Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (20 page)

Faezeh argued back, insisting there was nothing un-Islamic about activities like bicycle riding. The debate that followed led to the creation of a separate bicycle path for women in the park. She insisted that all female athletes wear Islamic dress, which mollified some of the mullahs, but meant that Iranian women could not compete in most international sporting events.

But Faezeh has a larger battleground than athletics or even mental health. Her real goal is to get more political power for women. “Socially, artistically, athletically our women are doing better, but in politics women haven’t made much progress,” she said. “Men don’t have to prove themselves to be chosen for high positions, but women always do.”

She is acutely aware of her own political vulnerability. “The clerics are very powerful in this country,” she said, sounding not at all like the daughter of one of the country’s most powerful clerics. Her father, she added, is always telling her to keep her opinions to herself, or at least let surrogates do the talking for her. Instead, in August 1998 she started her own newspaper,
Zan
, a women’s newspaper with an attitude. Operating from a beautiful marble-floored mansion rented from a wealthy
bazaari
, the paper argued against such practices as stoning to death and the unequal valuation of women’s lives in case of death or injury. It criticized a rule requiring female students at public universities to wear the full black chador, interviewing students who complained about the strict dress code. It sought out women’s views in surveys, concluding in one, for example, that more than 97 percent of women wanted the right to be spectators at soccer matches, which had been denied to them until recently.

But
Zan
had a short life span. First, Faezeh came under fire over a cartoon in which a husband appealed to a robber to shoot his wife instead of him. His argument: under Islamic law the compensation the thief would have to pay the family would be half what he would have to pay for killing a man. Faezeh was accused of ridiculing one of the primary principles of Islam. Then, Faezeh became even more brazen, publishing excerpts from a New Year’s message from Farah Diba, the Shah’s widow, to the Iranian people. It was all part of Faezeh’s campaign to challenge conventional thinking about what constituted acceptable public discourse. The two items were considered acts of counterrevolution and the paper was shut down, although Faezeh herself was never brought to court the way other newspaper publishers have been.

Faezeh’s staunchest supporter throughout her ordeals has been her mother, Effat Marashi, whose message to her daughter’s enemies was clear: “I asked God to take revenge.” Marashi said that the silence of her husband, the former President, when Faezeh’s newspaper was closed, was “tormenting” her. He kept telling her to keep quiet, she added. Obviously, she did not obey. “Faezeh was being persecuted,” she said.

I first met Marashi when Rafsanjani was President, and her boldness did not surprise me. Over tea and pastries one evening in the living room of her modern but surprisingly modest house, she sounded more like a militant feminist than the wife of an Iranian cleric-politician. “Every Iranian woman should become educated and use her knowledge to work outside the home,” she told me. “Women have been deceived, cheated. It’s like this all over the world. It’s time for them to go out and be active in society, to gain their own rights. There is no need to stay at home and do the housework.”

Indeed, the battlefield in which women are the most disadvantaged is marriage. As in most Islamic countries, marriage in Iran is not a contract between equals but an acquisition of property: the wife by the husband. Issues such as wife beating are scarcely ever talked about, and there are no statistics on how prevalent it is. Shelters for battered or homeless women do not exist.

One woman who has begun to talk about such issues is Shahla Sherkat, whose provocative monthly women’s magazine,
Zanan
, was a model for Faezeh Hashemi’s feminist journalism. Sometimes I could not figure out why
Zanan
had not been shut down. Perhaps the authorities didn’t consider the magazine much of a threat because its circulation was small and Sherkat never took them on directly. But there were subtler ways to pressure her. One time, she lost a government subsidy for newsprint, forcing her to buy it for several times more on the open market. When
Zanan
published a cover story featuring Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, one of Iran’s top female filmmakers, dressed in a colorful print scarf, fashionable sunglasses, and a garment that exposed her wrists and bangs, the issue was swiftly confiscated from the newsstands.

