Abstract:
What are the social and political bases for the existence of civil society in Islamist regime of Iran? What are the socio-political bases for emergence of social movements in an Islamic country? In much of the debates on Middle Eastern societies, modernization and Orientalist theory, there is an assumption that "modernizing states" are needed to allow for any possibility of social movements leading to democratization. Contrary to these models, the emergence of "Islamic feminism" in post-revolutionary Iran, as represented in one prominent women’s journal (Zanan), shows that social movements such as Muslim women’s movement are based on the discourse of social solidarity. In the post-revolutionary Iran this discourse is centered around women as the symbol of "culture." This paper shows how in post-revolutionary Iran, especially in the last decade (mostly after Khomeini’s death 1989) there has been an opening of public sphere through the activities of Muslim women activist who publicly engage in the formation of the moral as well social and public guidelines of the discourse of civil society.
The concept of civil society has a diffused and overwhelmingly ideological history. It has mainly been used as a normative notion and social scientist have seldom been precise in making clear distinction between civil society and democracy, civil society and ideological discourse of political elite or civil society and public sphere. In this paper, I will discuss and use Alexander’s definition of public sphere of civil society primarily as "the area of contestation and dispute [of actors] at different levels" (1992: 797). The main objective of this analysis is to investigate the past, present and future characteristics of post-revolutionary Iranian society as it concerns gender relations. In Alexander’s terms, discourse of civil society refers to the realm of interaction, institutions and solidarity that sustains the public life of societies outside the world of economy and state (1992: 797). I will try to give a "hermenutical understanding of the systems of symbolic representations and interaction that inform the culture of civil society" (1992: 801). The position of women in Iranian society and the process of constituting and reconstituting of gender relations by women in Iran illustrates the cultural representation of a civil society in an Islamic context where women have always occupied a central role in its ideology.
Within the European context, Habermas traces the roots of the bourgeois public sphere, or the public sphere of civil society whereby the public opinion of individuals replaces the absolute political authority of church and the monarchies. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Habermas equates the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere where "private people come together as a public"(27) and engage in "critical-rational debate in the political realm"(55) with the rise of capitalism.
Although Habermas tries to separate the sphere of the market, "private sphere"(55), from the sphere of family, "the intimate sphere"(55), and the public sphere, the interdependence of these realms are inevitable. For Habermas attributes the foundation of the public sphere to the bourgeois, capitalist men. The bourgeois, he states, "as a privatized individual... was two things in one: owner of goods and persons and one human being among others; i.e., bourgeois and homme"(55). The invention of cafes and salons constituted the nonstate realm where social and political issues were openly and publicly discussed. The utopian idea of "civil society" was then established as a non-state sphere where neither the crown nor the institution of church and religion could have monopoly of social and political power. It is through constituting and recognizing people as free and active citizens who participate in formation of political processes that capitalist democracy and free and democratic society emerges. In Iran, too, the rise of capitalism was accompanied by public talks on the "women’s issue" and uplifting women’s status. As Keddie states: "The role of intellectuals and bourgeoisie in pushing for increased women’s rights was not based on imitation of the West, but had indigenous bases in the needs of capitalism" (Keddie 1978: 11). As Alexander notes, this process in the modern times is shaped through "expressive media" and free and autonomous "offices." In today’s Iran, too, previously disadvantaged category of Middle class and lower class women are now more than ever engaged in the "public" debates around their roles as "mothers: the moral guides of the society" and citizens of Muslim country.
