Hejab, Islamic totalitarianism and the opposition
Jaleh Ahmadi
When in 1979 the new primary school books appeared, they showed “Sara” and her mother in
full hejab (Islamic covering for women). It all seemed a joke. The blotting out of Goya’s
Naked Maja with the censors black pen was even funnier. The History of European
Civilisation, which had illustrated Goya’s painting, soon became a rarity. In those days few
people believed that this farce would turn out to be the model for real life.
It was not long before what had appeared impossible became real. All those women who
survived the mass executions of 1981-2 began to resemble Sara and her mother. Censors
from the Ministry of Enlightenment (sic) attacked masculine fantasies, prose or figurative,
with the same ferocity as the naked body of the Maja. The History of European Civilisation
had not become an antique, but the absurd had become reality, the rule. Disaster was no
longer a disaster.
The covering up and the censoring of women in pictures, on the cinema screen and the stage
was left to the male journalist and the secular artists themselves. From then on the boundary
between a “committed” [maktabi] man and a secular artist was decided through bargaining in
the Ministry of Enlightenment as to the amount of a woman’s hejab in picture and in word.
Battleground
But the covering of real women was decided in an unequal battle fought in streets fenced off
by hezbollahi thugs, at home, at the workplace, at school, in political organisations, outside
the local grocer, in the bus queue, waiting for a taxi, and finally through whipping,
imprisonment and execution. In the course of this battle the uncovered woman was finally
annihilated.
But the war against women did not end there. In schools the scarf was replaced by the
maqne’eh [a special scarf that is sown round the head and neck rather than draped on the
head] later to be superseded by the “superior hejab” – the black chador (shapeless large piece
of cloth covering all but the face]. Women were now classified into “unveiled” and “badly
veiled”. The fight against the “badly-veiled” became the issue of social conflict and the
excuse to impose daily terror on women. It was at this time too that pictures of women
covered from head to toe in the manteau and scarf, but made-up and poking a strand of hair
(kakol) from their scarf in Abe-Ali ski resort or in Safavieh Bazaar were paraded as symbols
of the peace and liberalism of the men ruling Iran!
On April 1994, when disaster was no longer being seen as a disaster, and hejab seemed as
self-evident an organ as any other in a woman’s body, a woman in Tajrish Square [north
Teheran suburb] tore off her hejab, shouted long live freedom, long live Iran, and set fire to
herself surrounded by a ring of silent and astonished onlookers.
Iranian writers did not even register their surprise at this! A woman who had broken the
silence in a city of fear did not fit between lines, even in code. A woman, whose presence for
one moment had upset the uniform appearance of the city did not become the subject of a
narrative, even in metaphor or by innuendo. No poem extinguished the flames that swallowed
her body.
Why did Homa Darabi’s cry, which was the cry of you and I, remain unheard outside the
country, outside of family, friends and a handful of groups?
Nostalgia
In the 1990’s some political refugees, openly or surreptitiously rediscovered hejab, in search
of self-identity. The warmth of grandmother’s love, the smell of freshly baked bread and
granny’s chador blended together in personal recollections. Investigators such as Haleh
Afshar gave to grandmother’s chador a personal, and an even historic feel, giving myths
surrounding such historic figures as Fatemeh-Zahra and Zeinab [1] a persona touch. It
brought alive, and celebrated, in exile memories of the religious mourning of the month of
Muharram, [2] and offerings of halva, sholeh zard and rose water, with a scholarly expertise
worthy of the West.
Others fell into the trap of fighting Reza Shah [who copying Ataturk had forcefully banned
hejab in the 1930’s]. They tore up their historic memory years after the Islamic Republic had
torn down the grave of Shams-al-Moluk Mosaheb. The “modern Muslim woman”, born in
the 80’s in the bloody war of Islamic fundamentalists against everyone else, fought in the
90’s shoulder to shoulder with the Muslim little-superman. Hand in hand they crossed one
border after another, climbed barricade after barricade, disarming opponents of the Islamic
Republic.
Homa Darabi has not even entered any of the lists of the victims of the Islamic Republic.
Because she was not just a victim. Homa rekindled a forgotten memory. The memory of a
woman in a homogeneously masculine city. The memory of a women without hejab and with
the death sentence on her head – both forgotten memories. She had taken the veil off the open
warfare of the Islamic Republic against women, and of the crime of being a woman, which
carries a maximum sentence. This did not please everyone.
