Excerpt
After the karate class, five teenagers – between them they have won championships in Qatar, Malaysia, Slovenia and Italy – describe why they love karate. Like teenage girls everywhere, they break into fits of giggles and insist that someone else answers first.
“It makes me feel really tough and strong,” says Farnaz, a bespectacled 14-year-old who wears a headscarf when she practises, even though it is not required in this women-only centre. “And it’s also good for my physical wellbeing.”
“Yeah,” chime in the other girls, laughing and prodding each other. These girls are Iran’s next generation, who travel abroad and who have dreams that don’t involve weddings, or at least not yet.
All five name maths or science as their favourite subjects. “I want to be like Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi,” says Farnaz, referring to the famous Iranian scholar from the Middle Ages, the father of chemistry and mathematics. Zakiyeh, also 14, pitches in: “I like Marie Curie.”
= = =
Girls allowed
By Anna Fifield
Published: April 18 2008 20:11 | Last updated: April 18 2008 20:11
On a dingy suburban street in southern Tehran, cats pick daintily through piles of rubbish, and black-swathed women walk past low-hanging electrical wires and graffiti-decorated walls. Anonymous among them, Zohreh fits the western image of the repressed Iranian woman. Not a strand of hair strays from her headscarf, and she tops her scarf and coat with a head-to-toe black chador.
But inside her small, immaculate apartment it becomes clear that life for Zohreh – as for the vast majority of Iranian women – is much more complicated than the western world believes. “Of course you know Iranian women normally win at home,” she laughs. A large woman, she wears her dyed brown-and-blonde hair in long layers. Her black trousers and brown patterned top are accented by a big gold pendant.
“I don’t feel restricted in any way,” she says, carefully peeling a kiwi taken from a huge fruit platter she brought out from the kitchen. “I think that everywhere in the world, even in countries where there is talk about freedom and democracy, you can always find women who are oppressed in some way. And here in Iran there are women who can equal 10 men in terms of decision-making and being strong.”
Zohreh married at 16, and a decade later remains very happy. Her parents were reluctant to see her wed at an early age. But when she set eyes on Mustafa, in a carefully engineered meeting, she knew that her neighbour’s uncle was the right husband for her. “It wasn’t only his appearance – although I really like tall men with broad chests – it was his character too,” she says. Twelve years older than Zohreh, he explained during those first meetings that they would move into one of the rooms in his two-room family house, and she would help care for his mother, who lived in the other room.
Zohreh considers herself lucky. “I have a very good relationship with my husband and I think I have a very successful marriage. We have some kind of special chemistry. He got married late because it took him that long to find the right woman.”
She would love to have a job, but her husband will not let her work anywhere she might come into contact with men. “Although my husband has some prejudices, he also wants me to make progress,” she says, describing how she has been going to hairdressing classes and will soon receive her qualification. “Mustafa says he will buy me a shop and all the equipment so that I can have my own salon. And only women could come,” she says.
What’s startling about ordinary Iranian women like Zohreh is how accepting they are of their lives. They seem to be the inheritors of an age-old, traditional way of married life. But the traditions are very modern. Iran has had a women’s movement since the mid-1800s. Bibikhatoon Astarabadi founded the first school for girls and in 1895 published Failings of Men, the first declaration of women’s rights in Iran.
Iranian women started attending university in the 1930s, gained the right to vote in 1963 – earlier than in some European countries – and were a major force in the Islamic Revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979. But the history of women in Iran is complicated. While the Shah was in power, women had more freedom and greater legal rights, but the openness in society led traditional families to keep their daughters at home because they did not want them living in that kind of modern society. With the revolution, women’s legal rights decreased markedly, and they were forced to wear the hejab, or Islamic cover. Ironically, this gave new opportunities to many young women who were previously kept at home. Veiled women from traditional families could study and work – to such an extent that women now comprise about two-thirds of university students, a level that has led to calls for quotas for men.
The hejab is the most obvious sign of the status of Iranian women. But for most women, having to cover hair and hips is the least of their worries. And so it is for me. Now that I have figured out how to keep my headscarf in place while eating and interviewing, my bigger concern is making sure I that I have the same access and opportunities as a male journalist. In the relatively short time I’ve been here, I’ve been struck by the dynamism and strength of Iranian women. Whether they are artists or government officials or everywoman like Zohreh, the people I have met have had a clear idea of what they want, and how to work around the system to get it.