Whereas the constitutional states marked the beginning of Western democracies as we know them today, constitutions and Islamic law (shariat) provided the ground for formulating ideas of universal solidarity in the Muslim countries. The constitution, in both East and West, regulates the non civil spheres of the society. In Habermas’s theory, the public sphere of the civil society emerges out of the "intimate"(family) and "private" (economy) sphere, and stands in a dialectical opposition to them. There is, however, an ambiguity surrounding the family in modern societies. "The intimate sphere was believed to be independent of the private sphere, whereas in truth it was profoundly caught up in the requirements of the market. The ambivalence of the family as an agent of society yet simultaneously as the anticipated emancipation from society manifested itself in the situation of the family members: on the one hand, they were held together by patriarchal authority; on the other, they were bound to one another by human closeness" (55). As Cohen and Arato point out, due to Habermas’s conviction to a model of base and superstructure (with law and the state as the super structure), "patriarchal authority, expressed in the subordination of women and children, is a transmission belt for economic and political powers that then deform the components of humanity: Autonomy, emotional community, and cultivation are subordinated to money through the instrumentalities of power" (Cohen & Arato 1994:224). It is the ambiguity of the family, the patriarchal subordination of women to men, in the contradictory institutionalism of public sphere that is the key to understanding the public sphere of civil society in any society. This ambiguity takes much wider and more complicated form in the Islamic country of Iran where men and women are considered equal but different "Muslim." Women have political rights such as voting and the right to stand for public office while their position is subordinated to men in the realm of family. Women can not divorce, their testimony is considered as half of a man’s and they can not transfer their citizenship to their children.[1]
The constitution of modern societies, according to Habermas, signifies the established publicness of normative ideas of civil society. It is out of the "political task of the bourgeois public sphere [to] regulate the civil society"(52), mediated by critical-rational debates among the actors of the society that laws emerge and different groups with particularistic loyalties are integrated into the larger society. Habermas’s argument for the emergence of public sphere of civil society is strong on its publicness and the ability of this bourgeois public sphere to regulate civil society through norms of publicity. Alexander, on the other hand, codifies this process by conceptualizing the civil society not only in publicity terms but also on moral terms. As a critique of Habermas for presentation of a rather too rationalistic conceptualization of civil society, Alexander points rightly at the claims of "social solidarity"(1994: 6) underlying civil society. Discussing American civil society, Alexander refers to the American constitution as the reference point for claims of social solidarity. It is not only the universality of ideas discussed in the constitution that holds civil society together, but also the specific moral ideas about democratic and anti-democratic sets of characteristics that are equivalently important in forming social solidarity. Therefore civil society is seen as "the arena in which social solidarity is defined in universalistic terms. It is the we-ness of a national community taken in the strongest possible sense, the feeling of connectness to every member of that community that transcends particular commitments, narrow loyalties, and sectional interests"(1994: 6). By specifying both moral and public aspects of a discourse of civil society, Alexander paves the way for making "civil society" an analytical tool of sociological analysis which can then be used for comparative and cross cultural analysis. In the case of Iran, the rhetoric of Islamic Republic is internationalist [2], declaring the unity and brotherhood of all Muslims in one umma. This peculiar form of state ideology has two immediate consequences: First, it inevitably provides the ground for questioning the role of women who are members of the international community of believers but are yet confined to their "natural" environment of home through Islamic law. Second, it makes Iran a very important case study since the Islamic Republic of Iran is aimed at "exporting" its "republic" to all Muslim countries and thereby what happens in Iran with regard to the status of women can set new agendas for social movements in all other Muslim countries.
The possibility of rational-critical debate in constructing the political discourse of universal solidarity is what distinguishes civil society in any modern constitutional state-society relation. The existence of social movements as is illustrated in Alexander’s Collective Action, Culture and Civil Society and the struggle of the members of excluded groups to legitimately integrate into the morally and historically specific society shows whether or not, to what degree and through what channels a free and democratic civil society emerges. The symbolic frameworks of civil society as illustrated by Alexander and Smith’s system of codes, proves the existence of civil society as "a sphere that is separated from other institutional domains even though it may intrude upon them." The function of civil society, Alexander notes, "is not to produce wealth or power, salvation, love or truth, but to create and maintain a community whose boundaries include such institutional domains and define the ‘society’ as such" (1996: 308). Therefore an analysis of civil society as an analytical rather than normative sociological category will show the internal dynamics of the society, its contradictions and thereby the set of possibilities for change in the future. Alexander’s framework can constitute a comparative framework of analysis since the community discussed is a national community within historical and regional specificity in which it is situated in. "...civil society is roughly isomorphic with the nation. That ‘nation’ connotes solidarity and identity demonstrates that by no means can it be equated with the state: at the same time, the concrete and rooted quality of every nation suggests a particularity that challenges the abstraction of the normative idea of civil society, relativizing its philosophical universalism in a sociological way" (1994: 14). In the Iranian case, the women’s movement and what is gradually after the revolution of 1979 has been called "Islamic Feminism" (Moghadam 1998, Tohidi 1997, Najmabadi 1996, Paidar 1995) will show the paradoxes, complications and dualities of the contemporary Iranian civil society.
