All
the President’s Women
Nazanin
Shahrokni
Nazanin
Shahrokni is a doctoral candidate in sociology
at the University of California-Berkeley.
Marzieh
Vahid Dastjerdi, new health minister of Iran,
center, with two other woman nominees for
ministries who were rejected by Parliament.
(Vahid Salemi/AP) |
Raising
eyebrows all around, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced
on August 16 that he would nominate at least three
women to be ministers in the new cabinet that, unresolved
controversy notwithstanding, he will head as president
of Iran. It was a step unprecedented in the 30-year
history of the Islamic Republic, whose backers in
the conservative clergy regard the concept of women
in high office as contrary to God’s will. And it
was Ahmadinejad, of all people, who broke this barrier?
His political opponents among reformists and feminists
were, if anything, more suspicious of his intentions
than the conservative clergy. But Ahmadinejad was
true to his word, and later that week, he proposed
that Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi, Fatemeh Ajorloo and
Soosan Keshavarz become the ministers of health,
social welfare and education, respectively. Dastjerdi
was approved by the Majles, the legislature of the
Islamic Republic, and is now on the job.
It
misses the point to scrutinize these nominations
for evidence of budding “pro-woman” or sneakily downplayed
“anti-woman” tendencies in the Iranian president.
He is rather showing just how narrow is the political
base that he and his allies, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei
and the security apparatus, plan to rest on in the
aftermath of the disputed June presidential election.
Dastjerdi and the two other nominees have ties to
the Revolutionary Guard, created by Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini because he did not trust the regular army,
and the Basij, the “peoples’ adjunct” of the Guard
founded during the Iran-Iraq war. And all three women
are members of the hardline Islamist women’s organizations
around the Basij, which have been agitating for promotion
of women to ministerial rank. With the appointment
of Dastjerdi and the nomination of Ajorloo and Keshavarz,
Ahmadinejad is in a sense declaring his independence
of the clergy and the traditional conservatives,
but revealing his dependence on the most authoritarian
sectors of the lay establishment in Iran.
And
yet, the implications of these measures of political
consolidation for women’s rights are ambiguous: The
woman nominees and the organizations from which they
hail are undoubtedly conservative and, by the lights
of many Iranian feminists, “anti-woman” in their
attitudes. The record, particularly that of Marzieh
Vahid Dastjerdi, nonetheless shows some success in
improving the status of women and promoting certain
women’s rights. Meanwhile, the debates around these
nominations have brought women’s issues to the fore
in ways that Ahmadinejad likely did not foresee.
The irony, then, is that concrete improvements in
Iranian women’s lives may be achieved despite the
general increased repression.
Not
a Republic of Mullahs
Ahmadinejad
is not known to be a friend of greater personal and
political freedoms for Iranian women, but has sometimes
sought to appear as such, perhaps to make a fresh
appeal to women voters. During his initial campaign
for the presidency, in 2005, he dissembled in response
to repeated questions about his stance. Asked about bad
hejabi (laxity in women’s “Islamic” dress), for
instance, he looked into the camera and said: “Why
do you humiliate people?... Do you really think the
country’s biggest problem right now is the kind of
dress a young woman wears?” But the fears about Ahmadinejad
proved to be well founded. Less than a year into
his first term, there was a noticeable uptick in
the state’s efforts to banish bad hejabi from
the streets. There is dispute over who exactly was
behind this “culture of modesty” campaign, but the
police and the Basij were clearly under orders to
restore stricter standards of veiling in public,
amidst calls for further Islamization of the public
space.[1] Dastjerdi
is considered to be the mastermind of one such proposal,
for gender-segregated health care facilities.
As
president, Ahmadinejad has generally stuck to the
line that Islam holds the female sex in high esteem,
saying at a May 2006 press conference in Jakarta:
“Women are the crowns of men’s heads.” Yet his sentiment
that “women are cherished in Iran” has been applied
selectively, at best, by his administration. Since
2005, several women’s organizations and publications
have been shut down, including Zanan, the
reputable feminist monthly founded in 1992. Women
activists, for example, those working for revision
of the personal status clauses in the Islamic Republic’s
constitution, have been subject to arrest and imprisonment.
Against
this background, Ahmadinejad’s naming of three female
nominees for his cabinet seemed not only out of character,
but also out of step with political reality in the
Islamic Republic. There were no women heading ministries
under Ahmadinejad’s predecessor Mohammad Khatami,
the self-described reformist who rode a wave of support
from women, particularly younger, well-educated women,
to victory in 1997 and 2001.
