The Indigenous and the Imported: Khatami's Iran

Culture is what remains when one no longer believes in utopia.

--Farhad Khosrokhavar and Oliver Roy
Comment sortir d'une revolution religieuse ¹

At the bar of my hotel in Tehran--or what used to be the bar in officially dry, postrevolutionary Iran--I sip tea with a young career woman, a mechancial engineer named Jairan Jahani. Three or four times in the course of a few hours' conversation, she casually adjusts her roosari, the head covering that has been mandatory for women since the 1979 revolution. Jairan opts for the Benazir Bhutto look. Like that of the former Pakistani leader, her roosari consists of a colorful silk scarf worn well back on her head. And like many women in Tehran, Jairan would not look out of place on the right bank of Paris.

Even a few years ago, patterned silk would have been a dangerously risqué substitute for the traditional maghna'eh, a plain, rustic cloth that covers all but the face and drapes below the shoulders. But women such as Jairan--urban, educated, intent on looking outward--have achieved a certain accommodation with Islamic Iran. In matters of the hejab, the Islamic dress code, the authorities have eased off on women of modern tastes. And such women, in turn, have come to acquiesce in the wearing of scarves outside the home--an acknowledgment that for the vast majority of Iranian women, making the hejab compulsory has been immensely liberating.

The fortunes of the hejab over the past century follow the rough terrain of Iranian political history. In 1925, when Reza Khan became shah and founded the Pahlavi dynasty, he looked out upon a drastically underdeveloped nation. His response was to embark upon the most sweeping modernization program the nation had yet seen, a program entirely dictated from above. In 1936, Reza banned Islamic dress and made Western clothing mandatory. Then he enforced this edict with ruthless, still-remembered efficiency: police went through the streets ripping veils and robes from any woman dressed according to the hejab. Under Reza's son, who was deposed in 1979, the hejab was again tolerated. This was partly an accommodation to the clergy, just as Reza's ban was partly intended to suppress the clergy's influence. But under the last shah, as under his father, the hejab was still a badge of one's backwardness. It could hardly have been otherwise in a nation bent upon Westernizing as frantically and thoughtlessly as the Iran of the Pahlavis.

Then came the Islamic revolution--and the hejab is brought full circle: What was once banned is now compulsory. Post-1979, the hejab is intended to express not just religious commitment, but the triumph of Islamic populism over the worldly culture of the Westernized elite. In this it was a near-perfect symbol of the revolution. And what happens when all of Iran's women dress according to the hejab? The consequences were swiftly apparent: tens of thousands of Iranian families suddenly decide that it is acceptable to let daughters and spouses out of the house. Literacy among women rises from less than 30 percent just before the revolution to 75 percent. The university population changes shape: from about 25 percent women under the last shah, it grows to more than 50 percent women. Within a few years, women are a new presence in the workforce and the press, in the arts, and in politics. Tehran now has two women serving on its fifteen-member city council; Qom, the seat of Islamic learning 90 miles south of the capital, has one--who triumphed over several male rivals. Women were a decisive force in the 1996 elections to the majlis, the national assembly--and proved themselves a permanent feature of national politics in the majlis elections held in February this year.

From a Western perspective, there is something decidedly upside down in this brief account of the hejab and its journey through modern...