Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini Academic, women's activist, and responsible for the documentary on Iranian divorce courts writes for IranMania: The challenges facing women politicians and their endeavours in improving women's rights under the Islamic Republic of Iran. Comments on this article

The struggle for women’s rights in Iran dates back to the 19th century. Women were prominent in the political events leading to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906-11, but they were then forgotten as men monopolized power and power struggles, as so often happens in the aftermath of revolutions. Although the Pahlavi era (1925-79) saw major advances in women’s rights, these were largely imposed from above and in the teeth of clerical opposition. Not surprisingly, then, the clerical victory in the 1979 Islamic Revolution saw a resumption of various ‘Islamic’ restrictions on women: much publicized, as marks of women’s renewed ‘oppression’, were the imposition of hejab (‘Islamic covering’) and the dismantling of the Family Protection Law that had curbed men’s rights to divorce and polygamy.

But the Revolution led to many positive changes that neither the religious nor the secular opponents of the Shah had intended or predicted. Not least was a new critique of the gender biases in Islamic Law and a general raising of the nation’s ‘gender consciousness’.

Since the revolution, matters concerning women, from their most private to their most public activities, have been openly debated and disputed by different factions, often in highly charged and emotional language. Consciously or not, everyone has been drawn into these debates, and forced to take a position. A range of positions regarding family law and other facets of women’s rights were tolerated. Eventually, by the early 1990s, new laws made it difficult for men to exercise their right to divorce, and the issue of enforced hejab came increasingly under question. Meanwhile, Iranian society has been changing radically. 

Over 70 % of the population now live in urban areas, 60 % are under 25 years old, and 33 % are in education. Eighty percent of women are now literate; in 1998 51%, and in 1999 57 % of University entrants were female. The large majority of the population has no memory of the Revolution.

Elections are occasions when tensions come to the surface, positions are declared, and debates move on. The February 2000 elections for the Sixth Majles (Parliament) are taking place in a changed context and have a different dynamic from earlier ones.

The battle lines are more or less the same, but the rules have been changed by the unexpected victory of Mohammad Khatami in the 1997 presidential election, which has brought about a reformist movement and a free press and paved the way for ‘democracy Iranian style’, but against opposition from part of the clerical establishment. 

The outcome of the February 2000 elections will have a decisive impact on Iran’s crucial transition from theocracy to democracy, and just as women’s votes were decisive in electing Khatami in 1997, so women are major players in this year’s elections.

Politics and women’s place in the Islamic Republic might now be radically different from what they were before the 1979 Revolution. 

But one fundamental fact is unchanged: politics is still the man’s domain, and the only women who enter the field are related, by blood or by marriage, to prominent men. As such, most women politicians are hostages, vulnerable to the political fortunes of these men, and only a few have managed to break free.

This vulnerability, and the painful challenges and contradictions of this time of transition, are nowhere more evident than in the cases of Faezeh Hashemi and Jamileh Kadivar. Both women come from political families, and entered politics in the Fifth Majles elections (1996). Hashemi, younger daughter of President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani and the only woman in the Servants of Construction group, stood in Tehran. Kadivar, wife of Ataollah Mohajerani, one of the founding members of the same group, ran in Shiraz. The Servants of Construction broke away from the dominant Conservative faction and followed Rafsanjani’s lead to run on a platform of ‘Construction’, hoping to break the Conservatives’ control of the Majles. Both women advocated greater rights for women and identified themselves squarely as modernists in the battle with traditionalism.

In one of her pre-election speeches, Kadivar said that Article 1133 of the Iranian Civil Code, which gives men the absolute right to divorce, ‘should be changed under the guidance of the ulema and according to the requirements of the time.’ This remark caused an uproar. She was accused of ‘wanting to take away men’s right to divorce’ and of ‘insulting the Quran’. She was denounced by the Shiraz Friday Prayer Leader, and there were rumours she would be charged with heresy. Kadivar did not get into the Fifth Majles, even though she won the third highest vote in the first round of elections.

In Tehran, Faezeh Hashemi kept quiet on divorce, but broke other taboos. She promoted women’s sports, and cycling in public. She was the first woman politician in the Islamic Republic who dared to wear jeans, clearly visible under her chador.

Faezeh Hashemi

All these made her a target for those now termed ‘Conservatives’, who compared her to Ayesha, the Prophet’s wife who led the Battle of the Camel against Ali, the first Shi‘a Imam; but she became the darling of those who, after Khatami’s unexpected victory in May 1997, became known as ‘Reformists’. The public welcomed her: in the Majles elections she won the second highest vote in Tehran. It was rumoured she was top of the poll, but the Conservative candidate (Nateq-Nuri) was declared the winner. A woman beating a cleric in the capital would have been a quite intolerable blow for the Iranian political system and its deeply-rooted patriarchy.

