Persian Mirrors: The Elusive Face of Iran (22 page)

The leaders of the revolution must have known from the start that the dress code would be the most difficult rule to implement. Yet
hejab
(literally “curtain”), which is defined as any dress that follows Islamic principles, is the most visible symbol of the Islamic Republic’s power, and so it will be the last to go. I sometimes think that Iran will have some sort of relationship with Israel before it allows its women to go bareheaded.

The
hejab
is also something that I have to deal with personally. When it comes to dress, Iran in some respects is even stricter than Saudi Arabia, where foreign visitors like me can get away with a flimsy hat. But if I want entry in Iran, I have to cover up, and I have to decide whether and how much of a political statement I want to make with the degree of my coverage and the color and shape of my dress.

For the Islamic Republic, the rules about dress are laid out in the Koran: “Say to the believing women that they should lower their gaze and guard their modesty. . . . They should draw their veils over their bosoms and not display their ornaments.” They can go bareheaded only in front of other women, their husbands, fathers, sons, nephews, servants, and children small enough to “have no sense of the shame of sex.” A rule requiring all women to appear in public in Islamic dress was written into the country’s penal code, but the Koranic verse that defines it is subject to interpretation.

The Islamic Republic didn’t invent the veil, of course. Even before the advent of Islam, the practice of veiling probably existed among the Zoroastrians. From the sixteenth century on, a kind of all-enveloping Islamic veil was worn, although it was not black and its style varied according to region. Eventually, well-to-do women of the cities and the court—certainly not a majority of women—took up veiling and secluding themselves from public view. The black chador seen on the streets today probably made its entry in the late eighteenth century—among the upper classes.

In the countryside, women have always worn veils, usually lively prints that protect their heads from dust. They often wear scarves with veils over them, wrapping and gathering them at their waists to free up their arms and to make the garments less cumbersome. In fact, the consensus among modern and traditional, secular and religious women in Iran is that if women were given a choice, the majority would probably choose to cover their heads in public in some way.

Choice—to wear or not to wear the veil—has been an issue for decades. In 1935, going even further than Turkey’s secular modernizers, Reza Shah issued an edict that declared the wearing of traditional dress (for both women and men) an offense punishable by a prison term. The army and police roamed through villages to enforce the law, tearing chadors off women and handing out free Western-style suits to men. Reza Shah also banned men from wearing turbans. Mustaches were allowed but beards were forbidden, even for clerics.

To reinforce his message, Reza Shah brought the Queen Mother and the royal princesses, unveiled, to a graduation ceremony at the Women’s Teacher Training College in Tehran in 1936. The king told all Iranian women to follow their example and “cast their veils, this symbol of injustice and shame, into the fires of oblivion.”

Not all Iranian women saw it that way. To many, the veil was a source of protection, respect, and virtue. In her 1992 memoir,
Daughter of Persia,
Sattareh Farman Farmaian, the daughter of a Qajar prince, recalled her mother’s bitter reaction to Reza Shah’s edict: “He is trying to destroy religion. He doesn’t fear God, this evil Shah—may God curse him for it!” Some women refused to leave their homes, some because they didn’t want to be seen bareheaded in public, others to protest the decree. One of those women was Ayatollah Khomeini’s wife, Khadija Saqafi, who, according to relatives, went without a bath for a year rather than venture to the public bathhouse unveiled. But that was only one view. The elderly mother of a close friend of mine called the announcement of Reza Shah’s edict “one of the best days of my life.”

During the revolution in February 1979, women could go bareheaded in Iran, but within a month, Khomeini ordered all women to wear Islamic dress. At first, Iran’s women resisted. I walked through the streets of Tehran as thousands of women marched—bareheaded—to protest Khomeini’s order. Men hurled stones, bottles, and insults. Soldiers fired shots in the air. The American feminist Kate Millett showed up, branding Khomeini a “male chauvinist” and marching with Iranian women. She was expelled.

Still, Khomeini was politically supple enough to sense the strong opposition to his sweeping dictum. He had called the floor-length chador, the garment that covers all but a woman’s face, “the flag of the revolution.” But then he backed down, saying he had meant only to suggest how women should dress.

