The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran - Softcover

Osanloo, Arzoo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0691135479 ISBN 13: 9780691135472

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2009

Synopsis

In The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran, Arzoo Osanloo explores how Iranian women understand their rights. After the 1979 revolution, Iranian leaders transformed the state into an Islamic republic. At that time, the country's leaders used a renewed discourse of women's rights to symbolize a shift away from the excesses of Western liberalism. Osanloo reveals that the postrevolutionary republic blended practices of a liberal republic with Islamic principles of equality. Her ethnographic study illustrates how women's claims of rights emerge from a hybrid discourse that draws on both liberal individualism and Islamic ideals.


Osanloo takes the reader on a journey through numerous sites where rights are being produced--including Qur'anic reading groups, Tehran's family court, and law offices--as she sheds light on the fluid and constructed nature of women's perceptions of rights. In doing so, Osanloo unravels simplistic dichotomies between so-called liberal, universal rights and insular, local culture. The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran casts light on a contemporary non-Western understanding of the meaning behind liberal rights, and raises questions about the misunderstood relationship between modernity and Islam.

About this title

About the Author

Arzoo Osanloo is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology and in Law, Societies, and Justice Program at the University of Washington. Previously, she worked as a human rights attorney, practicing asylum and immigration law.

From the Back Cover

"Osanloo's original argument is that despite official rejection by the Islamic Republic of a discourse of rights as Western, liberal notions of rights are almost hegemonic in Iran today. Through wonderful fieldwork in Tehran's family court, lawyers' offices, and even the Islamic Human Rights Commission, she reveals how this has come about. She analyzes not only the force of the international politics of rights for a country that tied women's status to national identity, but also the surprising ways that Iran's unique system of civic-religious law has produced women with a keen sense of themselves as rights-bearing subjects. This is legal anthropology at its best and an extraordinary contribution to Middle East gender studies."--Lila Abu-Lughod, author of Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt

"Struggles for women's rights in the Muslim world are too often seen as a simple conflict between Islam and modernity. Osanloo's illuminating study of postrevolutionary Iran shows how women have articulated a much richer approach to advancing their political rights. They have developed a repertoire of claims that draws simultaneously on the state's republican foundations, the ideology of Islamic government, and the discourse of international human rights. The book is a highly original and important contribution to our understanding of the politics of contemporary Iran and to global debates about the rights of women."--Timothy Mitchell, Columbia University

"Osanloo examines a topic of great significance: the way the Iranian legal system has developed since the revolution to incorporate both the former civil codes and the newer ideas of human rights in ways that benefit women. This will be a widely read and valuable book."--Sally E. Merry, New York University

"This engaging book is original and groundbreaking in providing analysis and understanding for one of the most talked about yet neglected areas of research in Iran, the Middle East, and the North African region. It will open new directions for further research with important practical implications for women and human rights, Islamic or otherwise."--Homa Hoodfar, Concordia University

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Politics of Women's Rights in Iran

By Arzoo Osanloo

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Princeton University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-13547-2

Contents

Preface..............................................................................................ixAcknowledgments......................................................................................xviiIntroduction Human Rights and Cultural Practice.....................................................1Chapter One A Genealogy of "Women's Rights" in Iran.................................................20Chapter Two Producing States: Women's Participation and the Dialogics of Rights.....................42Chapter Three Qur'anic Meetings: "Doing the Cultural Work"..........................................75Chapter Four Courting Rights: Rights Talk in Islamico-Civil Family Court............................108Chapter Five Practice and Effect: Writing/Righting the Law..........................................138Chapter Six Human Rights: The Politics and Prose of Discursive Sites................................166Conclusion "Women's Rights" as Exhibition at the Brink of War.......................................200Appendix The Iranian Marriage Contract..............................................................209Notes................................................................................................211Glossary.............................................................................................227Bibliography.........................................................................................231Index................................................................................................251

Chapter One

A Genealogy of "Women's Rights" in Iran

The concern with "women's rights" in Iran, as elsewhere in the Muslim Middle East, has been a persistent trope of modernity. This genealogical exploration of women's rights attempts to situate the research question in broader historical processes that consider the power relations inherent in the approach to research or interpretation (Foucault 1977). The aim is not simply to address biases we bring to our subject matter, but also to consider how research questions and terms are shaped through contingent political and historical formations. To make sense of such terms, it is important to consider their significance in ever-changing contexts. The following discussion is not intended to be an exhaustive account of the scholarly literature on women's rights in the Iran but offers a glimpse of how rights talk in this context emerges through a dialogical engagement, through political and scholarly efforts.

