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Women

Covered in messages
The veil as a political tool

By Azadeh Namakydoust
May 8, 2003
The Iranian

During the 1979 Islamic Revolution many women deliberately chose to observe the Hejab, either in the form of wearing the veil or a scarf, as a sign of solidarity with Ayatollah Khomeini and a symbol of opposition to the Shah's regime. In the months immediately following the return of Khomeini to Iran, what had been a private matter before became very public and Shari'a Islamic laws became the law of the land.

With that, observing the Hejab and wearing the veil became mandatory and enforced with much rigor. But many of the women who had been observing the Hejab voluntarily during the revolution took to the streets once again; only this time they were demonstrating in opposition to the laws that were being implemented and enforced by the Islamic government, that they helped put in power, and in opposition to the enforcement of the veil.

On January 7, 1936, Iran became the first Muslim country to ban the veil following a royal decree by Reza Shah Pahlavi; this was part of a series of actions taken by Reza Shah in an effort to "modernize" Iran. The strict enforcement of the unveiling of women caused much uproar and distress among various communities.

For many women wearing the veil represented tradition, honor, femininity, and some times even comfort; hence most women, along with their husbands, passionately opposed the royal decree. Some women refused to leave their houses for months, some others ventured out into the streets in full cover and risked being beaten and having the veil violently pulled off of their heads.

Despite the rigorous efforts of the government to enforce the ban on veil, the resistance of women proved to be much stronger than what the government had predicted. Many women continued to observe a modest Hejab. When Mohammed Reza Pahlavi became the Shah following the abdication of his father in 1941, the ban on the veil was lifted.

According to Farzaneh Milani in Veils and Words, it was not long before that there was a "renewed interest in the veil". This time the traditional and religious women were not the only ones who observed some degree of Islamic Hejab; some of the more liberal and non-traditional women of middle and upper classes also took up the scarf and the observance of the Hejab.

This "renewed interest in the veil" coincided with the implementation of reforms in Mohammad Reza Shah's White Revolution. As Zohreh Sullivan states in Eluding the Feminist, these reforms, which were generally seen as a move toward Westernization and industrialization, "resulted in poverty and chaos that followed mass migration from country to city."

The masses of people, who were already concerned about the growing gap between the rich and the poor, became more alarmed and an opposition movement slowly began to take shape. As the media and the press were controlled by the government, university campuses and religious venues, mainly mosques, became the major outlets for the outcry against the pro-Capitalist, pro-Imperialist, and generally pro-American policies of the Shah's government.

That in turn encouraged a move towards more traditional values and ways of living, which included dressing more modestly for both men and women and even wearing the scarf or the veil for some women. For many women making the decision to wear the chador was not based on religious grounds, but it was a conscious effort to make a statement against the Pahlavi regime. It was against this backdrop that the Islamic Revolution of 1979 took place; a revolution, which one could argue, could not have taken place without the active involvement of women.

Ironically, Khomeini's decree, requiring women to wear the chador, came on March 7th, 1979, a month after his return to Iran and one day before International Women's Day. Energized and excited that they had achieved what they had fought so hard for, various women's organizations in Tehran and all across Iran, had planned celebrations for marking International Women's Day >>> See photos

As Parvin Paidar notes, those celebrations quickly morphed into massive protests and demonstrations; "the protesters included young and old, rich and poor, veiled and unveiled", just as women from all walks of life had marched in support of the revolution and Khomeini, they now were protesting against his policies on women's rights. Thousands of women participated in spontaneous and massive protests against the Hejab.

Once again women were demanding their rights, only this time they were demanding it from the very government that they had hoped (and had promised) would ensure the protection of their rights. Despite the numerous meetings and protests that were held on Tehran University campus, the streets, and even at the Ministry of Justice, the women were unsuccessful in reversing the compulsory veiling decree.

To make matters worse, most of the political action groups, which many of the women were members of, failed to fully support the women in their opposition to the compulsory veil. Although some of these political parties condemned compulsory veiling in writing, they failed to support their words with action.

All the different views taken by the various political parties on the question of women and the observance of Hejab can be summarized in the views of four major political parties: Fadaiyan-e Khalq, Mojahedin-e Khalq, Women's Organization of the National Front, and the Islamic Republic Party (IRP). The latter was the ruling party founded by pro-Khomeini clergymen.

The Marxist Fadaiyan-e Khalq believed that the women of Iran did not sacrifice their lives and did not partake in the Islamic revolution in order to achieve "unrestrained looseness under the name of liberation" but that they had strived for a genuine political and social equality with men in "all political, social, and economic activities."