Feminist activists suggest the current situation of women in Iran is part of the wider struggle to rebuild Iranian society after the trauma of the revolution and the war with Iraq in the 1980s. “Women have become like the canaries in the mine,” says Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, the bestseller about women who gathered to secretly read banned novels in the Iranian capital. “If you want to know how much society is changing, look at the women.”
Although women began to feel more relaxed during Mohammad Khatami’s reformist presidency, things have changed since the arrival of Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, who was elected president in 2005 on a pledge to revive revolutionary values and who has initiated a widespread clampdown across society.
Ahmadi-Nejad’s government has been trying to quash discussions about women’s rights and has put down demonstrations using violence. (An 80-year-old poet was beaten at one rally). Following the parliamentary election last month, Ahmadi-Nejad will have to work with a more moderate – though still overwhelmingly conservative – legislature. But women performed miserably in the parliamentary election, with only a handful making the cut in the first round in March, suggesting that the next parliament will contain even fewer women than the previous one.
In the face of violent opposition and poor representations, women’s rights campaigners have adopted new tactics, and have launched a petition that aims to collect one million signatures calling for greater rights for women. Activists won’t say how many they have collected until they get to their target number (which rather suggests that the number is still low).
Nahid Keshavarz, 34, is one of the petition’s organisers. In her apartment, over chocolates and espresso, she tells me in a mix of French and Farsi that feminism is not just the preserve of Iran’s educated elite. She comes from a normal family – her father is a farmer, her mother a housewife – in the southern city of Bushehr. It was going to university that opened her eyes to the idea of women’s rights.
Now studying for a doctorate in women’s studies in France, she says that the women’s movement has grown stronger since the clampdowns. “When Ahmadi-Nejad became president a lot of people predicted that the women’s movement would be marginalised, but over the last two years the movement has shown surprising growth,” she says.
A year ago she was arrested and put into prison for two weeks for collecting signatures in Tehran’s Laleh Park. But even prison has a positive side. “Every time one of us gets arrested, the issues of women’s legal rights are taken deeper into society,” she says. “And when I was in prison, even the guard said to me ‘Hey, you, the feminist.’ The concept of feminism has now become so widely known that even male prison guards know what it is.”
Keshavarz was in a cell with 25 women, 10 of whom had killed their husbands. “The situation of these women helped us prove our point. Most of them had been married off at very young ages and had been in violent marriages. They had come from the margins of society, but neither society nor the law protected them – so they took matters into their own hands. For all of them, the killing of their husbands was their first crime.”
Keshavarz was released, but her trial – on charges of taking action against national security by distributing propaganda against the system – goes on. The trial has never been completed: the authorities just leave it hanging, a reminder that if she puts a foot wrong, the court system could easily swing back into action. She continues to collect signatures, though she says she has to be discreet, collecting in taxis, shops and hair salons, rather than in public places.
The campaign has taken the issue of women’s rights to very remote areas, with workshops in almost 20 regional cities, from Kurdistan in the north to the remote southern provinces. “Middle-class women like me can find a way round the laws, but they are unjust and have to be changed because they are applied more strictly to women in lower classes,” Keshavarz says.
“Take polygamy. That’s not so acceptable here in Tehran but in the border regions, it’s a big issue,” she says. “I went to a village in the south of Iran and I met all these young, beautiful women who signed the campaign petition, and their first priority was to abolish polygamy because it is so widespread in that area.”
Under Iranian law, girls are considered adults at the age of nine and can be tried as an adult and sentenced to death for murder from that age (boys do not legally become adults until 15). A woman’s testimony in court is worth half that of a man’s, and if a man and a woman are injured in an accident, the man gets double the punitive damages. Women receive only half the inheritance of men, and if a man dies without having children, his entire inheritance goes to his parents, not to his wife.
Although Morocco, Egypt and Turkey provide better protection for women, Iranian women still fare better than those in many countries in the Gulf. Women here have the right to vote, to drive, and to become members of parliament.
There have been some improvements in recent years. Women have won the right to custody of children until the age of seven. Previously, custody automatically went to the father in all circumstances.
