Nine Parts of Desire (28 page)

At the university in the southern city of Awaz, I met a young student who had benefited from the postrevolutionary changes. She was studying medicine, living in a dormitory far from her extremely
religious rural family. Her parents, she said, would never have permitted her to go to university under the shah, or to live away from home, or to work in a hospital. But now they saw the universities and the hospitals as part of the Islamic system, and therefore safe places for their daughter. Away from home, she had the freedom to meet men, albeit in very controlled circumstances, and had recently found the one she wanted to marry. Her parents, to her astonishment, had accepted her choice, making her the first woman in her family’s history to marry for love.

In the theocratic Iranian government women have risen to the ranks of deputy ministers, and at each election Rafsanjani has called on voters to return more women to the Parliament. In business, I met a woman running a valve factory and another heading a trucking company. Nasi Ravandoost, who ran the factory, said she had no problems getting on with her business inside Iran. “My problems are all created outside,” she said. Traveling to buy parts was often complicated by embargoes and visa obstacles. The woman who ran the trucking concern said that success was a matter of common sense and tact, just as it was in business anywhere. “Obviously, I don’t go into the Transport Ministry wearing this,” she said, fingering the floral silk outfit she’d worn to an evening party in North Tehran.

By now, women have so solidified their place in postrevolution-ary society that some of them are outspokenly criticizing it. At the offices of the satirical magazine
Golagha,
some of the sharpest political cartoons are penned by a woman. But even more tellingly, in the fall 1991 issue of the
Iranian Journal for International Affairs,
Iran’s showpiece foreign policy publication, an assistant professor of anthropology named Fatemeh Givechian wrote a paper that criticized the lingering remnants of the policy of sex segregation.

“No doubt,” she wrote, the policy led to “more awareness of one’s own gender, but not necessarily any increase in one’s knowledge of the opposite gender. Sex segregation to this extent is not natural…. There will emerge a dual society of male and female stranger to one another and unaware of each other’s anxieties.”

Chapter 10

P
OLITICS,
W
ITH AND
W
ITHOUT A
V
OTE

“Say, O God, possessor of all sovereignty, you give sovereignty to whom you wish and take sovereignty from whom you wish.”

THE KORAN
CHAPTER OF THE FAMILY OF IMRAN

A
year after the Gulf War, in the mountains and valleys of Iraqi Kurdistan, the lines of women seemed to stretch forever. Spring sunbeams glinted on sparkling dresses of silver and gold. They had worn their best, because this was a day of celebration. For the first time in their lives, the women of Kurdistan were lining up to vote for their own representatives.

A year earlier, during the Kurdish uprising that followed the end of the war, I had seen similar sparkling, bright-colored dresses torn and discarded in a dusty pile by a door to a prefab hut on the grounds of an Iraqi prison. A stained mattress lay inside the hut.

Kurdish women had been brought to this place, stripped naked and raped. For some, the rape had been part of the regime of torture they experienced as political prisoners. Others had been raped as a means of torturing their imprisoned fathers, brothers or husbands. The idea was to break the spirit of the men by destroying their honor through the violation of the bodies of their women. The procedure was so routine that the bureaucrats of the prison had made up an index card for one of the employees, a Mr. Aziz Saleh Ahmad. Neatly and methodically, in the bottom left-hand corner, it listed his profession,
Fighter in the Popular Army,
and his “Activity,”
Violation of
Women’s Honor.
Aziz Saleh Ahmad was, in other words, employed as a rapist at the prison. Saddam Hussein had called his campaign against the Kurds the Anfal, after a chapter of the Koran which speaks of the spoils of holy war. It was hard to imagine a more perverse appropriation of religion.

For most of their lives, this had been the meaning of politics for the women of Kurdistan: a dangerous and possibly deadly activity that led to places like the stained mattress, or the airless, feces-smeared cells tunneled through the earth beneath it. To me, it seemed like a miracle that the meaning had changed, in one short year, to something so different as lines of smiling women, lining up to vote. Even more surprising were the names of the women on the ballot.

