mass protest met deadly force, as in the September 8, 1978 “Black Friday” machine-gunning of marchers, young girls tried to nurse wounded friends—who would be arrested if they went to the hospitals. And in such explosive confrontations, teenage defiance of authority tended to escape all bounds. In one instance, a 16-year-old girl from Chaleh Meydan (in south Tehran) disappeared from her home for three whole days. When she finally returned, her father furiously demanded to know where she was. She admitted she’d been in a street battle in Jaleh Square, making Molotov cocktails to throw at the shah’s troops. In the screaming fight that followed, the father and daughter physically grappled like wrestlers. She knocked him to the ground and kicked him. The father swore he was leaving the house, and he would never return unless she was gone (Sullivan, 233–234).
From his new refuge in France, Khomeini gave radio-broadcasts praising the resistance, issuing vaguely worded proclamations of support for democracy and women’s liberation: “We are proud that our women, young and old, are active in the educational and economic fields … forwarding the goals of Islam and the Holy Qu’ran. Any nation that has women like the women of Iran will surely be victorious” (Ansary, 88). In his scriptural literalism, Khomeini took the Quran’s verses about the Prophet’s wives staying in their houses as applying only to the Prophet’s wives. He assured women that he respected their freedom. In November 1978, he informed the Manchester Guardian that “women are free in the Islamic Republic in the selection of their activities, future and their clothing” (Alevi, 2005, 47). Clearly, Khomeini had changed his mind and decided to affirm the vote for women. Now he viewed women as a force for justice. By December, popular participation in the anti-Shah demonstrations was so vast that some observers claim the marches of December 10–11 were the largest in world history.
In the village of Aliabad, near Shiraz, the local women were slow to get involved. They had always heard that politics is a bloody game, played by men with men’s rules in the public spaces. Now, however, they heard from the mosques and news reports that political action by women was a religious duty. A woman named Rana explained, “The religious scholars and the ayatollahs have said that the men and women must revolt together for religion and freedom for all.” Another reasoned, “In Islam, action is more important than whether you are a man or a woman” (Hegland, 184, 182). Still, the Aliabad women felt very self-conscious about doing any public action in front of all their neighbors. It was only in early January of 1979, a few weeks before the shah fled the country, that a minority of the local women ventured out into the streets to join the revolution. Marching shyly down the road, they chanted some slogans against tyranny. When a few men joined them, they felt encouraged, and on subsequent nights went on longer, larger marches around the whole village. When they passed the homes of big landlords who supported the shah, they gathered at the gates and shouted more loudly.
For all this participation in civil disobedience, the vast majority of women were markedly reluctant to engage in any violence. Where protests turned deadly, mothers and fathers commonly demanded that their daughters stay away. On February 11, 1979, as the shah’s troops went on a last rampage, a young mother named Sima insisted on joining the protesters holed up in Shiraz’s Habib Mosque. Her father blocked her way, insisting that no religious duty could be more important than caring for her children. After the troops did attack the mosque, a friend told Sima, “If a woman wants to go on a jihad but can’t because of her children, she will be more rewarded than if she had actually gone” (Hegland, 185).
Later that year, the preamble to the Islamic Republic’s new constitution gave a somewhat grandiose tribute to women’s role in the revolution: “Women were conspicuous in every theatre of this great struggle. The sight of mothers with infants in their arms hastening to the scene of battle and towards the mouths of machine-guns showed the decisive part played in the struggle by that substantial section of society” (Buchan, 255).