Sherkat ran the magazine with a tiny budget, a staff of five, and a mounting debt. “I do this for two reasons,” she told me once. “I love it and I’m insane. I have two children and I always say
Zanan
is my third child. If one day the magazine stopped publishing, it would be as if I would never see one of my children again. I don’t belong to myself anymore.”

Zanan
has run articles with headlines like, “Why Should Only Women Be Receptionists?” and “Is Your Baby Sitter Your Husband’s Doll?” Sherkat showed me an article that she had recently edited on Iran’s burgeoning prostitution industry. It included an interview with a married man who owned a shop in the bazaar and was a patron of the streets frequented by prostitutes.

“Why have you come here?” the man is asked.

“Ask my wife. Whenever I go home she smells of food. When I want to talk to her she says our kid has an exam and she has to study with him. I’m fed up. I’m a human being. I haven’t married a cook. I want a wife, a woman who smells good and wears nice clothes.”

“If you give your wife extra money she will wear perfume and good clothes.”

“No, I’m a
bazaari
. I make good money but even if I gave my wife five million rials she would buy meat and chicken and vegetables.”

“Why don’t you tell her these things?”

“Do we have the time? Either I’m not home or she’s taking care of the house.”

Another article titled “A Triangular Love” dealt with the little-discussed issue of polygamy. Khosrow Sinaee, a well-known documentary filmmaker, had been “happily married to two painters for twenty years,” the article said. He and his first wife (who is Hungarian) lived together for ten years and had two children before they met the Iranian woman who would become his second wife. It was the first wife’s idea. “The three of us realized that we could not live without each other,” the second wife told the interviewer. The two wives divided the housework. The second wife bore the husband two more children and did all the shopping and errands. The first wife kept house and took care of the garden. The second wife declared that she could not choose between her husband and the first wife. “I cannot tell which one I love more,” she said.

Many readers were shocked. Stories were always circulating about traditional Iranian men taking more than one wife. But here was a secular intellectual giving legitimacy to the practice. The article mentioned nothing about sexual feelings between the women but still, some readers thought the arrangement sounded like a ménage à trois. Sherkat defended the article, saying, “I’m against polygamy, but if there are some people who have made this choice freely, we shouldn’t judge them.”

Sherkat added that it would be wrong to assume the relationship was a ménage à trois. Rather, she saw the article as a kind of feminist statement, because the women expressed more love for each other than the husband they had in common. “The man was on the margins,” she said.

For me, the most chilling article ever published in
Zanan
was a cover story titled, “Sir, Have You Ever Beaten Your Wife?” It included interviews with men who beat their wives and with women who had been physically abused.

The matter-of-fact flatness of the interviews gave the story its power.

“Sir, have you ever beaten your wife?”

“It happens.”

“What for?”

“We had problems.”

“Where were your children when you were beating your wife?”

“They were there. . . . Of course, it’s better if they don’t see.”

Another interview, this time with an abused woman:

“What was the excuse this time?”

“The fight began and I swore at him. He became angry and started beating me. He beat me so much that my daughter had to pull me away from him.”

“What do the children do when he beats you?”

“They cry and shake like scared chickens. . . . I have gone to court three times. They tell me that maybe it’s my fault.”

Sherkat explained that she was barraged with criticism after that article appeared. She had gone into the most intimate private space in Iran—the bedroom—and exposed its secrets. “People came into my office and said, ‘Now, are you happy to write about what happens in the bedroom?’ Some people said there is no such thing as wife abuse. Others admitted these things happen but said it’s better not to talk about them.”

Complicating the problem of wife abuse is the difficulty women often have in getting a divorce. Almost every woman I know in Iran has a friend or relative with a horror story to tell. Even though the standard marriage contract gives women many rights on paper, they are extraordinarily difficult to enforce. The Iranian family court is a hothouse of double standards and male vengeance. A woman might have to wait years to persuade a male judge (the Islamic Republic considers women too emotional to be judges) to grant a divorce.