While the importance of hejab in the Islamic Republic cannot be denied, its place in the
Gordon knot of sharia’ and secular law, religion and tradition, the law and the tyranny of
rights has been lost in the Islamic regime. Therefore any efforts to clarify its role is belittled,
seen as negligible, politically futile and marginal. The confusion between the two different
levels of political and cultural analysis, and hence analysis of the phenomenon of hejab and
other crimes against women in the Islamic Republic, has hindered an understanding of the
phenomenon of Islamic fundamentalism and the Islamic Republic.
In my argument hejab will be examined not as an issue of tradition or culture, but as
the issue of Islamic identity. This explanation is essential at the start in order to illuminate
one of the darkest ideological corners of Islamic fundamentalists, which is also at the core of
its identity and a foundation of the power to rule in the Islamic Republic of Iran.
Are women human?
To Islamic fundamentalism the natural inequality of the sexes is the starting point in its
definition of humanity, the state and citizenship. To understand power relations in human
societies in general, and in particular the structure of political power in today’s Iran, it is
necessary to distinguish the concept of male and female as an anthropological phenomenon
from the same as subject of social science. That means to study gender as a historic
phenomena.
Anthropological gender relations explains the different positions men and women occupy in
the human value hierarchy. An example is the different position Adam and Eve occupy in the
creation myths. Historic gender, however, is the basis of exploitation and social repression,
and consequently of the political repression of women and the basis of all paternalistic
societies throughout history. In this relation, the concept of man and woman are historicsocial phenomena and are the subject of sociology. In all civilised societies to date the
concepts of men and women represent the different positions the two sexes occupy in the
paternalistic hierarchy under the tutelage of men.
In the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism sexual anthropology and social gender
relations are fused into a single political ideology and make up a unitary whole. Gender
and sexuality is the subject of definition of humans, their social role and the immediate issue
of political violence. This is akin to the way German National Socialism formulated racism in
a political ideology and made it the direct subject of political violence.
Based on this political ideology the definition of a woman, and her crime, appears in the
preface to the Constitution of the Islamic Republic. This was no coincidence but was
necessary to define and explain the governing institutions of Islamic rule. In this preamble
women are defined as a “object and tool” “in the service of consumerism and allencompassing exploitation” the polar opposite of the “the leader of the alert conscience of the
nation”. The Islamic government is given the task of transforming her into a mother of
committed [maktabi- one who follows Islam totally] human beings. In the Islamic Republic a
woman, as a force of reproduction which has been seized and reclaimed, is transformed into
one of the institutions of the Islamic government, appropriately located in the Constitution
between the economic and maktabi military institutions.
In the ideology of Islamist fundamentalism the topic of women is not merely ideological but
is the foundation on which the definition of Muslim men, Islamic community and the nature
of the enemy rests. The confrontation of the insider and the foreigner is determined, and
becomes manifest, in the battle for the possession of women. The woman is excluded from
the image of a collective human and is placed at the opposite pole of man-human. This image
of a deformed human becomes once again complete in the image of a believing man.
Rationality becomes subordinate to belief.
The Muslim man is the epitome of true belief and the representative of the power of male sex
in safeguarding the harmony of creation. Its most complete form is exemplified in the Leader,
the great superman, Khomeini. Women on their own are the subject of sex, sexuality and lust,
and in consequence, the subject of ownership possession and conquest, on the one hand, and
of sin, control, crime, and punishment on the other. The body of a woman, as home for the
devil, becomes the place and the subject of the holy jihad.
Historically defined humanness
In the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism the relations of ownership and domination of
women is the main subject of belief, and power of the male sex and the definition of the
“male-human”. Injury to these relations is the work of the devil work and enemy conspiracy.
Women are the means of its execution. The negation of woman is the affirmation of the
Muslim man. The corrupted world is defined by women and the ideal Islamic society is
portrayed in the negation of this world through the negation of women as a subject. On the
other hand the human status of men is a given and self-evident product of creation, and its
loss is possible, though conditional.
In this ideology, the humanness of women, even contrary to the portrayal of humans in the
Quran, is openly questioned. The humanness of women is an acquired thing conditional to
obedience. Therefore the humanness of women is restricted to an historic period. According
to the founder of this ideology Khomeini, as he wrote in his large tome Safiyehe Nur, women
were reduced to a level below animals in jahelieh [pre-Islamic] times. Women became
human through the inception of Islam. Once Islam declined after the Islamic government of
Mohammad, women lost their human identity and once again became a tool and ally of the
enemy. A woman not under control, that is a woman in her natural and real being, is a one
potentially and in her very essence an enemy object, and for this reason is the subject for the
definition of the enemy. The Western variety is the continuation of the pre-Islamic woman,
the woman of jahelieh, and is placed in a position inferior to animals. She is the naked face of
the foreign enemy.