Rage Against the Beast
Compared to most dictators in world history, Mohammad Reza Shah had more limited powers, and he was slightly more benevolent. But as both the ruler and symbol of the state, he attracted the blame for every injustice in Iranian life. For the rising masses of rebellious youth, eliminating the despot was the solution to every problem. Like the West’s anarchists of the late 1800s, most Iranian revolutionaries assumed that once the system was demolished, freedom, justice, and prosperity would flow like an undammed river. Most rebels in the streets had almost no idea what should be next. Even Khomeini at first assumed that he would simply return to a liberated nation and resume teaching in Qom. Even after the shah fled, the mobs and militias who had battled the security forces simply continued destroying anything related to the system. They seized officers and bureaucrats who had served the state, dragging them before hastily assembled tribunals for judgment and revenge. The first administrative role Khomeini took after returning from Paris was to oversee these trials. At first he seemed to urge moderation, then yielded to pressure from furious young radicals, who demanded blood vengeance for everyone killed by the shah’s henchmen.
Out in Aliabad village, people seized the old local boss, Siyyid Ibn Ali Askari, and threw him in jail. Then a number of peasants staked out plots from his land for their own crops. The local police ran away, leaving nobody to enforce the law. Next, a number of local businesses closed and some people lost their jobs. The women who had chanted for revolution grew worried. Reportedly, a number of animals had been stolen from people’s courtyards (Hegland, 188, 186).
This sort of chaos across Iran seemed to demand immediate solutions. The administrative state was demolished and something had to fill the void. The solution most readily at hand was the existing system of the clerics, who had traditionally decreed family laws, run courts, operated schools, and managed charities. Surely the most moral and patriotic solution to modern corruption was to establish a godly government of traditional values. So, by generally popular demand, the clerics took a direct role in politics. Khomeini would not be just a spiritual guide, but would actually assume the shah’s place as top governor: “the people love the clergy, have faith in the clergy, and want to be guided by the clergy” (Abrahamian, 165). To replace the basically disbanded army, the militant gangs who had seized army storehouses full of weapons became a new paramilitary force called the Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Before they even had uniforms they set out to impose order on Tehran.
In the emerging Islamic Republic, clerics and mullahs were appointed to oversee communities across the country. A mullah named Rohani was dispatched from his studious life in Qom to guide the people of Aliabad village. There, local women brought him complaints about robberies and attacks on girls in the area. Aside from preaching morality, however, Rohani had little idea what to do. He did demand that people stop listening to popular music. When local weddings were held, he objected that the women should not dance. This was a very big deal, as most women felt that a wedding without singing and dancing was almost unthinkable. One of them said, “I’d like to know why, if dancing is such a sin, men can do it.” After a series of such affronts to his dignity, Rohani grew exasperated. He gave up on the villagers and went home to Qom (Hegland, 186–187).
Sources:
Abrahamian, Evand (2008) A History of Modern Iran. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.
Alavi, Nasrin (2005) We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. Raincoast Books, Vancouver.
Ansary, Nina (2015) Jewels of Allah. Ravela Press, Los Angeles.
Axworthy, Michael (2008) A History of Iran: Empire of the Mind. Basic Books, New York.
Axworthy, Michael (2013) Revolutionary Iran: A History of the Islamic Republic. Oxford University Press, Oxford.
Buchan, James (2012) Days of God: The Revolution in Iran and Its Consequences. Simon & Schuster, New York.
Hegland, Mary Elaine (1983) “Aliabad Women: Revolution as Religious Activity,” in Nashat, Guity (ed.), Women and Revolution in Iran. Westview Press, Boulder, CO.
Milani, Farzaneh (1992) Veils and Words: The Emerging Voices of Iranian Women Writers. Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY.
Moghissi, Haideh (1999) Islamic Fundamentalism: The Limits of Postmodern Analysis. Zed Books, London.
Sahimi, Muhammad (2010, April 15) “Iranian Women and the Struggle for Democracy.” PBS Frontline, Tehran Bureau.
Sedghi, Hamideh (2007) Women and Politics in Iran: Veiling, Unveiling, and Reveiling. Cambridge University Press, New York.
Sullivan, Zoreh T. (1998) “Eluding the Feminist, Overthrowing the Modern? Transformation in Twentieth-Century Iran.” In Abu-Lughod, Lila (ed.), Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
Excerpted from MOTHER PERSIA, by Brian Griffith.