At
the start of Khatami’s second term, many turned hopeful
eyes his way, anticipating that he would include
women on his list of cabinet nominees. One hundred
sixty-three reformist members of the Sixth Majles
signed an official letter expressing this expectation.
On the list that Khatami finally submitted to the
parliament, however, there were no women. Khatami
explained that he was not willing to risk angering
conservative clerics, who might issue fatwas instructing
citizens not to pay taxes to his “un-Islamic” government.
He tried to mollify the reformists by appointing
a woman, Masoumeh Ebtekar, as his vice president
and head of the Department of the Environment, both
non-ministerial positions.
When
Ahmadinejad announced his nominees, the clergy made
their distress known in private meetings and through
their tribunes in mosques and in elected office.
Mohammad Taqi Rahbar, leader of the Clerics’ Faction
in the Majles, worried openly about “a new challenge
between Ahmadinejad and the clerics.” Rahbar was
referring to a spat in the first year of Ahmadinejad’s
presidency over whether to allow women to attend
soccer matches. In response to agitation from women
fans, Ahmadinejad had reversed the ban that was in
place and demanded that a special section be reserved
for women, so as to create a “healthier atmosphere”
at stadiums. The high-ranking clerics were irked,
to say the least, that they had not been consulted
about the reversal of the ban. The controversy came
to an end only when Khamenei, the Supreme Leader,
intervened to ask Ahmadinejad to retract his statements.
In
August, however, the Leader did not intervene. He
refrained from coming out in support of the president,
but also did not object when conservative women officials
reported his privately favorable comments. So this
time Ahmadinejad did not back down. He insisted on
having his choice of ministers even when the clerics
publicly opposed his decisions. “This is a rightful
demand on women’s part,” he declared, implying there
was no need even to consult the clergy. It was a
provocative remark from a champion of the same Islamic
Revolution that established velayat-e faqih (rule
of the jurisprudents).
Khamenei’s
tacit approval, however, had the desired effect.
The uproar in the conservative-dominated parliament
quieted down, and in the end 175 out of 286 MPs voted
Dastjerdi in as the first female minister to serve
in the Islamic Republic. Along with a male candidate
for the Energy Ministry, the two other woman nominees
were rejected, ostensibly due to “lack of experience.”
Thus
partly rebuffed, Ahmadinejad used his executive authority
to appoint a woman, Nasrin Soltankhah, as vice president
for science and technology. He has also broached
the idea of elevating the headship of the Presidential
Center for Women and Family Affairs to vice presidential
rank, in which case he would need to introduce another
female vice president. As for the two ministries
that remained vacant, he proposed the names of Fatemeh
Aliya and Zohreh Elahian, both conservative MPs.
Both women nonetheless withdrew from consideration
so as not to offend the clerics.
Rahbar,
head of the Clerics’ Faction, frowned upon what Ahmadinejad
had done, stating, “The president’s behavior regarding
this issue conveys a sense of obstinacy.” Indeed,
with Khamenei’s backing, Ahmadinejad seems to be
quite willing to antagonize the conservative clergy.
Having lost much of the support that helped him in
2005, among the rural poor and recent urban migrants,
he now appears to be concentrating on and responding
to the demands of one sector of his base, those groups
that feel left behind by the dimming of revolutionary
fervor and relative cultural opening in Iran since
the end of the 1980-1988 war with Iraq. These groups
are the Revolutionary Guard, the Basij and their
ideological fellows.
His
women nominees are a case in point. While in school,
Fatemeh Ajorloo belonged to the Students’ Basij of
Azad University. Nasrin Soltankhah is a member of
the Professors’ Basij and was backed in her parliamentary
campaign by Basijis. Several of the women, including
the new minister of health, Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi,
are associated with the conservative Zeinab Society.
A
Presidential Gift
Many
argue that Ahmadinejad nominated women to appear
somehow responsive to the hundreds of thousands of
women who protested the procedural irregularities
in the June 9 election. It is an unlikely story,
since no feminists and reformists rallied to his
defense during his scuffle with the clergy, many
refusing even to comment lest the nominations divert
attention from the scandal of the election itself.
As Rafat Bayat, a former conservative MP, says: “I
doubt that, in nominating female ministers, Mr. Ahmadinejad
wants to attract the 16 million people who voted
for his opponents.”