It is important to make a comparative framework of analysis for understanding civil society in different regions. Because the scholarly discussion of civil society in Middle East has, for too long, suffered from two limiting theories: the modernization theory and the orientalist theorization of Middle Eastern societies. Both of these theories have lend too much importance to the level of economic development or cultural relativism. Classical orientalist, who studied the orient through texts and an "essential" Islamic core, focused on the religious aspect of these societies without analyzing the internal dynamics of secularization of public opinion in these countries. Since Iran was a constitutional state there are more similarities than differences with the Western societies which could be discussed and analyzed with respect to public sphere. However, it is crucial to point that eventhough a constitution, as in American and European case, constituted the moral grounding for a public and moral codes of membership in the civil society, the religious establishment of the Shii Islam also provided strong moral and religious bases for an Islamic community of Umma[3]. Whereas the church in Europe and America was an institution which was replaced by the impersonalized state, the Islamic clergies were able to enjoy wide range of political and social power through informal religious corners, such as howzeh and mosque[4]. With the rise of political Islam in the 1970s, the Islamic clergies in Iran campaigned around "women’s question," claiming that only true and authentic Islam can show the way to liberation of women from impurities of Western imperialism. Just as Orientalism claimed that the existence of Islam, both as a religion and way of politics, did not allow a civil society where contestation of power is publicly performed; political Islam blamed Western imperialism for the evils of Iranian society. The conventional discourse of orientalism, which was criticized by Edward Said’s Orientalism in 1979, was mainly used to justify the political and economic intervention of foreign powers in the region (Y. Sadowsky 1993; J. Crystal 1994; A. Ahmida 1997). Furthermore the orientalist tradition defined Muslim women as passive with rather marginal role in the political processes. As I will show neither orientalists nor Islamicists are correct in their assumptions regarding women’s role in Iranian polity.
Modernization theory, the second theory, was debated in the intellectual community in 1960s when Third World societies were considered backward, traditional and their whole political future was dependent on the degree to which they succeed in economic modernization. The main point of these arguments was that only after completion of modernization processes, Muslim societies would lose Islamic religiosity in their political culture and democracy is only possible when the whole society is secularized through economic development (see David Lerner 1958 & David Apter 1964). Modernity was assumed by these authors to have ambiguous, yet definite relationship with Westernization. Third World countries were either on the path of modernity, in its Western model, or getting there in a revolutionary and abrupt way. Becoming "modern" depended on urbanization, the acquisition of modern patterns of behavior, personality, cosmopolitan attitudes, acquiring democratic characteristics which were basically imported from the west (Lerner 1958; Almond 1960; Smelser 1960; Eisenstadt 1976; Shils 1958-59). The supporters of the modernization theory in the neo-Marxist camp, namely the dependency theorists, emphasized the role of global economy and the broader capitalist system of the western world but failed to analyze the internal dynamics of regional politics with regard to political religion and pre-existing ideologies of mass mobilization (Smith 1979; Baran 1962). Iranian revolution of 1979 is a direct contradiction of these theories because Iranian economy was flourishing at a fast pace in the late 1970s.[5]. Iran was in fact the model for Third world development in what scholars such as Binder even perceived as "democratic political stability(!)" (1969: 1) and was considered to move towards a political democracy. Moreover, as it is illustrated by Philip Smith’s Barbarism and Civility in the Discourse of Fascism, Communism, and Democracy (1993) industrialization does not necessarily lead to democratization or secularization, as it was presumed in modernization theories. Rather, the possibilities for a different political system depends and to a large degree is shaped by the public sphere of the civil society where limits and challenges of social movements take place.
Middle Eastern societies as well as their Western counterparts are based on universal notions of solidarity. According to Durkheim, in more traditional societies it is a form of mechanical solidarity, and in modern societies an organic solidarity. In both cases, solidarity depends not on the institution of the state but on collective consciousness (Durkheim 1984, Steven 1985). In Habermas’ terms, the civil/ non-state realm is where democratic action of "will formation" based on "communicative interaction" takes place.
The participation of women in the twentieth century Iranian political history and the changes they fought for in the legal system, their cultural representation and citizenship rights shows that in each period, the position of women has directly affected the form of the prevailing discourse of society’s social solidarity. Women’s movement in the Islamic Republic of Iran, however, illustrates that women’s position are central to the Islamists discourse, as the main discourse of social solidarity. Women’s daily struggles, however, are borne out of the boundary tensions created between their roles as mothers and guardians of Islamic nation and citizens of Islamic Republic of Iran. The vibrant women’s movement in Islamist Iran was borne out of the inherent contradictions of the Islamist regime. On the one hand, the Islamists discourse of the revolution based its revolutionary rhetoric on the exploited position of women in the Shah’s regime, arguing that the pro-Western ideology of the previous regime made women a mere sex object in the society and their salvation depends on institutionalization of a "true" Islamist doctrine. On the other hand, the revolution allowed the middle and lower class women who were previously excluded from the public participation, to join the men in revolutionary activities and become full citizens in charge of the newly formed morality of an Islamist Iranian community. This twofold condition of women led to an Islamists women’s movement whose claims for equality and rights are based on the same Islamists ideology of the regime. Viewed in this way, contrary to dominant theories and discourses which determine women’s position dependent on a single cause, be it Islam (Orientalism), nation state policies (modernization theory), integration into global economy (dependency theory), cultural imperialism (Islamists), there is not a causal or essential relationship between the claims embedded in one discourse and the women’s real daily struggles (Paidar 1995, Najmabadi 1998). The real site of struggle for the inclusion of women who were excluded from the public sphere lies in the claims for the moral regulation of society, the real existing civil society.
