[ Irans Women-Life-Freedom is a movement that has changed the
political culture of defiance and expressions of dissent. Its radical
creativity and imaginative forms of collective action, has opened the
possibility of thinking of politics anew.]
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HOW THE ISLAMIC REVOLUTION GAVE RISE TO A MASSIVE WOMEN’S MOVEMENT
IN IRAN  
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Behrooz Ghamari Tabrizi
November 9, 2022
CounterPunch
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_ Iran's Women-Life-Freedom is a movement that has changed the
political culture of defiance and expressions of dissent. Its radical
creativity and imaginative forms of collective action, has opened the
possibility of thinking of politics anew. _

Amir Kabir University uprising September 2022., Photograph Source:
Darafsh – CC BY-SA 4.0

 

Let me start with a straightforward proposition that is everywhere on
social and mass media these days: The Islamic Republic’s patriarchal
repression of women reached a tipping point after the murder in
custody of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini by the Guidance Patrol on September 16,
2022. A revolt, led by young women, engulfed the entire country under
the banner of _women, life, freedom._ At the root of this movement
is the anti-women core of the Islamic regime and the struggle of
Iranian women against it since its very beginning in 1979. The whole
nation — inside and outside the country, the global community, the
progressive Left as well as the hawkish Right, stand in solidarity
with this movement. The protests that began against the
compulsory _hijab_ and the demand for abolishment of the Guidance
Patrol, has now become a full-fledged intersectional revolt for regime
change in Iran, led by women.

This indeed is true that the Islamic Republic instituted draconian
patriarchal policies after the revolution on 1979 that stripped the
very basic formal rights that women had been granted under
the _ancien régime. _These measures formally reduced women to
second-class citizens in matters of marriage, custody, inheritance,
crime and judiciary, dress code, segregation, and many other spheres
of social life.  Yet, despite all this, women’s social mobility and
presence in public sphere grew exponentially in the past four
decades.  Ironically, this is in part an effect of the unintended
consequences of these policies. Women learned very quickly how to
navigate the new terrain, push the boundaries of the new institutions,
and _in practice _gain access to rights and privileges from which
the Islamic Republic deprived them. The recent revolt could not
materialize without the remarkable agentive presence and mobility of
women who carved out a space for ceaseless social and political
engagement during the past four decades. Women are revolting because
they refuse to continue the struggle in a field the boundaries of
which are drawn in the dilapidated spirits of patriarchy.  Their
gains have reached a hard as well as a glass ceiling that needs to be
overcome.

The Iranian revolution succeeded in ending the monarchy on February
11, 1979. On February 26, only two weeks after the victory of the
revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini annulled the Family Protection Law of
1967 and its 1975 amended version, which had given women more rights
in divorce and matters of custody under the Shah. Since its inception,
the clergy by and large had opposed the law’s basic premises, which
they believed violated the Islamic views on women’s role in
family.  Khomeini knew that the unity and uniformity that his
leadership afforded the revolutionary movement would not remain
uncontested for long after the triumph of the revolution. He knew that
the spirit of Islam and the symbolic revolutionary language with which
it inspired millions of Iranians of many creeds and classes needed to
be translated into a body of institutional projects of
postrevolutionary state-building.  So, he seized the opportunity to
put women under the control of their menfolk.

Despite such overt assaults on women’s rights, most political
parties continue to address women’s issues in the frame of
revolutionary politics, nationalism, class struggle, and
anti-imperialism.  For the first few months after the revolution,
except for the National Front, the oldest liberal organization in
Iran, and small Trotskyist group, Left and liberal parties remained
ambivalent about women’s issues. They failed to recognize the
remarkable contribution of women to the revolutionary struggle and the
need to check the assault on their rights.  At the time, most of the
women’s organization operated as an appendix to different political
parties to further the anti-imperialist struggle and tied women’s
issues to greater demands for social justice.

The establishment of the Islamic Republic proved inconsistent with
fundamental women’s formal and legal rights.  Despite earlier
assurances, on the eve of March 8, 1979, less than a month after the
triumph of the revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini called upon the
Provisional Government to uphold Islamic dress codes in its offices. 
His pronouncement scandalized many who played a significant role in
the revolutionary movement, including several members of his own
Revolutionary Council.  This was the second time, after the
abrogation of the Family Protection Law, in three weeks that issues of
women’s right had become a point of contention in the
postrevolutionary power struggle. That was why the festive
preparations for the first postrevolutionary International Women’s
Day turned into a rally with specific women’s rights demands such as
the recognition of women judges and, most importantly, a call against
compulsory _hejāb._  Thousands of women gathered in Tehran
University and the next day in front of and inside the hallways of the
Ministry of Justice chanting: _In the Spring of freedom, absent is
the rights of women._

Instituting compulsory _hejāb_ even in the tightly controlled
parliament and implementing it throughout the country was not an easy
proposition. It took another four years for the mandate to become an
enforceable law. Different factions inside the government as well as
influential clerics in seminaries raised questions about the wisdom of
such a law, its religious justification, as well as its feasibility.
Nevertheless, the new law went into effect on August 9, 1983.

