Journal no.6 1995. pp12-15.

A response to Haleh Afshar's article in WAF journal no 5
Mandana Hendessi and Rouhi Shafii

FIFTEEN years of Islamic fundamentalist gov-ernment have taken a massive toll on women's politics in Iran. Secularist feminism has been suffocated within Iran's boundaries; its survival should be mainly attributed to the efforts of Iranian women's groups outside Iran. Women in Iran can raise their issues only by using the framework set by the fundamentalists - they can exercise no real con-trol over the agenda. Naturally, given this imposition, those who have some influence are women who are trusted by the regime as 'true believers' of funda-mentalism.

Haleh Afshar's position on fundamentalist women should be placed in the context of a deepen-ing identity crisis which many Iranian secularist women living in the West face. It is part of a trend which is developing amongst some academic Iranian feminists in an attempt to respond to this crisis of identity. It was in 1985 in Nairobi, Kenya, in the women's decade conference held by the UN, that the power and appeal of fundamentalist Iranian women really sunk into our minds. it became clearly appar-ent there that larger numbers of Muslim third-world women were considering Islamic fundamentalism as a viable political option to combat western imperial-ism.

A cross-section of third-world women, from Bolivia right across the globe to the Philippines, tend-ed to find the 'anti-imperialist' message of fundamen-talism more attractive - more tangible. They also con-sidered the struggle against imperialism as a priority overriding the importance of achieving gender equal-ity. Haleh Afshar is therefore quite right to claim the third-world popularity of the fundamentalist mes-sage.

This meant that we, as secularist feminist partici-pants, had to spend time discussing with third-world women our differences with fundamentalist women, convincing them that we were also 'anti-imperialists' rather than raising their awareness about our princi-pal reason for being there - defending the rights of Iranian women. On the other hand, we felt a distance between ourselves and feminists representing Western countries who were less enthusiastic to commit themselves to issues around imperialism and racism which we were facing.

The Nairobi conference is just an example to demonstrate the gulf between us and the two domi-nant camps: the 'anti-imperialist' and Western femi-nists (the 'anti-imperialist' camp at that time also included women from the Soviet-supported coun-tries and 'liberation movements', e.g. Cuban and Palestinian women), our isolation, the struggle to be understood by both and the enormous difference between our resources and theirs. And it is this isola-tion which, in our view, has given rise to a crisis of identity amongst many secularist Iranian feminists.

Where do we belong? A question we repeatedly ask ourselves. In resolving this, some women have found the pull towards a full or partial reconciliation with Iranian-style fundamentalism stronger. A trend is now developing amongst some Iranian feminists, notably academics like Haleh Afshar, to 'stand back and consider' Islamic fundamentalism as opposed to stand up and fight against it.

If we examine what Haleh Afshar as a key participant in this tendency was saying in the early 1980's, shortly after the fundamentalist triumph in Iran, and what she is advocating now (though it is not always possible to see clearly where she stands), we can see the changes which have occurred since then in her views on fundamentalism.

Haleh Afshar contributed to a well-researched book called In the Shadow of Islam: 7-be Women's Movement in Iran, published in 1982. In her essay entitled "Khomeini's Teachings and Their Implications for Iranian Women", she argued that women in Iran faced the dual problem of the Qur'anic text and the clergy's interpretations of it. The text, she argued, 'relegates women to the sphere of domesticity and gives them a status below men' and the second obstacle is the text's clerical interpretations which further reinforces women's subordination.

She then compared the populist appeal of fundamentalism amongst Iranian women to that of fascism for Italian and German women in the 1930's. On the convergence of the two ideologies, she wrote:

Like fascism, Shi'ism has been using a pre-exis-tent ideology 'which was 'already deeply inscribed in the unconscious' to transform and recombine pre- existent patriarchal values and reimpose its yoke on women. Further, the substance of Khomeini's state- ments concerning women are strikingly similar to those of the Nazis. Both ideologies uphold the legal provision of the patriarchal society, place tbefamily at the centre of society, with women as guardians, protectors and servants of this unit.

On the basis of support for Khomeini, which she compared with those of Hitler and Mussolini, she wrote:

just as Mussolini drew the Italian women out into the streets, so Khomeini draws out his black-veiled demonstrators, cheering, mourning or cbanting slogans supporting the revival of morality and the old values.

Is this crowd of black-veiled demonstrators, chanting slogans supporting the revival of a fascist- like morality, the same women to whom Haleh in her WAF article attributes to 'have consistently and con-vincingly argued that Islam as a religion has always had to accommodate women's specific needs'? Yes, they are.

They are women who have been either staunchly religious all their lives, mainly from middle-class backgrounds, or those who resolved their crisis of identity in the Pahlavi era, where they were torn between a modernist state and religious values, through joining the ranks of Islamic fundamentalism as a revolutionary force.

The first group, mainly older women, were attracted to the fundamentalist movement because they had always desired an Islamic state. The second group, however, had more complex need They were generally younger and deeply frustrated with a crisis of identity brought about by a conflict between the values of their religious families and those of a secu-lar state.

