The Education of Women in the Islamic Republic of Iran

The Education of Women in the Islamic Republic of Iran Hammed Shahidian Advocates of women's emancipation have always been concerned with the paradoxical importance of education as a contributing factor in the reproduction of patriarchy as well as a precondition for women's liberation. The relatively increasing access to education for women in developing countries has been welcomed—especially, though definitely not exclusively, by mainstream social scientists—as a sign of modernization and a step forward toward a more egalitarian society.1 In order to understand the real possibilities and avenues these changes have opened to women, it is important to investigate the interaction among educational systems and class, gender, racial, and national systems. A more liberal educational system within the existing social structure could certainly improve the living conditions of its exploited and oppressed members but would be inadequate for transforming exploitative and oppressive relations .2 The impact of religion, and particularly Islam, on women's education has been the subject of many studies. Regarded as omnipotent and immutable , Islam was believed to have been the decisive factor in limiting women's access to education.3 The studies of the past decade, however, testify to the erroneous character of such an assumption and show that the authority of Islam is greatly undermined by the socioeconomic changes that "Muslim nations" undergo. Women's share of education does not follow a uniform pattern among Muslim societies and is greatly influenced by factors other than Islam.4 Whereas in some Islamic countries Muslim women have little access to formal education, women of other Islamic nations enjoy a higher degree of access to it. In Tunisia and Egypt, for instance, female enrollment ratios on the secondary level are higher than that of non-Muslim India and Costa Rica.5 The number of Muslim women who attended colleges in some countries like Kuwait (before its occupation by Iraq in 1990) equaled that of men.6 The education of Muslim women is further complicated in societies like the Islamic Republic of Iran, where, on the one hand, women are legally prohibited from pursuing education in certain fields while, on the other, a need to implement strict sex segregation increases women's access to other fields. Recent studies also point out that the negative reactions of Muslim authorities to women's education is not due to a hostility toward exposure to the West per se. Such sensitivities are products of the realization that increasing access to education means profound changes in the existing © 1991 Journal of Women's History, Vol 2 No. 3 (Winter) 1991 Hammed Shahidian 7 power structure even when male dominance is not directly under attack. As a Qor'an instructor from Fulani/Hausa in Sokota, Northern Nigeria, told Jean Trevor, the fear is that "scholastic ambitions might tempt [the women] not to give their full attention to their proper role as wives and mothers."7 A similar concern dominates the educational policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even though the Iranian Revolution of 1978-79 was not Iranians' reaction to "modernization" and "Westernization," the Muslim clergy did participate in it and gained its leadership as an attempt to rescue Islam and traditionalism. It is also noteworthy that because of its policy-making implications, the Islamic ideology in today's Iran has different effects compared to that of the pre-Islamic Republic of Iran or other "Muslim societies." This article reviews the educational policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The progressive access to education for women even before the establishment of the Islamic Republic regime, despite its contribution to the formation of a feminist consciousness among some women, did not challenge women's oppression in toto. This relationship appears more clearly in Iran under the tule of misogynist mullas, who advocate a superior social position for men and use education as a means for creating not only a sex-segregated labor force but also a strictly sex-segregated society. The educational system of the Islamic regime, like that of most other societies, prepares men and women for their future roles in life. Since Islam does not recognize women as breadwinners, their education not only must be incapable of upsetting the...