There
has, of course, been a long-standing demand from
women’s movements that women be appointed to high
political office. Prior to the June election,
42 women’s groups and 700 individual activists from
across a wide spectrum, secular and liberal on one
end and religious on the other, formed a coalition
called the Convergence of Women with the aim of pressing
the presidential candidates to announce their plans
for the advancement of Iranian women’s status. Could
Ahmadinejad be trying to alleviate the pressure on
the government from these women and their international
supporters? Not likely. In fact, he was the only
presidential candidate who refrained from participating
in Rakhshan Banietemad’s documentary, We Are Half
of Iran’s Population, about the Convergence and
its program.
The
introduction of women ministers seems to be less
of a response and more of a reaction to such coalitions.
Conservative and religious women’s organizations,
which are hooked into state institutions and lobby
for change from the inside, were far more influential.
The Zeinab Society is one such organization
Founded
in 1987, the Zeinab Society is one of the 14 factions
comprising the Front of the Followers of the Path
of the Imam and Leadership, a right-wing coalition
that has representation in the Majles and is often
described as “traditionalist.” The Society has 90
offices across the country: 22 in Tehran, 62 in other
cities and eight in the women’s seminary at Qom and
other centers of religious study. According to the
Society’s website, the seminary office is the most
active. Its internal reports reveal an organization
interested in enhancing knowledge of religious and
ethical concepts and practices among women, with
a focus on the disadvantaged and unemployed, housewives,
high school and university students, and war widows.
The Society presents religion courses, organizes
educational tours and offers unemployment benefits.
Like the Sisters’ Basij, it emphasizes that “women
should not just be passive observers of the political,
religious and current affairs of their society.”
Thus, while the Society’s activities may seem apolitical,
its board members are prominent in the public sphere.
Maryam Behroozi, the Society’s president, is probably
the most vocal. She has a seminary degree, served
in the first four post-revolutionary parliaments
and has always been daring in her political pronouncements.
She was the only woman from the conservative camp
to congratulate the human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi
on her 2003 Nobel Peace Prize and brave the criticism
that followed. She has also actively pursued a place
for women in the upper echelon of state institutions.
Behroozi
says that she paid a personal visit to Khatami to
express this wish on behalf of the Zeinab Society.
It was her conservative sisters, as well as reformist
and feminist women, who were disappointed when Khatami
failed to name a woman minister. In 2004, several
months before the election in which Ahmadinejad first
ran, Behroozi was interviewed demanding that the
next president of Iran appoint at least four women
to his cabinet. [2] When
Ahmadinejad won, she went to see him with women colleagues
and repeated the request. In the Majles, meanwhile,
Zohreh Elahian presented a bill helping to remove
the barriers to women occupying top state jobs. Ahmadinejad
did not comply during his first term, but the conservative
women did not give in.
The
August 2009 nominations of women, Behroozi claims,
came as no surprise to her. Prior to the June election,
members of the Zeinab Society, along with the Council
of Principalist Women, a like-minded group, met with
Ahmadinejad again specifically to discuss the place
of women in his administration. When they suggested
that he appoint women ministers, Behroozi recalls,
“Mr. Ahmadinejad smiled.” After the balloting, the
delegation of women offered him a list of names.
Marzieh Vahid Dastjerdi was on it.
In
2005, Ahmadinejad was widely perceived to have won
on the strength of his pledge to “bring the oil money
to people’s dining room tables”—the chicken-in-every-pot
politics employed by many a right-wing populist to
woo the disadvantaged. But the president’s accomplishments
in the economic realm so far are nothing to boast
about and he cannot rely on the working classes to
back him amidst the ongoing post-election turmoil.
His base in the Revolutionary Guard, Basij and related
groups has backed him to the hilt and will continue
to do so to protect the privileges they have accumulated.[3] Now the president’s base is flexing
its newfound muscle in various domains, including
women’s rights. Whereas four years previously Ahmadinejad
was able to ignore their requests, in 2009 the ideologically
right-wing women, from their relatively secure position
in the polity and because of an increase in their
bargaining power, were able to push him to act. To
the extent that the more liberal, secular organizations
played a role, it may have been to provoke a reaction.
