Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (19 page)

The rights enjoyed by the professional, Western-educated female elite of Tehran under the Old Regime might not have meant much to the majority of lower-class religious women who had never stopped wearing the veil. But many of these women came into the public sphere through another avenue: the revolution. Ayatollah Khomeini, in an act that illustrates just how complex his tactics were, chose to politicize these women. In the early days, he encouraged them to leave the confines of their homes and take to the streets—with or without the permission of their husbands and fathers. And so they did, by the thousands, putting on their black chadors to confront the Shah’s army. They were joined by many secular women who demonstrated against the Shah’s dictatorship. When it was over, both groups of women expected to assume a less subservient place in society. The secular, Westernized women expected that their emancipation and professional opportunities would expand as society became more democratic; the religiously oriented revolutionaries expected that society would become more pious, but in a way that would respect women as the equals of men.

When that didn’t happen, many women felt betrayed. They began to rebel, quietly, against the constraints. As the economy contracted, as they lost their husbands and sons in the war with Iraq, they often had no choice but to go to work. The clerics discovered that they simply could not exclude women, particularly younger women, from government, employment, and education. Mohammad Khatami’s sweeping victory in the 1997 presidential election—the contest in which Taleghani had sought to run—was due in large part to the votes of women, who believed his pledges to elevate their legal and social status and give them a key role in the civil society he envisioned.

It stuns me to see women daring to be outspoken, whether it is a peasant woman arguing with a bank clerk or a female deputy in Parliament arguing for passage of a piece of legislation. Perhaps it is that women are not as harshly treated or punished for wrongdoing as men; perhaps it is that they are not taken as seriously as men or considered as much of a threat. Or perhaps the traumas Iran has suffered since the revolution have in some way jarred loose the feminine imagination, allowing previously powerless women to become more powerful if only because they need to be. During the Iran-Iraq war, for example, women in chadors pressured the Parliament to change the law that gave custody of the children of a war casualty to the dead soldier’s family, not to the children’s mother, and the law that gave survivor benefits to fathers rather than to widows.

The reality, of course, is that Iranian women have an uphill struggle. Despite their gains, women do not serve as judges or religious leaders. Adultery is still punishable by stoning to death. Polygamy is legal. In a divorce, fathers control custody of sons over the age of two and daughters over the age of seven. A girl can be tried for a crime as an adult at the age of nine (a boy at fifteen). Although the practice is officially discouraged, girls are allowed to marry at nine. (At the age of fifty, the Prophet Mohammad took Aisha, who was said to be nine years old, as one of his wives.) Women inherit only half of what men do. Men can divorce their wives at will, but women need to prove that their spouses are insane, impotent, violent, or unable to support the family. A woman needs her husband’s permission to start a business and sometimes even to get a job.

Married women cannot get passports or leave the country without the written permission of their husbands, as was the case under the Shah. Rape is more often than not blamed on the woman. A woman’s testimony in court has half the weight of a man’s. Women can be arrested for jogging or bicycling or swimming in sexually integrated places, and for exposing their heads and necks and the curves of their bodies in public. Women are not even allowed routinely to share the same physical space with men of the same profession. Nazila and I once traveled with the Iranian equivalent of the White House press corps on a trip with President Khatami. Except for the two of us, the other reporters were men. We all flew on the same plane, rode on the same bus, and stayed at the same hotel. But at mealtime, the men sat at one long table while Nazila and I were ushered to a separate one.

Women have begun to use their growing political clout to press for more rights, more important jobs in government, and the same pay, work benefits, and promotions as men. Like Taleghani, the women leading the charge are products of the revolution. They have been joined by educated younger women who feel they deserve the same rights as men. (Since the revolution, literacy among women has soared from less than 50 percent to 70 percent.) Paradoxically, these women have been aided by secular professional women who struggle on the fringes of society to reclaim the rights the clerics have taken away. Together, these women share a common goal. They want something much more fundamental than sisterhood. They want power.

