Women and the Islamic Republic

Since tragic death of Mahsa Zhina Amini in September 2022, observers have attempted to make sense of the uprisings and to identify the sources of the movement. Some have sought to characterize it as the start of a social movement or even a revolution, while government insiders seek to label protestors as provocateurs influenced by activists outside of the country. I situate these uprisings from within the Islamic Republic of Iran and suggest that the conditions for the protests come from inside as the protestors draw on the very promises of the 1979 Revolution that they, their parents, and now grandparents, fought for almost half a century ago. To consider women’s rights and roles in the Islamic Republic, we might return to the revolutionary era and the promises afforded in the discourses that emphasized women’s roles and status in society.

In speech after speech, Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran’s first post-revolutionary Supreme Leader, addressed women’s groups and spoke about their important roles, not only in the family, but also in society and politics. He repeatedly reflected on women’s independent “character and identity,” and that they “stand shoulder-to-shoulder with men” in building a new and just society (Khomeini 2001).

At the time, revolutionary leaders used women’s status as a primary locus of the Revolution, literally, the site of the nation’s rehabilitation. In so doing, they turned women’s issues into markers of the state’s very legitimacy as well. Discourses about women’s objectification stressed the need to focus on women’s intellectual development. This, in turn, intensified the focus on women’s education and productive social and political participation.

Thus, the emphasis on women’s status and their expectation of better treatment—dignity and respect—not to mention equal rights, in the post-revolutionary era, was of a piece with Khomeini’s designation of women’s status as central to the much broader aim of creating an Islamic government (Hookoomat-e Islami) politically, discursively, legally, and materially. This language is significant and speaks to an important, if unexpected, consequence of the post-revolutionary Iran: the state formation legitimated the very language of equal rights for women.

By placing women’s issues and the improvements of their status as a primary revolutionary aim, I suggest, the founding leaders of the Islamic Republic also committed the post-revolutionary state to addressing women’s concerns. This emphasis on women’s status legitimated their expectation of better treatment in the post-revolutionary era. The ensuing Republic enmeshed with Islamic principles conditioned the field of possibilities through which women, among others, sought remedies for their concerns.

Rights in the Age of Benevolence

The tension between women’s rights claims and the post-revolutionary state’s mobilization of religion in contemporary Iran intersects with the geopolitical schism between Western and Islamic values. During the 1979 Iranian Revolution, leaders sought to challenge Iran’s emulation of Western societies and aimed to turn the country back to some “authentic” cultural values. At that time, revolutionary actors mobilized images of women, dressed in black chadors, as symbolic foils to individuated Western women who were seen as objectified, commodified, hyper-sexualized, and thus unemancipated and oppressed. The 1983 Veiling Act was legislated in tandem with a discourse of rehabilitating Iranian women and restoring them to a place of respect. The chador was symbolic, not just of the renewed status of Iranian women, but also of a collective shift toward a religio-national idea of Iran, born by women, that represented the triumph of the Revolution over Western values.

This anti-Western turn meant that “rights-talk” became politicized (Osanloo 2009). Revolutionary forces perceived rights-based claims as indicative of the ills of Western societies, such as excess and anomie, driven by a detached individualism. Increasingly popular rights-talk became a verbal index for a sense of entitlement without responsibility and individualization without regard for community. Instead, revolutionary leaders conceived of the family as the basis of a morally healthy society, with women, its “crowning jewels,” as its foundation. Individuals’ needs were to yield to greater social concerns. Leaders sought to improve society through a reintroduction of an honor-bound cosmology, which they seamlessly connected to Islam. In it, they situated women’s status—and thus dignity and respect—as key indicators of familial and social honor. Alongside these core values came the Islamic Republic’s greater attention to state, social, and even personal acts of benevolence and charity.