The road to political power is full of obstacles for women in most Muslim societies. In countries such as Kuwait, women have yet to win the right to vote, much less govern. And even where the system is supposedly open to women, claiming a place in it often means standing up to abuse and the threat of physical violence. In Jordan’s 1993 election, one woman candidate had to fight for the right to even speak at a rally, because Muslim extremists objected to the sound of a female voice at a mixed gathering.

In 1994, women led three Muslim countries. Yet often their place at the top has little effect on the lives of women at the bottom. As Tansu Ciller turned her attention to remaking Turkey’s economy, young Turkish women caught socializing with men in rural areas were being forced to undergo “Virginity checks” at local police stations. As Bangladesh’s Begum Khaleda Zia became the first Muslim woman head of state to address the U. N. General Assembly in 1993, extremists were using death threats to attempt to silence a Bangladeshi woman writer who criticized aspects of Islam. In her first term in office, Pakistan’s Benazir Bhutto let stand rape laws that punished the victim as a “fornicator” and let the rapist go free. On her return to power in 1993, it seemed that she might do better, promising to set up all-women police stations and appoint women judges.

Part of the difficulty for women leaders in Muslim countries is that their own position is often so tenuous and the risk of a backlash
always a threat. In Turkey, signs of resentment of Ciller’s sex surfaced at a conference in August 1993 for former Prime Minister Mesyut Yilmaz when delegates began chanting
“Mesyut koltuga, Tansu mutfaga
[Mesyut back to power and Tansu back to the kitchen].”

Muslim women politicians tend to be a special breed. On election day in Kurdistan in May 1992, one woman candidate, Hero Ahmed, didn’t wear a sparkling dress. She wore the same earth-toned baggy pants and sashed shirt she’d worn since 1979, when she went to the mountains to join the Pesh Merga, the Kurdish guerrillas whose name means We Who Face Death. During her twelve years in the mountains Hero, a psychologist, learned to use an assault rifle and an antiaircraft gun. But mostly she shot film. Her most famous clip shows clouds of gas rising over the village of Yak Sammer in 1988—one of the few pieces of film known to exist of an Iraqi poison gas attack.

On election day, women stood in line all day to vote for her. Some, illiterate, had never held a pen before. At the end of the count, seven women, including Hero, had been elected to the hundred-and-five-seat Parliament.

What happened next followed a pattern that has repeated itself in almost every Islamic state where women have won a political voice. Almost always, women politicians try to reform the inequitable personal status laws that govern marriage, divorce, child custody and property. In Kurdistan, the women parliamentarians began to campaign for reform of laws based on sharia that deprived them of equal rights with men. Among their demands: outlawing polygamy, except in the case of a woman’s mental illness, and changing inheritance laws so that daughters receive an equal share of a parent’s estate, instead of half the share allotted to sons.

Hero thought the Parliament would probably pass the anti-polygamy law. In the Koran, polygamy is presented as an option for men, not as a requirement. In seventh-century Arabian society, there had been no restriction on how many wives a man could take. The Koran, in stipulating four as a maximum, was setting limits, not giving
license. A close reading of the text suggests that monogamy is preferred. “If you shall not be able to deal justly, [take] only one” the Koran says, then later states: “You are never able to be fair and just between women even if that is your ardent desire.”

The issue of polygamy is analogous to that of slavery, which was gradually banned in Islamic countries. Saudi Arabia was among the last to legislate against it in 1962, when the government bought the freedom of all the slaves in the kingdom at three times the going rate. As with polygamy, the wording of the Koran permits, but discourages, slavery. Muhammad’s sunnah included the freeing of many of his war-captive slaves. Because freeing slaves is extolled as the act of a good Muslim, most Muslims now accept that conditions have changed enough since the seventh century to allow them to legislate against a practice that the prophet probably would have chosen to ban outright, if his own times had allowed. Polygamy is already on the decline throughout the Islamic world, and many Muslim scholars see no religious obstacle to a legal ban on the practice.

