In the spring of 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini took over as head of the Islamic RepublicOlivier Todd denounces the degradation of the condition of women which is “unquestionably an indicator of the progressive or retrograde character of a society” and warns: “The evolution of the situation in Iran embodies one of the most unpleasant discoveries of the 20th century: any overthrow of a feudal, or colonial, autocratic regime, does not automatically bring political, economic and social progress.”
Counter-evolution, by Olivier Todd, in 1979
In the matter of these women’s rights, symbolized and catalyzed by the wearing of the chador, Ayatollah Khomeini is deviating. In fact, he was biased for thirty years on all civil rights issues.
One morning, he announced the creation of a Ministry for the Control of Religious Behavior. This is an interesting contribution to political science and one with a rich future, like the invention elsewhere, of ministries of Information or Culture. The same evening, the holy man paid tribute to the role of women in the revolution. It proclaims that Islamic dress is not an order, but a religious duty. He also asks, a little late, for an “exemplary punishment” for those who have attacked unveiled women. At the moment, in Tehran, there are more women insulted or stabbed than insulters simply blamed by Islamic courts.
A conflicting dual power is established in Iran. On the one hand, that of Mehdi Bazargan, pushed or pushed back towards Western and democratic secularism. On the other, the mysterious Islamic Revolutionary Council, an emanation of the Ayatollah. It is spreading across the country. He is responsible for regulating the moral order, first and foremost among women.
The referendum, or rather the plebiscite, of March 30 does not offer a real political choice. It aims to legitimize a harsh Islamic regime. No longer able to fight on the wording of the referendum question, Bazargan’s supporters are fighting on the institutional level. They are preparing a draft Constitution more or less Western style. It would grant an important role to Parliament. The Ayatollah’s supporters, who do not want to “ape” the West, would like this Parliament to have primarily consultative powers. In this dispute, which is not simply legal, the formal status of women, and therefore their real rights, plays a fundamental role.
Women in the street
The current situation has a paradoxical appearance: regularly, the most advanced women find themselves on the streets. From a power that claims to be revolutionary, they demand rights that had been granted under the old monarchical, counter-revolutionary regime according to the demands of the bourgeoisie and the needs of industrialization. Women who, wrapped in chadors, demonstrated in December for Khomeini with extraordinary courage, are protesting today with equal determination against the obvious will of religious extremists. They want to confine women in clothing that does not allow them to easily be professors, engineers, flight attendants, secretaries, bank employees.
Under the Shah, Iranian women were undoubtedly, along with Lebanese and Israeli women, the most emancipated women in the Near and Middle East. There were around 40% women in universities, for a country which nevertheless remained 50% illiterate. In the mid-1930s, Reza Shah officially banned the wearing of the veil. In 1962, his son signed a decree allowing women to be eligible for municipal office. This decree was violently denounced by Khomeini. For this Manichean mind, everything that comes from the West is detestable. The following year, the Ayatollah also opposed a family protection law. She had her imperfections. However, it abolished polygamy and granted women the same rights as men in matters of divorce.
“Thirteen centuries ago”
The vanguard of Iranian women – it must be numerous, if it can bring together tens of thousands of demonstrators in the current climate – demands firstly the maintenance of the rights acquired under the previous regime, then their strengthening. These women clearly declare that they “do not want to go back thirteen centuries”. A cautious way of saying that an Islamic Republic based on the Koran risks, for them, being a step backwards and, in short, a counter-evolution. It is necessary to practice perilous intellectual gymnastics to draw from the surahs of the Koran an egalitarian interpretation of relations between the sexes. Of course, phallocratism, the fear of women or the deep desire of men to maintain inequalities are not specific to the most rigid Islam. In the Mediterranean basin, in any case, the more a political regime claims a religious ideology, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, Gaddafi’s Libya, the princes’ Saudi Arabia, the less free women are there. A religion, whatever it may be, harshly applied to the temporal does not often make women full citizens. The woman mother, devoted to the home, is frankly not the most attractive thing in Solzhenitsyn’s vision either.
The status of women is undoubtedly an indicator of the progressive or retrograde character of a society. That a girl has the right to go to a mixed school, that a woman has the right to be an cosmonaut or a roadman does not prove that a society is progressive. But if these rights are denied, then society is shown to be reactionary. In Iran, powerful forces of reaction and counter-evolution are boiling and fermenting. Even compared to the absolute and police monarchy which preceded it, today’s molarchy represents repression and regression for women. They proclaim it. They are heard. Around the world, the left enthusiastically welcomed the fall of the Shah. She distanced herself today, after the travesties of justice and the executions, but above all, perhaps, seeing the revolt of Iranian women. They are not remote-controlled “masses”, but they are an identifiable, self-determined mass.
The evolution of the situation in Iran embodies one of the most unpleasant discoveries of the 20th century: any overthrow of a feudal or colonial autocratic regime does not automatically bring political, economic and social progress. The old and sinister argument “You can’t make an omelette (a revolution) without breaking eggs (men or women)” no longer applies. There is a new acceleration in historical awareness. Despite the abundant evidence, it took half a century for part of the intelligentsia to discover the retrograde aspects of the USSR. Regarding so-called People’s China, the same conversion took thirty years. Cuba, less than fifteen years old. For United Vietnam, the operation was completed in three years. For Cambodia, in two. The Iranian “revolution” was defetishized in a few weeks, in part because it did not claim to be monolithicly Marxist.
Will this revolution only be the movement of a society traveling a closed curve? Is the green terror of Islam really more promising than the white terror of the Shah?