In a sense, then, Iran’s post-revolutionary leaders sought to upend Sir Henry Maine’s classic nineteenth-century measure of modern society as one that goes from “status to contract” (2012 [1861]). With Iran’s leaders focused on “returning” women to their important position within the family, women’s familial roles and social status would henceforth play a crucial defining role in the new, modern, Islamic Republic. Revolutionary leaders’ focus on family thus heralded the emergence of tensions regarding the sources of women’s supposedly improved status. That is, revolutionary forces sought to connect improvements in women’s status to cultivation of their roles in the family as mothers, daughters, and sisters—not as rights-bearing individuals. This conflicted with the fact that many supporters of the Revolution had seen it as a popular struggle to remove a monarch and made material claims on the state precisely through their roles as autonomous individuals endowed with rights.

The politicization of rights-talk was perhaps first seen in March 1979, when tens of thousands of Iranian women and some men flooded urban centers to protest the suspension of the Family Protection Law (1967, rev. 1975), which had given women new rights in divorce and custody. The protestors challenged other legal setbacks being discussed at the time, including mandatory veiling (which did come to pass), and revocation of suffrage (which did not).

To protest these actions, women held up signs to make their grievances known. They called for “Equality” and “Women’s Rights.” In response, they were dubbed Western puppets and attacked. Here was an illustration of some of the fractures within the popular struggle to remove a monarch. Just what was to emerge was as of then uncertain and people were divided. We also saw the language of rights becoming associated with Western excess and imperialism. At the same time, this language slowly became disassociated from the language of women’s status.

Despite politicization of rights talk, the resulting Islamic Republic became a hybrid of Islamic principles and civil codes incorporating mechanisms of parliamentary rule and a modern judiciary into its institutional and political framework. This is important because civil codes and legal procedures carry with them effects, including subject-making effects. As apparatuses of a republic, institutions of the state require subjects to operate as rights-bearing individuals, particularly when interacting with those institutions. One of the consequences of this blending, what I call “Islamico-civil law,” was in the family laws (Osanloo 2009).

Initially, it was only women—not men—who were required to make use of the new legal scaffolding of Islamico-civil family law. As they did so, women necessarily had to position themselves as autonomous beings and as bearers of rights. To outline their cases in civil courts, they needed to employ a rights-based understanding of their status, precisely what the Revolution had cautioned against. In the end, the revolutionary leaders’ interpretations of Islamic principles were made to accommodate the republican state framework. As the leaders’ interpretations of Islamic principles gave way, however, their system of blended governance produced and reauthenticated individuated subjects with rights in various segments of society, especially in the legal apparatus of the state. Even if the Islamic Republic had made women the grounds on which political disputes over sovereignty would be fought, the effects of those disputes were conspicuously liberal in form, through the nation-state formation of a republic. Institutions of the state comprise the tangible apparatus of everyday life and shape sensibilities, affect, subjectivity, and, ultimately, practice.

Conclusion

Today’s protests undoubtedly pose a challenge to Iran’s experiment in an Islamic Republic. The Iranian system is premised on a set of relations that is hierarchical and uneven; gendered and reactionary. Government officials speak of the values of honor and status and call for benevolence and charity. This unequal and hierarchical set of relations does not speak of redistribution, but of reciprocation. The state invests in and helps circulate a moral economy of benevolence that opposes individualism and rights-based claims—which, however, the system unwittingly propagates.

But the appeal to benevolence is premised on a discourse of humanitarianism or humanitarian care, as well. And we, in diverse societies in the Global North, are also increasingly called on to operate through benevolence and charity as substitute frameworks for human rights. What makes Iran’s protests revolutionary is less so the challenge that the protestors pose to Iran specifically than the challenge posed to all systems of governing today that are moving away from democratic mandates of equality and redistribution and toward charity and benevolence, which both produce and sustain inequality.

Iranian women’s protests resonate with struggles for civil, political, and human rights throughout the world. Yet solidarity with Iranian women’s struggles is more than contempt for the government of the Islamic Republic. The commonality with Iran emerges in part because of the global experience with humanitarianism that has undermined rights-based claims to justice. While contexts are distinct, global claims to justice underscore demands for rights, autonomy, and equality. In the Iranian women’s protests, the world has witnessed the vanguard in the fight for global justice.