The Condition of Women in Iran1
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
I am greatly honoured to be the
guest of Amnesty International and addressing such a very distinguished
assembly here to-night. I feel not only honoured, but also deeply indebted to
Amnesty for allowing me to be the voice of my wretched compatriots for a few
minutes and for lending that voice an attentive ear.
To-night I could have talked about
our writers and poets who have been reduced to silence; I could have talked
about our journalists who may die for having published a cartoon vaguely
resembling Khomeini; I could have talked about Iranian children, who in
war-time are sent to walk over mine fields, and in peace-time are being
brain-washed in schools. I could have talked about the religious apartheid in
my country, where a red blood stamp on non-Muslim work permits has replaced the
«yellow star». I could have talked about the callous disregard of the actual
regime in
Now before elaborating on this topic
I think it is only fair to quote Imam Ghazzaly — an 11 century theologian —
known no doubt to all those familiar with Islamic history.
What you are going to hear is a
short extract from an essay entitled: "About the Calamity and the
Catastrophe of Beholding Women"! The essay is longish, but I presume these
few lines will do nicely to give you a sort of avant-goût!
Imam says:
"Beware that the veil or the
mask does not suffice to make a woman harmless — on the contrary, if they (the
women) put on white chadors, or wear their masks coquettishly, they only
heighten the desire and quicken the lust!… What is worse, they may thus appear
even prettier than they actually are. Hence, it is religiously prohibited and
forbidden for women to clad themselves in clean and fashionable chadors. Any
woman who does so is sinful, and any man — be it her husband, brother, or
father — who let her do so, shares her sins… Do not even behold the veil of a
woman, because that too excites lust. It is imperative to avoid looking at
women's clothing, smelling their sweet perfumes, hearing their pleasing voices.
It is also incumbent to avoid, at all costs, sending or receiving messages to
or from them; passing through passages that they may pass through, even though
you may not see them. For wherever there is beauty, there is the seed of
lasciviousness and evil thoughts… Beware that corruption springs from nothing
more readily than from sitting in a place or in a gathering where there are
women present."
I said it is fair to start my talk
with this passage, because I wanted the gentlemen present here today to know
that they are committing sin after sin by merely being here, looking at me and
hearing me. I hardly think you can smell me — I am wearing Shalimar Guerlain,
in case you are interested — but not smelling me does not lessen the burden of
your guilt!
Ghazzaly died about nine centuries
ago, in isolation, a different man, having second thoughts about his works.
Nonetheless, he left behind his earlier teachings to be picked up by Khomeini
and other mullahs in our time.
Not that Khomeini needed any
specific example to follow — his religious convictions offered him ample
opportunities and more than an adequate number of excuses to humiliate women.
More over, he was so very resourceful himself, so terribly imaginative in
finding ways and means to belittle females.
Khomeini not only imposed the hejab, but also issued orders to
ministries, offices, hotels, restaurants, shops, public and private enterprises
not to serve, accept or deal with women without veil. He asked the
trigger-happy members of Hezbollah (The
Party of God) to give "spontaneous" demonstrations against women who
refused to wear the Islamic chador. By Khomeini's initiative Kanoon e Tazirat was founded, which
literally means "The Centre of Reproof"! This centre dishes out the
appropriate portions of punishments for felonies and offences, which are not
specifically dealt with in existing Islamic laws.
On 29 of June 1983 Kanoon e Tazirat decreed that:
Any "open defiance of hejab and
appearance in public without it is punishable by 74 lashes." (Note to
Article 102).
Khomeini saw to it that different
groups called Sarollah (The Revenge
of God), Jondollah (The Army of God)
and Khaharan-e-Zainab (Zainab's Sisters) patrol the city
constantly to stop and punish the women who dared to defy this act. By the way,
such culprits need not be taken to any court. I quote:
"Since the crime is
self-evident, the punishment will be immediate"!