It was within this patriarchal system that women deputies like Hashemi had to defend women’s rights during the Fifth Majles. 

Despite the highest number of women ever (fourteen), this parliament has the worst record on women’s rights. It has ratified two infamous bills: one forcing medical services to adapt to religious law, and the other banning the ‘exploitation of women’s images’ and ‘the creation of conflicts between men and women by propagating women’s rights outside the legal and Islamic framework’.

The first means that doctors can only treat patients of the same sex; the second prevents the press printing features on women, and terminates the lively debate on women’s rights. Both bills were part of a concerted effort by the Conservatives to frustrate the reforms promised by Khatami, by using his own slogan ‘The rule of law’. Ironically, both were drafted by the newly created Women’s Commission of the Fifth Majles, and were proposed in the name of the defence of women’s rights. Hashemi - and other Reformists in the Majles - opposed both bills, but to no avail. The two laws were, however, so far removed from the reality of Iranian society that it was impossible to implement them.

Meanwhile, Hashemi’s own newspaper (Zan) was another victim of the struggle between Reformists and Conservatives. In April 1999 the Revolutionary Court ordered it to close down; her father would not or could not come to her help.

The different press and public reactions to these two women now, compared with the run-up to the previous elections, can tell us something about how different this election is, and how far Iranian society has moved. Hashemi is no longer the icon of students and the youth. This has less to do with her actions during her term in parliament, than with her failure to distance herself from her father’s decision at the end of 1999 to enter the election race. Hashemi-Rafsanjani was nominated by the Conservatives, after all their attempts to curb and silence the Reformists and the press had failed.

He is seen as their last chance; despite their differences with him, they are prepared to stand behind him as a desperate tactic to avoid losing control of the Sixth Majles. Faezeh Hashemi has stood with her father, defending his record during the two terms of his Presidency (1989-97), and thus has lost the support of many Reformists.

Her place has been taken by women such as Jamileh Kadivar, who has consolidated her links with the Reformists. In February 1999, she nominated herself for the City Council in Tehran, and was elected. Meanwhile, her husband Ataollah Mohajerani, Khatami’s Minister of Culture and Islamic Guidance, has been responsible for nurturing a press that is now freer than at any time in Iranian history, for which he was unsuccessfully impeached in the Majles in spring 1999.

Protestor demanding release of Mohsen Kadivar

At the same time, Kadivar has become a household name; her brother Mohsen, a Reformist cleric, was convicted of ‘insulting the Islamic Republic’ following a much-publicized trial in the Special Clerical Court.

Another victim of this Special Clerical Court was Khatami’s former Interior Minister, Abdollah Nuri, one of the boldest Reformers. The Conservatives successfully impeached him in June 1998, and then had him tried in late 1999 to rule him out of the 2000 elections. This proved an unwise move, as in his defence Nuri effectively indicted some of the Islamic Republic’s harshly imposed rules, including compulsory hejab. As a former Minister and a man with impeccable religious and revolutionary credentials, what he said is particularly significant. While defending hejab as a religious rule, he advocated tolerance and recognition of reality.

‘Hejab is among our religious obligations’, he said, ‘but the fact is that this religious rule is not followed by some in society (including some Muslims), and government’s effort to force these people to observe the rule of hejab has not been successful.’

What to do with this reality, this fact?  

The Islamic Republic’s official answer so far has been to deny reality, or to force it into a straightjacket of legal rules, and to punish those who do not conform. But Nuri, reflecting the Reformist agenda, had a different proposal: to distinguish social reality from religious ideals and rules, to give people the choice whether or not to follow the mandates of their faith, which can never be enforced successfully, as the failure of the Islamic Republic’s hejab policy has shown.

The solution is to accept reality and respect the social rights of those who do not conform to religious rules, however much we disapprove. In his words, ‘an examination of the situation of contemporary society, and a glance at the past situation of Islamic societies, shows that these lifestyles (which in some respects are not compatible with religious rules) have been accepted as reality.’

Such a radical departure from the old slogans led to a predictable reaction from the Special Clerical Court. Nuri is in jail, absent from the elections, but he has raised the stakes by making explicit what the Reformists have not dared to say during their campaign.

How will the voters react? They will, in effect, be voting for or against what Nuri said during his trial. His defence, published immediately after his conviction, is a best-selling book which has become the unofficial manifesto of the Reformists. Both Faezeh Hashemi and Jamileh Kadivar are now running in Tehran, but have taken different positions as regards Nuri. How will the voters receive them this time?

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