Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (21 page)

Even the most minor changes in the law are difficult to attain. For several days in December 1996, I watched a rancorous debate in Parliament about whether the wife’s
mehriyeh
should be adjusted for inflation. Those deputies who opposed the move argued that it would set an inflationary precedent for all debts and thus create widespread economic instability. At one point, Abbas Abbassi, a conservative male member of Parliament, said: “A woman who gets married at a young age is highly valuable to her husband. And as she becomes older, her value depreciates. So it is not right to adjust upward for inflation because she is worth less.”

The female members of Parliament were outraged. “He believes that women are created to be used by men, that they are just secondhand goods that should be in men’s service,” Soheyla Jelowdarzadeh, who is also an engineer, shot back. “This is against the Koran!” Eventually, the female deputies prevailed and the measure passed by a comfortable margin. They considered it a major victory.

Even more fundamental than the problem of divorce for women is the problem of sex. Islam forbids all sex outside marriage. Adultery can be punished by stoning, although technically four witnesses to the “crime” are needed. Even secular parents expect—or at least hope—that their daughters will remain virginal until marriage. But neither they nor the Islamic Republic can prevent men and women from socializing, dating, and having sex outside marriage. Birth control is legal; abortion is not, except to save the life of the mother, but that doesn’t stop young women from getting pregnant and having abortions in small, underground clinics run by doctors who sometimes offer surgical hymen reconstruction as well.

There are occasional voices in the Islamic Republic that have encouraged couples to make use of a uniquely Shiite way around the fornication ban: temporary marriage. Temporary marriage, or
sigheh,
originated during the lifetime of the Prophet Mohammad. Prostitution was widespread, and
sigheh
was a way to give names to children born outside of marriage, who would otherwise be considered no better than slaves. The Sunni Muslims banned the practice; the Shiites did not.

Historically,
sigheh
was practiced most frequently among pilgrims and clerics in the holy cities of Mashad and Qom. Pilgrims who traveled had sexual needs, it was argued;
sigheh
was a legal way to satisfy them. In his two-volume 1892 opus on Iran,
Persia and the Persian Question,
Lord Curzon described his shock at the widespread practice of
sigheh
among pilgrims in Mashad, where, he said, “a gigantic system of prostitution, under the sanction of the Church, prevails.”

Clerical use of temporary marriage is more complicated. It is hardly ever talked about, although the cultural anthropologist Shahla Haeri, in her groundbreaking study of
sigheh, Law of Desire,
cited interviews with clerics who offered a number of explanations. One proclaimed that because God banned alcohol, he allowed temporary marriage. Another said that some clerics exercised a “hypnotic influence” over young women, becoming both their spiritual and sexual tutors. Still another said that he believed that
sigheh
contracts had increased among clerics since the revolution. He told the story of a highly educated cleric who became headmaster of a boarding school for girls in Qom. The headmaster’s wife became suspicious of his socializing with his students and took him to court. He was ordered to temporarily marry eleven of the girls. “The headmaster’s wife, who had appealed to the court expecting justice, found herself a temporary co-wife to eleven teenagers!” Haeri wrote.

The
sigheh
ritual is simple. A man and a woman agree to a marriage contract. The contract can last for as little as a few minutes or as long as ninety-nine years. In some cases, the woman is paid. The couple can be creative in structuring their contracts, putting in writing how much money will be paid, how much time they will spend together, and what services will be provided. A cleric generally registers the contract with a written order, but the couple can write the contract without witnesses or formal registration. The union is not recorded on identification cards. Only virgins need their father’s permission.

Children born of a
sigheh
marriage are considered legitimate and entitled to a share of the father’s inheritance, although in practice it can be difficult to register the father’s name on the child’s birth certificate, force fathers to pay child support, or enroll children with no birth certificates in school. Although it is less common, nonsexual
sigheh
has been used by unrelated men and women who want to live or work in close quarters.

Even though
sigheh
is on the books, it was not talked about much in public until a stunning sermon by President Rafsanjani during Friday prayers in November 1990 at the University of Tehran, the country’s main public forum for launching political statements. It was there that the President tried to revive it as an acceptable—and necessary—arrangement, particularly for young people. He called sexual desire a “Godgiven” trait that needed to be fulfilled. He condemned Iranian culture for dictating that young people had to be deprived of sex until they were twenty-five or thirty years old and had made a home for themselves. “We know that when a child reaches fifteen, when he or she becomes sexually mature, a serious desire forms in his or her body,” he said quite openly. The solution was not to be “promiscuous like the Westerners,” but to obey the law. “God has not said that this need cannot be met. . . . God and religion have practically and simply resolved the problem.”

In his own way, Rafsanjani was also arguing that the use of temporary marriage would further the rule of law by wrapping the practice of extramarital sex in an Islamic cloak. It would end the common practice of arresting—and often fining and lashing—couples who were not married and charging them with immoral activities. If young people were too embarrassed to go before a cleric, they could even make the contract privately between themselves, Rafsanjani said. “No court has the right to prosecute anyone, whoever they may be, if they have indulged in temporary marriage,” he said. “This is the law.”

Rafsanjani’s sermon touched off a rancorous debate. Thousands of demonstrators protested against him in front of Parliament. Some women argued that the government should financially support war widows and poor women, not encourage them to enter into temporary marriages. After all, the practice favored the man. He could take as many temporary wives as he wanted and up to four permanent ones; a woman in a permanent marriage could not take a temporary husband. He could break the
sigheh
contract at will; she could not.

From time to time, I heard stories of
sigheh
relationships. I once met a woman whose father was in construction and had to travel a lot. Only years later did her mother learn that in one of the cities where her husband worked he had temporarily married a peasant woman and had two children with her. An Iranian businesswoman I knew became the
sigheh
of a married man until his divorce came through and they could be permanently married.