As one conservative commentator writes, “Why should
Shirin Ebadi, with her Western approach and attitude,
be the one who claims the credit for the promotion
of women’s rights, and the Islamic system the one
that falls into a passive or defensive mode?”[4]
The
Gray Area
Perhaps
not surprisingly, then, the most serious challenge
to Ahmadinejad’s women nominees has come from the
best-known feminists and reformists. “If women activists
insist on having women in policymaking positions,
it is because they want them to understand women’s
needs and improve their situation,” says Fatemeh
Haqiqatjoo, a former reformist MP who is now a research
fellow at Harvard University. She doubted that Ahmadinejad’s
women nominees would do anything to better women’s
status, “because [they] have extremely traditionalistic
approaches to women.” Shadi Sadr, a leading feminist
lawyer, describes Ahmadinejad’s appointees as “yes
men” and, along with other feminists, worries that
they will propound “anti-woman” legislation. Known
to be a fervent follower of the Supreme Leader, Marzieh
Vahid Dastjerdi did not accept the nomination for
minister of health until she paid a visit to Khamenei’s
office and was assured that he had not issued any
statement against the appointment of women ministers.
She has also come under particular scrutiny for her
advocacy of segregated health care facilities and
her opposition to the Convention on the Elimination
of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women.
Dastjerdi’s
record, nonetheless, makes her difficult to pigeonhole:
She was born in 1959, entered Tehran Medical School
at the age of 16 and graduated with a degree in gynecology
in 1988. As a doctor she has directed Arash Maternity
Hospital, located in a low-income neighborhood in
northeast Tehran. Between the years of 1994 to 2001,
she was on the managerial board of the Family Planning
Association of the Islamic Republic of Iran, during
which time the population growth rate fell to 1.3
percent. As an academician she is on the faculty
at Tehran Medical School and was on the Ministry
of Health’s Council for Professional and Medical
Training in the 1990s. As a politician she has served
in the Fourth and the Fifth Majleses. She was one
of three women selected by the Supreme Cultural Revolution
Council in 1987 to form the Women’s Social and Cultural
Council, which later became a major conservative
policymaking institution. She has also sat on the
board of the Zeinab Society for several terms.
Far
from a passive adherent to a hardline conservative
men’s agenda, Dastjerdi is often up front about her
opinions on women’s rights, which at times clash
with those of her male counterparts. In 1993, Dastjerdi
stood in front of an assembly full of male MPs to
speak emphatically for women’s right to ministerial
positions:
I
doubt that anyone believes that men are born ministers….
In an Islamic society where women can simultaneously
maintain their chastity and work alongside men,
sometimes even harder than men…why shouldn’t we
make use of women at the ministerial level?...
Considering how male ministers have performed so
far, it seems that the situation could not worsen!
In
the Fifth Majles, Dastjerdi was head of the Commission
for Women, Youth and Family Affairs. She blocked
several men from joining the Commission because of
their hardline views. “If you want to turn the Women’s
Commission into the Anti-Women’s Commission, go ahead
and vote for them!” she told the Commission’s presiding
board. In her capacity as an MP, she was also influential
in the passage of bills on the establishment of special
Civil Courts assigned to family matters, which require
the presence of female advisory judges, amendment
of the child custody law, which gives the court the
power to place restrictions on the father’s right
to custody and remove custody from him under circumstances
the court considers harmful to the child, adjustment
of dowries for inflation, and pensions for dependent
children of deceased women. These reforms, although
dismissed as “insufficient” and “minor” by some feminists,
were moves in the direction of advancing women’s
rights.
In
1997, Dastjerdi was interviewed by Elaine Sciolino
in the privacy of her Tehran home. The New York
Times reporter was surprised to find that Dastjerdi
believed that women should serve as judges as they
had done under the Shah; that the right of unilateral
divorce for men should be curtailed; that the state
should establish shelters for battered women; and
that non-Muslim female visitors to Iran should be
allowed to wear hats instead of headscarves.[5] Nonetheless, when it comes to Iranian women,
she and her conservative colleagues actively support
the strict controls on women’s dress through the
“culture of modesty” campaigns.