Feminist Movement in Islamic Republic of Iran
The seeds of Islamic Republic were planted in Iran during 1970s by Islamists discourse which was openly against westernization, and secular women who represented the "corrupt Western values." Contrary to the discourse of modernity which was the bases for constitutional revolution of 1906 and followed by Pahlavi dynasty (1925-1926), Islamist discourse aimed at constructing an Islamic version of modernity which defends Iran in the face of "ruthless cultural invasion of the West" (Khomeini: Touzihol-Masael, 1971: 3) and "Cultural imperialism of the United States" (Shariati, 1978). Among the founders of the ideology of Islmicization were Ali Shariati, Morteza Motahari, Khomeini and other mojtaheds (Islaminc clergy). Although the ideology of political Islam was opposed to the western/modern regime of Shah, it shared the same stand with regard to women: they were both against Western feminism since Shah also publicly announced that "Western feminism is a false ideology because women possess certain unique endowments and with those go unique responsibilities" (quoted in Paidar,1995: 177). From its early days, Pahlavi dynasty brought all women’s organizations under the state’s umbrella justifying it as the only way to ensure its progress in tune with the nationalist/ modernization project. The Shii version of modernity was also anti-west and thereby against the western model of women. But in order to present a new version of modern Shii, it was evident to its proponents such as Ayatollah Motahari that the traditional position of Islam on women should seriously be modified. Therefore political Islam which mobilized a major sector of Iranian population in the events of 1978-79, took radically different position on women. This inevitably led to a different configuration of Islam, revolution and feminism in Iran.
As a part of modernization project, Pahlavi’s regime (1925-1979), initiated state policies to improve women’s conditions. Although these policies opened up a whole series of social and economic opportunities to women, it closed the other possible alternative routes that "women’s question" could have taken in Iran. Some scholars have taken this course as the only possible direction of improvement of women’s conditions. For instance, Afkhami states: "…without the support of the modernizing state and its political organs, which were controlled by men, women’s rights are unattainable in an Islamic society. The law as the expression of the will of the state was indispensable to the securing of women’s rights in Iran"(1994: 14). But can this theory be proven otherwise by analyzing in fact a very different course of women’s movement in post-revolutionary Iran that demonstrates the possibility of a viable women’s movement within a theocratic regime? If one follows the line of argument proposed by Afkhami, one is led to believe that modernization, secularism, and feminism are intertwined. But just as any other discourse of social solidarity, Islam, if it is to hold any political legitimacy, is also bound to universal claims for social solidarity. In less than a century of women’s movement in Iran (beginning in 1906), the modernizing state of Pahlavi took control of "women’s question" and thereby closed all other historical possibilities for growth of women’s movement. As the historical experience of feminism in this era has shown, Islamic feminism, as strange and paradoxical it may sound, has emerged offering a whole new trajectory for improvement of women’s status.
Among the programs of the "modernizing state" to deal with the "women’s question" were its state policies towards the family. Throughout the modern history of Iran, the clergies claimed the total religious authorship over the "sacred" sphere of family. The previous regime’s attempts to modernize the family were: Reza Shah’s order of mandatory unveiling in 1936 and Mohamad Reza Shah’s installment of Family Protection Law in 1967. The first attempt, unveiling of women, set the stage for debates and political struggles over the women’s bodies; Islamic clergies campaigned around state’s "Western" and corrupt policies on women while the state justified its claims in the name of modernization. The Family Protection Law, however, made structural changes in the institution of family by limiting the clergy’s actual power in the matters of divorce, women’s employment and education. Through implementation of Family Protection Law, arbitrary divorce, polygamy based on pleasure, and the man’s right to child custody were abolished (Paidar 1995: 118-147, Afkhami 1994: 5-19). These changes, however, did not emanate from a women’s movement that was based among working or middle class women. Rather these laws were drawn from the above, by the state’s apparatus of Pahlavi dynasty and the women’s organizations that were directly under its control.