Let me quote an example of this view of women as a tool of foreign enemy from the official
journal of the Islamic Republic – Zane Ruz – reporting a seminar of Women From the
Viewpoint of Islam in 1982:
“Women have always played a fundamental role in colonialism and exploitation, especially
in cultural exploitation. The obvious example is Spain. The most important role in the
conquest of Spain from the Muslims was played by Christian women. Or the [Quranic] story
of Bala’m Bal’ur who by flinging the women of that city onto the troops of Moses caused on
one account 6,000 and on another 4,000 to be contaminated, and what calamities did not
befall them. In general wherever you find the footprint of corruption and colonialism women
have been present ”.
In Islamic countries women are the fifth column of the foreign enemy.
In the bloody battle where Islamic fundamentalists realised their identity, the enemy was
internal. The enemy incarnate was not western man or women. It was the Iranian woman,
now attacked as the tool of the outside enemy. The changing of women, in other words the
war against their physical presence and other manifestations of her presence, became the
main substance of the anti-imperialist struggle and the realisation of the Islamic revolution.
Resistance against this amounted to political betrayal.
The total separation of male and female, the removal of women from the pictorial
representation of humanity, the conquest of women as the embodiment and manifestation of
the enemy, the victory over the feminine and her control, attempts to turn her into the slave of
the Islamic government, and ultimately her exhibition, whether present or not, in the cliché of
the Muslim woman was the main subject-matter of the ideology and policy of Islamic
fundamentalism in Iran. Hejab is the expression and means of its implementation.
Among the numerous examples of the efforts to criminalize the hejab can be seen in the
official newspaper “Jomhuri Islami” on International Women’s Day in 1984:
“In underdeveloped countries … women act and serve as the unwitting ally of the powers to
destroy our culture… A woman is the best agent in aiding imperialism to destroy our culture.
The role of women is even more sensitive in Islamic countries. In these societies the woman
possesses a shield that protects her honour, chastity and humanity against the conspiracies
that are plotted against these. Hejab is this shield. Lack of hejab was a blow against chastity
and personality of women. Women were used to distort the Islamic culture of society and to
destroy the faith of the people and to take society towards corruption, decline and collapse….
It is here [in the realisation of hejab] that the we realise the glory and depth of the Islamic
revolution in Iran.”
To doubt the humanity of women, is to efface women as a subject or person in ones ideology.
To define women as an unwitting agent is her effacement as a political person, victimising
her, and making her disappear as an individual with legal rights. To ascribe women’s lack of
free will and crime to her nature is to remove women as a moral agent.
The struggle against women and femininity in order to save masculinity and to revive male
power is the direct and central theme of political power, social codification and Islamic law.
Through these the institutions of power in the Islamic Republic took form. Hejab is the
subject, the shape and the means of realising the ideology of Islamic fundamentalism in the
Islamic government.
Hejab and the cliché of the Muslim women
The transformed woman in the cliché of the Islamic woman is defined, before all else by the
hejab. This is more than mere religiosity. Women from other faiths, if they accede to hejab,
become human. The wife of a man, whether heathen or fervent Islamic believer, will become
a Muslim if she wears Islamic covering.
The philosophy of hejab is the negation of women as a subject, alongside the negation of the
individual on the whole. Control rather than choice and free will becomes a principle. The
Islamised nation is shaped by the hejab and replaces the dismissed nation. The Western
foreigner, just as the Muslim Arab, can sit on the negotiating table only once she accepts the
national border of hejab.
The woman in the eyes of Islamic fundamentalist, is not the woman of the Qur’an and the
obedient slave to husband and God. Nor is she the ideal women of men in the end of the 20th
century. She is a characterless cliché with the right to vote against freedom and free will. She
is a faceless, alienated being which has become the yardstick for evaluating things. The
modern Muslim woman is the outcome of a bloody war in the trial of power by the system of
terror and destruction of humans and the product of the fundamentalist’s programme to
Islamise society.
The hejab in the view of Islamic fundamentalism is not a sign of the belief of the Muslim
man, nor the border between the believer and the non-believer, nor a protector of morals, nor
a separation between the Muslim umma and the foreigner. Hejab is the expression of the
duality of sexuality in its pure form, the impassable border between male and female, and the
fortification of the absolute power of a masculinity with pretensions to globalised application.
Translated by Mehdi Kia
This is the first part of an article in Farsi that first appeared in Arash no 84 on June 2003.
Jaleh Ahmadi then goes on to exemplify her case with examples from the Islamic Republic of
Iran.
1.
The Prophet’s daughter and grand daughter respectively.
2.
Shi’ite ritual mourning of the martyrdom of Mohammad’s grandson Hossein and his
followers in an unequal battle with the Umayyed caliph Yazid.