Women’s rights movements in Iran have been an integral part of the political landscape since far before the infamous 1979 revolution. As the politics of Iranian power shift, Women’s issues are used for political gain. From the time of Reza Shah and his forced unveiling campaign of the 1930’s to the re veiling under Ayatollah Khomeini, women’s rights have been major campaign points for Iran's leaders from secular to theocratic. The co-opting of women’s emancipation and rights has pushed grassroots women’s organizing to become strongly critical of those in power and demanding that decisions about women be made by women themselves.
Currently gender apartheid is still written in law, women continue to risk incarceration by publicly pushing against it. Women today are unveiling, women are dressing how they want, and women are actively pushing the boundaries of the state, just as they had stood by their veiled sisters in protest of the Pahlavi dynasty before 1979 (Mojab 142).
This article is inspired by the legacy of Azerbaijani Iranian activist, Ashraf Dehghani of the Iranian People's Fedai Guerrilla (IPFG) who at 76 years young is still active in revolutionary Marxist discourse until this day. When I open Ashraf Dehghani’s active website, the radical leftist inside me is excited by the unmistakable Karl Marx quote that reads “Material Force Must be Overthrown by Material Force” scrolled across the top. In studying her pre-revolutionary militant organizing, I am inspired to understand the nuisance of women’s movement building in Iran. Forward we explore what has changed since pre-revolutionary time through various geopolitical frameworks and changing political discourses.
I am interested in the ways in which class power, media and co-option have morphed and infiltrated women’s organizing in Iran from the Deghani’s Marxist movement
leading in the 1979 revolution to the Jin, Jiyan, Azadî movement following the death of the 22 year old Kurdish woman, Mahsa Jîna Amini at the hands of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard in 2022. By examining how emancipatory movements are taken over and watered down, we can use these histories to reflect on how we not only interpret Iranian women’s movements from the West, but who we build solidarity with and how we stave off co-option in our movements at home.
The co-option of women’s rights played a major role in the massive and forceful secularization program at the hands of Reza Shah Pahlavi. In 1932, Reza Shahlegally instituted the banning of the veil claiming to be the liberator of Iranian women. This forced modernization tactic was not done at the request of women, but instead, used their image to project his political agenda and affiliation with the West. This moment in history pulled religious and secular women apart, giving one access to the public sphere, and restricting religious women to the home as they could not wear their hijabs or chadors without the risk of violent harassment via the morality police (Sadeghi 4).
The history of Reza Shah’s unveiling laws in 1932 are an important time to frame when looking at visible women’s organizing and uprisings in Iran. This moment made it abundantly clear that no matter what type of government, from religious to secular, that women’s bodies would be forcefully co-oped to be a visual marker of the state. His elitist government made way for pushback via the religious leftist activists such as the Islamic People’s Mojahedin Organization as well the Marxist-Lenninists the IFPG (Sadeghi 5). Each found his policies towards women restrictive and affiliation with the United State neo-colonial, but with differing ideological reasons and fighting for different end goals.
To understand the politics of forced modernization and nation state nationalism in the region, we see similarities in Egypt and Turkey. In the interwar period, both states were moving through similar secularization projects under Gamal Nasser in Egypt and Mustafa Kamal aka Ataturk in Turkey. Both leaders brought with them similarly heavy handed secularization reforms to Reza Shah. These secular movements positioned themselves as liberal, with their modern, unveiled woman at the forefront of their new state image (Zaatari 231). The 1930’s to the 1960s in Iran, Egypt and Turkey showed women off as a new part of the public realm, using the modernization of women as proxy for their progress. It was the years that followed that brought class consciousness that allowed for leaders like Ashraf to emerge.
Following the American backed coup d'etat of Mohammad Mossadiq in 1953, the reinstated Pahlavi monarchy came back more brutal on dissident women than before (Shahidian 10). Many women fought to overthrow the Pahlavi dynasty. A major faction of the underground women’s movement were aligned with Dehghani and the IFPG, fighting for the working class and a part of the call for international women’s emancipation and to dispel gendered roles and stereotypes about women (Shahidian 8). However, the IPMO were also fighting for their rights to not be regarded as property of men as well as freedom to exist as religiously dressed women in public society (Shahidian 19). Both militant groups were aligned against the infiltration of Western powers, the elitism of the Shah and his violent secret police.
