IRAN – WOMEN’S RIGHTS ACTIVISTS, BOTH RELIGIOUS & SECULAR, SEE PROGRESS, BUT RESISTANCE FROM HARDLINERS

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/08/29/the-islamic-republics-war-on-women-iran-feminism/

The election of  President Hassan Rouhani gave new momentum to Iran’s devout Muslim feminists – but the mullahs aren’t having it.

Photo credit: Zhang Peng/LightRocket via Getty Images

By Ziba Mir-Hosseini, Anthropologist Specializing in Islamic Family Law – August 29, 2016

The phone calls started around six weeks ago. Men who didn’t introduce themselves, working for Iran’s security agencies, rang the country’s most prominent women’s rights activists and demanded they show up for interrogations. They were all told the same thing: “Don’t tell anyone we’ve called you here. Don’t speak to the media, don’t breathe a word to anyone.” But word seeped out, first in Tehran’s feminist circles, and then among political activists, who traded accounts of interrogations and lines of questioning.

The Iranian government’s current crackdown on feminists, one of the Islamic Republic’s periodic intimidation campaigns against women’s rights activists, is still underway. But the present iteration isn’t just a push-and-pull struggle between the government and civil society, or between censors and the country’s most prominent women’s magazine – it’s a proxy battle between the president and the country’s hardliners.

Iran’s women’s rights activists, both religious and secular, seized the space offered by President Hassan Rouhani’s 2013 election to emerge from the underground and engage again in public life. The Revolutionary Guards, and the clerical establishment, have responded by charging a vast international “feminist conspiracy” to undermine the Islamic Republic, funded by wealthy Western donors, intellectually articulated by feminist academics based abroad, and conducted by foot soldiers inside Iran – and even inside the president’s own cabinet.

That’s why hardliners took special note of Rouhani’s appointment of Shahindokht Molaverdi, for whom “egalitarian Islam” has been an intellectual bedrock, as his deputy minister for women’s affairs. Trained as a lawyer, the devout Molaverdi was active in the reformist presidency of Mohammad Khatami from 1997 to 2005, helping expand Iran’s network of women’s NGOs. She spent the stifling Ahmadinejad years working in civil society. Her views were progressive, but her determination to work within Iran’s political system made her highly diplomatic. She always stopped short, for example, of explicitly calling herself a feminist, and when she was asked in New York, during a U.N. meeting, why Iran had not yet joined the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), her answer was nuanced. She said that, as in the United States, there were certain factions in Iran strongly opposed to it, and suggested there were other ways her government would enhance women’s human rights.

Since taking office, Molaverdi’s religious leanings have given her a degree of protection that secular feminists lack altogether, but she has confronted hardline attacks all the same. Conservative news sites objected to her appointment, and hardliners in the clerical and military establishments accused her of undermining Islamic values by encouraging women to work. They took issue with her collaboration with women’s activists, her stance on the 2009 election, and even her MA thesis on violence against women. For the hardline establishment, she was a clear threat: too grassroots, too effective, too connected. It even rankled that she had managed to become the first woman in Iran to secure a license to run a notary office, the privilege of clerics since the early 20^th century.

The conservative establishment’s anxiety has also been fueled by Molaverdi’s successes in office. Her aim of encouraging women’s participation in politics resulted in what hardliners have called the “gendering” of the last parliamentary election, in February this year. Last October, a coalition of women activists, with Molaverdi’s encouragement, announced in a press meeting the launch of a new campaign “To Change the Masculine Face of Parliament” by inviting more women to stand for election. Iranian reformists had their own separate meetings, demanding a 30 percent quota for women, among other things. This revival of civil society paid off. Moderates affiliated with Rouhani swept Tehran, taking all 30 of its parliamentary seats, and, of these new legislators, eight were women. Across the country, there was a fourfold rise in the number of women candidates running for the latest parliament, which led to doubling the number of women deputies.

That election, and Molaverdi’s association with it, rankled Iran’s hardliners. They have responded by training their anger on a magazine run by one of her allies, the legendary publisher Shahla Sherkat.

Zanan-e Emrooz is a relaunch of Zanan, a legendary publication that, throughout the 1990s and 2000s, brought women’s issues into Iran’s national conversation by convening religious and secular women’s activists. It ran stories about everything from nose jobs to domestic violence, making the case that gender equality was entirely Islamic. It was a sort of religiously-tinged Ms. Magazine, an extraordinary publication unlike anything else being published in the Middle East. And it wasn’t just a forum for activists like Molaverdi — it made women’s legal and political rights the concern of ordinary women across the country. At least until then-president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad shut it down in 2008, accusing the magazine of “blackening” the country and spreading pessimism.

Zanan-e Emrooz was launched in 2014 in the wake of Rouhani’s election. The first edition featured a group of smiling women veterinarians on the its cover, with the headline, “We Are Happy With This Choice,” leaving it intentionally ambiguous whether that was referring to the veterinarians being content with their career choice, or the women’s movement being happy with Rouhani. In her editorial announcing the magazine’s rebirth, Sherkat writes that once again it feels like there is hope, and that after years of silence, journalists like her feel like they can have a voice. “We know they’ll push back against us, but we have no choice,” she writes. Its cheeky October issue of that year, about the rise in “white marriage,” otherwise known as couples just living together, prompted a temporary closure, but it soon resumed its predecessor’s signature style of high and low feminist conversation.

