Veiled Threat

What do the Iranian protests mean for the country’s women?

Source: The New Yorker

Many Iranian women enjoy high levels of education but are nonetheless subject to some of the harshest gender laws in the world. Illustration by Francesco Bongiorni

Letter from Tehran

Two days after Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was sworn in for a second term as Iran’s President, and nearly two months after large numbers of Iranians began protesting what they regard as fraud in the election of June 12th, I went to a gathering at an apartment in North Tehran. I was expecting to see Negin, an artist friend of mine, but when I asked where she was my hostess replied, “She was beaten up on inauguration day and is resting at home.” I wanted to get in touch with Negin to see how she was, but, as a journalist who has been barred from working by the authorities, and whose conversations are probably being monitored, I hesitated to call her. The next day, however, I was getting my hair cut, and I realized that I was only a few streets away from Negin’s apartment. I asked the barber if I might use his phone. Negin answered, and I said that I’d like to stop by.

When I think of the people I know who are active in Iran’s pro-democracy movement, I think first of the women. It’s not that the movement has been dominated or driven by women, or that the murder of Neda Agha-Solta—the young woman whose death at the hands of a sniper, on June 20th, was captured by mobile phone and beamed around the world—was more tragic or significant than that of Sohrab Arabi, a young Iranian man who was also killed during the protests. But when I look at photographs of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, when Iran won a parliament against strong monarchical opposition, and then at photographs of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, and, finally, at footage of this summer’s demonstrations in Tehran, I’m struck by the absence of women in the first, the paucity of women in the second, and the triumphant presence of women in the third.

The story of women’s rights in Iran is one of advances and setbacks, stretching back to the start of the twentieth century, when a national women’s movement first took shape. In the nineteen-thirties, the wearing of the traditional veil was banned, as Reza Shah sought to establish a modern secular state, and women were allowed into universities. During the reign of his son, women gained the right to vote and to enter parliament, and many became students and teachers. After the 1979 Revolution, many women’s rights were taken away, and strict clothing laws were enforced. Today, the Islamic Republic’s gender laws are among the harshest in the world. They penalize women in the areas of marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. Polygamy is legal for men, and the legal testimony of one man carries the same weight as that of two women, an imbalance that helps explain why there are so few convicted rapists in Iran. Against this background, women like Negin—educated, cosmopolitan, and old enough to have come of age before the Islamic Revolution—occupy an anomalous position. They were formed in a society far more liberal, if not necessarily freer, than the one they now inhabit. And though Iranian women remain very highly educated by the standards of surrounding countries, the social and professional avenues open to them are often disappointingly narrow.

This summer, as the protests against the election result spread and two of the defeated candidates, Mir-Hossein Moussavi and Mehdi Karroubi, emerged as figureheads for a pro-democracy movement, the political desire of millions of Iranians for an end to religious despotism was for the first time aligned with the aspirations of millions of Iranian women for more independence and dignity in their lives.

I know many women who had not been conspicuously political before the election but started attending every demonstration. The woman who told me that Negin had been hurt is shy and law-abiding, and she pampers her teen-age son so much that everyone jokes that until recently he didn’t know that apples had pips. Yet, over the summer, she went out once or twice a week to defy the power of the state. Even after violence turned the demonstrations into ordeals of nerve, she and others like her stood among the protesters, trembling with fear but voicing their hatred of the regime.

Negin opened the door. (I’ve changed her name and the names of others in this piece.) She is a strong, well-built woman in her mid-forties, with long black hair and a brilliant, even smile. It was a shock to see her now. One of her cheeks was bruised, the skin broken, and she limped heavily. She was wearing trousers, and told me that both of her legs were swollen and blue. She laughed and said, “Everyone looks so horrified when they see me that I can only say, ‘It looks as though you’re the one who got a truncheon in the face!’ ”

Negin lives on her own in a small, fifth-floor apartment. Living alone makes her an exception in a country where women are expected to leave their parents’ home only when they enter their husband’s. She was born into a traditional family in a provincial town in central Iran, and has not told her parents that she attended the demonstrations. Her mother is a strong supporter of the Islamic Republic and of its leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and a paternal uncle holds a position in the Revolutionary Guard. Whenever Negin sees this handsome, courteous man at family gatherings, she wonders if he has blood on his hands. The uncle has two sons who are in the Basij, a government-linked militia. When she went to the demonstrations, Negin half expected to see her cousins among the Basijis, lining up to hit and kick her.