Women's Rights: Trope and Consequence

Nashat (2004) categorized the approaches to women's rights in Iran as either Western secular feminist, Islamic apologist, or a third kind of approach in which Islam is seen as not opposed to women's rights and equality. I seek a different approach: I consider how rights are discourses embedded in and in dialogue with multiple ideologies while at the same time they are also hegemonic. This approach not only considers how notions of rights are constructed but indeed contemplates how and why concerns with "women's rights" emerge locally and transnationally as legitimating tropes of modern law and state institutions derived from liberal and Muslim values.

I do not search for the origin of the women's rights movements, but rather trace rights formations through an analysis that considers the shifting tensions underlying hegemonic forces through which claims to rights manifest. Women's rights talk is always changing insofar as it is intertextual—it cannot be understood out of the historical, political, and social contexts, and it occurs as a dialogue among multiple voices, that is, it is dialogical. Understanding rights in this way, it becomes apparent that the scholarship on women's rights in Iran is part of broader discussions about rights throughout the world.

In Iran, as elsewhere in the Muslim MENA region, the role and status of women have been subjects of much scholarly research and debate, particularly since the early 1970s. Such studies have illuminated women's varying positions in different sectors of society (Beck and Keddie 1978), adding the oft-forgotten component of gender to early historiographic records written by scholars who did not have access to women, and clarifying or rebuking stereotypes of women's status in the Middle East. Historians explored formulations of women's roles according to sacred sources (Ahmed 1992; Mernissi 1991); the role of patriarchy in producing historical records and in studies of gender in the region (Keddie and Baron 1991; Nashat and Tucker 1999); and women's status before the rise of Islam in the region (Spellberg 1994; Stowasser 1994). Women's legal histories added an analysis of gender to the law, legal records, and legal practices both before the period of state building and after, especially in the Ottoman region (Peirce 2003; Thompson 2000; Tucker 1998). In addition to historically grounded research, anthropological monographs gave ethnographic detail in contexts where little or no previous research existed, due in part to the lack of access by male scholars to these sectors of the societies (Abu-Lughod 1986; Delaney 1991; Fernea 1965; Friedl 1989).

The interventions of Said's Orientalism (1978) and Mohanty's Under Western Eyes (1991) exposed the latent biases in research methodologies and showed how research methods are already colored by a set of assumptions about the subject of study. It is not only the researcher who brings bias to her field of study but often the categories of study that we take for granted or as self-evident are in fact shaped through historical and political contingencies. For instance, women's roles were redefined in the context of nation-building after World War II and the fall of the Ottoman Empire (Kandiyoti 1991a; Moghadam 1993) and during wars for independence (Cherifati-Merabtine 1991; Peteet 1991), and in defining the postindependence state (Brand 1998; Joseph 2000). After independence, women's roles continued to be reshaped in connection with modernization (Moghadam 1994a, 1994b, 2005), development (Elyachar 2005), and human rights (Afkhami 1995). As a trope of nation-building, gender constitutes legal categories, such as citizenship, while nation-states, in turn, shape gender systems (Kaplan, Alarcón, and Moallem 1999; Joseph 2000; Joseph and Slyomovics 2001). In this vein, Charrad (2001) studies the gendered effects of the intersection between national legal codes and kin-based paradigms of social control. Postcolonial studies of nationalism reveal how women's status and the sacred role of domesticity are related to and in conversation with imperialist calls to "save women" from their male kin (Chatterjee 1993; Spivak 1987, 1988). Their insights have allowed for increased attention to global and transnational influences, including secularism, feminism, human rights, and neoliberal economic policies (Abu-Lughod 1998, 2002; Elyachar 2005; Hatem 1998; Hoodfar 1997; Moallem 1999). These later clarifications situate understandings of terms, whether "citizenship" or "freedom," by placing them in historical and political context (Altorki 2000; Mahmood 2005; Osanloo 2006a). The post-9/11 flurry of attention to the Middle East, North Africa, and Central Asia brought with it explorations of women's roles in international and political contexts, especially with regard to Islamic piety and modernity (Deeb 2006), geopolitics (Hirschkind and Mahmood 2002), and globalization (Nouraie-Simone 2005), with a renewed focus on global discourses on women's rights movements (Anwar 2005; Barlas 2005; Hatem 2006). A seemingly new area of research within this field emerges as scholars begin to study the relationship between the global war on terror and women in Muslim societies, adding a much-needed gender component (Ferguson 2007; Hunt and Rygiel 2006; Salime 2007). In what follows presently, I situate the specific literature pertaining to women in Iran. To give this literature more material context, I weave in ethnographic accounts.