Divorce reform is now the most pressing issue for many women’s rights activists. Men still have the exclusive right to end a marriage, except in specific circumstances or if it is expressly written into the marriage contract that the woman can herself seek a divorce.
In Zohreh’s apartment I ask her about these issues. She tells me she will receive 250 gold coins if Mustafa ever divorces her. But it did not occur to her to ask for the right to call an end to the marriage. “I didn’t even think about it. I think most Iranian girls are like that when they are getting married – they are thinking about love and being together forever, not getting divorced,” she says.
. . .
In the huge Zeitoon gymnasium in western Tehran, 25 women and girls in white karate suits – many of them tied with black belts – perform their warm-up.
“Ichi, ni, san, shi,” the teacher puffs, counting in Japanese as the girls kick their legs in the air, exhaling sharply as they do so. The girls, aged seven, take their routine as seriously as the women in their early twenties, stern faces checking their posture in the mirrors that line the practice hall.
Karate is one of the most popular female sports in Iran, and one of the few women’s sports to be shown on television. (Topped with a headscarf, the karate suit constitutes good Islamic covering.)
In the gym, women with bouffant hairdos and tiny lycra outfits listen to their iPods as they run on treadmills, while mothers in full chador sit knitting, waiting for their daughters to finish working out in their sports classes.
After the karate class, five teenagers – between them they have won championships in Qatar, Malaysia, Slovenia and Italy – describe why they love karate. Like teenage girls everywhere, they break into fits of giggles and insist that someone else answers first.
“It makes me feel really tough and strong,” says Farnaz, a bespectacled 14-year-old who wears a headscarf when she practises, even though it is not required in this women-only centre. “And it’s also good for my physical wellbeing.”
“Yeah,” chime in the other girls, laughing and prodding each other. These girls are Iran’s next generation, who travel abroad and who have dreams that don’t involve weddings, or at least not yet.
All five name maths or science as their favourite subjects. “I want to be like Muhammad ibn Zakariya al-Razi,” says Farnaz, referring to the famous Iranian scholar from the Middle Ages, the father of chemistry and mathematics. Zakiyeh, also 14, pitches in: “I like Marie Curie.”
Asked about the prospect of their getting married, they shriek, almost in unison, “We’re too young.”
“There are still more important things for us to think about,” Zakiyeh says. “I’m not saying I don’t want to get married, just that it’s not an issue for us now.”
These girls in the gym represent the activists’ best hope. Political change may be hard, but demographic change is unstoppable. Seventy per cent of the 70 million population is under 30 years old. The potential collective power of young people to resist regulations they do not like – and shape their own lives in defiance of official regulations – is huge.
Young people watch bootleg DVDs of the latest Hollywood films, write blogs about their social lives and pass phone numbers through car windows during interminable traffic jams. In the wealthy suburbs of northern Tehran, women go out wearing long coats over mini-skirts and low-cut tops as they make their way to the wild parties that take place almost every night.
Mona Zandi Haghighi is a 35-year-old film director whose first film, On a Friday Afternoon, has won prizes in Germany, France, Greece and the US, as well as in Iran’s Fajr film festival. Of the recent clampdown, she says: “It is like we have returned to the period before Khatami but the difference is that people started to become more relaxed – and they won’t be able to silence them anymore.”
She’s a confident, cosmopolitan woman with short dark hair and large silver earrings, and lives a privileged existence in northern Tehran, making films in her stylish modern office during the week, and doing pilates and going to parties at the weekend. “Now people complain more, they resist more. I think the nature of our society is such that it’s very unpredictable – you can never tell what is going to happen next.”
Even forward-thinking Iranian women like Haghighi don’t disapprove of everything President Ahmadi-Nejad has done. “Some things – such as the economy and living conditions – have become worse,” she says, “and the crackdown on arts, books and films, all happened when Ahmadi-Nejad came to office. But I think some parts of it are not bad. Only someone like Ahmadi-Nejad could stand up to George Bush.”
But Azar Nafisi, the author, is optimistic – like most of the women I speak to in Iran. “Living in Iran is like the month of April – there are always periods of sunshine followed by showers,” she says. “You get through the periods of repression and closing and crackdowns. But because society is still advancing, it won’t hold: things will always be opening up again.”
Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008
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