Women in Iran

Shorn of dignity and equality
Oct 16th 2003 | GHAZVIN AND TEHRAN
From The Economist




Iranian women are proud of the lawyer (above, at the centre) who has won the Nobel prize. But her reformist approach has not done much to improve their lot

SHIRIN EBADI, this year's winner of the Nobel peace prize, is the sort of woman?assertive, severe and frighteningly well-versed in Islamic and western law?that Iran's conservative establishment cannot stand. A judge under the monarchy, she did not follow colleagues to overseas refuge after the revolution, but stayed on as an advocate, fighting cases of political murder, repression and domestic violence. A defender of Islam, she wrote learnedly about women's and children's rights under Islamic law. She lost most of her high-profile cases, but survived. Overnight, she has become a celebrity.

Ms Ebadi, who has always argued that Iran must solve its own problems, returned home this week from a visit to Paris to find hardline newspapers charging her, yet again, with supposed links with foreign powers. One paper surmised that devious America had influenced the Nobel committee's decision. Her celebrity will probably protect her from a repeat of the short prison term she served in 2000, but not from the restrictions and dangers that dog all Iranian women who struggle for their rights.

It has been a bad summer for assertive women. A female journalist was slain in custody (true to form, Ms Ebadi has let it be known that she will represent the dead woman's Canadian-Iranian family). A young mother was sentenced to death for killing her would-be rapist; her mode of dress had, the judge believed, ?prepared the ground for her rape?. Four women were given suspended prison sentences for disseminating contentious ideas about women in Islam. Iran's appointed upper house, the Council of Guardians, vetoed the country's adherence to the UN's 1981 convention against sex discrimination. Worse still, the mass of Iranian women reacted to all this with indifference.

Women were at the forefront of the 1979 revolution that toppled the monarchy, although they had not done so badly out of the shah. Under his rule, women got the vote, polygamy was, in effect, outlawed and the divorce laws were egalitarian. If anything, the state was too permissive for most tastes; the elite gyrated in bikinis to Shirley Bassey, and swam in pools full of milk. The revolution promised women dignity, as well as equality.
A quarter of a century on, they have neither. Rather than the flexible jurisprudence to which Shia Islam lends itself, and which Ms Ebadi champions, Iran's Islamic Republic has promoted what Farideh Gheirat, a leading women's lawyer, calls a ?bone-dry version?. Lawmakers and judges reinstated polygamy, made it virtually impossible for women to divorce without their husband's consent, and condemned adulteresses to be stoned to death. The intrusion that offends foreigners the most, the compulsory head covering, is a minor irritant.
Iranians' patriarchal mind-set, says Ms Gheirat, is as constricting as the fustian legalism. Many official buildings do not admit women without a black chador, even though Islam has nothing against bright colours, and a coat and headscarf can be concealing. Only in the teeth of vociferous opposition did women win the right to ride a bicycle in public.

Healthy, well-educated and abandoned

But Iranian women have the Islamic Republic to thank for two things: health and education. After a baby boom in the 1980s, family planning reduced the national fertility rate to two. Women live to 72, two years longer than men. In 1975, women's illiteracy in rural areas was 90%, and more than 45% in towns. Now, the nationwide literacy rate for girls aged between 15 and 24 has risen to 97%. Last year, for the first time, female students in state universities outnumbered male ones.

There is disagreement over the responsibilities that society should assign to these healthy, well-qualified girls. The state-approved role model is Fatima Zahra, the Prophet Muhammad's daughter, but different people concentrate on different facets of her life. Progressives recall her active politics, in the vanguard of Islam's efforts to fight injustice. Traditionalists highlight other qualities: her piety, chastity, devotion to God, even her housework.
We don't have one model for all women, says Fakhrolsadat Mohtashamipour, the head of women's affairs at the Interior Ministry, but the law regards men as the rightful breadwinner. Friday prayer leaders counsel women to concentrate on raising children. Senior clerics assert that a woman needs her husband's permission even to go shopping.

With inflation running at more than 15%, few families can survive on one income. But the economy is not generating enough jobs to absorb educated women. The most recent available figures, from 1999, showed that 10% of women were part of the workforce, 3% less than the proportion in 1972. Although unemployment is high across the board, it is much higher among women than men. Senior positions in the civil service are overwhelmingly a man's preserve. And since it is not uncommon for male bureaucrats to use spurious sexual slurs as a means of keeping uppity female colleagues in their place, some women prefer not to work in government offices that are male dominated.