The institution of compulsory _hejāb_ and other patriarchal
measures in cases of travel, marriage, custody, inheritance, criminal
laws, etc. all of which formally reduced women to second-class
citizens, gave yet more credibility to feminist concerns that the
Islamic republic would entirely force women out of the public sphere.
Comparisons were made with Reza Shah.  Some argued that whereas he
liberated Muslim women by the “unveiling law” that banned
the _hejāb _in public spaces in 1936, the Islamic Republic was now
forcing women back into the private sphere where they would be
subjected to the repressive domestic patriarchy.  Yet curiously –
these contrasting policies produced paradoxical results on the ground.
Reza Shah’s “unveiling” did not liberate women, and the Islamic
Republic’s repressive measures did not imprison women at home.
Ironically, it was under Reza Shah’s “unveiling law” that a
great majority of women in urban areas were forced to stay at home,
either because they chose not to appear in public without a veil or
were not allowed to leave their homes by their fathers or husbands.
Under the Islamic Republic, despite the institution of repressive
anti-women laws, rather than being imprisoned in their homes, women
gained unprecedented mobility in the country and year after year
increased their presence in the public sphere.

These were unintended consequences, but they were quite substantial.
As a consequence of the restrictions imposed on women in public
places, a new system emerged of what I call _patriarchy by
proxy. _The new laws created the possibility for a great majority of
socially conservative Iranian families who were previously reluctant
to see women’s participation in social affairs, to trust the new
“Islamized” public sphere as an extended domain of
patriarchal/religious order. The state became the ultimate guardian of
patriarchy and by becoming so, paradoxically, sanctioned an
unprecedented mobility among rural and urban women. Despite barring
women from entering key political and judicial positions of
decision-making, women entered and shaped the conditions of those
spheres in significant numbers.

_In practice_, gender politics and policy under the Islamic Republic
have been far from the mere enactment of literal readings of the
Qur’anic verses or a replication of women’s repression in Saudi
Arabia. There is no doubt that the postrevolutionary regime instituted
formal and legal apparatuses in order to constitute a _homo
Islamicus._ But in its _realpolitik_, the Islamic Republic negated
the anxieties that it would implement a literal reading of the
Qur’an and expunge women from the pubic and restrict their lives to
the domestic sphere. A quick look at the human development indexes in
relation to women’s status in education, health, sports, artistic
and cultural production, and civic engagement shows that the women in
Iran have the most visible presence in public sphere in its history. 
These changes were not the result of top-down state policies, but
rather the consequence of a contentious engagement between different
factions within the polity, women’s community and civic
institutions, and political parties and activists.

From the time of revolution in 1979 to the latest reports in 2019,
women’s literacy rate rose from 36% to 97.93%; share of women
students in higher education rose from 15% to 60%; women’s life
expectancy rose from 55 to 77; infant mortality decreased from 90 per
1000 to 10 per 1000. None of these could have been possible without a
remarkable presence of women in public space and their involvement in
policy planning and implementation.

The significant presence of women in the public arena created
unanticipated shifts in gender relations in the country, conditions
that forced even the most patriarchal factions in power to advocate
unlikely propositions regarding women’s role in society. In
2006-2007 school year, women comprised 60% of incoming class of
university students, and that trend continues. The conservatives of
the 8th Parliament introduced legislation for affirmative action for
men to catch up with women in higher education. The conservative
parliamentarians, who otherwise insist that the place of women is at
home to raise a virtuous family, argued that women who use resources
of free public universities had to commit to a 10-year employment
(public or private) after graduation. The paradox there is
self-evident.