The family and at the core of it, women, were the site of political struggle between the modern state of Shah and the clergies. By the rise of the discourse of Islamisation in the 1970s, Islamic clergies engaged in a debate over the Islam’s stand on women which would be modern and yet Islamic. In an attempt to modernize shii Islam, Motahari, a student of Khomeini who taught at Tehran University’s Faculty of Theology in the 1950s-60s, in his famous book The System of Women’s Rights in Islam (Qom: 1978) discussed the position of men and women in the shariat (Shii law). In his systematic and overall work which was one of the first attempts on re-interpretation of Qoranic verses, he showed how Islam treats both men and women equally while it acknowledges their "natural" differences. Motahari, was one of the first clergies, who in a political climate of 1978, openly discussed the idea of Islamic Civil Society in which women are the "nurturers and preservers of Islamic morality.[6]" The core of his argument was that the ‘social’ sphere should be separate from that of the ‘family’ because civil society is governed by man-made laws whereas the holy and sacred sphere of family is governed by ‘natural laws.’ In this newly forming discourse of Islamisation which became the bases for the Islamic constitution written in 1980, Motahari and his followers established the line separating family from the civil society sphere. This demarcation was necessary, according to Motahari, because "all the evils of the Western societies originated form mixing the realm of sexuality (family) with the realm of social activity (civil society)" (1978: 88). Motherhood was recognized as the holy task of women which ‘naturally’ confined women to the home environment. Since the separation and isolation of sexuality from the social activities were realized as the pillar of Islamic civil society, Motahari then argued that social and economic activities of women which serve this purpose are women’s obligations. Women’s active participation in professions such as nursing, teaching and sewing was necessary to prevent a close interaction between men and women which could lead to unIslamic behavior. These tasks were considered crucial for women since it would guarantee and preserve the Islamic fabric of the wider society. Islamic veiling, hejab, was the necessary device, Motahari argued in the eve of revolution, that the Iranian women "voluntarily" wear to further guide the Islamic society.
The culmination of these debates resulted in the Islamic Republic’s constitution of 1980 which abolished political as well as social rights of women to an unprecedented degree. Immediately after the revolution of 1979, secular women were attacked on the streets for deviating the "revolutionary purification and Islamic cleansing." Enforcing the compulsory "purification" of the Iranian society meant dismantling of the Family Protection Law on February 26, 1979 and thereby dismissing women’s rights to higher education and judiciary positions as well as equal status with regard to men in the family. Ironically enough, veiling was declared mandatory two days before International Women’s Day , March 8 1979. At the same time, the discourse of revolutionary Islam openly invited women to participate in the revolution, preserve the Islamic values and become the real guardians of the Islamic nation. The Muslim women who previously in the Shah’s regime did not find the public spaces appropriate to work, now found an attractive pull to extend their social activities. As the Syrian feminist, Bounthaine Shaaban observes, in Muslim societies of Lebanon, Palestine, Algeria and Syria "adherence to the Islamic dress code provides a new public space for young women in traditionally segregated societies" (1991: p. 85). Leila Ahmed, however, argues that there is a high correlation between the socio-economic background of women and the degree to which these women adopt veiling and join the fundamentalist movements (Ahmed 1992: pp. 222-4). Although there is no such study on Iran, one can draw similar conclusions based on the large number of rural women from lower and working class and urban Muslim women activists who engaged in the social activities in the post-revolutionary Iran (Paidar 1995, Najmabadi 1998)[7]. It did not take a long time, however, that these Islamic women activists realized that their most basic rights were taken away by the very revolutionary regime they had fought for. In order to preserve the new public sphere opened to them, Islamic women activists utilized the very discourse of Internationalism and universal Islam of Islamic Republic for proposing alternative and pro-women policies.
The presence of Islamic feminism as a social movement in Iran is an inevitable outcome of a political system with overly misogynous policies, and yet an internationalist rhetoric which claims to be open to both men and women and economic need for labor force. It is the perspective of this paper that social movements such as Islamic feminism will set the agenda for the broader discourse of social solidarity which is the bases of societal norms, actions and interaction among people. The success or failure of these movements set the limits and boundaries of the public sphere of civil society which then affect the non-civil spheres of the society such as labor force participation. In other words, just as Islamic feminism re-opened the universities to women after the revolution (Najmabadi 1998, Paidar 1995), its efforts can have crucial outcomes for setting the state policies on a "women’s Job" in the labor force or their political and social rights such as the right to equal citizenship and becoming judges. As an economic analyst of Iran observes:
The Women’s Press and Zanan:
One of the ways in which Islamic women’s activists have tried to open up the public sphere of civil society is through media and specifically journals[9]. In the Iranian society of today where Islamist discourse has been the dominant discourse for nineteen years, the degree to which the soldiery community exists with its contradictory terms for women’s participation in the public sphere, it is exhibited by "public opinion." Communitive institutions broadcast "translations" of general symbolic codes into specific messages that inform public opinion. There are six women’s journals published in Iran today which translate and politicize the feminine Islamist virtues into the broader society. In addition to an unprecedented number of publications by women, these six journals; Neda (the Voice), Payam-e- Zan (the message of women), Payam-e- Hajar (the message of Hjar), Zan-e- Rooz (the Woman Today), Farzaneh ( the cultured) and Zanan (Women) represent diverse and multivocal voice of Iranian women. In this paper, the journal of Zanan will be discussed and the ways in which this particular periodical has been able to publicize and politicize feminine virtues in an Islamic context. The analysis of Islamic feminism, as a social movement, in this journal will demonstrate the degree and limitations of an existing public sphere of civil society.