The 1979 revolution did not end in positive change for either leftist guerilla group. These groups, though being divided as religious and secular, both wanted either a society that was explicitly Marxist, or implicitly Marxist in a religiously open society (Momayezi 85). However, because of the impossibility of organizing the rural working class, the leftist movements in Iran were regarded as urban and to many, their demands for equality didn’t have real world impacts on people who had completely different cultural values and had very different material needs (Momayezi). Ayatollah Khomeini and the New Clergy movement slipped into the power vacuum of the revolutionary moment to create what is now the Islamic Republic of Iran (Razavi).
The Women’s faction of the IPMO gained power in opposition to the militant secularism of the Shah’s regime. Later, in post-revolutionary Iran, Islamic reformists co-opted revolutionary organizing and watered it down. Their claim was that they could achieve equality through religious law, and not through calling for a secular state, making claims that it was actually cultural tradition within fundamentalist Islam that needed to change, and that the Quran actually preached a much more equitable society than was being practiced. It is argued by Marxist Feminists that ‘women’s equality’ under a theocratic patriarchy is an oxymoron (Mojab 130).
A continued failure of women’s movements in Iran is the failure of reaching the lumpenproletariat, nor the rural working class (Momayezi). To examine a recent call to action, the ‘One Million Signatures’ campaign of 2006-2008 aimed at state legal reform through creating a mass petition demanding equal rights for women in the realms of marriage and divorce, polygamy and temporary marriage and inheritance. The called for women and men to be considered equal when they are victims of violence and sexual crimes, especially when it comes to honour killing (Passanante). Though this campaign promotes equality and women’s solidarity, under 20% of women in Iran were even aware of this movement, and even less were able to be involved (Sadeghi 12).
As we move into the 21st century, we examine women's sovereignty with politics of the body. With the new found globalization and the reach of social media, Women in the Middle East and Arab states have been using their bodies to dispel the idea of women being property of men nor of the State (Salime). In Iran Protests, were happening on the streets collectively with the young women removing the hijabs and waving them on sticks. At the same time, protests were happening online in the individual sphere, with some women showing their breasts with slogans and using their immodesty as a weapon against the oppressive state (Salime 14). Some critiques of this movement have been that it is Islamaphopbic in its focus on sexuality, viewing feminism only from a Western ideal (Salime 16).
The politics of the body were and still are inescapable for women in Iran as their bodies are always being monitored and controlled. Even when we look back to the guerilla movement, women were desexualized as militants, the collective good was emphasized through depersonalizing their struggle as women (Shahidian 21). The social media based movements have been critiqued as neoliberal in their focus on the individual. However As a person who grew up with the changing world of social media, the individual scale of the body can be used as a unifier, and it is in the messaging and alignment with a greater movement that makes an individual act of resistance into a collective one.
Women in Iran continue to fight for gender equality and the end to gender based violence and in this fight, politics of the body are still a site of resistance. The 2022 murder of Mahsa Jîna Amini by the morality police was for a crime as simple as improperly wearing her hijab on the public streets of Tehran. The death of Amini erupted into an entire youth-led movement of women and allies throughout Iran. Thousands of Iranians, led by the ethnically persecuted
Kurdish community, demanded the state be held accountable and demanded the Islamic Republic State be dismantled. Iranians took to the streets in protest, culminating in a massive militarized
crackdown, and the jailing and death of many young activists (Mohammadpour 86). A global solidarity movement called Zan, Zendigi, Azadi was formed with the help of Iranians in diaspora and their allies to echo the calls for justice by those protesting in Iran (Zan. Zendegi. Azadi. Woman, Life, Freedom).
When the Jîna uprising hit the global stage, the history of leftist Kurdish resistance was washed from the public narrative (Mohammadpour 86). Jin, Jiyan, Azadî , a popular slogan of the leftist Kurdish anti-colonial women’s movement, became translated into Farsi as Zan, Zendigi, Azadi. There in this transference of words, creates a struggle of national Iranian freedom and the erasure of Kurdish demands for sovereignty apart from the state of Iran, not in service of it (Mohammadpour, Sadeghi). With this flattening has come the dangerous co-option of the Jîna movement by right-wing Monarchists calling for the reinstatement of the Shah’s reign and using the death of Kurdish and Iranian women to call for the reinstallation of the very regime revolutionaries worked so hard to overthrow in the years prior to 1979 (Sadeghi 463).