Years ago, a Turkish journalist friend of mine, Cengiz Candar, was offered a
sigheh
contract by a well-known ayatollah who even suggested a temporary wife for him: me. Cengiz and the cleric were together late one evening when Cengiz phoned me at my hotel. I had interviewed Khamenei, who was then President, that afternoon; Cengiz had an appointment to see him the following day and wanted a sense of what he had said. Years later, Cengiz told me the rest of the story: “When I got off the phone, I told the ayatollah about our conversation. He said, ‘I don’t want to block your real intention. If you’re interested in something else, it’s perfectly okay. It’s legal.’ He was joking and saying, ‘I give you my blessing.’ I told him, ‘No, no, it’s not that kind of relationship.’ He said, ‘Come on. You are a Turk; she’s an American. You’re a Sunni and you don’t have this system, but Shiism provides these kinds of opportunities. Don’t be shy!’ After a few minutes he left so that I could implement my real project if I wanted to!”

Despite the legality of
sigheh
in the Islamic Republic, it is unpopular among young people and that is not likely to change. It has nothing to do with religion. It has to do with long-held Iranian traditions. Most Iranians I know regard the practice as little more than legalized prostitution, for
sigheh
is a public advertisement that a woman is not a virgin. And for many Iranian families, that makes her unmarriageable. Even illicit sex is considered better than
sigheh
—as long as the sex is kept secret.

Although Mohammad Khatami captured much of the women’s vote in his campaign for the presidency in 1997, I did not see much evidence that the legal situation of women had improved much during his tenure. Khatami’s political agenda—the creation of a civil society, the need for tolerance, and the rule of law—did not train the spotlight on women. Women’s rights per se would have to come later.

“Everyone’s forgotten about women’s rights in Iran,” Kar, the lawyer, told me one day in her office. “We’re seeing a political war between two factions of the system. All the arguments about freedom have overshadowed women’s rights. Women as women have been forgotten. Women need a separate space for themselves in this thing called civil society.”

Kar ranted about Islamic dress, calling its enforcement “violence against women.” She ranted about how girls could be married off or prosecuted for crimes at the age of nine. She ranted about how women’s prisons had become a training ground to initiate teenage girls into a life of crime. She ranted about the failure of the government to create women’s shelters. She ranted about how she is not allowed by the court to represent a group of male prisoners who had been accused of homosexual activity because she would have to talk about male sexual organs and the details of the homosexual act. “The rule of law means nothing for women,” she ranted. “There are so many battles, so many battles,” she said. “I am so tired.”

“Why don’t you just leave?” I asked her. I knew she had family in the United States.

Suddenly, Kar’s demeanor changed, and she smiled broadly. “I love it here!” she said. “I would feel lost in a country like America. Nothing belongs to me there. My life is here.”

In her case, it was a brave choice indeed. In April 2000, several months after that conversation, she participated in a conference in Berlin about Iran’s reform movement. The conference was disrupted by protesters, including one woman who stripped to her bra and panties and another who did a hip-rotating dance—bareheaded. Back home, Iran’s state-run television broadcast the incident and accused conference participants of “decadent” activity. Kar was among those arrested and held for questioning. Even a seasoned lawyer like Mehrangiz Kar was not immune from the country’s capricious system of justice.

C H A P T E R   S E V E N

The Chanel Beneath the Chador

What are these unbecoming cloaks and veils?

They are shrouds for the dead, not for those alive
.

— MIRZADE-YE ESHQI, EARLY TWENTIETH-CENTURY IRANIAN POET

The most precious ornament for a woman is the Islamic covering
.

— POSTER AT SHIRAZ AIRPORT SHOWING THE FACE OF A WOMAN COVERED IN BLACK EXCEPT FOR HER EYES NOSE

You cannot enforce the
hejab
with clubs and weapons.

— ABDOLLAH NOURI, FORMER VICE-PRESIDENT AND FORMER MINISTER OF THE INTERIOR

I
T WAS HER WEDDING DAY
, and the bride wore a form-fitting white gown and a sheer veil. She was determined not to ruin her hairdo. So she defied the law and did not cover up when her groom took her out in a swan-shaped paddleboat on a crystalline lake hidden in the woods near the Caspian Sea. A hired cameraman videotaped the scene: the sweating groom in an ill-fitting suit paddling as hard as he could, the bride smiling sweetly as she drank a bottle of Iranian cola in the thick, humid, summer air.

The wedding season in Iran had begun, and just a few days before, the police had issued warnings about proper behavior. “The public presence of a bride dressed in a transparent gown showing her figure or without the necessary Islamic head scarf is forbidden,” said the statement. Violators would be prosecuted.

This bride didn’t care. She stayed with her groom on the lake for an hour. When the newlyweds got back to shore, I saw that she was a rebel of sorts, a pretty enough woman who looked no more than eighteen, wearing too much makeup, showing too much cleavage, and ill-accessorized in black patent leather platform shoes. She put on a long white chador and her moment of freedom was over.

Many of my Iranian women friends criticize me for focusing so much on what women wear. But the reality is that since the beginning of Iran’s revolution, by far the most relentless struggle for control of public space has been over women’s dress. More energy has been spent on this social issue than any other, and there are profound political consequences. Women, after all, are a large part of the constituency for reform. They test the limits with colorful clothing or painted toes or visible bits of hair, then retreat in the face of episodic mass arrests. The battle is fought on different levels: between women who try to wear less and men who believe that women should wear more; between women who feel comfortable with veils and women who consider veils to be backward. The issue is serious enough that in just about every store, every taxi, every bus, every public building, particularly in neighborhoods and cities in which a large percentage of women try to bend the rules, there are warnings that “
bad-hejab
” (badly covered) women will not be served.