Out of the three groups I mentioned,
namely: The Revenge of God, The Army of God and Zainab's Sisters, this last one, with that rather homely
appellation, is dreaded by women much more than the other two hair-raising
ferocious-sounding names. This group is reputed to be particularly zealous in
carrying out the mullahs' orders. Just one example: The Sisters do not stop at
supervising the proper attirement of women; they have also taken it upon
themselves to cleanse the faces of those who have ventured to paint themselves
slightly. The only snag about it is that they rub the colour off with hankies
full of broken glass and bits of razor blades. At least in one particular case
that I know of, the face of a 17 year old girl, a very pretty one, has been cut
all over by Khaharan-e-Zainab, even
though she was not wearing any rouge, lipstick or any other sort of make-up for
that matter. The only explanation they later gave the poor mother of the girl
was, "It is not holy to be so beautiful. Your daughter, woman, is the
creation of the Devil!"
It has occurred to me more than
once, that their god is quite incapable of producing anything lovely.
I have been talking to you for
almost six or seven minutes now and I have only dealt with the plight of compulsory
hejab for women in
Surely, you have heard Mr.
Bani-Sadr's explanation on this matter. He was – May I remind you – the first
president of Khomeini's regime. He offered us the famous theory of those
mysterious rays coming out of women's hair, like so many Red-Indian arrows I
suppose, if not poisonous, certainly containing enough tickling material to draw
a few giggles even from an unticklish man. Hence, he stood firm that the hair
of women should remain unseen.
Other mullahs did not stop at that.
They said no part of a woman's body should ever be exposed to men; and to make
this irreversible, they quoted from the holy book: "Women must cover their
adornments." You heard me correctly: adornments. Unbelievably adornments
extend from the ear lobes down to the toenails! Therefore, they maintained that
a woman has to become an amorphous mass in order to let men live in peace. They
take all men to be mullahs, in other words unbalanced sex maniacs!
I have not finished with chador yet
— for I have one very good reason to talk about it a bit longer — and that is,
the imposition of hejab united women in Iran in an unprecedented way,
and was the cause of the first vast and organised opposition to Khomeini and
his regime.
If Mary Ann Cross, better known as
George Eliot, is right in saying that: "The happiest women, like the
happiest nations, have no history", then one can easily assume that the Persian
women, prior to 1979 Revolution, were among the very happy females. They indeed
did not have much of a history of their own. Up to 1906 — the date of our
Constitutional Revolution — they lived very much in the shadow of their men.
When the constitutional reforms started, our women were almost coaxed,
particularly by our writers and poets, into accepting a certain amount of
liberty and participating in a limited way in public life.
Between 1906 and 1979, they were
offered certain opportunities without fighting for them or even demanding them.
This, of course, does not mean that Iranian women were not conscious of their
rights and did not feel the urge for obtaining the due liberties and freedoms,
but as it happened, the modernisation of the country in that span of time, went
in the direction, which was beneficial to women.
In those 70 years or so, we were
presented with a number of gifts. The most significant ones are access to
education; abolishment of the veil (that famous veil again!); the right to
vote; curbing of the unequivocal male right for divorce and custody of
children; possibility to ask for abortion; banning of polygamy; the right of
maintenance after divorce. By 1979, not only the way was paved for women to enter
public and political scenes, but also they were already massively active in
many different fields.
All these rights and achievements,
however, melted away and evaporated into thin air within a few months of
Khomeiny's accession to power. Women were told in no ambiguous terms that they
were unequal to men in the eyes of the law and inferior to them in every
domain.
All ecclesiastics voiced this
opinion triumphantly, and showered us with citations from Koran, prophet and
Imams about the shortcomings of, I quote: "the God given nature of
woman." So much so, that they left no room for any doubt whatsoever, that
an Islamic state and a theocratic government as such, was incompatible with
emancipation of women and indeed with democracy itself.
To back up those 14-century-old
quotations, some mullahs offered their up-to-date explanation of women's
uselessness. Hashemi Rafsanjani, the speaker of the Islamic Parliament at the
time and the actual President of the Islamic Republic, came out with this
stupendous observation:
"The so-called emancipated
women of the world haven't had the slightest impact on the destiny of their
countries, be it political or otherwise ...Where women are apparently in
charge, they are nothing but the mouthpieces of their husbands."