Eventually, however, head covering prevailed. The regime ordered women who worked in ministries and universities to cover their heads. Restaurants and hotels put baskets of scarves near the entrances. The mother of a friend met me for tea one day early in the revolution in the lobby of the Inter-Continental Hotel. She was wearing a maroon-colored knit hat that covered much but not all of her hair. I was bareheaded. A waiter handed my friend’s mother an eggshell-blue card that said, “Sister, following Islamic laws helps keep the place of women in society so high. Please respect the rules and let us have the pleasure of serving you.” She was furious and argued with the waiter. Her head was covered, she said. He said only a scarf would do. She refused. We left. And that was the wave of the future. By the beginning of 1982, three years after the revolution, all women were forced to cover up in public space—Iranians and foreigners alike.

Iran’s women, being subtle and adaptable, came to think of the veil as something more complicated than just an imprisoning garment. The writer Farzaneh Milani argued in her book,
Veils and Words,
that “veiling has functioned more like a code that allowed anyone and everyone to vent their private aspirations, fears, dreams, and nightmares. An emblem now of progress, then of backwardness, a badge now of nationalism, then of domination, a symbol of purity, then of corruption, the veil has accommodated itself to a puzzling diversity of personal and political ideologies.” For many women, the Islamic dress became a tool to be used to their advantage, a way into public spaces. It gave them the right to be present in public spaces—to work in offices, to attend college, to drive, to walk on the streets. “The veil gives women the license to do things,” my friend Farideh Farhi, the political scientist, once told me. “They can cross borders with it.”

Still, the
hejab
was undeniably a symbol of the forced will of the Islamic state. So resistance to it became part of everyday life. Since the revolution, there have been degrees of acceptable coverage. It took a while for me to figure out that what an Iranian woman wears often defines her politics and her level of piety. If a woman wants the most anti-regime dress of all, she will first put on any kind of clothing that looks stylish, and then accessorize it with a kerchief that reveals hair. Sunglasses, see-through hose, jean jackets, bright colors, makeup, and colored nail polish send clear, even subversive messages to the authorities. Teased or frosted hair is one way to protest the head covering; another is the gravity-defying trick of showing as much hair as possible without the scarf falling entirely off the head. Sometimes I have found women’s use of makeup and the choice of hairdos grotesquely exaggerated. That’s what happens when something is forbidden.

A more Islamically acceptable covering is a loose-fitting, drab-colored longish coat called a
manteau
(after the French word for coat) or a
roupoush
(which literally means “outerwear” but has come to mean “uniform”). It is worn over a long skirt or pants, with a hood called a
maghnaeh
that covers the head and neck but leaves a hole for the face. The trend began in the 1980s, when, amid pressure for more cover, women started wearing raincoats indoors and calling them “Islamic dress.” The advantage of the hood is that unlike an ordinary head scarf, it ensures full coverage. And it doesn’t slip. That may be one reason that schoolgirls in state-run elementary schools must wear them; outside of school girls can get away with going bareheaded until they are about ten or eleven, especially if they look younger. As for the coat, it can be stylish. It is sold in crepe, silk, polyester, wool, rayon, or cotton. It comes plain or with epaulets, gold buttons, lace, sashes, or sequins; single-breasted, double-breasted, unbelted, loosely belted, hooded, collared, or zippered. It can resemble an oversized Thierry Mugler trench coat, a voluminous Issey Miyake kimono, or a classic London Fog. Some enterprising seamstresses ran profitable
manteau-
making businesses out of their homes. I once found a tailored pin-striped Ralph Lauren coat-dress at a secondhand shop in my home town of Buffalo that became my colleague Nazila’s power suit.

The unassailable uniform, of course, is the classic black chador. More than anything else, it symbolizes the Iranian revolution. Some women wear it out of conviction; others out of opportunism. Massoumeh Ebtekar admitted in an interview in
Zanan
that she began wearing the full chador only when she assumed the position of Vice President for the Environment in 1997. She wanted to represent her country with the “ideal” covering, she said.