In the days immediately following the March 8th decree, Bakhtiar, the last Prime Minister under the Shah's regime, in a last attempt to regain the support of large groups of women, ceased the opportunity to criticize Khomeini's policies on the issue of the veil and warned women of the horrific laws that were sure to follow compulsory veiling.

This attempt did not go unnoticed by the Fadaiyan. They warned women that the issue of compulsory veiling was being used by the royalists and Bakhtiar supporters to benefit from the chaotic situation that the country was in at the time and to try to present and promote themselves as pro-women.

It seems that it would be safe to conclude that although the Fadaiyan were in favor of some degree of observance of the Islamic hejab, they were opposed to the enforcement of chador and compulsory veiling.

Another major political group that addressed the issue of compulsory veiling, was the leftist-Islamic Mojahedin-e Khalq. The Mojahedin took the stance that seems to have been the general view of many other factions involved in the revolution. They took the position that the question of Hejab and mandatory veiling was a minor one and that it should not be included in the major issues that needed to be addressed.

While acknowledging that in the past Hejab had been used to oppress women and exclude them from social and political activities, they noted that many "Iranian militant Muslim women" had adapted their clothes accordingly so that "while still observing Hejab they [did] not hinder social relations."

The Mojahedin believed that dealing with the impertinent question of veiling would be a waste of energy and forces and that "it [would] provide opportunities and pretexts for plotting and agitation by the counter-revolutionary forces"

The Women's Organization of the National Front party took quite an interesting approach to Khomeini's decree. They utilized the teachings of the Koran and the Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) to argue that Islam does, in fact, guarantee women equal rights with men and that women have traditionally been integral members of society. They further argued that the Islamic Republic should, taking advantage of "divine blessings", strive to help women realize the rights they fought for during the revolution and to help them realize their full potential in the political and social arena.

Also, noting that the Article 21 of the Constitution states that "government must assure the rights of women in all respects, in conformity with Islamic criteria", they held the government responsible for making sure that the constitutional rights of women were protected.

It is interesting that the National Front took the position it did, because this was the party of the former Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh, which believed that the government of Iran should be a secular one with having the protection of the rights of the Iranian citizens as its main priority.

The positions that all of the above political parties took on the issue of compulsory veiling, was obviously in opposition to the views of the ruling party, the IRP.

Abolhassan Banisadr, who became the IRI's first president, justified the enforcement of the veil by stating that in a society such as Iran, "clothing has a social role" and that the goal of the society should be to establish a "unitarian society" in which the relationship between men and women would be a "relationship between brains" and in order to achieve such a society, people "must inevitably minimize those relations that are engendered between bodies. [People] must choose clothing appropriate to such aims."

Taking similar views IRP leader Ayatollah Beheshti, cited tradition, history, and opposition to "colonialism and imperialism" as some of the reasons for the necessity of wearing the chador by women. He also noted that wearing the chador gives women "national character". Reminding his audience of the ban on veil during Reza Shah's reign, he condemned Reza Shah for trying to "'undignify' our women and draw them into lightheaded loose behavior" as part of his "colonialist policies".

He also makes the argument that women started to wear the chador and to observe the Hejab voluntarily and that "no one forced [them] to come with Hejab on demonstrations" and that they felt an "Islamic responsibility" to do so. Surprisingly, he notes that just as no one forced the women to wear the chador during the revolution, no one is trying to force them to wear it now, and that they (the IRP members) are only "requesting it" and that "Ayatollah Khomeini has not expressed it in terms of imposition and force".

Clearly, there seems to have been a discrepancy between Khomeini's decree and their interpretation of it, perhaps for the purpose of trying to calm people down. The only thing that is clear is that no matter how the decree was interpreted, the women were not successful in lifting the mandate on wearing the veil and that veiling did indeed become compulsory.

During the revolution women were encouraged to participate in demonstrations against the regime. Women, who had been actively opposing the regime in various ways, became an integral part of the anti-Shah movement. They had many of the same ideals as their male counterparts. They believed in equal rights for men and women, in freedom of speech and expression, and in "abolishment of all discrimination in law against women, particularly in relation to the family".

None of these ideals became reality after the revolution. As Haleh Esfandiari notes, almost all the women she interviewed for her book, Reconstructed Lives, felt a sense of betrayal and loss. Almost all said that "they had felt profoundly the humiliations visited on them by the regime's policies and actions regarding women."