Clearly,
opinions about the rights of women and their status
in society do not always track with opinions about
the reformist-conservative conflict, velayat-e
faqih and other controversial issues in Iranian
politics. Conservative women who voted for Ahmadinejad
in 2005 and 2009 do not necessarily hold stereotypically
conservative opinions across the board. Second, and
more important, there is no fixed agenda for what
the rights and interests of Iranian women are. Defending
her proposal on the sex-segregated hospitals, Dastjerdi
argues that she aims only to provide women with greater
comfort and privacy. The proponents of this proposal
contend, as well, that a patient has the right to
be treated by a doctor of the same sex. They worry
that some women might be unwilling to be examined
by a man and thus put their own health at risk. Hossein
Ali Shahriari, a member of the Health Commission
of the Majles, states that the proposal aims to eliminate
these situations. While some women find the idea
of gender-segregated clinics discriminatory and offensive,
others think they will actually expand access to
health care for women. Figuring out which position
is “pro-woman” and which “anti” is a tricky business.
Reforms
of the Anti-Reformists?
Mohammad
Taqi Rahbar complained of Ahmadinejad, “The insistence
of the president upon nominating women may create
cognitive spasms in the Parliament, seminaries and
society.” He was right.
The
nominations spurred a series of debates about interpretation
of the Qur’an, hadith and sunna, as
well as Ayatollah Khomeini’s own statements about
women’s role in an Islamic society. Once a marker
of difference between reformists and conservatives,
the question of women’s status is now bringing out
fissures in the conservative firmament itself. For
the first time since the revolution, the issue of
appointing women ministers appeared on Iranian state
TV and percolated through society.
The
debates are not limited to religion. For some, the
question revolves around something deeper, what they
call “natural” gender roles. The concern is that
women who are active in public life will be unable
to serve as the foundation of the family. This concern
transcends the reformist-conservative divide; even
Mohammad Khatami on occasion fretted about the effects
of women’s employment. Others, like Hojjat-ol-Islam
Salman Zaker of the Principalists’ Faction in the
Majles, do not consider women capable of doing jobs
traditionally performed by men. But even supposing
that women are capable, Zaker says, they cannot serve.
“Due to the specific culture of Iran, men will not
readily obey women,” leading to debilitating interruptions
of the chain of command at ministries.
Surprisingly,
even those who are not against the act of appointing
women ministers draw upon the concept of “natural”
feminine attributes of women to argue that women
are better suited to some ministries than others.
Ironically, there is no consensus upon which ministries
are best. Both Ahmadinejad and Rafat Bayat, the former
conservative MP, posit that women’s “motherly care
and supervision” and “nurturing capacities” qualify
them most for the Ministry of Education. Esfandiar
Ekhtiari, representing the Zoroastrian minority in
Parliament, finds the Ministry of Education to be
“the worst option for women”—too big a job, he says.
His suggestion is to start by “offering women the
vice presidential position of cultural heritage,
tourism and handicrafts.”
Not
every faction in Iran that has taken up the question
of women’s rights during the period of ferment over
Ahmadinejad’s ministerial nominations has done so
out of genuine concern for women. Nevertheless, the
conflicts among those who claim to speak on behalf
of women have enriched Iranian public life and—quite
possibly—boosted the chances of concrete improvements
in women’s lives and life opportunities.
What
all this suggests is that, ironically, reform may
come at the hands of anti-reformists. It all depends
on two factors: first, how vigorously international
organizations press the Iranian government on violations
of women’s rights, and more important, how consistently
the secular and liberal activists try to form coalitions
with more conservative civil society organizations,
like the Zeinab Society and the Council of Principalist
Women. One such coalition was formed in 2008, during
Ahmadinejad’s first term, when all of these women
joined forces to block passage of Clause 23 of the
notorious family bill, which would have facilitated
polygamy by canceling the requirement that a man obtain the agreement of
a judge and his first wife before taking a second. The
progress of the quest for reform and democracy may
indeed be necessary for advancement of women’s rights
in Iran across the board, but the retrogression of
that political project with the consolidation of
the hardliners’ power will not necessarily lead to
a degradation of women’s rights and status.
Endnotes
[1] See
Azam Khatam, “The Islamic Republic’s Failed Quest
for the Spotless City,” Middle East Report 250
(Spring 2009); and Fatemeh Sadeghi, “Foot Soldiers
of the Islamic Republic’s ‘Culture of Modesty,’” Middle
East Report (Spring 250).
[2] Abrar,
November 7, 2004.
[3] See
Kaveh Ehsani, Arang Keshavarzian and Norma Claire
Moruzzi, “Tehran, June 2009,” Middle East Report
Online, June 28, 2009.
[4] Abdollah
Ganji, “Hypothetical Reasons Behind the Selection
of Women as Proposed Ministers,” Charqad,
August 24, 2009.
[5] New
York Times, May 4, 1997.