It is not a bit surprising that
Hashemi Rafsanjani does not know Persian History and has never heard of at
least two powerful
Going back to George Eliot's saying,
one concludes that the history of Persian women started with Khomeini.
A great issue was made out of the
massive participation of women in those interminable pro-Khomeini
demonstrations all over the world. True — women were present in thousands in
those marches, but they had come out with their colleagues, with those who
shared their ideological beliefs, or even as curious individuals— but certainly
not as a united group. It was after the revolution that they had to become unified,
because they were being addressed as a separate category, a marginal bunch, a
handful of inferior human beings.
I regret the fact that not even a
fraction of the publicity bestowed upon those notorious pro-Khomeini marches
was ever given to women's demonstration, when they were entirely on their own,
against the enforcement of chador and against the gang of mullahs. I was in
Women have been under pressure ever
since. This pressure, however, has not been a constant upward curve, but a
zigzag path with its difficulties. The reason for the down-tides has not been
due, as you may well imagine, to the lack of desire of the clergy to crush
women, but owing to the sophisticated society they had usurped, where women
played a vital role and could not be dispensed with over-night. None-the-less,
the mullahs have done their level best to reduce them to mere housekeepers
wherever possible: No woman is ever seen on sports grounds, any woman judge or
solicitor in court. The activities of women physicians and teachers are
restricted to women patients and girls schools. Mixed primary and secondary
educational institutes have been turned into boys' schools or simply closed
down.
Mullahs are unanimous in saying that
women are borne simply to be married and bear children, and all they expect is
for women to remain chaste prior to marriage and become loving wives
afterwards. Their chastity should not be stained by the slightest knowledge of
sexual relationship or even the anatomy of the opposite sex; and their devotion
to their husbands should be such that they accept willingly to go to any length
in giving them all sorts of possible and impossible physical pleasure on the
nuptial night and there after. Don't you find the leap enormous, considering
the short notice and bearing in mind that a girl under Islamic laws and the
clergy's orders is marriageable at the age of nine?
One comes across so many contradictions in the Islamic Republic that one
more or one less does not make much of a difference. Take the question of
prostitution for example. They hang publicly the prostitutes, but highly encourage
the temporary marriage, which is an institutionalised prostitution. The other
day I heard on a French TV that a man was arrested in
It is never without a profound sense
of shame and horror that I refer to the Retaliation or Retribution law of the
Islamic Republic. This barbaric bill, which has taken us back to the
"blood wars" of the dark ages, illustrates the nature of
About 36 articles in this bill (and
just as many notes) deal only with women who have deviated from the path of
chastity. The punishments vary according to the sexual crimes they have
committed. They include shaving of the head, banishment from home, public
flogging, or stoning to death. Any husband who finds his wife in bed with
another man has the right to kill her on the spot and go free. If later the
woman is proved innocent, her male guardians (father, brother, uncle) can also
kill the murderer, but they must pay his family half the blood price prescribed
by the Islamic judge — because a woman, dead or alive, is only worth half a
man.
You have heard of scores of women
being publicly humiliated by being whipped. You have heard of pregnant women
having been hanged. You have heard of women put in jail with their small
children, shot dead or stoned to death. One of the last lapidating of a woman
took place in the city of
According to the society for Human
Rights attached to a group opposed to the actual regime in
I was talking on the 'phone with a
woman friend of mine the other day and asked her anxiously how things were in
The women of my country are brave
and courageous, and I have no doubt that they shall fight the insufferable
regime of mullahs as best as they can. I also know that they feel embittered
and neglected by the world — no one seems to care much about what happens to
them. That is why I am most grateful to you to-day, for wanting to know, for
caring. I thank you very much.
1This lecture was
given at the invitation of Amnesty International within the framework of its
Annual General Meeting,