Coming back to Ashraf Dehghani, I went to her website to see if she had addressed the cyclical nature of the Jina uprising. I wanted to understand how someone who had fought so hard to create leftist political consciousness would view the call to bring back the very family into power she and her comrades fought to overcome. Her website doesn’t specifically address the death of Amini, but in her article that came shortly after, she breaks down the reasons for all inequality as the system of capitalism. he calls for everyone to use this revolutionary moment to rise up as a working class movement and destroy the capitalist theocracy of the Islamic Republic of Iran, not separating the women’s movement from the workers movement (Ashraf Dehghani).
In many ways, the demands for women in Iran have come full circle. State violence against women is prevalent, and organizers are still aiming at the same types of legal and cultural oppression. In these cycles of revolution, reform and revolt, what has continued from Dehghani’s period before 1979 into the present is that movements must always stand strong against political co-option. The flattening and neoliberalizing of Iranian women’s organizing has successfully disrupted true emancipation. To carry Dehghani’s legacy, there must be a collective framework within social media organizing, a new awakening of class consciousness and a strong focus on anti-capitalist discourse in order to step outside the cycle of false modernity and cruel theocracy.
About the image: Taken from the Archive of Defiance website which documents the Jina's Uprising in Iran.
Works Cited
Ashraf Dehghani, eng.ashraf dehghani.com. Accessed 22 Jan. 2024.
Mohammadpour, Ahmad. “Decolonizing Voices from Rojhelat: Gender-othering, ethnic erasure, and the politics of intersectionality in Iran.” Critical Sociology, vol. 50, no. 1, 19 May 2023, pp. 85–106, https://doi.org/10.1177/08969205231176051.
Mojab, Shahrzad. “Theorizing the politics of ‘islamic feminism.’” Feminist Review, vol. 69, no.
1, winter 2001, pp. 124–146. The Realm of the Possible: Middle Eastern Women in Political and Social Spaces, https://doi.org/10.1080/01417780110070157.
Momayezi, Nasser. “Decimation and Fragmentation of Leftist Forces in Iran.” Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies , vol. 11, no. 1 & 2, 1987, pp. 83–101.
Passanante, Aly. “Iranian Activists’ One Million Signatures Campaign for Gender Justice, 2006-2008.” Iranian Activists’ One Million Signatures Campaign for Gender Justice, 2006-2008 | Global Nonviolent Action Database, The Global Nonviolent Action
Database is a project of Swarthmore College, 4 Mar. 2011, nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/iranian-activists-one-million-signatures-campaign-ge nder-justice-2006-2008.
Razavi, Sahar. “Labor, Women and War in the 1979 Iranian Revolution.” Northern Arizona University, 2017.
Sadeghi, Fatemeh. “Bypassing Islamism and Feminism: Women’s Resistance and Rebellion in Post-revolutionary Iran.” Revue Des Mondes Musulmans et de La Méditerranée, no. 128, 15 Dec. 2010, pp. 209–228, https://doi.org/10.4000/remmm.6936.
Sadeghi, Fatemeh. “From Women’s Revolution to jiyanist democracy.” Translated by Setareh Shohadaei. Journal of Middle East Women’s Studies, vol. 19, no. 3, 30 Oct. 2023, pp. 458–468, https://doi.org/10.1215/15525864-10815679.
Salime, Zakia. “New feminism as personal revolutions: Microrebellious bodies.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 40, no. 1, Sept. 2014, pp. 14–20, https://doi.org/10.1086/676962.
Shahidian, Hammed. “Women and clandestine politics in Iran, 1970-1985.” Feminist Studies, vol. 23, no. 1, 1997, p. 7, https://doi.org/10.2307/3178296.
Zaatari, Zeina. “WOMEN’S MOVEMENTS IN THE MIDDLE EAST From Feminist
Consciousness to Intersectional Feminism and Everything In Between.” Routledge
Handbook on Women in the Middle East , 1st Edition ed., Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, Abingdon, Oxon, 2022, pp. 221–252, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315165219.
Zan. Zendegi. Azadi. Woman, Life, Freedom., www.womanlifefreedom.today/. Accessed 24 Jan.
2024.
Kommentarer