Iranian Women Lead New Revolution

As dawn breaks over the towering Elborz Mountains, Elaheh Adeli throws a baggy coat over her sweats, covers her bobbed hair and runs to an outdoor lot to engage in what, for an Iranian woman, is a blatantly defiant act. She plays basketball with her husband and his pals.

For 15 years, Simin Ekrami has worked artistic magic with chunks of wood, clay and plaster of Paris. But lately the barefoot, denim-clad sculptor has worked on what was once unthinkable in the Islamic Republic: uncovered and anatomically correct figures of women. Although she ducks descriptions, her husband openly calls them nudes.

During Iran’s 1979 revolution, Mahboobeh Abbas-Gholizadeh campaigned hard against the monarchy, and she later studied at one of the famed seminaries in the city of Qom. Now the editor of the women’s intellectual magazine Farzaneh--and a divorced mother of two girls who smokes Marlboros and likes mountain climbing--she writes editorials challenging the same revolution. She says it hasn’t done enough for women.

A revolution has erupted within Iran’s revolution. Its pace is slower. It rarely speaks with a single voice. And it still faces obstacles so formidable that, by comparison, ending 2,500 years of monarchy looks almost easy.

But the passions that have emerged from disparate corners of Iranian society to inspire a vibrant women’s movement are just as deep as those of 1979.

“Ironically, the [1979] revolution appears to have given women a keener sense of their rights, created among them a sense of community and turned them into an informal constituency or pressure group,” said Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, author of “Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran’s Islamic Revolution.”

“In Iran today, women are regarded with awe because of the combative attitude they adopted toward the state’s attempts to interfere in their private and public lives.”

That combative spirit is now visible in virtually every aspect of Iranian life, from the 84 women’s basketball teams in five Tehran leagues to the unprecedented 200 women who ran in 1996 elections for the 270-seat parliament, from the women’s groups now on the Internet to new laws improving women’s rights in divorce, employment, dowries and child custody.

Iran’s movement, however, differs from women’s lib in the West. It often works from within Islam. The majority of women are adapting traditions and reinterpreting Koranic verse rather than rejecting either outright.

“What I say about women’s rights is based on what I studied of religious law and logic,” said Abbas-Gholizadeh, the editor. “And I can tell you from knowing the Koran and hadith [Islamic traditions] that whatever the clerics are doing is not what is written in the Koran. It is only their interpretation--their male and sometimes chauvinist interpretation.

“In the Koran, it is written that men and women are equal before God. And those who are better are better because they are good Muslims, not because they are men or women.”

Supporters of Khatami

Putting their own imprint on the way Islam is applied has led women to become a defining force in politics here. The overwhelming turnout and unity of the women’s vote were factors behind the May 1997 electoral victory of Iran’s President Mohammad Khatami, who campaigned on a platform of reform, in the biggest election upset in the nearly two decades since the 1979 revolution.

Four women even applied to run for president. None was deemed qualified by the Council of Guardians, a clerical body that evaluates candidates. Yet the idea of a female chief of state was not rejected. In August, a poll widely cited here found that 72% of respondents approved of a woman as president.

A month later, one of Khatami’s early appointments was a female vice president. Today, almost a third of government employees are women. And the president’s office and most ministries and governors’ offices have departments for women’s affairs headed and staffed, for the most part, by women.

During women’s week last October, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the conservative supreme leader who has the last word on all issues, told a stadium full of women that “a blind imitation of Western women” would be “noxious.” Yet even he demanded “greater participation of women in social and political affairs.”

“In the end,” said Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson Center, “the regime itself has been forced tacitly to acknowledge it cannot exclude women from public life.”

The New Politicos

Women have not yet achieved the same rank as some did under Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, the late monarch. But what distinguishes the current women’s movement from activism during the shah’s era are the types and number of activists. Many leading advocates today are not westernized or upper-class elites but from the masses of women from traditional families, rural areas and even clerical circles.

Dozens of the 200 women who ran in the 1996 election came from rural areas rarely before involved in politics; the number of women who sit in the Majlis, the parliament, has more than tripled since the revolution, to 14.

Marzieh Sadighi, 41, is one of the new politicos. Raised in a traditional family and married at 13, she nevertheless went on to college and graduate school in engineering. She served as deputy minister of housing before both she and her husband, Golam Reza Shirazian, decided to run for parliament from Mashad in 1996.

Both won, but she got more votes. And she is quite an independent thinker.

“Sometimes we have real quarrels over the pros and cons of proposed laws,” she said with a laugh.

Added Shirazian, “When she votes for a bill and I don’t, friends often say to me, ‘Can you go home tonight?’ ”

Although Sadighi is a member of parliament’s conservative majority, her agenda is shaped by the issue of women’s rights. She supports the idea behind a controversial new bill mandating separate medical services based on gender, but questions it out of concern that there are not enough female doctors, nurses and medical technicians to provide equal care for women.

On the other hand, “it will provide important employment opportunities for women,” she added.

Sadighi opposes a second controversial bill banning the publishing of pictures showing women without proper hejab, or modest Islamic dress.

“The idea is to present women based on their abilities and knowledge, not their bodies--an idea I support,” she said. “But we have enough regulations already to deal with this issue.”