They were predominantly brought up in families ranging from lower to upper middle-class back-grounds. Their upbringing required an adherence to religious values which were increasingly under-mined by the demands of a modernist state. They were young women who took off their veils outside the high-school or university gates and put them back on at the front door of their homes.

They lived two lives, separating their family life from their outdoor activities and interests, nurturing secrets about both. Those outdoor acquaintances and friends who were the off springs of secular families tended to put down religious values, calling them 'backward and regressive'. On the other hand, their families were punitive and hostile to secular values, and to women unveiled and mixing with men.

These young women were drawn in great num-bers to revolutionary Islam which started gaining momentum rapidly in the mid-1970s. They took shel-ter within its confines and gained strength through its supportive and fraternal networks. it was bliss, an alternative to the combined pressures they were under - those exerted simultaneously by traditional Islam and the secular state.

It was an attractive option as it drew a distinction between its vision for future development, and both traditional Islam and the modernist Pahlavi state. The former was proclaimed as stifling progress and the latter as promoting Iran's domination by the West. The revolutionary Islamic leadership condoned tradi-tional family values, whilst encouraging these young women to retain an active interest in a political move-ment which was preparing for power.

It is not they who have changed, but Haleh Afshar's views of them. Whereas before she saw them as a black-veiled crowd, she is now adopting a more understanding stance towards them. They are enlightened 'Islamist' women.

Is the Qur'anic text embodying 'women's specific needs' different from that which 'relegated' women to the sphere of domesticity in the years immediately following the revolution? Hardly. We are dealing with the same text, written 1400 years ago, and the same fundamentalism, though after the death of Khomeini we have become more aware of the different ten-dencies within it. All of them unite on the oppression of women.

This is not to deny that fundamentalist women have made some important gains in reforming laws in favour of raising women's status in the family, and that many of them are becoming more conscious of the stark oppression women face in Iran. But, do we have to go as far as sympathising with them and their oppressive philosophy?

It is like Christian women winning the battle on women's ordination. True, we were happy for them and cheered them. But, we did not join them. We also made no effort to stand back and sympathise with their faith.

In her WAF article, Halch Afshar claims that the 'Islamist' women's return to the 'source' is the desire to return to the 'golden age' of Islam. That is when Islam was a new religion. This 'golden age' embraced the period where Islam respected the economic inde-pendence of women such as, according to Haleh Afshar, Khadija, the wealthy wife of Mohammed.

Islam in the first two decades of its emergence, like any new order, made certain concessions. it had to because it was a new movement and the prevail-ing social relations had been robustly in place for centuries previously. The pre-Islamic social relations which provided women with a relative economic and social freedom had to be at least partially accommodated (Mernissi,1993; Ahmed,1992). Women, in the pre-Islamic Arabia could remain within their own tribes as opposed to moving to those of their hus-bands, as advocated by Islam. They could choose to reject their husbands' sexual demands without fear-ing punishment.

When Islam consolidated its global grip, achiev-ing a comfortable leadership position, its tolerance of these freedoms was lowered substantially (Mernissi, 1993; Ahmed, 1992). It then started reversing the position of women through using force. The 'golden age' was indeed short-lived.

At the time of the Iranian revolution many women, those reared by religious and veiled mothers, re-veiled themselves, discarding their 'Western' clothes. However, we have now had fifteen years of Islamic fundamentalism in Iran. Can we now say that during these years, where women have faced a strong denial of their rights as citizens in every sphere of choosing their clothing, employment, education, travel, etc, they are still 'choosing' the veil as a liber-ating symbol?

In a country, where the moods of the ruling regime and the extent of its factional divisions is mea-sured through the tightness of women's veils, what is the 'choice' for women? Naturally to survive, women have to adhere to Islamic clothing.

Looking closely at government policies on educa-tion and employment of women, the element of 'choice', to which Haleh repeatedly refers, becomes a mere myth. The basic goal of educating women in Iran is to produce Islamic women (Higgins, Shoar- Ghaffari, 1994). Purification and commitment take precedence over knowledge and skills. The belief underlying both the content and the form of women's education in Iran is that women's primary role in life is to be good wives and mothers. The suit-ability of other activities is judged by the degree to which they interfere with or draw women away from their family responsibilities.

Women are virtually excluded from agricultural and technical fields (Higgins, Shoar-Ghaffari, 1994). Whereas Haleh Afshar proudly rejoices in the tri-umphs of young Iranian women in achieving top grades in university entrance exams because they had male maths teachers, we would ask: what is the point of celebrating this when they are ultimately barred from further education and employment in agricultural and technical areas? What is so remark-able here when they are discouraged to become maths teachers themselves? Instead, should we not demand women as maths and science teachers?

In respect of other Muslim countries, the concept of choice for women to re-veil is again blurred when one considers the existing political vacuum. Fundamentalism is gaining momentum because there is no other political alternative to the prevailing stagnant ruling regimes. The demise of the Soviet Union and the subsequent retreat of socialism as a state ideology have left a large gap which is now, sadly, being filled by Islamic fundamentalism in countries like Sudan, Egypt and Algeria.