As the Islamic regime eradicated any possibility for secular women’s public presence in political arenas, Muslim women activists were left with the sole responsibility of defending and legitimizing women’s rights after the feverish days of 1979 revolution. Following the trends of women’s publications in 1980s and onwards, indicates a smooth but steady progress of the women’s press towards a more autonomous and out of the state realm. Zan-Rooz, Payam-e Hajar, Neda, and Payam-e Zan started as dependent organizations of the state and have moved towards a quasi-official status. Although these publications are actively engaged in the process of politicization and publicization of feminine virtues, they have shied away from identifying themselves as strictly feminist (Najmabadi 1998, Nakanishi 1994). Farzaneh, with feminist outlines, started its publication in Fall 1993 but as a strictly scholarly journal with limited subscription. Zanan, on the other hand, is the only widely read women’s journal that has openly published its feminist agenda. With a relatively high subscription rate of nearly 120, 000 readers who are mostly urban and educated women (see figures 1-4 in the appendix for the number of its readers and their distribution according to age, class, and gender), Zanan has embarked on a project of radical re-interpretation of Islamic sources concerned with women’s rights. Zanan soon became the locus of political debated both inside and out side of the country. [10] Although there is a history of interpretive attempts within Islamic culture to adjust and moderate the modern transformations of Islamic societies, including attempts by Arab feminist on the issues of women’s rights and status ( Fatima Mernissi 1992, Lama Abu Odeh 1993, Leila Ahamd 1992)[11], Zanan’s interpretive venture is novel in many ways, which promise to make the journal’s overall interpretive strategies productive of cultural change and social power for women. These interpretive work also reach beyond women’s positions since they change the very culture, norms and guidelines of morality and power, usually associated with women in Islamic societies.
Zanan journal was first published in 1991 and has successfully opened up a space for debates on women’s issues such as economic independence, freedom, the right to choose within an Islamic context. It is widely quoted in the credible journals and newspapers both inside and outside of the county as a "prominent women’s magazine" (New York Times, January 1 1998, A6)[12]. Zan Rooz, the state-controlled women’s magazine from which Zanan was borne, started its publication in 1980 under the supervision of "writer’s Association" and its editor in chief suddenly changed in 1991. Soon after, Zanan was published and its editorial note indicated that its separation from Zan Rooz was due to
Zanan publication illustrates the diversity of women’s voices in a way which has been unprecedented in the Iranian history. Even though Zanan introduced and continues to represent the views of Islamic feminism, it provides a floor for debates on women’s rights that are transnational[14]. By translating articles and works by important Western feminist scholars such as Simon DeBouvar (Zanan 1991: 1: p. 31), Nadin Gordemier (1991: 2: p. 48), Mary Wolstonecraft (1992: 4: p. 16), Nancy Friday (1992: 6: p.2), Deborah Tannen (1993: 10: p. 4), Virginia Wolf (1993: 11: p. 41), Susan Faludi (1993: 12: 18), and focusing on the similarities of the women’s movement in the religious settings of Europe and America, at the same time that it is reinterpreting Islamic sources in a pro-woman way, Zanan has artfully posed women’s issues in a comparative way yet avoiding the long term hatred towards Western Feminism. In addition to opening the floor for debates on women’s rights in Islamic Iran, Zanan has also taken up the difficult task of initiating a real dialogue between Islamic and secular/ pro-Western feminists. Zanan was the first women’s publication that openly invited "exiled women" to have a dialogue with Islamic feminists inside of Iran:
The uniting of secular and Islamic voices abolishes the long existing demarcation and separation of Islam versus feminism. Since Islam has constituted and ruled over the public arena of society, reaching its peak in the revolutionary years (1977-79) where Islamic manbars (pulpit) [15] and mosques served as the main devices to challenge and contest the previous regime, the emergence of feminism in this very sphere that is the public sphere of civil society is now detrimental to the political and social changes in Iran. In other words, a new configuration of feminism and Islam which to many was unthinkable has emerged by basing its legitimacy on both the particularity of women’s question in Islamic culture and its universality in the broader (and previously masculine) society. As the revolution of 1979 and the creation of Islamic regime has proved the overriding importance of the autonomous sphere of culture in Iranian polity (Abrahamian 1993, Moaddel 1993, Kamali 1995, Keddie 1995), the formation of Islamic feminism and its demands on the state become a crucial factor in determining the future possibilities for social change in Iran.[16]
