Nine Parts of Desire (31 page)

I had heard about the first Islamic Women’s Games in early February 1993, when Mary Glen Haig, a British representative of the International Olympic Committee, phoned me at home in London to get advice about what a Western woman should pack for a trip to Tehran. The International Olympic Committee, she said, had been invited to observe the games and she—a former Olympic fencing champion—was to be the observer.

A few days later, having wangled an invitation of my own, I went looking for her among the contestants and spectators at the track and field stadium, to see what she was making of the events so far. Someone pointed me to an official table, where a black-hooded woman sat alongside a sporty, svelte figure with bobbed blond hair, a denim jacket over a Liberty-print shirt, blue jeans and Asics athletic shoes. I’d explained on the phone that it wasn’t necessary to wear hijab at all-women gatherings, but I was surprised that she’d dressed so casually. I wandered over and introduced myself. The blonde smiled and held out her hand. “Faezeh Hashemi,” she said. “Vice-president of the
Iranian
Olympic Committee. This,” she said, indicating the woman in the black hood, “is our British guest from the International Committee.”

Faezeh Hashemi was President Hashemi Rafsanjani’s thirty-year-old daughter and the brains behind the first Islamic Women’s Games. Women’s sports had practically disappeared after the Islamic revolution, when the mullahs put an abrupt end to the mixed training and competition that had taken place under the shah. The idea of
girls, in revealing athletic gear, training alongside boys had turned many religious Iranians against sports, especially for women.

“There is no fun in Islam.” Khomeini had told his flock in a radio sermon in 1979. During his lifetime the city of Tehran reflected his opinion. A combination of an economically ruinous war with Iraq and the eagle eyes of Islamic zealots turned the city into a gray place of sandbagged buildings and circumspect citizens. All the old prerevo-lutionary night spots were gone. Even the Hiltons and the Kentucky Fried Chicken joints were changed utterly. Terrible hybrids had been born, such as the former Intercontinental Hotel on the former Los Angeles Boulevard, which had become the Flower of Martyrdom Hotel on Hijab Street, where mold bloomed in the bathrooms and a sign saying “Down With U.S.A.” loomed in the lobby.

And yet even Khomeini hadn’t been entirely oblivious to the need for bodily fitness. His own daily routine included a walk—round and round the courtyard of his house.

The wealthy, landowning Rafsanjani clan had taken a much more freewheeling approach to exercise, even having a little unmul-lah-like fun. In the privacy of their own family compound, Raf-sanjani’s two daughters and three sons swam, bicycled, played table tennis and volley ball. Before the duties of the presidency took up all his time, Rafsanjani himself often joined his kids in the pool or at table tennis.

After the 1979 revolution most of Iran’s sports facilities had simply been handed over to men. The government set up an important-sounding “Directorate of Women’s Sports Affairs” in 1980, but it remained nothing but a name until 1985, when an odd alliance of Iranian women began a patient campaign to get women’s sports back on the agenda. Some of the activists were Iran’s former women athletes—a few of them Olympic-class competitors—who had been forced out of sportswear and into hijab. Athletes who hadn’t gone into exile eventually adopted an “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” philosophy, and reached out to women’s groups within the religious establishment for help. It was Faezeh Hashemi, who could speak the language of the radical mullahs, who proved their best ally. Faezeh had many assets, including her father’s backing. As a master’s degree
student in management at the University of Tehran, she knew a lot about manipulating organizations.

Like most religious women who wanted to get something done, she built the foundations of her case on the prophet’s hadith. Muhammad is on the record as recommending that Muslims have “strong bodies.” He also said: “You shall excel in all respects if you are the believers.” Faezeh argued that sports should be part of the search for excellence, and that these recommendations applied equally to women and men. Women, as the lynchpins of the Islamic family, needed the physical and mental benefits that sports could provide. Fine, the conservatives responded; let them follow a program of exercise in the privacy of their homes. Faezeh responded that women and girls shouldn’t be robbed of the social benefits of teamwork and competition.