Another measure that contributed to the remarkable shift in family
structure and gendered relations in public and private spheres was an
aggressive family planning and population control program that was
instituted in 1989. Although the Islamic Republic repealed the family
planning and protection laws of the old regime soon after assuming
power, in a significant shift, in 1988, the government introduced and
carried out one of the most efficient family planning programs in the
economically developing world.   Dictated by the perceived necessity
of containing an unchecked rise in population, the program
successfully reduced the population growth rate from the high of 3.4%
in 1986 to 0.7% in 2007. During the same period, the number of
children per family dropped from 6.5 to less than 2. Before his death
in 1989, Ayatollah Khomeini endorsed the new program thus affording
religious legitimacy to this ideological reversal.  As the
Candadian-Iranian anthropologists Homa Hoodfar
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national consensus-building, a massive mobilization of women, both by
government agencies as well as non-governmental agents, promoted with
effective religious justification, and offered through an efficient
delivery service in birth control and contraceptives (such as
distribution of free condoms), and premarital sex-education programs,
this ambitious family planning project could not have been realized.
Called by many “The Iranian Miracle
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the program was so successful that, fearing the emergence of an aging
population, the authorities are now trying to encourage families to
have more children.

The purpose of this brisk history is not to draw a sanguine picture of
women’s conditions in contemporary Iran. The complexities of how
government and non-governmental actors interact on these issues, how
the expansion and containment of state power shape the social
realities of women of different classes and ethnicities, or how
religious doctrines and convictions hinder or facilitate women’s
mobility cannot be fully detailed here.  Rather, I want to show that
the Islamic Republic instituted policies and imposed patriarchal laws
that produced unintended consequences in gender relations and
women’s mobility. For an uprising to materialize, there needs to be
a socially mobile, politically conscious, and subjectively free
population. Iranian women have long been the fierce political actors
we see on the street, not the oppressed, shadowy, veiled subjects that
are the meat and potatoes of foreign misperception and paternalism.
Yes, a mighty patriarchy shaped social order in Iran, like many other
places in the world, but women were never its hapless captives. That
image, the helpless veiled women, while effective in gathering support
in global liberal feminist circles who believe that Muslim women need
to be saved
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does not correspond to the practice of those women’s everyday lives
and fails to credit two generations of Iranian women for their
political creativity.

At its core, _Women-Life-Freedom_ is a movement for dignity and
sovereignty of the subject.  It is a movement that has changed the
political culture of defiance and expressions of dissent. Its radical
creativity— posters, songs, graffiti, and imaginative forms of
collective action, has opened _in practice_ the possibility of
thinking of politics anew. The transformative acts of insubordinate
bodies and liberated souls has made party platforms and unruffled
sermons ineffective and obsolete.

While Iranian women and their male allies fight against the state’s
brutal crackdown, their aspiring revolt, with its novel singularities,
faces instrumentalization by regional and global actors, facilitated
through a misreading of Iranian women’s history of deliberate and
agentive action. While the global reach of this movement through the
media operates as an instrument of its effective dissemination,
paradoxically, it also subjects it to a discursive violence.  We
should not misread the core principles of _Women, Life, Freedom_ as
being a simple “desire for the west
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population who are simply fed up_.  _Under such a misreading, a
whole host of unsavory interests, from neocolonial expansionists to
ethno-nationalist separatists, from delusional monarchists to all
those who still lament being on the losing side of the 1979
revolution, try their best to claim ownership of this movement.  Yet
Iranian women on the ground have been the very actors who historically
have created the conditions of possibility for their protest.  They
have opened space for themselves and their daughters in the face of a
state desire for repressive patriarchy. Over decades they have
succeeded to take advantage of the unintended consequences of state
policies; they are not merely reacting—they are instead determined.

Today’s massive women’s movement in Iran represents one of the
great achievements of the 1979 revolution—a revolution that
generated hope-bearing, conscious subjects who have perpetuated
themselves for more than four decades – despite and in the face of
all manner of repression. The paradoxical effects of the Islamic
Republic policies brought women to the centerstage of social
transformation in Iran. Now that transformation has reached a point of
frontal war with the state. Iranian women today hold key positions in
journalism, artistic and cultural production, civic engagement,
political organizing, higher education, scientific communities, local
political offices, etc. Daughters of those women, irrevocably demand
an extension and expansion of their mothers’ positions without any
patriarchal restrictions, either by the state or inside their homes.
Those demands will only be realized through the transformation of the
state, or by rethinking the meaning of the state. How this
transformation will unfold and with what means is yet not known, but
its inevitability is evident. How fortunate we are that these
generations of women taking the lead.

_[BEHROOZ GHAMARI-TABRIZI is an Iranian-born American historian,
sociologist, and professor.]_

* Iran
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* Iranian women
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* Women
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* Islamic Republic
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* Islamic State
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* islam
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* religion
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* Mahsa Amini
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* Iranian Revolution
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* political struggle
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