|
|
|
I have divided up my discussion into the following parts: first, I’ll very briefly talk about the rise of sexist culture and its specific manifestations in Iran. Then, I’ll look at the objective and subjective bases of the survival of sexist in Iranian society. Following on, I’ll say a few words about the differences between Iranian and Western societies, i.e. how it is that in the West sexist has been under attack and lost so much ground, while in Iran it is relentlessly holding on. Finally, I’ll take on the key question of this Conference: how to fight sexist? Manifestations of Sexism Iranian society is a sexist one. The political system in place is sexist; the laws are sexist; the dominant culture, values and traditions are sexist. As if they have posted a huge sign on top of society saying: "Here women are half of men". Here women and men live worlds apart. Just like the "inner" and "outer" worlds which for years have shaped the sexual structure of society in Iran and which the Islamic regime has aggravated with its Sexual Apartheid. One of the glaring manifestations of sexist culture in Iran, which I find particularly repulsive, is the fact that in this society woman is not recognised as an independent being. Woman is a dependent of man and is defined in relation to man. She is somebody’s wife, mother, sister and even – wait for this - ‘honour’! Woman on her own doesn’t have an identity. Society, laws and family do not recognise woman as an independent being. This is the essence of the sexist viewpoint. Woman is not independent in legal, economic, social or sexual terms. She does not have the right to her own fate. Her life is decided for her. To work and study, she has to get the man’s permission. Her sexual life is decided by the man. She doesn’t have the right to live on her own, can’t get a flat of her own, and can’t choose who she wants to share her house with. There was a report out a while ago - Women not in care or in bad care - about divorced and single women who have nowhere to live and so are out on the streets. If a woman does not live with her husband or if her father won’t let her into the house, she won’t have anywhere to live. Because, firstly, she won’t be able to get a job and maintain herself (she would need some man’s permission), and, secondly, she’s not allowed to live on her own. Soraya Shahabi talked about this aspect of the issue in detail yesterday. Here I’ll only refer to Iranian literature held in such high esteem by our nationalists who go so far as to claim that ‘Art is the preserve of Iranians - and Iranians alone"! Iranian poetry and literature as a whole is infested with sexist. It is intensely misogynist and backward. Of course, nobody expects Ferdousi, Hafez and Molavi [early Iranian poets] to be the epitomes of woman’s lib and equality; they are the products of their own times; it would be strange if it was otherwise. But what is wrong is to uncritically embrace that literature in this day and age and teach it uncritically to our children. The poets of today, however, have only themselves and their own backwardness to blame for their sexist. It is more than a century since the banner of women’s lib and equality was raised around the world. There have been major social movements for women’s rights. We have had the October Revolution, the women’s rights movements in the West, the Suffragettes in England, the 60s’ feminist movement, etc. As an example from this literature, let me just read for you this poem by the poet Mehdi Akhavan Saless: [Reads a poem that compares taking a wife to buying a fruit on the market: buy it only on the condition that you first see what’s inside to make sure it’s neither "unripe" nor "squashy". Try her for a year - if good and fertile, keep her and plant a baby.] How is this different from that verse in the Koran that says women are men’s sowing field? What’s more, Akhavan Saless is supposed to be one of the more "progressive" poets in Iran! It is not 14th century poets that we are dealing with here. This is unforgivable. The common, established, approach to culture talks in terms of a ‘popular culture’ - the intrinsic culture of a people that is based on whether they are literate or illiterate, backward or modern, used to democracy or not, etc. You hear a lot about people not being informed enough and on the need to change minds through long-term educational and awareness-raising plans. Thus, cultural changes are effectively put off for ever. As Marxists, however, we understand culture in relation to the political and economic system that is in place. I’m sure you are all familiar with the terms base and superstructure. I can’t enter this discussion here, but just want to reiterate the basic point that the ruling culture is determined by the ruling political and economic system. I’ll return to this point later. Objective and subjective bases of the survival of sexist culture in Iran In Iran the dominant culture is fiercely sexist. Its rottenness is nauseating. But the important point to note is that a