[T]he word Islam does not need adjectives such as democratic. Precisely because Islam is everything, it means everything. It is sad for us to add another word near the word Islam, which is perfect. Besides, this democracy, which you love so much and that you consider so valuable, does not have any precise meaning. Aristotle’s democracy is one thing, the Soviet democracy is another thing, the democracy of the capitalists is still another. We cannot afford to have such an ambiguous concept placed in our Constitution.

Khomeini’s response might give way to the suggestion that the naming of the new country, the “Islamic Republic” as it was ultimately named, constituted a strategic formation—one highlighted in another of his famous quotes, “neither East nor West, but Islamic Republic,” in which he pointed out the need for Iran’s political, social, and economic independence.

“... it was not democracy in all of its abstraction that created spaces for claiming women’s rights; it was the ensuing republic alongside Islamic principles. Following the revolution, women and others came to seek remedies within the conditions of possibility that the Islamic Republic provided—if unwittingly—to satisfy their legitimate expectation of better treatment in the postrevolutionary era.”

Despite this antipathy to democracy and the idea that “Islam holds answers to all questions,” I suggest that by placing women’s issues and the improvements of their status as a primary revolutionary aim, the new leaders were also committing the postrevolutionary state to address women’s concerns. Thus, I argue it was not democracy in all of its abstraction that created spaces for claiming women’s rights; it was the ensuing republic alongside Islamic principles. Following the revolution, women and others came to seek remedies within the conditions of possibility that the Islamic Republic provided—if unwittingly—to satisfy their legitimate expectation of better treatment in the postrevolutionary era.

2. The Women

In 1999, I was surprised by the lawyer in Tehran telling me that women were seeking redress for grievances through civil law and procedure and not some generalized platitudes about respect for women. Indeed, this attention to legal process emerged as a central focus of my research for what it reveals, not just about disputing processes, but about the politics of rights and the operations of power and gender relations, and especially, subject-formation in Iran.

Figure 1. Demonstration held at the University of Tehran, Iran, for International Women’s Day,  8 March 1979; the first to follow the overthrow of the monarchy in February. (Photo by Annabelle Sreberny)

During the 1979 Iranian revolution, leaders sought to challenge Iran’s emulation of Western societies and aimed to turn the country back to some “authentic” cultural values. At that time, revolutionary actors mobilized images of Iranian women, dressed in black chadors (full-body, cloak-like coverings open at the front), as symbolic foils to individuated Western women, who were deemed objectified, commodified, hyper-sexualized, and thus unemancipated and oppressed. The 1983 Veiling Act was legislated in tandem with a discourse of rehabilitating Iranian women and restoring them to a place of respect. The chador was symbolic, not just of the renewed status of Iranian women, but also of a collective shift in Iran—born by women—toward a religio-national idea of Iran that represented the triumph of the revolution over Western values, where gendered roles in the family would spill into and guide a more moral social economy.

This turn away from the West also saw a politicization of “rights-talk.” By politicization, I refer to the critique of the language of rights for being indicative of the ills of Western individualism, touted by numerous revolutionary forces at the time. Rights-talk in this context became a verbal index for a sense of entitlement without responsibility, thought to be the source of much of the ills of Western societies, characterized by excess and anomie. The new revolutionary state articulated the basis of a healthy society as the family and, they noted, the fundamental unit of this familial foundation (kian-e khanevadeh) would be women. It was with this focus that individuals’ needs were to yield to greater social concerns.

One of the earliest instances of the politicization of rights-talk was in March 1979. Tens of thousands of Iranian women and some men flooded urban centers to protest the suspension of the Family Protection Law of 1975 that had given women some new rights in divorce, and possible other legal setbacks, including mandatory veiling, which did happen in the end, and revocation of suffrage, which did not. To protest these actions, women fought back and held up signs to make their grievances known. They called for “Equality” and “Women’s Rights” (figure 1). In response, they were dubbed Western puppets and attacked, revealing some of the fractures within the popular struggle to remove the monarchy, which the revolution had achieved. Just what was to emerge was as-of-then-uncertain and people were divided. Yet, importantly, we also see in these attacks how the language of rights came to be associated with Western excesses and imperialism and began to be disassociated from the language of women’s status and roles in family and society.

This is in part what influenced my surprise when the lawyer I met in Iran emphasized civil codes and laws rather than Islam as key to understanding women’s rights in postrevolutionary Iran, and further inspired my interest in understanding how the law operates. In those first months in Iran, I was amazed again and again to find that most of my interlocutors—including pious Muslim women, many of them supportive of the revolution if not the Islamic Republic—spoke in a renewed rights-talk, referencing not Islamic values but the rule of law as their source of rights.

To understand the significance of making rights-based claims today, we need to recall that Khomeini’s thesis for Islamic government had little use for a law-making body. There was no need for “man-made laws” as only God’s law would matter and thus the legislative body was to be dissolved. So, it is significant that despite this, the Islamic Republic retained not only the legislative branch of government, but also, the civil courts as a venue for adjudication and civil codes as the formal expression of the law. 