The prophet is said to have praised three sports in particular: swimming, archery and horseback riding. Since the hadith, “Teach your children swimming and archery,” used the Arabic word
awalaad,
which may be translated either as “sons” or “children,” and not the more specific
awalaad wa binaat
—sons and daughters—some strict parents argued that only sons were meant to take part in such pursuits. But archery’s modern equivalent, pistol or rifle shooting, was a useful skill in a revolutionary country recently at war and was one of the few sports that could be done in a chador. So shooting ranges were among the first sports facilities to welcome women, at first as members of civil defense militias, and later just as women looking for a hobby that would get them out of the house.

Faezeh argued that Iran’s Islamic government could differentiate itself from the old shah regime by demonstrating that it was interested in “sports for all women,” rather than the elite squad of topflight athletes the shah had encouraged to show off amid the “corruption” of mixed international competitions. Her arguments led to the handing back of sports facilities for certain “women’s hours” each week, and more emphasis on sports in girls’ schools. Eventually Tehran’s woodsy “Runners’ Park” banned men three days a week, between eight and four, so women could jog without hijab.

Then Faezeh began to tackle the much more difficult question of international competition. Many Islamic countries kept their women
out of international arenas: sometimes because of considerations of modesty, sometimes because of lack of money, and sometimes both. With tight sports budgets, countries such as Pakistan that had many Olympic-class women competitors sent none of them to the Barcelona Olympics. “The men, basically, are better than we, and the government selects those who are in with a chance,” said Firhana Ayaz, a sports writer with the
Pakistan Observer.
But she also saw a growing Islamic influence behind such decisions. In Pakistan most women athletes played in modest costumes of loose, long T-shirts over long pants, but that was no longer seen as adequate in some circles. “Mullahs have been making an issue of field hockey lately, because you have to run and bend. And during the Olympics, none of the women’s events were televised, because of pressure from the mullahs.”

When Hassiba Boulmerka, the Algerian runner, won a gold medal for her country at the Barcelona Olympics, she made a moving speech about her victory, saying she was glad to show that a Muslim woman could achieve such things. But not all of the Islamic world cheered her triumph. In Algeria the main Muslim political party, the Islamic Salvation Front, denounced her from the mosques for running “half naked” in shorts and a vest, and forced her to leave the country to avoid harassment while she trained.

While some Iranians joined in branding Hassiba “a phony Muslim,” Faezeh Hashemi saw the danger in such denunciations from Islamists who weren’t offering any positive alternatives. Muslims, she said, should be happy if any Muslim sportswoman excelled. All Muslim countries had different traditions, she said, and it was up to Iran to demonstrate the superiority of a truly Islamic system. She argued that the “oppressors,” meaning Western countries, used Muslim women’s absence from the sports field as an example of women’s inferior position in Islamic countries. “If Islamic countries can’t come up with their own principles for women’s competition,” she said in one widely reported speech, “then the way dictated by Western oppressing countries will be imposed on us.” Iran sent men’s teams to international contests. Why not, she said, let those women who excelled in any of the five sports that could be done in hijab go too?

In September 1990 she won her point, and when the Iranian
team joined the march at the opening of the Asian Games in Beijing, six chador-clad women—the Iranian shooting team—led the way. One of them, an eighteen-year-old student named Elham Hashemi, managed to break the Iranian men’s record.

By the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, Faezeh hoped to be able to send a squad of hijab-wearing equestrians as well. I doubted she’d win that one. It’s quite possible to show-jump wearing a neck-hiding wimple under a riding helmet and a tunic covering the legs down to the tops of riding boots, but what if a rider fell off her horse and was photographed with limbs sprawled and, heaven forfend, scarf askew? Conservatives were already arguing against women archers being allowed to compete in front of men, because the motion of pulling back the bowstring was too revealing, even in a chador.

For most of Iran’s women athletes—runners, swimmers, high jumpers—competing in hijab wasn’t even a remote possibility. It was for them that Faezeh had come up with the notion of an alternative Olympics, the Islamic Women’s Games, where women athletes from Muslim countries would gather in hijab for an opening ceremony that both men and women could attend. Afterward, the athletes would toss off their coverings and compete against each other with only women watching.

The paradox of her scheme was that the strict Muslim countries whose women could have benefited from the games’ women-only environment had no women athletes to send. In Saudi Arabia and most of the Gulf States, there were no women’s sporting organizations of any kind. Women’s competition, even strictly segregated, didn’t exist. Wealthy women who wanted to keep fit maintained well-equipped gyms in their homes and hired personal trainers. The rest led completely sedentary lives.