Following Khatami’s election, the most powerful woman in Iran’s government—on paper at least—was Massoumeh Ebtekar, a steely symbol of his promise to promote women into high-profile positions. Khatami had been elected with the help of the left, and the left needed to be rewarded, or at least neutralized. So he named one from its ranks to his cabinet. A mother of two with a doctorate in immunology, she was appointed at the age of thirty-six as Vice President for the Environment, the first woman to hold cabinet rank in the Islamic Republic.

Unlike Taleghani, who is unadorned, down-to-earth, and speaks only Persian and Arabic, Ebtekar is Islamically elegant, wears high-heeled boots and pin-striped coats with matching hoods under her chador, and speaks near-perfect, American-accented English. Ebtekar quickly became Khatami’s showpiece woman. She has met with foreign journalists and environmentalists to explain how Iran is struggling to improve Tehran’s dismal air quality and to prevent further pollution of the Caspian Sea from oil development. She has chaired environmental seminars for the United Nations and the World Bank. She has accompanied the Foreign Minister to the annual World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.

But Ebtekar is a woman with a past, one that does not appear on her official résumé. I had heard a rumor and thought I knew her secret. I confronted her one day in 1998 with second-rate-movie lines. “Mrs. Ebtekar,” I said, “I think we’ve met before. I remember your face.”

She gave me a puzzled look. “You were once very famous in America,” I continued. Then I asked her whether she was ever known as Mary. Ebtekar took a long breath. Her dark eyes stared through me, betraying quiet anger. “I was,” she said sharply. “But I don’t bring those issues up.”

In 1979, as an eighteen-year-old freshman at what is now Amir Kabir Polytechnic University, Ebtekar was the face and voice, the official interpreter and spokeswoman, of the militants who occupied the American embassy. Hiding her hair under a kerchief and using an anglicized nom de guerre, she became an object of anger and curiosity with her regular appearances on American television during the 444-day siege.

The hostages had called her Tiger Lily, after the name they knew to be hers—Niloufar Ebtekar. Niloufar is an old Persian name that means “water lily.” Somewhere along the way she became Massoumeh—an Islamic name that means “innocent woman.”

Night after night Mary had listed the “crimes” of America against Iran and denounced the hostages as “spies” who should be put on trial if the United States did not turn over the deposed Shah. Asked by an ABC News correspondent one day whether she could see herself picking up a gun and killing the hostages, she replied: “Yes. When I’ve seen an American gun being lifted up and killing my brothers and sisters in the streets, of course.”

This teenager was one of the first examples Americans saw of the Iranian revolutionary woman, and her combination of veil and vitriol contributed to the tortured relationship that followed. Standing with other journalists outside the embassy gates in Tehran day after day during the hostage crisis, I wondered about her identity. Her American-accented English suggested long exposure to the United States. But if that was the case, how could she not understand how despicable her words would sound there?

Indeed, I now know, Ebtekar had lived in a middle-class suburb of Philadelphia for six years, attending an elementary school in Highland Park while her father was a doctoral student on an engineering scholarship at the University of Pennsylvania. Back in Tehran, she majored in engineering and banded together with fervently religious students to demonstrate against the Shah.

Her loyalties to Khatami dated from those early years of the revolution. When Khatami became head of the Kayhan Publishing Company in 1981, he named Ebtekar editor-in-chief of
Kayhan International,
the English-language edition of the daily newspaper
Kayhan
. Later, she received a Ph.D. in immunology and participated in government-sponsored programs for women.

I asked Ebtekar about the wisdom of the embassy takeover. She offered no apology; she made no excuses. “I wouldn’t think that it would be logical for any nation to look back and see any part of its revolution or its movement as negative,” she said. “That was the best direction that could have been taken.” She said the embassy was seized to preserve what she called “the values” of the revolution. “It wasn’t a plot,” she said. “It wasn’t a ploy. It was a natural reaction. I can say that.”