* * *

Negar

Reza Shah came one day. I was about ten years old. My father brought home a hat and coat. It was the "constitution celebration" (jashn-e mashrutiat). Then Reza Shah went into parliament and said that women have no right to wear the chador and if they do it will be pulled off them. I saw it happen with my own eyes. They ripped scarves off women's heads, even in Tehran. When [his son] Mohammed Reza Shah came, we were still without, but we could do as we liked.

Negar lives in a comfortable house on a street along the well-manicured lawns of Tehran's Exhibition Hall. Her house is also near the large Shahid Beheshti University and a short walk to the infamous Evin prison. Her husband of almost sixty years had died in an accident about five months earlier, and she is now left in her four-bedroom house with her youngest son, his wife, and their six-year-old daughter. Almost eighty at the time of our interview in 2000, she lives off of her husband's retirement pension.

Negar was born in a small village to the north of Tehran, Taleghan. When she was fourteen, a visitor from out of town, the treasurer of his village, came to her house on business. When he saw her, with two long braids down each shoulder, he decided that he wanted to marry her. She liked how he looked, and her parents approved. It happened very fast. After they married, he took her to his home, where she learned that he had another wife. She did not like this and decided that she could not stay, so she left and returned home to Taleghan.

"Was that difficult?" I asked.

"No, it was not difficult," Negar answered. "I told my mother he had another wife. We didn't know this when I married, so I returned home."

On the day of our interview, Negar invited me over to lunch, where we ate chicken kebabs grilled outdoors and picked ripened cherries from their last surviving tree. We began the interview just before lunch at the kitchen table. After lunch, we resumed the interview, but Negar hastily finished it—she was getting tired. She had an endearingly abrupt way about her. She spoke her mind and laughed at herself and others openly.

A few years after her first marriage ended, Negar met and married another man, Firouz. Just before the war, she and Firouz went to Tehran together, where they began their lives. Firouz was a construction foreman and was able to provide a decent living for his wife and their six children, some of whom live in Tehran, while others live abroad, in Europe and the United States. Now the house seemed empty without Firouz, though I had never seen it with him there.

We worked very hard to make our home in Tehran. Making money was not easy in those days. First there was the war and the English were here fighting with the Russians. It was very expensive in those days. I had six children, one after the other. I kept telling Firouz to save. We have this house because of me. He never saved. Then he died and all I have left is this house.

Left with only the house to be divided between herself and her children, Negar lamented her situation. In spite of this, she was left with a monthly pension, savings interest, and a house, in which she had partial ownership, and which her children agreed not to sell as long as she wanted to live in it. The fact of her economic status was not what bothered her, however. She clarified this for me in specific terms:

I worked all my life. I raised these children. Why does this house automatically belong to them? Where is my portion? Do you know I am due only one-eighth the value of the house, not the [more valuable] property it sits on?

I interject, drawing from the legal rationale that others had given me for the gendered inequities in property division: "Isn't this because your sons are legally bound to support you financially?"

Supposed to, perhaps, but I am not anyone's burden. I worked all my life. Why should I be dependent on my sons to take care of me? My children grew up; each found a way, a life for him/herself. Now I am here, alone except for my one son. I taught my daughters to know their rights—and to go after them, so they do not end up disadvantaged like me. This is the most important issue facing women in Iran today.

* * *

Women between Revolutions, 1906–1979

Detailing the significance of historical changes in the region gives depth to otherwise reified topics, such as the veil (Hoodfar 1997; Yeganeh and Keddie 1986; Nashat and Beck 2003), gender roles and sexuality (Najmabadi 2005), education and domesticity (Najmabadi 1998b), and the inadequacy of the private/public dichotomy as an analytical concept (Friedl 1991; Hegland 1991).