The countries that jumped at Iran’s invitation were the former Soviet Muslim republics, whose women athletes had been trained in the Soviet sports juggernaut. None of them had ever veiled; few had cracked the binding on a Koran. But, with the collapse of the Soviet system, nominally Muslim republics such as Azerbaijan were strapped for cash for luxuries such as sports. “Our entire budget for this year is enough to send one athlete to one competition—so long as it’s in Europe,” sighed Alyev Mouslim, the Azerbaijani team manager.
For him, an all-expenses-paid trip for a hundred and twenty women athletes—even if they had to veil and sit on a bus for the twenty-six-hour bus ride from Baku—was an offer too good to refuse.

As always with Iran, politics played a part. Iran was prepared to pay for big teams from the former Soviet republics because it was anxious to extend its influence there. But it balked at footing the bill for countries such as Sudan, that were already firmly in its orbit. So the cash-strapped Sudanese didn’t send women to the games. Nor did countries such as Egypt, which had sour relations with the Iranian government. Others sent tiny teams as a good-will gesture. “We are here to say ‘yes’ to the Iranian system,” said a diminutive table-tennis player from the five-woman Maldives squad. “But from a sports point of view, it’s pointless for us,” she said, shivering as a light snow fell outside Tehran’s underheated table-tennis center. “We’re from the equator. It’s impossible to get warmed up in this place.”

In the end, the former Soviet republics had the biggest teams, in every sense. Altogether, four republics sent 332 athletes, most of them tall, big-boned blondes who towered over the 51 women from the small squads sent by Malaysia, Syria, Pakistan, Maldive and Bangladesh.

Some of the women were national champions; one or two were Olympians. But for all but the shooting team in the 122-member Iranian squad, this chance at international competition was a first. Under their chadors, their faces shone as they marched into the 12,000-seat Azadi stadium.

During the games men were banished from the stands at all but the shooting range. At the swimming complex, schoolgirls filled the spectators’ benches, peering down at the unfamiliar sight of Iranian lane judges uniformed in fetching purple miniskirts and acid-green T-shirts.

At the track stadium Padideh, the torchbearer, had shaken off her hijab in favor of black Lycra shorts and had literally risen to the occasion by adding nine centimeters to her personal best in the high jump. Her jump, at 1.67 meters, wasn’t good enough to beat the Kyrgyzistan champion, but it broke the Iranian record, set before the
revolution. That afternoon, back at the athletes’ hotel, Padideh was ebullient. At heats for the 400-meter race, she had made the final four and was beginning to allow herself to hope that the next day might bring her a medal.

Although Padideh’s mother had been a sportswoman during the days of the shah, Padideh had grown up knowing nothing but segregated sports. “This is nice for us,” she said, waving a hand at the foyer full of women athletes. “Our way of thinking, our culture is this way,” said Padideh. “It would be hard for us, now, to compete in front of men.”

Official translators milled among the athletes, facilitating conversations. Each of them wore the usual Iranian attire—black hood and long tunic—but with a vivid, color-coded athletes’ warmup jacket pulled incongruously on top. Indigo and acid green meant the translator spoke English; pink and chrome yellow, Russian; lime and sky blue, Arabic. As conversations bounced from Farsi to Urdu to English, the hotel lobby filled with a pleasant, feminine buzz. It reminded me of sports day at my all-girl high school.

But in one corner a group of men sat self-consciously, murmuring together in Russian, without the aid of the young women translators. Alyev Mouslim, the Azerbaijani team’s administrator, sighed as he leaned against the wall, waiting for the elevator marked “Special for Men.” He was finding it hard to manage athletes who disappeared early in the morning on women-only buses, bound for arenas he wasn’t allowed to enter. “Actually,” he said, “I don’t have it so bad; I don’t have to coach.” The Kyrgyzistan volleyball coach had had to wait outside during his team’s matches for one of the women to grab a scarf and come out to tell him what was happening so he could make decisions on tactics. Alyev shrugged. “If we can play chess without seeing the board, why not this, too?”