Iranian Women Protesters Strategize Against Violent Repression

An Iranian grandmother reading the Koran. Photo © Ahmad Khatiri, www.flickr.com/people/ahmadkhatiri

In early June, Zanestan, an Iran-based online journal, announced a rally in Haft Tir Square, one of Tehran's busiest, to protest legal discrimination suffered by Iranian women. The demonstration was also called to commemorate the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, when women agitated for emancipation, as well as the June 12, 2005 women's rally for revision of the constitution of the Islamic Republic. According to Zanestan, the June 12, 2006 reprise would raise specific demands: a ban on polygamy, equal rights to divorce for women and men, joint custody of children after divorce, equal rights in marriage, an increase in the minimum legal age of marriage for girls to 18, and equal rights for women as witnesses. The protesters would call for redress of the gender inequalities embedded in the dominant interpretations of Islamic law upon which the constitution is based.

With conservative hardliners in control of the legislative, executive and judicial authorities, even to plan such an event was an act of great courage — or, some might say, foolhardiness. Several prominent reformist women, and some of the activists who had organized the 2005 rally, questioned the wisdom of a repeat performance in the current atmosphere. In their view, the confrontation with the United States over the nuclear issue, like Saddam Hussein's 1980 invasion, provides the hardliners with a pretext for blaming internal dissent on an outside enemy, so as to suppress it violently. Their names did not appear on the list of supporters.

The police did indeed forcibly stop the rally before it started, but does the fact that the rally was organized at all portend a major change in the gender politics of the Islamic Republic, marked by increasing activism by educated, middle-class women? Will these women now be able to carry Iranian women's century-old struggle for equal rights to fruition? What are the issues at stake?

History's Irony

Educated, middle-class women participated in the 1978-1979 revolution, like other Iranian women, not with specific "women's" objectives but as part of different political and social forces. Those who belonged to secular, leftist and nationalist groups opposed to the Shah's regime were marginalized soon after the revolution, but they did make themselves heard on March 8, 1979. On that International Women's Day, thousands of women marched in Tehran and Shiraz to inveigh against the discriminatory laws being introduced by the new Islamic Republic. The marches were organized to register activists' objections to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's call on women employed in government offices to observe "Islamic hejab," and to the dismantling of the 1967 Family Protection Law that had placed women more or less on the same footing as men in access to divorce and child custody. Religious zealots attacked the marchers, accusing them of following the West's agenda. But the protest was so large that the provisional government had to reassure women that they had misunderstood Khomeini's message. There was no plan for compulsory veiling, they said, and they promised to set up new family courts.

But the respite was temporary. Islamist ideology was ascendant, and the onset of war with Iraq in September 1980 effectively silenced critics of the new order. In due course, hejab was indeed made mandatory, and gender discrimination was written into the constitution of the post-revolutionary state. Many of the women who organized that first rally were executed, imprisoned or hounded into exile. Most of those who remained were forced into uneasy quiescence. Women loyal to the new regime's Islamist ideology assumed the mantle of promoting women's rights and managed to modify the harsher edges of some laws and tone down the official gender rhetoric.

In the early 1990s, secular women activists began to add their voices to emerging dissent among religious-minded women, but it was another decade before they could again protest in public against gender discrimination in the law. Meanwhile, much has changed in Iranian society. The population is far more educated than before the revolution. Literacy is at around 80 percent nationwide, and over 90 percent among those below the age of 25. There are 22 million students, around 3 million enrolled in universities, and over half of these are women. As the state's Islamist ideology has lost its lustre, society has experienced a form of "secularization" from below and given birth to what is now openly referred to as "Islamic feminism." It is history's irony that the revolution that brought the clerics into power also sowed the seeds of a new intellectual and popular movement for the separation of the institution of religion from that of the state, if not of faith from politics.

Speaking Truth to Power

The presidential elections of 2005 presented women activists with a window of opportunity.

The political temperature in June 2005 was exceptionally high. Mohammad Khatami's two terms as president, and the tug of war between the reformists within the system and their opponents, had lifted taboos. A burgeoning, if fragile civil society had emerged. Shirin Ebadi's Nobel Peace Prize had lent confidence and hope to women activists. These activists regularly celebrated March 8 as Women's Day, organizing seminars, lectures and events to which reformist women in Parliament (in Persian, Majles) or government ministries were sometimes invited. Khatami had created a Center for Women's Participation, headed by Vice President Zahra Shoja'i, who encouraged the formation of women's NGOs. The number of registered women's NGOs rose from 67 in 1997 to 480 in 2005. The reformist-dominated Sixth Majles (2000-2004) passed many bills in women's favor, though most — including the proposal to ratify the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) — were rejected by the Guardian Council, the unelected clerical body constitutionally empowered to vet legislation for adherence to "Islamic" principles. The most profound changes, however, were happening in society at large, the most visible being the relaxation of the dress code, the "Islamic hejab" that was imposed upon all women in 1983. Colorful and stylish outfits made their way back into the streets, and unwritten gender segregation rules were broken.