With the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a shift in scholarship, not limited to Iranian studies, focused on the effects of the politicization of Islam and the relationship between Islamic values and the formation of modern nation-states. Although the concerns with the status of women can be traced to nineteenth-century reformists who favored the creation of a strong centralized state (Algar 1973; Amin 2002), the use of the liberal language of "women's rights" to express demands on state institutions for attention to women's concerns can be traced to the 1906–1911 constitutional revolution and the creation of a modern nation-state.

Constitutional Revolution, 1906–1911

In early 1905, an economic crisis was followed by a series of public protests led by merchants, shopkeepers, and lenders in alliance with some members of the 'ulama. The protests movements converged around the imperialist policies of the Qajar rulers (1794–1925) and eventually ended in a constitutional revolution. The strategic coalition called for limiting the powers of the dynastic rulers with the formation of a representative national assembly and a house of justice. Coming in the early days of the twentieth century, Iran's constitutional revolution raised many questions about the relationship between the centralized state and the practices of the 'ulama, especially as they pertained to women, including the degree to which they should participate in the operations of a new centralized state (Bayat-Philipp 1978; Cole and Keddie 1986).

There is some dispute over the effects of the constitutional revolution on the status of women—whether it did not do much for the status of women at that time (Mahdavi 2003) or was a moment in which important contributions for women arose because of the attention given the "woman question" (masaleyeh-zan) (Afary 1996). Women participated in nationalist struggles against imperialist encroachment as well as on the side of constitutionalists hoping to abolish the monarchy. Their later agitation, based solely on women's issues, independent of the broader revolutionary goals, was rebuffed by state authorities (Bahar 1983). The establishment of a constitutional system, however, eventually laid the groundwork for formal claims to be made on state institutions for women's legal and political rights. More significantly, in this period, the formation of women's political councils (anjoman) increased. Although such councils were not particularly new, the public acknowledgment of such groups and their improved organization led to more structured agendas for women's activism. These groups also legitimated public discussions about women as a sector of society and raised women's political position as a question for debate. The councils began publications, magazines, and newspapers focused solely on women's concerns, with special emphasis on their education and literacy. Although circulation of publications was limited, the transmission of ideas made women's rights and status important markers for the growth of a modern civil society. It was also at this time that schools for girls first opened.

Pahlavi Period, 1925–1979

Women's roles were of considerable importance for the modernizing reforms of Reza Shah (1921–1941) and later his son, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi (1941–1979), especially in the realms of education, literacy, employment, and legal rights. Major contributions during this time included the formation of the judiciary, despite the fact that the constitutional movement had laid the groundwork for this much earlier. Legal developments included the formal codification of laws for the first time. Personal status laws, including laws on marriage, divorce, custody, guardianship, and inheritance, were integrated into the civil legal system and codified in increments during this period (Paidar 1995). Modernization practices were complex and uneven, and affected women's lives on a practical level differently from the level of the ideal. For instance, much has been written about Reza Shah's decree to ban women from wearing the veil in 1936, but this decree, often related as an emancipatory measure, primarily addressed elite women's dress practices and specifically focused on the removal of face covers (picheh) and the chador, the long, tentlike body covers, rather than head covers (Rostam-Kolayi 2003). Such policies hindered some women's status and decreased mobility when they or their families felt discomfort or even shame in permitting women to leave the house "naked" (Hoodfar 1997). The prohibition on veiling was a factor in the decline of Reza Shah's popular appeal (H. E. Chehabi 2003).

This period was perhaps the single disruption of the Shi'i 'ulama's monopoly over women's status since the Safavids declared Shi'ism the state religion in 1501 (Mahdavi 2003). Reza Shah advocated and adopted policies intended to "modernize" Iran and used the question of women's status as a marker for this modernization. Such policies, while often hailed as achievements by some, primarily affected those whose families were in a position, both ideologically and economically, to benefit from literacy, education, and nondomestic work programs. For instance, the educational measures in the end applied to only about 1 percent of Iran's population (Mathee 2003). Despite declarations of progress and modernization, many were ensconced in new difficulties engendered by these policies: uneven development and poor distribution of resources.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691135479
• ISBN 13: 9780691135472
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 282