In Qom shortly after the revolution, I saw a scene that chilled me: three women in black chadors, their faces hidden behind gauzy black cloth. They could see out, imperfectly, I guessed, but outsiders couldn’t see in. “Death out for a walk” was the way the nineteenth century French writer Guy de Maupassant once described women in chadors. He could have been in Qom with me that day.

Unfortunately, there is no scientific survey measuring what percentage of women wear chadors. In parts of the Arab world, the long black veil worn by some women at least has sleeves. But in Iran, the chador is a garment sewn of two pieces of fabric with no buttons or hooks that is thrown over the head, falls to the ankles, and is normally held in place by a hand under the chin. Except, that is, when carrying an object like a baby. Then the chador is held in one’s teeth. The dry cleaning slip at Tehran’s Laleh Hotel translates the word chador literally as “tent.” Some people call the women who wear them
kalagh siahs
—black crows. It’s astonishing how many black crows there are.

The veils send a double image of the ideal Iranian woman. Women are supposed to be shrouded wives and mothers; they are also supposed to be warriors of Islam. Some of the most powerful images of the revolution and the war with Iraq showed women in chadors carrying machine guns. The images were reminiscent of an earlier time, in 1911, when hundreds—some said thousands—of women marched from behind their walled courtyards into the office of the President of the Parliament, then pulled out revolvers from beneath their chadors, demanding that the Parliament not give in to the Russians, who were claiming the right to certain properties in Tehran. The Parliament was destroyed by a Russian-backed coup the following week, but the women had made their point.

During the revolution and the war with Iraq in the 1980s, however, the existence of veiled and armed women—“nuns with guns,” we journalists called them—was largely a myth. A film produced by a German television crew during the war with Iraq showed soldiers teaching women in layers of black how to use weapons. The women rolled on their bellies as they wrestled with old muskets. The propaganda was too much even for Ali-Reza Tabesh, President Khatami’s nephew, who showed the film to me years later. “Did you see that?” he asked. “She was holding the gun backward! That was a smart cameraman!”

As in other areas of social conduct, the rules regarding dress can change without warning. Some clerics regard
hejab
as a vague edict on modesty for both men and women; others give a strict interpretation; still others seem to bend with the circumstances. One ayatollah told a friend of mine who had inquired about the dress code that “it’s very important to cover the head and the skin under the neck.” But, he added, “This is only important for pretty women. You don’t have to worry about it.”

During a visit to Qom shortly after the revolution to interview Ayatollah Kazem Shariat-Madari, the female Iranian interpreter working with me wore a sweater, jeans, and a head scarf. Wearing a head scarf was not yet obligatory, but she wore it out of respect for the ayatollah. I was wearing—badly—a chador. “Where’s your chador?” the ayatollah asked her. “I respect you and so I am covering my hair,” she replied. “But there is nothing in the Koran that requires me to wear the chador.”

At first, he looked at her quizzically. But Shariat-Madari was an easygoing sort of ayatollah. “Okay,” he replied, smiling. “You made your point.”

Schools are particularly whimsical when it comes to dress codes. “When I was in seventh grade, our dress and handbags were checked every morning and if we were not wearing the
maghnaeh
we were not allowed in,” Nazila told me one day. “If they found mirrors in our bags we could get expelled from school. They kept changing the rules. In eighth grade, we were not allowed to wear jeans, only black, brown, or dark blue pants. In ninth grade, white socks and backpacks were banned. Backpacks were considered too Western. But now white socks and backpacks have been rehabilitated.”

I have never found the chador particularly comfortable, practical, or safe. It gets caught in escalators. It drags along the ground collecting dust. It makes it hard to climb stairs. It is hot in summer. Try taking notes or straphanging on a bus while holding a chador firmly under your chin, or in your teeth.

Many Iranians have nothing but disdain for women who choose to wear the chador. A scathing attack came decades ago from the poet Iraj Mirja in his 1921 satirical epic
Aref Nameh
. In translation it reads:

Pardon me but are you some onion ball