There is an Iranian word,
porrou
, which means
beyond chutzpah
. And in an extraordinary display of it, Ebtekar blamed the United States for causing the embassy to be seized. “The action was a natural consequence of decisions that had been taken by the Americans,” she said.

At that point, she had had enough.

“Our time is up,” she said. She pointed to my tape recorder. “Turn this off.”

Then she pulled me aside. “Please do not write much about these things,” she said dryly, as if the personal history of someone as public as a cabinet minister should remain private. She asked for my complicity in her secret, and I politely but firmly refused.

I couldn’t understand why Khatami, whose mantra was the rule of law and who came as close as any Iranian official had to apologizing for the hostage crisis, would have chosen a woman like Ebtekar as the Islamic Republic’s first female cabinet member. There were so many other qualified women around, serious, outspoken women with agendas for change.

One such woman is Taleghani; another is Faezeh Hashemi, the daughter of Iran’s former President Rafsanjani, and herself a strong promoter of Khatami’s platform of reform. In her thirties, Faezeh has been the head of a sports federation for women, a member of Parliament (until she was defeated in 2000), and, until it was banned, the editor of a lively daily newspaper called
Zan
(Woman). There is nothing soft or sentimental about her. She is arrogant and brusque, daring and foolish, sometimes all at the same time. Women respect her or reject her, but I never found anyone who doesn’t know who she is or who feels neutral about her.

Faezeh refuses bodyguards, drives without a chauffeur, barks at her two children, and grew up wanting to be a boy. She puts blond streaks in her hair and sometimes forgets appointments. She wears blue jeans and sneakers under her chador, even though she has been criticized for wearing Western dress. She rejects the “feminist” label because, she said, it suggests “special privileges for women.” Married at seventeen to a man chosen by her parents, she doesn’t believe in romantic love before marriage because, she said, “love before marriage usually doesn’t last.” But she does believe in women proposing marriage to men and in getting married young. “One of the problems we have in this country is women wait too long before they get married,” she said. “A girl is mature at thirteen or fourteen. If she waits too long, she won’t have many suitors. And her expectations will get higher—too high.”

The first time I visited Faezeh at her apartment in Tehran, she arrived at the door barefoot, dressed in a red terry bathrobe, her wet hair wrapped in a towel. She took me on a tour, even showing me her bedroom where the ironing board was stacked high with a pile of clothes. And in a country that condemned “Westoxication,” she allowed her daughter to fill glass cases in her bedroom with nearly two dozen Barbie dolls, even a Barbie dollhouse and a pink convertible.

Faezeh has an ambitious agenda: to use the framework of Islam to keep women healthy. Specifically, she is determined to get women—particularly young women—physically active again through sports programs in order to fight the insidious low-level depression that has come to affect much of the country’s female population. Even the conservative newspapers acknowledge that rising depression among women has contributed to the 2,500 suicides in Tehran each year. One women’s monthly cultural magazine laid out the reasons: “Family problems such as addiction of the spouse, difference of age, lack of mutual understanding, polygamy, lack of interest in family affairs, lack of love, premature marriage, and excessive sensitivity toward the taboo of divorce are the most important reasons that lead to suicide among women.” The article also cited studies indicating that the degree of a woman’s piety made no difference in her decision to commit suicide, even though suicide is forbidden under Islam.

“If women are not active, they will become susceptible to disease and depression,” Faezeh said. “And sports can fill the empty times for young women. It gives them the strength and courage to be taken seriously. And it will keep them away from addiction, corruption, and mischief—and will help prevent suicide.”

This stance is more controversial than it may sound to the Western ear. Women’s sports virtually disappeared with the Islamic revolution, because the clerics banned men and women from training and competing together. In addition, some religious hard-liners consider exercise for women to be both frivolous and immoral. At one point, bands of men beat up female bicyclists in a park outside Tehran and a group of ayatollahs denounced bike riding, boating, running, and horseback riding for women as sexually provocative.