Then, in February 2004, the Guardian Council and Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei made sure that the Seventh Majles returned to conservative control. All 12 women deputies, with one exception, are conservatives intent on reversing the gender policies of the reformists. They have vowed not to tolerate the discussion of women's rights outside the framework of Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh) and to fight against laxity in hejab. The only bill that these women have so far introduced is one to establish "National Dress."

Against this backdrop, and just five days before the first round of the presidential elections, a coalition of women's rights activists rallied against the systemic legislated discrimination against women. The June 12 event was preceded by two smaller protests. On June 1, a coalition of religious and secularist women activists staged a sit-in in front of the president's office to protest the ban on women running for president. And on June 9 one hundred younger women activists forced their way into Azadi Stadium to watch the second half of an Iran-Bahrain soccer game, in effect breaking the ban on admitting women to matches.

But the June 12 rally took women's demands to a different level, framing the issue as a constitutional problem. Many argued for a boycott of the elections and a referendum to change the constitution. This made prominent women reformists in government and in political parties wary of supporting them. These women still hoped that change could come through elections.

The coalition of women activists who organized the June 2005 rally, however, saw the time as ripe for divorcing women's struggle for equality from dependence on the political fortunes of men of power.

The activists were prepared to take the risk of turning their back on the state. Thus the rally became the official birth of what they proclaimed as "the women's movement." Estimates of the numbers gathered on June 12 in front of Tehran University vary from a few hundred to several thousand. The rally started peacefully but soon the paramilitary forces that had surrounded the women started to close in, provoking anti-regime slogans from bystanders. The women protesters sat down, chanting an anthem written for the occasion, but the paramilitary forces eventually succeeded in dispersing the protesters, though none were arrested. All this took place under the eyes of the international media in Iran to cover the elections. Statements that were not read out loud at the protest were posted on women's websites, celebrating the birth of an independent women's movement. The experience enhanced the women activists' confidence, and they resolved to continue their peaceful protests until their demands for legal equality were met.

Enter Ahmadinejad

Few of the women at the rally anticipated the result of the first round of the presidential elections: the two (out of seven) candidates who survived to compete in the second round were the former president, the old clerical autocrat Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, and the unknown hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Some women activists joined a spontaneous campaign in support of Rafsanjani, but it was too late.

While the other candidates had vied for the female vote, Ahmadinejad, was silent on women's rights. Asked whether he would have a female minister in his cabinet, all he said was: "We are all part of a nation and should not have a 'gender gaze'; the most suitable person should be chosen. Discrimination [based on gender] has negative consequences in different realms." The statement was highly ambiguous. If read as liberal and modern, it contradicted the gender ideology of the president's political base, the radical anti-reformists Coalition of Developers (Abadgaran).

Restrictions on celebrating March 8, which the reformists had relaxed, were reinstated for 2006. A few small-scale gatherings took place, but police and paramilitary forces broke up a March 8 meeting organized by women activists in a central Tehran park where some women were beaten. The women injured that day have launched a formal complaint, and are being represented by Shirin Ebadi. The case has not yet been heard.

With the onset of summer, hejab, and women's presence in public, once again became major issues.

But this was merely the annual ritual of official threats and conservative consternation over the loosening strictures on women's attire. Since the late 1990s, this ritual begins in early summer and fades as the heat sets in. What was different in 2006 was that proponents of compulsory hejab, who had blamed the reformists for not punishing "immodest" women, now argued for "cultural means" to deal with the problem. Ahmadinejad joined the chorus, and the police came up with a new strategy. Male police, accompanied by female colleagues, used persuasion rather than force -- they merely stopped women and issued warnings, as well as guidance toward "the right path."

On April 24, with the seasonal ritual in full swing, Ahmadinejad wrote to the head of the Sports Organization, directing him to make provision for the admission of women to soccer stadiums as spectators. "(W)idespread presence of women and families in public places [ensures] that social health, morals and chastity become dominant in these places," he wrote.

Women activists gave the directive a cautious welcome. In an April 29 editorial on the front page of the reformist daily Sharq, Shadi Sadr, a lawyer and women's rights activist, pointed out that women had first demanded access to stadiums, like other public spaces, during Rafsanjani's presidency in the 1990s. This demand had only become a problem for the authorities during the past two years, when women activists assembled in front of stadiums during matches to assert that entry was their right as citizens. Sadr stressed that, to achieve their rights, women must generate political will, women's rights activists should therefore applaud Ahmadinejad's directive, as, regardless of his motives, it indicates his need to expand his constituency to urban middle-class strata. Women could end up as winners in this political game, Sadr concluded.