Fundamentalist women have always based their negation of 'Western' feminism on a widely-accepted myth. This myth is born out of a profound ignorance of feminist history and what feminism stands for. The myth says that feminism in the West has reduced women to 'sex objects'. it has degraded them to the level of 'marketing their sexuality as an advertising toot to benefit patriarchal capitalism'. The myth also says that Western patriarchy has 'offered' women these kinds of degrading freedoms.

Women in the West have worked hard to establish major rights and freedom of choice for women, stem-ming from the dominant liberal ideologies. They have wholeheartedly opposed the objectification of women through redefining sexuality, offering a strong negation of its macho manifestations in pornography and advertising. There is no doctrine in feminism, as there is in Islam, on how women should or should not behave, which makes the claims of fun-damentalist women meaningless.

Women's rights to personal autonomy in the West have been achieved through consistent struggles, though we still have a long way to go. They were not offered on -a plate. For instance, nowadays we take for granted a woman's right to live in a women's refuge when leaving a violent relationship. This was a struggle in which the women's movement in Europe and America fought hard to win, starting in the early 1970s.

Western women have no exclusive ownership of feminism. Iran has not been without its own feminists through its many different periods of development. Going back to 2500 years ago, to the ancient Iran, women ruled as queens. We have many examples of women leaders - Queen Esther, Pourandokht and Azarmidokht, to name a few. Even the then patriar-chal poet, Ferdowsi, could not fail to ignore the power of women as depicted in his fictional charac-ters of Roudabeh, Tahmineh and Gordafarid.

In the nineteenth century, Iranian women led the struggle for educational rights and political freedom. Later, women like Parvin E'tesami and Forough Farrokhzad used their poetic imagination to cam-paign against women's exploitation continuing the path of the earlier feminists.

The failure of liberal democracy in Iran in the early and middle twentieth century led to the isola-tion of feminism. Liberal state ideologies which flour-ished during the Constitutional Revolution 0905-1911) and later re-emerged in the mid- 1950's failed to rally support for two major reasons.

First, Iran's global position as a country under imperialist domination undermined the growth of a state ideology based upon parliamentary democracy and individual liberties. Secondly, Iran with a large peasant population, dispersed over a wide and large-ly inaccessible geographical area, a small though growing industrial working-class.1 and a long history of autocratic kingdoms, found liberalism an alien concept irreconcilable with its communal and feudal cultures. Indeed Eastern-style socialism (particularly Maoism) had more appeal, (still insignificant com-pared with Islamic fundamentalism) to Iranian mass-es because of its closeness to autocracy and dictator-ship.

To argue that fundamentalism or 'revivalism' has been a God-sent gift to Iranian women (p17, WAF 5) reflects the naive romanticism of those who can choose to live outside it and be unaffected by it. True, Iranian women have demonstrated resilience against fundamentalist encroachments, and some fundamen-talist women have shown how the law can be reformed in favour of women as a whole. But not all Iranian women have gained specific benefits from the fundamentalist regime.

Only for some women fundamentalism has been a god-send, through which they have gained respectability and a high social status. These are mainly women in the top echelons of the Islamic state hierarchy, who are distinguished and accredited for being related to and supported by powerful men, and their female cronies who run the regime's chari-table institutions with no wage expectations.

They have just managed to, in fact can only, touch the surface. The roots are rotten to the core. And that is because Islamic fundamentalism is essen-tially a ideology which reinforces male domination and women's oppression. The evidence of this is starkly visible in Iran and in the other parts of the world where fundamentalism controls the state. Even in places, like Turkey, where it is an oppositional force, we can clearly see the Subordination and mar-ginalisation of women within its ranks. it is a system through which women can only exist and be spoken about through their relations with a man - they have no identity of their own. A close look at Haleh Afshar's article illustrates this.

Throughout the article, when referring to the key Islamic women, whether those in the past or present, they are introduced as wives, sisters or daughters of a notable male figure. Khadija and Aiesha were Mohammed's wives (two of the hundreds of wives and concubines lie happened to possess), Fatima is known as Mohammed's daughter and Imam Ali's wife, Azam Taleghani as the daughter of the late Ayatollah Taleghani, and Zahra Rahnavard the wife of the previous prime minister Mousavi.

The oppression of women within fundamental-ism is a well-documented fact, not least in In The Shadow of Islam, of which Haleh Afshar was a co- author in 1982. As a state ideology, it cannot be reformed to include women as equal partners with men in social and political life, neither can it be reformed to ensure women's equality in the family. Women will continue to be marginalised under fun-damentalism because by definition it is a return to an archaic set of gender relations based upon domestic-ity and the Subjugation of women.

Mandana Hendessi is a research/training consultant specialising on women's issues in social policv. Rouhi Shafii is a sociologist researcher on women 's issues.

REFERENCES
Azar Tabari and Nahid Yeganeh (ed) In the Shadow of Islam, Zed Press, 1982
Fatima Mernissi, Islam and Democracy, Virago Press Ltd 1993
Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, Yale University Press, I992
Patricia J Higgins and Pirouz Shoar-Ghaffari, Women's Education in the Islamic Republic of Iran in The Eve of the Storm, Mahnaz Afkhami and Erika Friedl (ed), IB Tauris, 1994