Negin’s apartment, which also serves as her art studio, was neat, with well-tended potted plants on the balcony, and canvases carefully stacked in a corner of her sitting room. Negin is a fine draftswoman, with a subtle sense of color, and if she had a greater appetite for self-promotion she might be a celebrated painter. But, following her own tastes rather than those of buyers or critics, she is only moderately well known, and supplements her income by working as a school administrator. We sat on chairs near her bookshelves, which were full of art books, eating chunks of melon, as she told me her story.

The demonstration of August 5th was the first that Negin had attended on her own. She usually went with a friend or in a group. Lone women can be vulnerable, so she intended to stay in her car, driving around among the demonstrators, honking and flashing a furtive “V”-for-victory sign. (If the police or the Basij see you doing this, they may take down your license number, and you risk arrest later; or they might smash your windshield.) But then she had seen some big groups walking around, shouting slogans. Although the police were watching, the scene appeared calm, so she parked her car and joined one of the groups.

“We were walking up and down the street, shouting our slogans, and then suddenly the police ran toward us,” Negin said. “Everyone turned to flee, of course, but something came over me, and I couldn’t move. I just stood like a fool. The police were getting closer and closer, and I decided to stand there, up against the wall, and hope they would run past.” She smiled and shook her head.

“They ran past, but not without hitting me as they did—every single one of them, on my legs, on my back, everywhere. One stopped and hit me in the face and shouted at me, and he was a young man, and I remember thinking, This young man is hitting and insulting a woman he doesn’t know, who is old enough to be his mother! He must be crazy or something! I pushed him back and shouted, ‘What are you hitting me for!’ He hit me some more and then he ran off and I felt water running down my leg. I looked down and saw I was covered in blood.”

Negin asked a passing motorcyclist to give her a lift, and he took her into a side street where protesters were resting and hiding from the police. There, another man bound her leg, and she called her sister, a pharmacist, who drove over immediately to pick her up. Because it was well known that the security forces had officers in the hospitals who arrested anyone whose injuries were consistent with a truncheon blow, her sister phoned a doctor she knew and asked if she could bring Negin over.

The doctor examined Negin, ascertained that her leg wasn’t broken, and gave her painkillers. During the examination, a group of demonstrators had gathered in the street outside the doctor’s office, and Negin and her sister had to wait until the commotion had passed. Negin went on, “Luckily, I was in a good mood by then. Perhaps it was the painkillers. I was making everyone laugh. The doctor’s assistant said something about the dimples in my cheek, and I said, ‘I never had a dimple there! They must have hit me there with a truncheon!’ ”

That evening, Negin’s sister took her home and put her to bed. The doctor had instructed Negin to keep her leg up for several days. If it became infected, he warned, she would have to go to the hospital. That night, for the first time in her life, Negin took a sleeping pill. Whenever she closed her eyes, she saw the policeman shouting at her and then hitting her in the face.

While she told me her story, Negin poured tea and served it to me with poolak, disks of caramelized sugar. I remembered something she had said during our last conversation, shortly after the killings and the mass arrests of June 20th. At the time, Negin, like many other Tehranis, was in shock. She told me how she and a friend had been caught up in the tear gas that day, and in the firing and the beatings; having fled to a quiet street, the two women had sat exhausted by the side of the road, and wept. On the opposite side of the street stood a group of young Basijis. They, too, were exhausted and had taken off their helmets and laid down their truncheons. They were laughing and drinking sherbet from a roadside stall. Negin had looked at the boys, with their sweaty, elated faces, and wept even harder. “As a woman,” Negin told me, smiling apologetically, “I have come to regard men and violence as inseparable.”