It did not take long for the hopes of the women for a democratic society to turn into a nightmare, as the country became a theocracy. Some of the women Esfandiari interviewed kept their hopes alive for a year or two after the revolution; for some the dream died almost immediately after the IRP took over. Mari, one of the women interviewed by Esfandiari, says:

Like many others, I was also swept off my feet by the revolution... I remember the night Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran. I was excited and agitated... I never considered this [wearing the chador] a social movement, but rather a show of defiance against the system. I was too worried about communism to pay much attention to Islam.

This seems to be how most of the women felt. Most women who took part in the revolution did not cover their heads for strictly religious purposes. Most of the women saw wearing the chador as a sign of opposition to the shah's regime and as Esfandiari suggests, as a sign of protest "against a government associated in the minds of its opponents with the West."

The term "Westoxification" (gharbzadegi) was coined by Dr. Ali Shariati and the anti-Western movement that had started to slowly take shape in the early sixties was now in full bloom. Wearing the Hejab not only was a symbol of defiance of the regime, but as Milani suggests, it was a way of making a personal statement. It was a last step in the healing process of some of the women who had gone through the "distress and traumatization" that the violent enforcement of the ban on veil during Reza Shah's reign had caused them.

As Akram S. Pari suggested in an interview I did with her, there was another purpose for the observance of Hejab during the revolution. Many middle and upper class women saw the scarf and chador as unifying factors among women. She states that:

In order to show solidarity with the economically lower class women, who have traditionally been more religious, the middle and upper class women started wearing a scarf or chador in demonstrations. This was perceived by many women as a weapon they utilized against the Shah to demonstrate their unity.

This is a view that was shared by many women during the revolution. This is one of the reasons for the advocacy for modesty. Also, as Afsaneh Najmabadi suggests, "Wstoxification" was quite a taboo concept and every effort was made by women and men alike to avoid looking like a Westoxificated (gharbzadeh). This further encouraged the need for modesty in clothing and behavior.

Millions of women took part in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. They saw the revolution as a means to achieve the rights they thought they deserved to have. Many of the women did indeed wear the chador voluntarily during the revolution, but for them the revolution was a political movement rather than a religious one. They resented the Pahlavi regime and every thing that it stood for and in the 1970's Hejab represented what the Pahlavi's had rejected. As Sullivan states, "the chador is used by opposing camps for opposite reasons: the veil as a symbol of liberation from the dictatorial state and as an instrument for hegemonizing a revolution by those whose only aim was political power."

The IRI regime has tried its best, without much success, to sell the idea and impose the veil on women. Today's women not only oppose the enforcement of the chador and compulsory veiling with as much rigor as they did in 1980, they are slowly gaining some of the rights they had hoped to gain through the revolution. These women are utilizing the experiences they gained through organizing and activism during the revolution to bring about change in the Islamic Republic.

It seems that this is precisely what the regime was afraid of at the onset of the revolution. They realized that women had been so empowered through their involvement in the revolution that no one could have stopped them, thus they became even obsessed with restraining women and denying them their rights. Today, most women in Iran are of the opinion that the veil and the scarf are not their Hejab (restriction); they believe that the laws and denying them their rights are their real Hejab. Today, both religious and secular women are striving to acheive those ideals that they had hoped to be able to acheive some 23 years ago.

Author

Azadeh Namakydoust wrote this paper for a Middle Eastern history class at the University of Cincinnati.

Bibliography

-- Afshar, Haleh, ed. Women and Politics in the Third World. London, NY: Routledge, 1996.
-- Afshar, Haleh Islam and Feminisms: An Iranian Case Study. NY: St. Martin's Press, INC, 1998.
-- Esfandiari, Haleh Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution. Washington DC: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1997.
-- Milani, Farzaneh Veils and Words: the Emerging voices of Iranian Women Writers. NY: Syracuse University Press, 1992.
-- Najmabadi, Afsaneh (Ed.). Women's Autobiographies in Contemporary Iran Harvard Middle Eastern Monographs, No 25, 1991.
-- Pari, Akram S. Interview by Azadeh Namakydoust. 27 November, 2000.
-- Paidar, Parvin Women and the Political Process in Twentieth-Century Iran. Great Britain: Cambridge University Press, 1995.
-- Sullivan, Zohreh. Eluding the Feminist. Remaking Women: Feminism and Modernity in the Middle East. Ed. Lila Abu-Lugod. NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000.
-- Tabari, Azar and Nahid Yeganeh. In the Shadow of Islam. London: Zed Press, 1982.

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