Zanan and women’s employment issues
While women participated in the revolutionary period (1977-79) in great numbers, the Islamic restrictions on the role and status of women seriously impeded their entrance into the work force. According to the 1991 census, the female share of the measured labor force in Iran was only 11 percent, but women at all levels experienced higher rates of unemployment than did men. The 1991 data found that 1.2 million women were employed, while nearly 350,000 reported themselves unemployed and seeking employment (Moghadam 1998: 166). But the ideological discourse of social solidarity displayed by the Islamic Republic of Iran, is at the same time internationalist and claims to be all-inclusive. The Islamic feminists, writing in the pages of Zanan, argue that this equality has to be proven to the working class Muslim women who fought for Islamic regime in 1979, gave their sons in the course of Iran- Iraq war and are the symbol of cultural purity of Islam. As Moghadam states: "It is possible that, in an extension of the trend following the Islamic revolution, working class women are bearing the greater burden of joblessness" (1998: 166). These are the same women from Middle class and working class who were counted as "traditional" in Pahlavi’s regime but were promised "liberation" by the Islamic revolutionaries and were praised for their holy task of motherhood as well as citizens of Islamic Iran. A female lawyer, Mehrangiz Kar, writes periodically in Zanan about women’s position in the legal system. In an interview with an English journal, she eloquently described the tension in the Islamic Republic of Iran over Women’s rights as such:
Women’s profession and their qualifications to hold social as well as political positions is another issue proposed in the Zanan. In an article written by Mina Azadi, the question is posed: can women be Islamic judges and lawyers? She then replies:
Qoran says: ...and if there was fear of separation of a couple, choose one judge from the husband’s family and one from the wife’s family. These judges will be blessed by God’s wisdom to do justice. Qoran is referring to all and every one of the family members. This reference is not gendered. The judge could be either a man or a woman. There exists other verses in Qoran that testifies to Qoran’s sense of egalitarian relation between men and women. (Zanan, 1992: 6: 22)
According to Islamic laws, women can not be judges because they are emotional being deprived of a sense of reasoning. In a series of articles, Zanan has argued for reinterpretation of Qoranic verses which will lead one to accept women’s eligibility to become judges. These struggles have not been with no results. As Moghadam observes: "Perhaps as a result of international criticism as well as agitation from Islamic feminists, the government also changed its policy on women and the legal profession. Unless they were designated antirevolutionary, even those women who had been purged in the early 1980s were asked to return to work, though not necessarily to their previous positions. Former judges could now work as inspectors in the equivalent of a district attorney’s office" (1998: 164). In April 1993, there were 2,661 registered lawyers in Iran, including 185 women (Lawyers Committee for Human Rights, 1993: 44). It is hard to imagine how this space could have been carved out for women without the efforts of Islamic feminists as represented by Zanan. .
Journalism and governmental occupations are also positions that have traditionally been restricted to men in Muslim countries. Islamic feminists argue, based on women’s superior moral sensitivities of over men, that these positions should be open to women in the postrevolutionary period. Zanan justified this and demanded for more support from the government by stating:
We need female journalists who have hermenutical understanding of the civil laws and procedures and can report on women’s activities in accordance with moral guidelines propsed for women in the Islamic Republic. (Zanan, 1992: 3: p. 23)
It is evident here that the writers use the same Islamic guidelines that were restrictive in order to justify their claims for equality.