Negin has lived most of her life with the expectation of seeing violence. Hundreds of people, maybe more, were killed during the struggle to end the monarchy. The new revolutionary authorities executed members of the Shah’s regime and released photographs of their corpses. The Iran-Iraq War, which in eight years cost more than a quarter of a million Iranian lives, and whose effects will be felt for generations, placed martyrdom at the center of the country’s official culture. Now there are public hangings of murderers and drug dealers. Disputes between motorists are resolved with crowbars. Children attending Friday prayers join their parents in shouting, “Death to America!” Alongside Iran’s humane literary and artistic culture, there is a second culture, of murder and obscenity.

As a teen-ager, Negin participated in demonstrations before the 1979 Revolution, and she remembers the Shah’s troops calling her and other female protesters “whores”—for being out on the streets. Then, as various revolutionary currents came together under the influence of the exiled Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, she and women like her started to feel the effects of a radical ideology. “At first, they told us to put on a head scarf, out of respect for the beliefs of the majority, and we agreed that we must do whatever was necessary to achieve freedom from the Shah,” she said. “Then, after the Revolution, they attacked women for wearing makeup in public, and we went along with that, too, because we regarded makeup as a bourgeois affectation. Finally, they told us, ‘Sorry! A head scarf is not sufficient as a hijab.’ ” Now, when she goes to work, Negin must wear a maghna’eh, a black hooded coat.

During last summer’s demonstrations, female protesters were harassed by Basijis, and sexually threatened. For many Iranians, especially older people, such behavior is evidence of the regime’s moral degeneration; accepted codes of conduct hold that men and women occupying the same public space should be segregated or, if contact is unavoidable, should treat each other with distant courtesy. Negin said, “The people going out to break up demonstrations have been told that they are God’s foot soldiers. They have been brainwashed into thinking that normal standards of behavior and decency don’t apply.”

A few days later, Mehdi Karroubi showed a similar sense of outrage, posting on a Web site a letter he had written to Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former President and a bitter foe of Ahmadinejad. Karroubi wrote that he had been reliably informed that men and women who were detained during the recent disturbances had been tortured while in custody. Male prisoners had been sodomized with truncheons, and women raped so violently, so frequently, that their reproductive organs had been badly torn. Karroubi’s letter appeared shortly after a show-trial hearing that was notable for the shocking physical state of some of the defendants, high-ranking supporters of Moussavi, Karroubi, and former President Mohammad Khatami. Suspicions that these defendants had been maltreated in jail were reinforced later on by one woman’s claim that her father—one of the defendants—had indeed been tortured. The spectacle of the trial aroused both fear of the regime and repugnance toward it.

In response to government criticism of his letter, Karroubi published an affidavit by a male victim of jail rape. The published account did not dwell on the rape itself but on its aftermath. The man had been freed and recounted his ordeal, only to be summoned to an interrogation, at which judiciary officials ridiculed his allegations and said that he had brought shame on himself and his family. They also asked whether his assailant had achieved orgasm—a question designed, the man said, “to destroy my spirit and my morale.”

For many Iranians, the show trial and the reports of brutality, even more than the original suspicions of electoral fraud, have stripped away the aura of piety that has surrounded the Islamic Republic for thirty years. As the government’s moral authority wanes, violence has become its principal source of power—and violence is not a monopoly of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij. Several Basijis were killed by protesters during the summer’s disturbances. Early in the protests, I heard an account of a group of women who toppled Basijis from their motorbikes in a northern Tehran suburb; only the arrival of reinforcements saved them from a lynching.

