Iran: Women of the revolution

international | gender and sexuality | other press Monday February 16, 2009 16:06 by Anne McShane

On the Thirtieth anniversary of the overthrow of the Shah in Iran, Azar Sheibani looks at how Iranian women have defied the reign of misogynist terror. Full text of the article at the url below.

Imperialism’s sabre-rattling against Iran has prompted the Tehran regime to intensify its suppression of grass-roots progressive movements. The regime uses the threat of war to claim that radical and progressive movements – like the women’s, workers’ and students’ - are in league with imperialism, are somehow ‘fifth columnists’. Harsh repression inevitably follows. The irony is that the experience of two imperialist invasions in the region has shattered any illusions among women and other social movements about the so-called ‘liberation’ on offer from US-led intervention. The barbaric consequences for the women of Afghanistan and Iraq are eloquent testimony to that. Women in Iran are fully aware that they are the only force that can change their destiny.

The Islamic constitution and the penal codes prohibited women from the presidency, religious leadership, judgeship and entering certain educational fields. All civil courts were replaced by Islamic courts. The Law of Retribution (Qisas) and its barbarically archaic practices were re-introduced into Iran after 13 centuries. Via the constitution, the Islamic penal code and the Council of Guardians’ directives it is legal to value a woman’s life as half of a man’s life in blood money exchanges (deyeh), to stone adulterers to death, torture women for not observing the strict hijab and showing some strands of their hair (Ta’zir), punishing them by cutting parts of their body (including blinding by gouging an eye out), rape virgin women in prison before execution (so they are excluded from ‘heaven’) and much more. It should be emphasised that although ‘children’ are exempt from such punishment, all of the above can apply to girls aged nine and above and boys aged 15 and above. In the civil law of the regime, this is the age that girls and boys reach puberty,

The discriminatory religious laws against women do not just limit women’s rights: They also confer privileges on men. For example, polygamy (giving men the Islamic blessing to have up to four permanent wives at a time and unlimited temporary wives, Sigheh); the right to divorce is exclusively male; custody of children after divorce and many more outrageously sexist ‘rights’. Sexual violence in Iran became a state affair, legalised and sanctified by religion.