Civil codes and legal procedures carry with them subject-making effects. As apparatuses of a republic, the institutions of the state require subjects to operate as rights-bearing individuals, particularly when interacting with those institutions.

One of the consequences of this blending, which I call “Islamico-civil” law, was in family law (Osanloo 2009). Women were required to make use of the legal scaffold to seek remedies in court. They needed to show cause and evidence for their cases, but the laws did not require the men to make any proffer whatsoever. As women made use of these laws, they necessarily had to think of themselves as autonomous beings and bearers of rights. In order to outline their cases in civil courts, they needed to employ a rights-based understanding of their status: precisely what the revolution had cautioned against, yet exactly what the civil laws—now authenticated by the Islamic legal system—required.

In the end, it was Islam that was made to accommodate the republican state framework. In doing so, it produced (and re-authenticated) individuated subjects with rights in various segments of society, especially the legal. Even if the Islamic Republic made women the grounds on which political disputes over sovereignty were fought, the effects of those disputes were forms that were conspicuously liberal, through the nation-state formation of a republic. The institutions of the state comprise the tangible apparatus of everyday life and shape sensibilities, affects, subjectivities, and, ultimately, practices. 

So it was with this understanding, perhaps, that the lawyer insisted I go to the courts where it was so apparent that women and men, judges and adversarial parties, alike, were discussing their rights, not their status. And it is here that I redirect your attention to the remarkable unremarkability of people in Iran making demands for rights and proving to be examples for the democratic pursuits for justice and equality worldwide.

This attempt to forge an Islamic government in the name of improving women’s status contributed to the postrevolutionary women’s movement in some unexpected ways. Since that period—in which women themselves played important roles—women’s issues have gained a permanent foothold in state politics as their concerns are now part of the broader issues of social justice affecting the entire nation and its revolutionary aim to create an ostensibly more just society after monarchy.

3. Challenging Benevolence 

During protests in 1999, after Iranian security forces had attacked students in University of Tehran’s dormitories, a journalist friend who was covering the events saw a woman tugging at her headscarf and shouting at the officials, “In 20 years, this is all that you have you given us!” referring to the compulsory hijab. After recounting the story to me, the journalist reflected, “The problem is that people are not willing to die for ‘just this,’” as he gestured to an imaginary head-covering of his own. 

But today, some 24 years after those protests, people are willing to die over the compulsory hijab. After four and a half decades what becomes apparent is that it was not democracy that “lacked precision,” as Khomeini stated, it was the “republic.” The lack of understanding by those who created the Islamic Republic about such a form of government and the kinds of citizens and subjects-endowed-with-rights it produced led the leaders of the country to brutally suppress the very possibilities that it had created. 

Today’s protests are of course challenges to Islamic government. The system is premised on a set of relations that is hierarchical and uneven; it is gendered, even reactionary, and mirrors the reality of Iranian people’s lives, socially and economically. It speaks of the need for honor through charity and benevolence. This unequal and hierarchical set of relations does not speak of a redistribution of power and wealth, but of a reciprocation.

“So, what Iranian protests can teach us about democracy is that globally, we are at risk of moving away from democratic mandates of equality and redistribution and towards charity and benevolence. [...] appeals to charity and benevolence are not appeals to human rights and democratic principles, but a different set of values premised on premodern concerns that thrive in inegalitarian societies.”

At its core, this discourse of reciprocation shares a framework with humanitarianism or humanitarian care, which is entirely different from the discourse of the human rights purists and activists who call for equality and economic redistribution. What I think often eludes these same activists, however, is that care-work is emerging as a substitute framework for Western human rights as advocates unsuspectingly shift their demands for equality and redistribution to requests that appeal to (Western) populists: charity and benevolence. Dropping their rights-based demands so as not to offend their wealthy donors, human rights activists increasingly appeal to the values of service and generosity, even as they become clients to the patronage of these powerful elites. Elites, in turn, bestow their beneficence as reciprocation for the supplications they receive, all the while entrenching their privilege and status and maintaining their wealth.

There is, in these calls for charity, benevolence and not redistribution, moreover, a neoliberal redefining of democratic principles and human rights, which are the other side of the coin of forms of traditionalism embedded in honor (Farvardin 2020). These forms of paternalism emerge differently in different contexts, but women the world over should be wary of such “returns” to their “authentic roles,” whether this be in Iran, the United States, or elsewhere.

So, what Iranian protests can teach us about democracy is that globally, we are at risk of moving away from democratic mandates of equality and redistribution and towards charity and benevolence. We might also contemplate that appeals to charity and benevolence are not appeals to human rights and democratic principles, but a different set of values premised on premodern concerns that thrive in inegalitarian societies.

It is for these reasons that I believe that Iranian women’s protests resonate throughout the world and why Iranian women once again stand at the precipice of radical hope for equal rights [1]. While the contexts are distinct, the claims to equality are sustained. And it’s no wonder that the world has taken note, as Dan Rather said, “To have but an ounce of the courage of the women and girls in Iran.”

ENDNOTES

1. In 1911, Morgan Shuster, an American in Iran, wrote, “Iranian women are the most progressive, not to say radical, in the world” (1912:191).