A few weeks before Negin was hurt, I was invited to a dinner party. The other guests were mostly cultivated, middle-aged women engaged in business or the arts. Before the protests, we might have spent the evening talking about films and books and foreign travel, but the night was disturbed by the sound of people gathered on the rooftops of their apartment blocks, yelling “Allahu akbar! ”—a rallying cry from the Revolution which had been revived by the opposition. Thousands of people were thought to be behind bars, some of whom we knew. One had been in this house a few weeks earlier.

All of us were fearful that night, but we still hoped that the disturbances would force Ahmadinejad from office. In the course of the evening, we consumed a great deal of bootleg alcohol, and no senior member of the regime escaped the women’s lacerating wit. One of the guests, who runs a publishing house, asked permission to tell a “true filthy story,” which she was sure we would appreciate. She described a demonstration that she had taken part in a few days earlier. Two Basijis had attacked the group, using their truncheons and hitting one young man on the forehead. But the Basijis underestimated the size of the crowd and were forced to retreat as the protesters rushed toward them.

“As he was fleeing,” the woman said, “one of the Basijis dropped his walkie-talkie, and we heard the voice of his comrade, calling, ‘Isar! Isar! Do you read me? Isar?’ The young man who had been hit on the forehead, and who now had blood running down his face, poor thing, put the walkie-talkie to his mouth and shouted, ‘Listen here—I fucked Isar’s sister and his mother, and now I’ll fuck yours!’ ”

The guests exploded with laughter. They hated the Basijis as much as the Basijis hated them. Later, the party broke up and the woman who had told the story distributed spearmint gum to each of the guests—“just in case you get stopped on the way home and they sniff your breath for booze.”

A few days later, I went to visit a woman called Shahrzad, who lives with her son, Kaveh, in a large old apartment lined with books; she used to share the apartment with her late husband, an architect. In her youth, Shahrzad was renowned for her beauty. She is in her fifties now and has a laugh that is throaty and full of mischief. It was one of the hottest days of the year, and the apartment had a single, antiquated air-conditioning unit. She sat me down in front of it—“the only place that’s bearable in the whole place!”—and brought me sour-cherry sherbet.

Shahrzad is a translator. She told me that she had hardly done any work since the election. Her life had been taken over by the movement. On days when there was no demonstration, she spent her time surfing the opposition’s Web sites using anti-filter software—most Persian-language sites have been blocked by the authorities—and pasting notable articles and blogs into group e-mails. She added the request “Delete sender’s identity before forwarding,” because the authorities were known to monitor people’s communications. She showed me a cartoon that she was e-mailing to her list of contacts. It depicted a Basiji sniffing a man’s mouth and saying, “Let’s see if you give off a stench of Allahu akbar.”

Shahrzad told me that she had two daughters who were studying abroad. Their absence was a relief. “If they were here, they would be in the thick of the demonstrations, and I’d be ill with worry,” she said. Instead, Kaveh accompanied her to the demonstrations. He came home as we were talking, a slim, handsome young man, accompanied by his girlfriend. They immediately sat down at Kaveh’s laptop to find out when the next demonstration would be, and to find out about friends who had been detained. As they hunched over the screen, Shahrzad whispered to me, “I dread the day they arrest him. Even more than that, I dread to think what would happen if he suffered a fraction of what they’re doing to the other boys in jail.”

Like Negin, Shahrzad had joined the protests in 1978-79, and had been angry when it became clear that the Islamic Republic would discriminate against women. She and her husband remained in Tehran during the Iran-Iraq War. They were not tempted to move abroad, even in the mid-nineties, when several secular-minded writers and intellectuals were murdered by agents from the Intelligence Ministry. “We had seen Iranians living as exiles abroad,” Shahrzad said, “and it had made us sad.”

In Ahmadinejad’s first term, books, music albums, and scripts gathered dust at the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, before being rejected in their entirety or cut with broad, destructive strokes. Many in the artistic community sought a means of emigrating. Shortly before my visit, Shahrzad had received several sheets of suggested amendments to a reprint of a translation of hers that had been cleared for publication without censorship a decade before. This time, she had been told to cut the work by several pages. “What exactly has changed in ten years, that a book that was acceptable then should be unacceptable now?” she said.