vehemently repressive and reactionary system is protecting and revamping this culture. For 20 odd years the Islamic Republic has been ruling this country, and along the way safeguarding this rotten and backward culture, through imprisonment, torture, stoning people to death, acid-throwing, stabbing, with the help of laws from the age of ancient tribes. To put in place a modern, progressive, egalitarian and anti-sexist culture, we need to settle accounts with the Islamic regime. In Iran the fight on the cultural plane is intimately tied with the political struggle against the Islamic Republic. But Iranian culture was deeply sexist even before the inauspicious rise to power of the present regime. The struggle for a progressive culture in Iran has always been suppressed by the ruling dictatorships. Around the time of the Constitutional Revolution [1906-1911], when society was in revolutionary upheaval and the system of repression in retreat, we had intellectuals and communists taking up the banner of struggle for modern cultural values and attacking sexist. This struggle was eventually suppressed along with the general revolutionary movement itself. True, the Shah’s regime was more progressive than the previous regimes and the Islamic regime that replaced it. However, those were years of great social change. Capitalist development required that certain traditions hampering growth be swept aside, and this included certain reforms in the situation of women. But even then we were faced with a sexist despotism. A mainstay of cultural backwardness and sexist in Iranian society is Islam. If we want to fight sexist we have to lock up Islam. We have to launch a massive anti-religious and secularist campaign; something that began somewhat with the Constitutional Revolution. But atheism and secularist campaigns have always been severely sanctioned in Iran. This is because they are breeding grounds for communism. Religion is an important weapon against communism and ought not to be weakened. Thus, the Shah and his father Reza Shah opposed secularist movements and used religion as an ideological tool. Remember the ‘green belt of Islam’ which was supposed to keep the neighbouring Soviets out? In Shah’s time, a mullah like Khomeini would be exiled, but Islam and the Mosque as a whole would receive plenty of support and resources to be able to carry on. Indeed, if you said anything against Islam you’d be thrown in jail. To get a job you would need to believe in one of the main four religions. Islam and religious studies were a main subject of the national curriculum. Moreover, the struggle against sexist questioned the ancient royal culture as an important component of the royal ideology as a whole. To oppose this culture was regarded as opposition to the national culture and was a serious offence. Under the monarchy, the laws remained intensely sexist, legislative reforms being very slight. As we can see, in Iran due to repression, fighting backward and sexist culture and values is a very hard and complex business. The political system protects and guarantees the survival of sexist. Any real challenge to this culture must also challenge the political system. The fight for a modern and egalitarian culture should go hand in hand with a struggle for an open political system. A system that guarantees unconditional freedom of expression, organisation, etc; where people can say what they want without fear of persecution for having insulted supposed ‘national and religious sanctities’; where women’s movement can say what it wants, break any taboos and icons and criticise the dominant culture. We need such a system in Iran so that all this can be done. Differences between Iran and the West In the West, with the rise of capitalism, an immense political, philosophical and cultural movement came about that mercilessly cirticised anachronistic ideas. Defence of individual and civil rights, combatting religion, the Church and superstition opened the way for an immense revolution in society’s ideas and values. Society shook itself off backward feudal and religious ideas. Movements sprang up for women’s liberation. The French Revolution had a great impact on people’s minds. Socialist and Marxist movements emerged that right from the start inscribed equal rights for women on their banners. Intellectual giants took the centre stage. The women’s rights movement in the West has such a legacy behind it. In Iran, however, capitalism was born under a political and military repression. What we have here is not an array of enlightened intellectual giants, but, rather, an army of intellectual dwarfs who are up in arms against modernism, progress and women’s liberation. In the West we have struggle against religion; for secularism and atheism. In repressive Iran backward intellectual midgets crowd the scene; take shelter under the robes of mullahs against the march of modernism and people’s demand for freedom. Western bourgeoisie defeated the representatives of feudalism and the old order. Iranian bourgeoisie wretchedly looked