For the Kurdish Parliament, the difficulties would come with demands for change in things that the Koran doesn’t present as optional, such as the division of an estate to give sons double the share of daughters.

The Koran sets out the formula for inheritance as an instruction which all believers must follow. In seventh-century Arabia the Koran’s formula was a giant leap forward for women, who up until then had usually been considered as chattels to be inherited, rather than as heirs and property owners in their own right. Most European women had to wait another twelve centuries to catch up to the rights the Koran granted Muslim women. In England it wasn’t until 1870 that the Married Women’s Property Acts finally abolished the rule that put all a woman’s wealth under her husband’s control on marriage.

Today, Muslim authorities defend the unequal division of inheritance by pointing out that the Koran requires men to support their wives and children, whereas women are allowed to keep their wealth entirely for their own use. In practice, of course, it rarely works that way. Hero headed the Kurdish chapter of Save the Children, an organization whose research has proved repeatedly that money in
women’s hands benefits families much more than money flowing to men.

I went to visit Hero in January 1993, as Parliament got ready to debate the women’s platform. Her office was a small room in a large house that had once belonged to one of Saddam Hussein’s top officials. Hero had stripped the room of furniture and tried to recreate the mood of a traditional Kurdish mountain dwelling. Kurdish kilims and cushions covered the floor. Climbing plants wound their way up the walls and over the rafters. Near the ceiling, a squirrel darted in and out of a small knitted pouch that dangled from a beam.

To Hero, legislation was only a beginning. “I don’t believe some habits and ways of thinking can be changed by making a new set of rules,” she said. “It needs time, publicity, education; first to make people understand it, then, gradually, to get them to accept it.”

At that time, members of a committee formed by the women parliamentarians were traveling Kurdistan, trying to raise support for the law reforms. They visited women in towns and remote villages, carrying a petition in favor of reform. In August 1992, the petition carried 3,000 names. A year later, 30,000 had signed.

In principle, the support of ten parliamentarians is all that is required for a proposed law reform to be put to a vote by legislators. By September 1993, thirty-five MPs had signed the proposals. But still the reforms languished. Timid MPs said it was necessary to wait for what they called the “right” time to present them.

It wasn’t clear when that “right” time might be. And by the summer of 1994, it seemed it might not come at all. By then, the Kurdish parliament had collapsed amid bitter fighting between the two main Kurdish parties. It seemed unlikely that any meaningful change would come from there.

Even if it had, legislative reform of sharia-based law has rarely been a lasting success. Tunisia in 1956 replaced its Koranic law with a unified code for Muslims, Christians and Jews that banned polygamy and repudiation, and gave women equal pay and equal rights in divorce. But the law was so far ahead of public attitudes that it never succeeded in creating deep change. To walk the streets in Tunis today is to be transported to a planet where women barely exist. Apart from a few foreign tourists, women aren’t seen in public places.

In Iran the shah’s laws banning polygamy and child marriage were overturned after the revolution. In Egypt, the birthplace of the modern Arab feminist movement, legal reform had a mixed history. In 1919 veiled women marched through the streets of Cairo to protest British colonial rule. In 1956, with British rule banished, Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser granted women the vote. But until 1979 restrictive personal status laws prohibited a woman leaving her husband’s house without his permission or a court order.

In his novel,
Palace Walk,
Egypt’s Nobel Prize-winning novelist Naguib Mahfouz writes movingly of Amina, who leaves her house just once in twenty-five years of marriage to visit a nearby mosque. When her husband learns she has defied him and gone out, he orders her from the house: “His command fell on her head like a fatal blow. She was dumbfounded and did not utter a word. She could not move… she had entertained many kinds of fears: that he might pour out his anger on her and deafen her with his shouts and curses. She had not even ruled out physical violence, but the idea of being evicted had never troubled her. She had lived with him for twenty-five years and could not imagine that anything could separate them or pluck her from this house of which she had become an inseparable part.”