Like many others who are involved with Iran’s women’s movement, Shahrzad voted for Karroubi in June’s election, because, unlike Moussavi, he had signed on unequivocally to the demands of women’s-rights activists, including constitutional and legal amendments to end discrimination between the sexes. A particular challenge for women’s-rights activists has been to counter the government’s depiction of their movement as a vehicle for sexual anarchy and “moral corruption”—a portrayal that many traditional-minded Iranians, women among them, find persuasive. In 2006, Shahrzad took part in a demonstration by women’s-rights activists that was forcibly broken up. She recalls the contemptuous comments of shopkeepers nearby. “These women would be better off coming into my shop and buying clothes,” one said. “They need husbands,” another replied.

It is possible that last summer’s protests have advanced the cause of women further than any formal movement could have. For the first time in Iran’s history, men and women in large numbers marched as equals. When, at Friday prayers on July 17th, thousands of men and women scandalized traditionalists by praying side by side, in the streets around Tehran University, Iran’s culture of separation gave way to one of solidarity.

Shahrzad told me about a woman who had become well known among the demonstrators for her interventions whenever she saw a Basiji beating a young man. “She doesn’t intervene in the normal way, which is to scream ‘Don’t hit him!’ and to try and physically restrain the Basiji,” Shahrzad said. “Instead, she strides over to the protester and admonishes him, ‘Fereydun! I told you not to come out today and make mischief! Come home immediately!’ Then she hustles him away from the startled Basiji.”

The story showed the ironies inherent in the involvement of Iranian women in a violent political movement. It appealed to Shahrzad that the woman in question had mischievously exploited the maternal role that society allotted her in order to save young men from a beating. Inside this movement of oppressed freedom-seekers, Shahrzad seemed to be saying, there was a second, less obtrusive movement, of women playing with their status.

She told me a similar story about a protest she had attended in July, shortly after the election. One afternoon, Shahrzad had come across a rally to mark Ahmadinejad’s official victory. It was a response to a much bigger demonstration, in support of Moussavi and Karroubi, a few miles to the north. Shahrzad found herself in a press of people, most of them women wearing chadors and holding Ahmadinejad posters. “I realized I was stuck,” she said.

“As we stood there waiting,” Shahrzad went on, “I heard a woman speaking in a loud, coarse voice behind me. She was mouthing off against Ahmadinejad’s opponents. She said, ‘They deserve to be killed like dogs! They want to be free and walk naked down the street. Where do they think they are? Europe? America?’ ”

Normally, Shahrzad would not have responded to this provocation, which was standard government propaganda. But she felt bruised and angry. “The people around me had come to celebrate a victory that I considered to be a theft, and there was a triumphalism in the woman’s voice that I couldn’t stand,” she said. “It suddenly occurred to me that she had sized me up as an opposition sympathizer and was addressing me. Suddenly, she said loudly, very near my ear, ‘Revolting uptown girl!’ ”

Shahrzad turned to confront her antagonist and saw that the woman was not dressed chastely, as she had expected. “She was stuffed into a tight coat that hugged the contours of her body, and she was made up to the nines! I immediately thought of the last regime, when court officials bribed mobs to come into the streets and demonstrate in favor of the Shah, and the mobs included prostitutes from the red-light district.”

There was no way of knowing whether the woman was a hired rabble-rouser, but her appearance, Shahrzad realized, presented an opportunity. In a stern, admonitory tone, Shahrzad asked, “Why are you wearing so much eyeliner? Weren’t you ever told you should only wear makeup for your husband?”

The woman, taken aback, replied that she didn’t have a husband but then realized that this was the wrong thing to say in front of the Ahmadinejad women, so she started attacking former President Mohammad Khatami. “It’s all his fault!” she exclaimed. “He allowed moral corruption to grow and encouraged women to wear makeup. He’s to blame!”

