Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (18 page)

The teacher’s comment about lying echoes a theme that many Iranians find in the disconnect between public standards and private behavior. The lying, the compulsion to beat the system in the name of freedom, the insecurity that comes from not knowing when the state might intrude into a private space all create anger. The feeling is just under the surface, but it can explode unexpectedly.

I saw it while driving with a young married couple from the Caspian Sea to Tehran in a snowstorm late one night in the New Year season. Just a few days earlier, Ayatollah Mohammad Yazdi, then the conservative head of Iran’s judiciary, had given a sermon warning the overzealous not to invade people’s private spaces in the name of Islam. “No one can violate the people’s personal sphere without a legal permit thus causing insecurity; this includes their homes, their cars, and their offices or places of business,” he said.

But prices were high and petty corruption seemed worse than at any time since the revolution. The poorly paid security forces needed money for new clothing for their children for the New Year. Our car was stopped by three security officers in uniforms of indeterminate origin. They ordered an inspection of the car. We complied. Then they demanded proof of marriage from the couple with whom I was driving. The man was ready to show them their identity papers. But it was too much for his wife. Though normally serene, she just couldn’t take it anymore. “You have no right to search our car!” she screamed at one of the guards. “Ayatollah Yazdi said it himself. Didn’t you hear him?”

“Ayatollah Yazdi has no control over this road,” the guard sneered. “Now show me your papers.”

The husband handed over the papers. We were allowed to drive on. But the wife was still raging. “After all these years someone has to stop them!” she screamed at her husband. “Sheep! Sheep! My mother and her generation were like sheep, letting people like this come into our lives whenever they wanted.I won’t be a sheep!”

C H A P T E R   S I X

Sir, Have You Ever Beaten Your Wife?

Persian women since 1907 had become almost at a bound the most progressive not to say radical in the world. That this statement upsets the ideas of centuries makes no difference. It is the fact.

— MORGAN SHUSTER, THE AMERICAN FINANCIAL ADVISER TO THE IRANIAN GOVERNMENT IN THE EARLY TWENTIETH CENTURY

Islam made women equal with men; in fact, it shows a concern for women that it does not show for men.

— AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI, ADDRESSING WOMEN IN QOM ON MARCH 6, 1979

Khatami is talking about the rule of law. Everyone is talking about the rule of law. We will only have the rule of law in Iran on the day that women are treated the same as men under the law.

— SHIRIN EBADI, HUMAN RIGHTS LAWYER AND THE FIRST FEMALE JUDGE DURING THE OLD REGIME

A
ZAM TALEGHANI
not a sheep.

A mother of four in her fifties, she is so traditionally Islamic that she wears black on black—a black chador, with black hose and sensible black shoes. She is an open, generous sort, with a sharp sense of humor and an inability to be on time. Her bad back (and probably her being overweight) causes her to waddle slightly when she walks. Her passion is so great that she can ramble on and on well past midnight, but she uses only her right hand to gesture because her left keeps her chador firmly in place under her chin. Once when I arrived at a conference in Cyprus minus my suitcase she offered to lend me part of her wardrobe. “You look better in a scarf anyway,” she said.

But Taleghani has both pedigree and name recognition. She is the daughter of the late Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, who was one of the most celebrated and progressive clerics of the twentieth century and was almost as important as Ayatollah Khomeini in his day. Soon after the success of the revolution, Ayatollah Taleghani warned of a return to despotism, as he opposed the intrusion of the clergy into politics and Khomeini’s vision of the all-powerful Supreme Leader. Massive demonstrations in Taleghani’s name in Tehran shortly after the revolution threatened to plunge the country into chaos. Khomeini summoned Taleghani to Qom, and he emerged from their meeting a humbled man. I saw him on television, his face pale, his eyes studiously avoiding the camera, as he declared his unconditional loyalty to Khomeini. Afterward, Khomeini gloated that Taleghani was “sorry for what had happened.” The demonstrations for Taleghani subsided and he kept quiet about politics until his death the following September. The official line was that he had died in his sleep. Some of his supporters claimed that the electricity and phone lines to his home had been cut on the night of his death and that he had been poisoned.

Azam Taleghani is not the silent type. Her father had taught her how to think—and to argue. “Women have many skills and potential for growth, but even they themselves don’t realize their skills and their rights,” he would tell her. Even though she first started wearing a chador when she was six, she threw it off in a fit of rebellion as a young woman, daring to go out in public unveiled. Years later, she reveled in recounting how she debated the issue with her father, who told her she had to make up her own mind. Eventually—years before the Islamic revolution—she made the choice to return to the veil. She also turned to politics. Her clandestine activities distributing literature against the monarchy landed her in prison for two years, and helped win her a seat in Parliament after the revolution, where she incurred the wrath of many clerics by speaking out against the stoning of women.

Now Taleghani earns money from a small clothing-making operation in Tehran, whose headquarters also serve as a classroom for a Koran-reading and -interpreting night school—for women only. For nearly twenty years she published an outspoken weekly newspaper called
Payam-e Hajar
that challenged the clerical—and patriarchal male—interpretation of Islam. From the moment I met Taleghani in her classroom one evening, I liked her. She was suffering from a dreadful cold, but obviously didn’t believe in antihistamines or bed rest. So she coughed and wheezed and blew her nose loudly as her students stumbled through the dense Koran reading in Arabic, offering textual analysis in between. Even though it was late, she invited me to stay as she slurped down a medicinal soup of herbs. Her mission with her informal school, she explained, was simple: “to give women the intellectual tools to flourish in the Islamic Republic.” She didn’t like it at all that the brand-new seminary in Qom, Mofid University, had a student body of five hundred men and no women. That’s why she had started training women herself.

Then, in 1997, she shook up the status quo even more. She tried to run for President.