Meanwhile, four religious authorities (maraje) issued fatwas forbidding women's admission to soccer matches, even if they sit in separate sections apart from men. The fatwas unleashed a flurry of responses and counter-responses in the press and on websites, which brought to the surface differences of opinion among the clerics and the hardliners, and the unsoundness of the arguments of those for whom gender segregation and strict observance of hejab are the only guarantee of public morality.

For a week, the president remained silent and let his cultural advisers defend his position. Then, on May 1, the Leader brought the debate to an abrupt end, urging the president to respect the opinion of the maraje'. By mid-May, the affair was over. But women with short trousers, narrow scarves and tight, hip-length tunics were going about their business in Tehran as usual, and their war of attrition with the authorities went on as before.

The suspension of Ahmadinejad's directive on stadiums, and the reversal of his earlier position on hejab, indicate both the limits of his power and the authorities' recognition of their need to come to terms with society today. Both the discourse and the practice of hejab went through profound transformations during the reformist era, and even hardliners like Ahmadinejad, when in office, have to adjust to contemporary realities.

In current reformist discourse, hejab is not seen as a woman's "duty," but as her "right." Many reformists oppose compulsory hejab on religious grounds, as it can have meaning and value only when a woman has the right to choose it freely. Women's access to soccer games is not yet an urgent issue, although at every major match, many young girls manage to get in by dressing as boys.

A Difficult Road Ahead

The June 12, 2006 rally never got off the ground. A day earlier, some of the organizers were summoned by security officers and warned that, if they went ahead with their plan, they would be met with force. They went ahead. A group of 20 to 30 women managed to get to the small park where the rally was due to gather, but as they started to chant the feminist anthem composed for the 2005 rally, they were chased away. Some were beaten, and a judicial spokesman confirmed on June 14 that over 70 arrests were made. All this was carried out by members of the newly created female police force, who grabbed protesters by the hair, squirted pepper spray in their faces, handcuffed them and beat them with batons before dragging them to the police vans. Protesters did not even get a chance to display their placards reading "Misogynist law must be abolished" and "We are women, we are human beings, we are citizens of this land, but we have no rights."

With Ahmadinejad's election, gender politics in the Islamic Republic entered a new phase. The unprecedented control of all branches of the state by one faction — the one with the most retrograde views on gender — has already radicalized women's demands. The opinions of reformist clerical leaders carry no weight with the hardliners, and there are no women left within the structure of power who will promote women's rights. Islamist women activists who used to lobby the religious and political authorities, and bargain with the government and the Majles for more rights, are no longer in a position to do so. Yet women's demands for equality are as strong as ever, and secular and middle-class women have found a new voice and legitimacy. But for this voice not to be silenced once more, and for the women's movement to reach its goals, these women must foster new alliances and new strategies. In Shadi Sadr's words:

Entering a social movement is like entering a struggle where at any moment the conditions and governing rules are changing; you must be all ears and eyes, equal to your rival, able to change your methods and even your mentality, without forgetting your principles and your ideals, and without departing one step from them.

Women activists who organized the June 12 rally were not afraid of taking difficult decisions. It remains to be seen whether they were the right ones, or whether, as some activists who did not support the rally thought, they were inappropriate. They were right to frame their demands for legal equality in marriage and in society as part of women's basic rights. This framing resonates with a large majority of Iranian women, even with the female commandos who herded them into paddy wagons. But the protest organizers seem not to have done the work needed to articulate their demands in a form meaningful to ordinary women. The activists behind the rally call themselves "secular feminists" and make a conscious effort to avoid any engagement either with religious arguments or with "Islamic feminists." Likewise, if they thought that the confrontation with the US over the nuclear issue, with the consequent world media focus on Iran, would provide them with a window of opportunity, as the campaign season did the year before, they were mistaken. What the hardliners in Iran need in order to survive is an outside enemy, and the Bush administration, with its broad hints of intervention, has been playing into their hands. The movement for women's rights, like the reformist movement before it, is caught in the crossfire.

But if the nuclear crisis is resolved, and if women's rights activists play their cards well, Ahmadinejad's government might even prove useful for the movement in the long run. Either the hardliners will be tamed by the gap between their vision and reality, or they will go too far and spur new alliances among women whose common struggle became divided soon after the revolution into "Islamic" and "secular" camps. If this division ñ false, but pernicious ñ is overcome, women's rights activists will have the kind of dynamism they need in order to transform their activism from a fringe of the educated middle class into a general movement.

They have two powerful new weapons: first, the gender awareness that the Islamic Republic has unwittingly fostered, and second, cyberspace. The June 12 protest was planned and conducted via websites and blogs.

Even if, unlike in 2005, the state crushed the rally, the internet continues to disseminate worldwide the words of the protesters and images of the brutal treatment they received.