The February issue of this year would prove a fateful turning point. It featured an interview with the Iranian-Canadian academic Homa Hoodfar, a highly-regarded anthropologist based in Montreal. The interview focused on her latest academic book, Electoral Politics: Making Quotas Work for Women, which discusses research on women and elections conducted in various countries and fueled the lively ongoing Iranian debate about quotas for women in parliament.

It was not a debate that hardliners were inclined to have. Hoodfar travelled to Iran last December and returned to Canada, telling friends that the mood was hopeful and that she was optimistic for progress under Rouhani. But after she returned to Iran in February during the parliamentary election cycle, authorities raided her flat the day before her intended departure. Agents confiscated her passports, laptop and mobile phone. A string of interrogations culminated in her detention on 6 June. One month later, Tehran’s prosecutor announced that she, along with three other Iranian dual nationals, had been charged, but did not specify the grounds.

Not long after Hoodfar’s arrest, articles began trickling out on websites affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards. Hoodfar, one piece claimed, was a foreign agent. Another published a day later featured an elaborate info-graphic showing the purported financial links between funding bodies in the West and the organs of the ‘feminist conspiracy’ they supported. They alleged that her research was part of a sprawling conspiracy, an international network that with the aid of foreign funding has been seeking to infiltrate Iranian society and government. Not long thereafter, the regime began using Hoodfar and her foreign connections to tarnish influential figures in the Tehran women’s movement. Many of them have already received the ominous phone calls ordering them in for questioning.

The connect-the-dots of intrigue eventually lead to the Rouhani government itself. Hardliners now angrily cite his administration’s attempts to suspend Ahmadinejad-era gender policies, like a ban on women studying certain subjects in universities, a reduction in their permissible work hours, and a stricter dress code. The hardliners claim the Rouhani administration’s efforts are nurtured and led by a conspiratorial network with Molaverdi at its center. Articles on the conservative websites affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards enumerate her dangerous intentions and actions. Molaverdi’s aim of enabling women to participate more widely in the economy, her sustainable employment initiatives, “are in line with feminists who want to push women out of the family, into society, straying from the right path.” By “making a model of political women as successful,” she is said to be distorting the honorable, traditional image of the country’s rural women. (No mention is made that Iran has been an urban-majority country since 1979.) An excessive focus on domestic violence, rape, and the violence against women perpetrated by Islamic State, is “disturbing the public mind,” the news site claimed. Ultimately, Molaverdi is seeking to “change women’s lifestyle through changing laws and fine-tuning and reducing the religious, traditional aspects of Islam.”

Perhaps most far-fetched of all, in the conspiracy theory spun by the hardliners, is that the diaspora-based feminists are the brains – and funds – behind home-grown feminism in Iran.

Perhaps most far-fetched of all, in the conspiracy theory spun by the hardliners, is that the diaspora-based feminists are the brains – and funds – behind home-grown feminism in Iran. If there is one major fracture in the world of Iranian feminism, both domestically and in the diaspora, it is between mainstream women’s rights activists, who are prepared to work with Islam, either out of faith or out of political expediency, and those who are openly hostile to Islam and project an Ayaan Hirsi Ali-esque revulsion for faith. The progression of some women’s rights activists to this extreme anti-religious position reflects their despair at years of intense repression in the name of Islam. For years the state only tolerated the activism of religious women, and targeted secularists with special violence; with the crackdown on the Green Movement in 2009, state aggression grew so severe that some of them abandoned the middle ground entirely.

The notion that anti-Islam diaspora feminists could be deeply involved in a plot with academics like Hoodfar, who has herself been the focus of their criticism for what they see as “pro-Islamic views and scholarship”, is inconceivable. These dissident feminists, who have long severed real ties with the mainstream women’s movement inside the country, are the sort of figure the Iranian regime wishes to hold up as representative of feminism: intentionally disrespectful to religious sensibilities and cosily enmeshed with donor institutions. Their inclusion, women’s activists say, is aimed at blackening the credibility of Molaverdi and others by association.

The last issue of Zanan-e-Emrooz appeared in June. In July a post appeared on its website announcing that it would not be published again until further notice; the closure was “due to some problems,” but no other reasons were given. Sherkat was among those summoned for regular questioning after Hoodfar’s arrest.

Rouhani’s government, for its part, has made little headway with progressive gender policies, and Molaverdi and her supporters are mostly focused on re-establishing themselves as part of the national conversation. The tough work of correcting Ahmadinejad-era legislation around remains. But even given the modesty of their aims, hardliners seem determined to squelch their re-emergence. The persecution of innocent figures like Professor Hoodfar looks increasingly like part of a concerted plan by the hardliners to undermine the chances of Rouhani’s re-election next year. For now, Rouhani’s government has remained quiet about the stealthy harassment of women activists, but as the 2017 presidential election nears, he will need to say something to persuade Iran’s women that he is still on their side.