Shahrzad was enjoying herself now. Several conservatively dressed women had gathered and were following the argument with interest. Shahrzad retorted, “You blame Khatami for the fact that you’re wearing eyeliner? Khatami has been out of power for the past four years! Didn’t you find the time to wash off your eyeliner?” Shahrzad’s gaze fell on the woman’s coat. “And why are you wearing such tight clothes?”

In this way, Shahrzad exacted her revenge. Soon, the Ahmadinejad supporters were agreeing that the woman was inappropriately dressed. One of them said, “Someone might think that you were a woman of ill repute.”

“I’m clean!” the woman wailed. “I’m clean!” But the other woman muttered, “The shopkeeper never admits his curds are off,” and everyone laughed. The object of their derision, defeated, swore at Shahrzad, before forcing her way through the crowd and slinking away.

When Shahrzad finished her story, she and I were smiling, but Kaveh was looking hard at the dregs of his coffee. Shahrzad rested her hand on his and explained, “Kaveh doesn’t like this story. He doesn’t like that I humiliated this woman using arguments I don’t believe in.”

At the end of the summer, as the weather was starting to cool, Negin dropped by to see me. Her cheek was healed. She was walking without a limp and looked rested. She described a dream that she had had a few days before.

“I was sitting in the mountains and looking at two peaks in front of me,” she said. “It was a placid scene. Suddenly, the peaks began to tremble, and rocks and snow fell off and landed nearby. The trembling grew more intense and then the mountains split in two and collapsed, and there was a great cloud of dust in the sky. When the dust settled, I could see beyond the ruins of the mountains. There, on the plain, very small and far away, I saw different types of military equipment—jeeps and tanks and rocket launchers on wheels, being driven around.”

Negin had asked several friends what they thought her dream meant. They had all said that the collapse of the mountains represented the collapse of the Islamic Republic’s claims to divine legitimacy. The plain full of tanks and guns represented the militarization of society, the victory of the Revolutionary Guard and the Basij.

As soon as her wounds healed, Negin spent a week at her parents’ place, where she learned that her uncle, the Revolutionary Guard officer, had been involved in the movement’s suppression. This uncle had been part of a team that seized a large group of protesters and took them to a place where they were beaten to a pulp. Negin’s Basij cousins had also been out that day, cracking heads.

“What about your mother?” I asked. “Does she still love Khamenei?” Negin shook her head and said, “Whenever she sees him on television, she turns away and says, ‘Enough of the lies. Enough!’ ”

Negin’s return to the capital had coincided with the end of the demonstrations. Ahmadinejad was trying to persuade parliament to support his nominees for cabinet positions; it was almost as if politics had returned to normal. The movement seemed dormant; what if it never came to life again? I knew lots of people who were apprehensive that the suffering would turn out to be worthless.

Reports of torture undoubtedly contributed to a decline in street protests at the end of the summer. The fasting month of Ramadan was another factor; people felt listless and tired. But it was clear that people had lost a lot of their old fear. Indeed, many thousands of opposition supporters succeeded in subverting Jerusalem Day—an official protest against Israel and its actions in Gaza and Lebanon, which falls at the end of Ramadan—and turning it into a demonstration against the regime. If a new round of demonstrations occurs in the coming weeks, they may be more violent. The protesters will know what is in store for them if they are arrested.

As Iran enters a new phase of uncertainty, and international powers wrangle over its nuclear program, Iranians are keenly aware that their country has changed. Not so long ago, assertive, politically aware women were an isolated minority. This is no longer true. Even traditional people like Negin’s mother are revising their loyalties. And the middle tier of Iranian society has become urgently politicized—activists whose goal, an end to tyranny, is now clear. Half of that tier is women.

Negin and Shahrzad were among the Jerusalem Day demonstrators. “Not for Gaza and not for Lebanon!” they shouted. “I will give up my life for Iran.” ♦