on as a war was waged on modernism and secular thought. Under a dictatorship, where protection of capitalism and fear of communism required that any attempts for freedom, equality and secularism, any challenge to the sway of religion and nationalism, be nipped in the bud, only Islamist intellectuals could raise their heads. These intellectuals owe their existence to the repression. To this domestic picture add the international situation with the anti-imperialism and anti-colonialism of the so-called Third World countries. Then you’ll have all the ingredients of a reactionary and misogynist movement. Since the 60s, anti-imperialist and nationalist struggles in the Third World have been perceived as a struggle against imperialist culture and ‘Westernism’. The intellectual protagonists of this struggle - by no means a forward-looking or freedom-loving, but, rather, a backward-looking, deeply patriarchal and anti-libertarian crowd - have been thrust forward as the ‘intellectual heroes’ of anti-despotic movements in many of these countries, including Iran. It is under such conditions that Al-Ahmad writes his Westernism and has it warmly received by the anti-Shah movement. Let me read for you a couple of lines from this book: "We have allowed single women to appear in public. To appear means to show off. Thus, we have led women - the protectors of tradition, family and generation - to levity. We have brought them onto the streets. We have led them to flaunting and frivolity, so they may put on makeup, try a new style everyday and roam around". These are the engaging words of Mr Al-Ahmad. This book on ‘Westernism’, this misogynist document, had become the bible of many of the country’s intellectuals. Even those who fought the Shah did not dare criticise it. If the ideological and cultural tools of the ruling political system can be criticised, combatting the ‘Easternism’ that this crowd represents is a much harder job. This movement for Easternism is a serious barrier to the struggle for women’s liberation. Its leaders and followers despised a girl with a mini-skirt who walked hand in hand with her boyfriend and danced to Beatles and Rolling Stones tunes more than they did the Shah’s regime! It was thus that during the 1979 revolution the revolutionary movement against the monarchy was disarmed ideologically in the face of the onslaught by the Islamic movement. When the Islamic tendency got the upper hand, following deals struck by the Western governments to fob off Khomeini and the Islamic movement on people’s revolution, society was disarmed. The populist left, whose ideas had been shaped more by the likes of Al-Ahmad and Shariaty than by Marx, and who felt a closer kinship to Ayatollah Taleghani than to Alexandra Kolontai or Rosa Luxemburg, was also disarmed. It was under such circumstances that women who had never before worn a Hejab [the Islamic head cover for women], put it on voluntarily for the sake of ‘society and revolution’. People like me who took part in the anti-Shah demos without Hejab had to argue every step of the way, especially with women, why we were not prepared to wear a Hejab. One common slogan in the demonstrations, "Sister, your Hejab is more potent than our guns", had come directly out of the book Westernism; from the works of these intellectual representatives of the Easternist anti-Shah movement. This was not only our misfortune. Algerian women experienced the same thing. People in lots of other countries in the Third World who were fighting colonialism had the same fate. But the case of Iran was perhaps the more bloody and violent one. The cultural and ideological barrier in Iranian society to women’s liberation is Easternism and Islam. The struggle against both requires in the first step a powerful struggle against the Islamic Republic, which is the main protector of this culture and ideology. But things have changed - sadly, though, at the cost of the blood of hundreds of thousands of people, the destruction of the lives of millions, and the displacement of millions. Never before has the movement for secularism and atheism, for modern thought and culture, for free relationships, for women’s liberation, been so massive. Things have changed. Hatred of religion and backward and Easternist culture is very widespread. The youth and women in Iran are the champions of this struggle; a growing struggle that has already shaken the ground under the feet of the Islamic system. As advocates of freedom and equality, as defenders of equal rights for women, we have to settle accounts with Easternism and religion. Only a secular system that ensures unconditional freedom of expression and organisation can also ensure triumph over sexist culture. In the 21st century it is high time that women were free and equal, decided their own fate, had their own independent identity, enjoyed sexual freedom and, in one word, had full and independent status. Today worker-communism is a force that is unequivocally fighting Islam and backwardness, for women’s full equality and liberation. |