“I didn’t want to become President,” Taleghani confessed that evening. “I didn’t have any claim on the job. What I wanted to do was seize an opportunity, to crystallize the issue in the mind of the nation.”

Taleghani is one of the new power women of Iran—a small, elite group with impeccable Islamic credentials, loyal daughters of the revolution who have entered the fluid, treacherous battlefield of Iranian politics to negotiate ever so carefully for change. Fearless, she had been repeatedly threatened by vigilantes loyal to the conservative clerics. But when she decided to run for President, Iran’s clerics had no choice but to take her seriously.

The role of women has always been one of the most vexing issues for the Islamic Republic. Just as race is the great problem for American democracy, gender is the fault line of the Islamic world, as women struggle at different stages and at different speeds both to push beyond the confines of the veil and to use the veil to enter the public domain.

Given the harsh treatment of women in much of the Islamic world, it is understandable that Iran’s clerics would seek to rehabilitate their country’s image around the world by celebrating the centrality of their women. Women make up 25 percent of Iran’s labor force and half of the university population. They drive their own cars, buy and sell their own property, and run their own businesses. They keep their own names at marriage. The roots of these rights date from the constitutional movement of the early twentieth century, when women began to demand more rights, and later from the rule of Reza Shah, who expanded education and employment opportunities for women.

Most important, women vote in elections and hold political office. In 1999, when Iran held the first town council elections since the revolution, some Iranians told me that they voted for certain candidates simply because they were women. (In the city of Qazvin, eighty miles from Tehran, for example, a 25-year-old woman came in first.) But women in political life have a long way to go. In 2000, a smaller percentage of women were elected to Iran’s 290-seat Parliament than had been four years before, and women have yet to enjoy a significant presence in the decision-making circles of government.

Unlike many other Islamic countries, Iran has an active family planning program, and birth control is widely available. Women are out on the streets early and late; they catch buses and communal taxis to school and work at 6:00
A.M
., and they shop for food at 3:00
A.M
. in twenty-four-hour supermarkets. In countries like Saudi Arabia and Kuwait, most of these rights are denied to women.

Despite the Western perception of Iranian women as backward and oppressed, Azam Taleghani and others like her are very much of the modern political world. The declaration of Taleghani’s candidacy forced a serious debate on a key provision of Iran’s Constitution, which said that only a
rajol
—a respected person of consequence—could run. In Arabic, the word is masculine, but Taleghani argued that in Persian its meaning is not so clear. So Taleghani went knocking on the doors of religious scholars in Tehran and Qom who had been drafters of the 1979 Constitution, seeking opinions on whether she might be considered a
rajol
. They debated for hours over endless cups of tea. Eventually, she came to her own conclusion: she was, indeed, a
rajol
.

“Some of the clerics said that women absolutely could not become President,” she told me. “But one ayatollah said that men and women, and, I’m sorry, even hermaphrodites could become President.”

Some ayatollahs argued that in theory women could become judges, clerics, or even Supreme Leader, but that the presidency was different. Others, claiming ignorance, said they could only set aside the matter for later. One ayatollah declared that women should be invisible from public life altogether. “Word got around Qom that Miss Taleghani, the daughter of the late Ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, was asking these questions,” she said. “While I was at the home of one ayatollah, the phone rang. It was another cleric who said, ‘Please tell her the word
rajol
means man and only man.’ That proved I had caused quite a stir!”

When one ayatollah said that such a high-level, high-pressure job “destroys women and puts too much pressure on their nerves,” that was too much for Taleghani. As a young mother, she had spent time in the Shah’s prisons and even now remains the primary caregiver for one of her children, who is severely disabled. “I pointed out that running a household, earning a living, and raising children is not exactly an easy job,” she said.

In the end, the Guardian Council disqualified Taleghani from running, as it disqualified most of the potential presidential candidates. Still, she looked on the exercise as a success. “I was told I wasn’t a religious and political personality and that was why I couldn’t run for President,” she said. “But it was a victory. I was not disqualified because I was a woman. That proves that a woman can run for President.”

Her battle was not over. She tried to run for Parliament in the 2000 elections—as she had tried every election cycle since her first term in Parliament—but was again rejected by the Guardian Council. The assumption was that her rejection was not because of gender but because of her long affiliation with the Freedom Movement co-founded by her father to oppose the monarchy half a century ago. Despite the expansion of Iran’s political landscape, members of the movement were banned from running for public office.

When I first came to Iran, black-clad women like Azam Taleghani all seemed the same: scary, unsmiling servants of the ayatollahs. Monireh Gorji, the only woman in the Assembly of Experts that wrote the Constitution in the summer of 1979, was a model revolutionary woman. She told Iranian women that their freedom would come only through Islamic law. “I am the slave of God,” she mumbled from behind the black garment that hid even her chin and mouth.

But over the years, I have come to realize that a sustained and creative ideological war is being waged by Iranian women, whether they wear black chadors or Western dress topped with a small kerchief. I also have realized that I have something in common even with the sour-faced women who bodily frisk me at airports and the entrances to government buildings. We are all working women, many of us working mothers. So I smile at them and ask about the health of their families; I shake their hands; I show them pictures of my kids. Eventually they start smiling back. Their battles mirror the battles of women everywhere: to balance their public and private lives and attain a better quality of life for themselves and their children.

As sweeping as it was, the revolution did not wipe out the Westernized, secularized society built up by the Shah, in which women had begun to play an important role. Many secular professional women fled the country; many others lost their power and jobs; some even lost their lives. But many stayed behind. They had fought for more equality and legal rights and they were not about to relinquish their hard-won gains. They forged an uneasy peace with the new rulers, continuing to function as doctors, lawyers, academics, writers, and businesswomen.