The most transparent window into the way the Iranian system of divorce works is an extraordinary documentary film,
Divorce Iranian Style,
co-directed by the Iranian anthropologist Ziba Mir-Hosseini, who is herself twice divorced. Produced with the cooperation of the Ministries of Justice and of Islamic Guidance, the film takes the viewer into a tiny Tehran courtroom presided over by a wry, white-turbaned judge whose primary mission is to persuade couples to stay together, since divorce is considered abominable in the eyes of God. I watched a video of the documentary in Iran with a young, educated upper-middle-class couple and their single male friend. Just as surprising as the documentary itself were their reactions to it.

The documentary portrays women as active players in their fate, alternately using logic and emotion, anger and humor, deception and charm to achieve their common goal: liberation from their marriages. In one case, a woman tries to convince the judge that her husband is crazy, testifying that in thirty years of marriage he has refused to let her answer the phone “even if it rings a hundred times.” “This man has made my life hell,” she says. The judge tells her to make herself attractive so that she can get back into his good graces.

In another, a sixteen-year-old named Ziba, who was married off by her parents at the age of fourteen, wants more than freedom from her loveless marriage to a man two and a half times her age who smokes, works late, and hangs out with “rascals.” She has lost her virginity and wants her husband to give her the $10,000
mehriyeh
so that she can go back to school. (
Mehriyeh
is a kind of dowry pledged by the husband at the time of marriage in case of divorce that the wife has the legal right to collect even if the marriage has never been consummated.) The case goes to an informal sort of arbitration in the living room of a relative in which her uncles serve as mediators. Although she is the only woman in a room full of older men, Ziba boldly struggles to make her case. “Why won’t you grant me my legal rights?” she asks. “Wasn’t I a virgin?”

“Ha!” exclaimed the husband of my friend as we watched. “She’s such a bitch. All she wants is money.”

His friend agreed. “Her family is treating it like a business deal,” he added.

The court also handles child custody cases and the documentary shows the plight of Maryam, who has remarried for love and is ordered to turn over her four-year-old daughter from her first, loveless marriage to her former husband. He already has custody of their older child, an eleven-year-old girl. At one point during the proceedings, the clerk of the court, a woman, puts in her two cents. “She’s ruined her children’s lives just for lust,” she says. “It was lust, lust, lust.”

But Maryam is despondent. She lies, shouts, sobs, pleads, and throws herself on the mercy of the court. “I’ll never give you the child!” she cries, holding her younger daughter. “You could at least give me one of them! For the sake of your own children, let me keep this one. . . . I’ll go mad! Please, sir, for the sake of the child.” Unmoved, the judge tells her, “You remarried, and when you remarry you lose the child.”

The two young men watching the documentary were as unmoved as the judge. “What phony crying,” said the family friend. “She should have stayed with her first husband if she really wanted the kids. He had a job. He wasn’t a drug addict. He didn’t beat her. There was nothing major wrong with him.”

My young female friend was incredulous. “Would you want to be with a woman who didn’t love you?” she asked. “How come you as a man have the right to fall in love with a new woman—a blonde maybe—and divorce your wife? Why doesn’t a woman have that right?”

Her husband tried to calm her down. “You’re taking sides, you’re taking sides,” he told her. “You think the woman should have custody? What about the man’s rights?”

The harshness of the courtroom infects the court clerk’s young daughter, who comes to the court every day after school to wait for her mother. In one scene, the girl climbs into the judge’s chair when he goes off to pray. Pretending to be the judge, she opens a file, bangs the table for silence, and delivers a devastating monologue, ordering the imaginary wives before her to go back and obey their husbands. But later she tells the judge that she will herself never get married. “I’ve seen what husbands are like,” she says.

For Mehrangiz Kar, a secular lawyer whose practice focuses on women and family law, the documentary is an accurate, but sanitized, depiction of reality. Most judges are not so enlightened, she said. “Even if the husband insults his wife or beats her, the judge demands a witness,” Kar told me one day. She described one case that had been going on for three years in which the husband brutally beat his wife and she wanted a divorce. “But he comes to court and says, ‘I love my wife. If she divorces me, I’ll die.’ The judge tells them over and over to try again.”