Indeed, a lot of young women are not offended by the idea that Iran is churning out overqualified housewives. The majority, says Mahdiyeh Ghafelbashi, who helps run the Association for Tomorrow's Women, an NGO in the city of Ghazvin, two hours from Tehran, subscribe to their grandmothers' view that men should bring home the loot and protect them. As elsewhere in provincial Iran?as distinct from Tehran awareness of women's issues among Ghazvin's 350,000 residents is virtually nil. At a recent exhibition to publicise the city's new NGOs, Ms Ghafelbashi's activities were met by incomprehension by local women. Unless there was money in it,? she recalls, they couldn't understand the point. Even so, she insists, a historical process is in train.
There are ten universities in Ghazvin province, which has about 1m inhabitants, and they provide an environment for boys and girls to mingle that exists nowhere else. Gone are the days when a curtain divided male and female students. Now, young Ghazvinis grade universities according to the tolerance they show in allowing the sexes to mix.

Conservative-minded university chancellors used to cite Fatima Zahra's pious aphorism: The best thing for a woman is not to see, and not to be seen by, an unrelated man. But they are now fighting a losing battle to prevent boys and girls socialising on campus. Progressives at the city's three private universities have reined in the snoops that used to monitor student morals. They concede that allowing a boy and a girl to share a lunchtime sandwich may not be so terrible after all.

Small freedoms have a knock-on effect. Ms Ghafelbashi says that quite a few girls in the province are now marrying boys of their own choice, rather than their parents'. A decade ago, she says, that was virtually unheard of. Some parents feel threatened. In a recent tragic case, a father in Shiraz, a southern province, forbade his daughter from taking up the MA place she had won. The girl immolated herself.

The journey to emancipation would be less daunting if there were a consensus among politicians on the need. But there is no such consensus. Along with much else, the issue of women's rights has become a football, punted between the relatively progressive reformists, led by President Muhammad Khatami (who himself belittled Ms Ebadi's achievement in winning the peace prize), and his traditionalist, conservative opponents.
Punted rather gently: the reformists are not great goal-scorers. Prayer leaders on good terms with the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, fulminated from their pulpits against the UN's anti-discrimination convention, which was, in the words of a senior ayatollah, ?a pretext by westerners to impose their culture on Muslims.? But even if the Council of Guardians had endorsed parliament's decision to sign the convention, the result would have still been a sham. The parliamentarians had ruled that Iran would opt out of all obligations that conflicted with Iranian law.

Iran's custom-made convention would have been shorn of commitments to equality of employment: women are not eligible for the supreme leadership, certain ministries, or to become judges (Ms Ebadi's appointment was swiftly withdrawn after the revolution). Articles on marriage and inheritance would have been binned: the law puts women at a severe disadvantage in both. Even the blandest commitment to equality would have been fatally undermined by the setting, according to Iranian law, of a man's blood money at twice the level of a woman's.
Shadi Sadr, a courageous and talented female newspaper columnist, distinguishes between two groups fighting for women's rights. First, there are those who believe that piecemeal legal reform, underpinned by an enlightened approach to Shia jurisprudence, can solve women's problems. She puts Ms Ebadi, who insists on the essential compatibility of Islam and human rights, into this category. Second, there is the more radical group that ?takes issue less with laws than with the whole legal superstructure?.

It is hard for the second group to speak out: expressing their beliefs might get them thrown into jail. But the first group?which includes reformist parliamentarians and Mr Khatami himself?has achieved little. Parliament's progress, in its three-way slugging match with the Council of Guardians and the marginally more progressive arbitration body, the Expediency Council, has been modest. After wrangling, the marriageable age for girls was raised from nine to 13. The mehriyeh, a pre-fixed sum that women receive on demand from their husbands, has been linked to inflation. Girls can now get grants to help them study abroad; before, there were fears that the experience would corrupt them.

The Expediency Council tends to echo the Council of Guardians. It did so when it spiked parliament's plan to award a temporary stipend to widows, disadvantaged by inheritance laws, from their late husbands' estates. It agreed with the Council of Guardians that husbands should retain their all but unassailable right to custody over their children.

Ms Mohtashamipour's office in the Interior Ministry, staffed by women, and with a dress code that tolerates jolly colours, is one of the less overpowering government departments. She talks seductively of ?empowerment?. In this year's budget, the government gave her department a big dollop of extra cash, and obliged provincial governors to devote 0.25% of their budgets to ?women's affairs?.

The free marriage-guidance and vocational classes being offered by Ms Mohtashamipour and her colleagues in the provinces seem only modestly enlightened. But the advantage of their blandness is that they might survive if the conservatives took over the government again. Moreover, cautious as they are, they constitute an encroachment by the state into areas of feminine life that were off limits.

At the same time, the reformists are trying to help NGOs whose goals may be much more radical. According to Mahboobeh Abbasgholizadeh, who trains NGO activists, Iran has gained some 150 women's NGOs in the past few years. It will take time, she accepts, for the organisations to become effective advocates. With a few exceptions, they are little more than talking shops for young women: ?a way for these girls to express their own identity, to announce: I'm here'.''