Revolutionary law imposes daunting restrictions on women, from cumbersome hejab to stipulations that a wife can’t leave the country without written permission from her husband. Among the most offensive to women here is the fact that their testimony in court carries only half the weight of a man’s word.

To outsiders, Iranian law also seems riddled with contradictions. Women must ride on the back of buses but can be squashed in between men in public taxis. Women and men can’t date in public, but they can sit together in darkened theaters--as increasing numbers do.

A woman also is not allowed to touch a man to whom she is not related--although, women here like to point out, the same is true for men touching women.

At the same time--and unlike their counterparts in the nearby pro-West sheikdoms of the Persian Gulf--Iranian women can vote (beginning at age 15), drive, go to university with men and work alongside them in offices or employ them in female-owned businesses. Iran’s first police academy for women was inaugurated June 14.

More than 40% of the university population is female, government figures show--a far higher percentage than during the shah’s era. Greater numbers also work, although not always out of choice.

“Economic need, engendered by revolution, war and inflation, made two-income households a necessity and pushed many more women into the work force,” Esfandiari said.

Women in government are making deeper inroads by tackling the most controversial laws--and in the process blending modernism with religion and tradition.

The Iranian version of dowry, the mehr, is still a part of most marriages. But a recent law mandates adjustment for often-soaring inflation when the mehr is returned by a husband to his wife during marriage or after a divorce.

Tens of thousands of women were left destitute because a once-hefty mehr had become a pittance by the time husbands left them. And within a marriage, a mehr that keeps up with inflation provides women independent financial power that cannot be diminished.

Polygamy also is still legal, but it is decreasing in practice and increasing in cost in part because another recent law introduced the right for women to initiate divorce and to receive back pay for housework and child rearing.

Outrage and demonstrations after the death of 8-year-old Arian Golshani last September are helping change custody laws. Children had automatically gone to the father after a divorce--even in the case of Golshani, whose father was a drug addict with a criminal record and a documented pattern of abusing the child.

At the time of her death, Golshani’s skull was fractured; both arms were broken; her body had multiple burn marks; and she weighed only about 35 pounds.

A new law stipulates that a child can no longer be awarded to an unfit father. “It defines the qualifications needed, and it is mainly men who do not have those qualifications,” said Sadighi, the member of parliament.

Another law added a female assistant judge to advise on all divorce cases--a precedent with wider implications because the judiciary is the only field outlawed for women in Islamic tradition. Other recent laws protect women in the work force, guaranteeing they can’t lose jobs for family reasons and providing generous terms for part-time work or early retirement with pension.

Most women downplay the extent of change.

“There is still no equality in family law or criminal law,” said Mehranguiz Kar, a female lawyer. “And some of these changes are only good steps to what we had in the past, not to the future. Before the revolution, women could be judges.”

Yet the energy behind the debate has made women’s rights a cutting-edge issue. “Never in Iran have we witnessed discussion like there is today,” said Kar. “It’s developing in the press, among clerics and by men in high positions. Not in a short time, but eventually it could change almost everything.”

A critical new dimension to the women’s movement comes from the younger generation that doesn’t remember the monarchy. Its impact on women’s lifestyles is sweeping.

In official basketball games, Adeli, a scrappy forward with more heart than height, can play only at all-female facilities such as the Hejab Club on Hejab Street--Los Angeles Avenue before the revolution. The only male allowed at a recent game was the 3-month-old son of Adeli’s sister, the team captain, who sat in the bleachers nursing the infant during halftime.

But sheer numbers, public pressure and a recent relaxation of Iran’s strict social code are opening up sports. About 2 million women engage in athletics, a fivefold jump in the past two years and a whopping increase from the few thousand before the revolution. Women’s facilities can no longer cope.

More Mixing of Sexes

With fewer fears of punishment from morals police, the genders have begun to mix in recreational sport at public parks, playing table tennis or badminton and jogging or skating. “As long as I am properly covered, no one bothers me when I play with the men,” Adeli said.

After 5,000 women broke the gender barrier at Tehran’s soccer stadium--to greet the returning national soccer team after it qualified in December for the World Cup--the government began debating whether to allow female spectators to watch games. And in April, it announced permission for a professional women’s soccer league.

Although burdened with clumsy hejab coverings, Iranian women have even begun vying at international meets, sometimes against men, in sports such as equestrian events and shooting. The shift was reflected when an Iranian woman not only competed in the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta for the first time since the revolution but carried the national flag at the opening ceremony.

Since his election, President Khatami also has tried to alter Iran’s rigid atmosphere. He set a precedent during his first reception for diplomats by inviting both husbands and wives to the same function, after years of separate events, often on separate days.

Khatami’s supporters, however, want much more. “I’m a backer,” said Abbas-Gholizadeh. “But I am now writing articles warning the president that he will lose his popularity unless he pays more attention to gender issues. We now have expectations.”

Indeed, predicted one prominent European envoy, “Ultimately, the extent of freedom in Iran will be decided by the way the female population is treated.”

* POLITICAL DUEL IN TEHRAN

President Mohammad Khatami countered foes who impeached his interior minister. A10.