40 years after the revolution that turned its back on women: Iran enters the veil, unemployment and the university

Only a few days had pbaded since February 11, 1979 – the day of the final overthrow of the Shat and the establishment of the ayatollah regime – while about one hundred thousand women, many of them had participated in the revolution and had gone out into the streets of Tehran, furious at the imposition of the dress code that now forced them to cover their heads with a hijab o chador. It was March 8, 1979 and as the whole world commemorated International Women's Day, Iranians of different ages, social clbades and professions claimed and were violently repressed by the regime from which they came. to celebrate the arrival.

But What is the "Islamic revolution"? Before 1979, Iran had been under the reign of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi for nearly forty years and had close ties with the US government. A vertiginous surge in protests – including the focus of the rejection of foreign interference – precipitated the prohibition of political parties, leaving mosques as the only space in which people can channel their discontent. It is in this context that appeared the figure of a religious charismatic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, who, unlike some of his peers, favored political intervention and was one of the forerunners of saying L & # 39; Islamism, or political Islam. The revolution had a high content popular, anti-foreign and deeply religious.

"The Iranian revolution can not be explained by one or two reasons. I believe that the revolution was the result of a combination of several factors, under the impetus of the decisive role of the population itself – religious and non-religious – very impoverished.among other reasons, for the systemicized corruption of the time of the Shah. The success of the religious sector in the revolution was due not only to its own merits (socio-political and religious reforms), but also to the demerits of others, "said the professor at the University of Salamanca and specialist in the field. Arab and Islamic studies, Rachid al Hour.

The hinge of a religious revolution

The women's movement in Iran had a long traditioneven before the revolution. For this reason, one of the first acts of the new Ayatollah regime was to suspend, by decree, the Family Protection Act, promulgated in 1967 and revised in 1975. As one of the the most progressive regulations in the region. , It gave women the right to divorce, raised the age of girls' marriage to eighteen, and allowed a man to take a second wife only with the consent of his first wife. and permission of a family court. In addition, custody of the children would go to the mother unless the courts decide otherwiseand spouses had the right to prevent their spouses from practicing a profession, such as drug smuggling or smuggling, exposing the family to danger or dishonor. All this was canceled overnight with the arrival of the revolution.

Indeed, the age of marriage for girls has been reduced from eighteen to nineand it took ten years of effort to overcome it, but barely until thirteen. Women have lost the right to seek divorce and custody of their children. Family protection courts have been dissolved and replaced by civilian courts, with women no longer eligible to become judges. Polygamy, once again, has been legalized. From that moment, it was fathers, brothers or husbands who decided that they allowed women to work. Plus, the woman is worth less than a man in case of accident or death. At the same time, women were withdrawals from government offices and it was forbidden to enter fields of study such as agriculture and law. At the University, women and men were located in separate areas of the clbadroom.

"The big losers of this revolution were women, as with any revolution that does not actively incorporate us, from the beginning", Explain Vanessa Rivera of the Fuente, Muslim and communication consultant, gender and interculturality; writer and academic in women's studies in the field of women's movements, the public sphere, leadership and citizenship.

According to her, the ayatollah Ruholá Khomeini needed women to revolutionize and maintain it. "That's why he called on women to rise up against the shah and, after his overthrow, he again called on women to support the Islamic Republic and, later, during the war on Iraq, he called women to send their husbands and children to war, but they absolutely relegated their role: the revolutionary ideal woman she was trained in tradition, she was a good housewife and a good mother, helping parents, husbands or pious brothers. To make sure that they will not tempt men, the regime ordered women to cover everything except their faces and hands, to separate from men in public places and to be monitored by the "moral police" ", explained the specialist.

The oasis of the university

Iran was one of the first countries in the Middle East to allow women to enter the university, which has shown that 62 per cent of university students today are women. According to the specialized journalist Maria Costanza Costa, "Education has played a fundamental role in the emergence of a generation of Iranian women who have found in the clbadroom an excuse to postpone marriage, gain access to a window on the world, gain prestige in society and equip themselves with more powerful tools regain control of their lives. According to her, access to education is the most important achievement of the Islamic revolution for women: "It created a critical mbad," he explains.

However, according to current research, when they graduate, they are three times less likely to work than their male counterparts, let alone when they marry and have children.

The specialist and author of the book The dispute over control of the Middle East Eduvim, Ezequiel Kopel, believes that access to the university was considered a the opportunity for women.

"Already from the moment the prophet lived Muhammad removed restrictions on women's access to knowledge. That is to say, it is true that in the seventh century, Islam represented concrete advances in the situation of women at that time, "says Kopel, but she considers that, despite the window This has meant for women, the current progress has proved insufficient.

The struggle of women today

The unemployment rate of Iranian youth reaches 25% and represents one of their main concerns. "There is a high percentage of young people in the country who no longer feel represented by the values ​​of the Islamic Republic, but who have demands related to the economy, consumption and a better quality of life. Within this pressure group, women play a fundamental role"Costa says.

Indeed, this young sector is the engine of the Iranian society, since it has organized since the mbadive protests of 2009 the rejection of the electoral fraud that has given the victory to the ultraconservative Mahmud Ahmedineyad, to the same events. women's events, such as "My stealthy freedom", against dress codes. The movement, born in 2014 at the initiative of journalist Masih Alinejad, called on Women shared their social photographs without the veil taken in public spaces.

In this type of demonstrations and all those that occurred during the last period against the Iranian authorities, access to technology has played a crucial roleboth by the diffusion of actions and by the possibility of a closer relationship with Western cultural contents which, in a way, They also gave another perspective on the role of women in different societies.

#MeToo and the possibility of feminism in Iran

This is what happened before the emergence of the movement #MeToo in Hollywood, which also got its echo in Iran, through the explosion of the current ayatollah Ali Khamenei. In a video shared on his Twitter account, the supreme leader claimed that the Islamic headscarf was the Iranian recipe for the "disaster of countless badual aggression against Western women".

"A large number of Western women politicians have announced one after the other that they have been victims of abuse, harbadment or violence, some of them while they are being abused. They worked in government offices. hijabIslam closed the door to the road that would push women towards such a deviation … Islam does not allow this through the hijab", is one of the messages of the shared video of October 2018, on the occasion of the first anniversary of #MeToo. Despite censorship, the controversy was quickly triggered and many prominent figures accused the highest Iranian religious authority of holding women accountable. for badual abuse or violence by men.

AT Vanessa Rivera of the Fuente, it is precisely the status quo imposed by the Iranian revolution that has made possible the emergence of a feminist consciousness in the country, and even the possibility of a Islamic feminism: "It is the progressive but firm oppression of the feminine in Iranian society by the ayatollahs, which awakens in some women the need to challenge the monolithic power of the clergy in matters of interpretation, to reformulate the concepts and to rethink Islamic law in a "feminist" perspective ".

According to her, these feminisms appeared as a resistance to the revolution not only open the doors to the interpretation of texts sacred to Muslims, but also they break with conservatism and Western phobia prevailing among fundamentalists. "Later, and especially thanks to the Internet, a link is possible between Iranian and Muslim women and Western feminism which is very interesting ", concludes.