They have a precarious toehold. The law is ambiguous on who should register NGOs, the legality of their accepting foreign money, and their tax status. They are deeply vulnerable to the conservatives' fear of civil society. The newly-elected Tehran municipality, which is dominated by conservatives, recently expelled Ms Abbasgholizadeh and several NGOs from the building that the previous, reform-minded, municipality had lent them.

Six years after Mr Khatami came to power with an overwhelming majority of women's votes, some women, even in parliament, suspect that the reformists are more interested in women's votes than in women's rights. The president, they point out, did not see fit to appoint a woman to his cabinet (before the revolution, there were two female ministers). His most forceful intervention on behalf of women, when he insisted that the judiciary introduce a moratorium on stoning adulteresses to death, was obviously motivated by a desire to improve Iran's image abroad.

A cracked society

The scene for women is gloomy, the pace of change sluggish. Even professed reformists are reluctant to challenge patriarchal attitudes. Beyond this, it is perfectly possible that the reformists will lose their dominance of parliament at next year's elections, when the expected disqualification of reformist candidates, and a low voter turnout, may favour conservatives. Against this dispiriting backdrop are the more immediate, and more shocking, incidents of female degradation.

It is a tribute to Mr Khatami, and to his genuine, if feebly advocated, commitment to transparency, that such subjects as prostitution, domestic violence and drug addiction are being discussed at all. Before 1997, they were taboo. Nonetheless, so long as the transparency is not accompanied by plans to tackle the ills, the impression will grow of a cracked society.

Shoukou Navabi-Nejad, a north Tehran family psychologist, sees the cracks in her middle-class patients. Familiar western complaints domestic violence, infidelity and fear of AIDS are multiplied. The erosion of family values has had a western consequence: a third of all marriages end in divorce, whereas 15 years ago, Ms Navabi-Nejad recalls, divorce was a rarity.Yet very few judges are sympathetic to female divorce petitioners. In order to secure their husbands' consent to divorce, women are often forced to barter away their mehriyeh: assets that should, in theory, help them start up on their own.

Many of the problems noted by Ms Navabi-Nejad are exacerbated by a sexual frustration that is writ large across society. No one knows how many prostitutes work in Tehran, though their visibility on street corners suggests that there are tens of thousands. There is agreement on three things: most prostitutes are runaways from poor and broken homes, they are getting more numerous and their age is falling.

A journalist from a magazine called Zanan (women) recently conducted a remarkable interview with a 17-year-old prostitute. Arrested in Tehran's southern bus terminal, the girl was condemned to 80 lashes and to a fine that was commuted, when she pleaded penury, to a three-month prison term. Upon her release, her brother tried to kill her for staining the family honour. In a year or two, she will be past her prime, and alone.
The few NGO activists who work with prostitutes attest to the government's inability to deal with the problem. Women's prisons are full to bursting. Tehran's previous mayor stopped providing money for the capital's sole rehabilitation centre for female runaways. The new mayor, a conservative, has no plans to restart it.
Even if the government was co-ordinating attempts to wean girls off prostitution, says Khosro Mansuriyan, who runs two NGOs in Tehran, they would fail. Why should young prostitutes quit a well-paid profession, he asks, when poverty awaits and they are already outcasts? The causes of decay are as much economic as they are social and legal. Ghar Park, in south Tehran, provides a snapshot of this decay. Designed to raise the spirits of poor Tehranis, it has been colonised by drug addicts. One female addict estimates she has spent 18 of the past 24 years in jail. Being inside is bad, she says; the heroin is more expensive.

Looking for a role model

It is a far cry from Fatima Zahra. In these confusing times, the prophet's daughter faces stiff competition for women's loyalty, especially among the 19% of the population that is female and aged between 10 and 25. Zanan recently ran a flattering profile of Hillary Clinton. Some girls like Madonna, in part because her music is banned. Iran's most talked-about young movie directors, two siblings by the name of Makhmalbof, are women. Comely actresses abound.

Iranian women, even many who are indifferent to her causes, are intensely proud of Ms Ebadi's achievement. But do not expect her to become a role model. Despite a dash of radicalism?she goes bare-headed outside Iran?she remains wedded to the cautious reformism that is espoused by Mr Khatami and his supporters. And that, many believe, has failed. A small but growing number of women are coming to reject the legal superstructure to which Ms Ebadi is committed.

Take the increasing interest being shown in the poetry of Forogh Farokhzad. In the 1960s, Ms Farokhzad was a beautiful hell-raiser who had an affair with Iran's hippest film director. Shortly before her legend-sealing death in a car crash in 1966, she observed that social change had endowed concepts like religion, morals and love with new meanings. Forty years on, expressing such revisionism can get you jailed, but the judges are powerless to stop lots of young women from agreeing.