As the presidential elections in May 1997 proceeded, Zanan’s cover changed drastically. On the cover of the issues of the journal starting from issue 32 (March 1997), two faces appeared that changed the appearance and the content of the journal to a highly political journal. These two faces were Azam Taleghani’s (the first female candidate for presidency after 1979) and Seyyed Mohamand Khatami (the current president). Following the candidacy of Azam Taleghani, Zanan featured a whole series of articles on the "natural" and "Islamic" right and obligation of women to head the governmental offices. In an interview with Azam Taleghani, the Zanan’s reporter asks: "How have you nominated yourself for presidency when in the Islamic constitutional law, it is not specified that women are qualified to be political leaders?" Azam Taleghani responds by qouting directly from Qoran and drawing heavily on her own interpretation of Islamic law as a woman:
Zanan and Family Laws
The Islamic Republic did not inherit a family law from the previous regime since the regulation of family matters was left to the Islamic clergies in the Shah’s regime. However, as a part of modernization project, the previous regime had written and put into effect a "Family Protection Law" (1967) which was designed to modernize the family and elevate women’s position in the traditional setting of the family. This law was an attempt to control population, increase the age of marriage for women (in Islam it is nine years old for women and fifteen for men), and restrict polygamy. The right to divorce was given to women in an attempt to recognize them as autonomous individuals since in Islamic law women’s bodies are the direct property of the men in their families (the father, brother or son). Although the Family Protection Law decreased the birth rate, it was immediately annulled by Khomeini for its "Western influenced regulations." The family became the center of Islamic Republic’s discourse of Islamisation. There was clearly a tension because in 1978 the Islamic state had total control over the family but it had to become legalized and constitutionalized. Instead the Islamic clergies annulled the Family Protection Law, released the previously existing restriction on polygamy and the women’s rights were subjected to the ambiguous "extra-constitutional" and "sacred" criteria of ‘conformity with the Islamic Law.’ Women were praised for their role as mothers, and it was their eternal and glorified motherhood that gave meaning to their existence. As Paidar notes, "In the Islamic constitution, women as citizens and political beings were subjected to women as mothers" (1995: 259). Furthermore, citizenship according to the Iranian legal system is granted on the bases of one’s paternal status. Section 2 of Article 976 of the Civil Code specifies that those born in and outside Iran and whose fathers are Iranian shall be considered Iranian citizens. However according to section 5 of Article 976 if only the mother of the child is Iranian the child will be granted Iranian citizenship provided that the child is born in Iran (Afkhami 1994:171). Therefore as far as marriage and citizenship are concerned women are not considered full individuals. At the same time, women’s roles as mothers is praised by the clergies and they are considered responsible for preservation of morality in the Islamic society. By leaving the sphere of family unregulated and ambiguous in the constitution in pre-revolutionary as well as post-revolutionary era, the Islamic clergies in power aimed at preserving legitimate political and patriarchal rule over the people. But as Islamic feminism, represented by writers in Zanan shows, the Muslim women who poured into the streets in support of the Islamic Republic, went to the war and sacrificed their sons for the cause of Iran-Iraq war, now demand and alter the notion of Islamic Justice to further integrate themselves into the wider public sphere of the civil society.
Issues such as family law, or rather the confusion over the Islamic family law, children custody laws and women’s position in the contemporary Islamic nations are posed and debated in the publications of Zanan. In series of articles, Mina Yadegar Azadi analyzed the Islamic laws on marriage. After three articles on women’s position in the family law, she concludes:
Due to its egalitarian premises, Islam has not determined a single dominator in the relationship between wife and husband. It does not seem logical that women need guardianship of men since women are considered full human beings who can be in charge of themselves. ....Furthermore if women and men are equal, then men can not impose their sexual drives on their wives without their consent even in the marriage settings (Zanan, 1991: 2: p. 30).
The writer is interpreting the Qoranic verses to reclaim women’s bodies which were subjected to men in their families unconditionally according to the Islamic laws. As Najmabadi states: "That women interpreters have now positioned themselves as public commentators of these [religious] texts promises that a future process of democratization of politics may not remain an exclusively masculine preoccupation" (1998: 71). The Islamic feminists draw on the holly and sacred position of women as mothers in Islamic sources to claim justice and equality for women and thereby establishing women’s status as "autonomous individuals" whose identities are derived from being Muslim citizens and is not based solely on their primordial relation to their families. The practice of reinterpretation of Qoran by women as both women (and potentially mothers) and the citizens of an Islamic Republic decenters the clergy from the domain of "sacred / religious truth" and thereby radically widens the public sphere of civil society.
Conclusions
As the publication of Zanan shows, Islamic feminism has emerged in the Islamic Republic of Iran despite regime’s attempts to regulate and restrict women’s rights by holding them as the "moral guides of the Islamic nation." Iranian women, once recognized as active participants in the revolution and the post-revolutionary political and social activities, no longer realize their roles as mothers only. The subordinate status of women as citizens to their role as self-sacrificing mothers have created what Alexander calls "boundary tensions." Muslim women activists have been able to use their "dual membership" in the "holy" sphere of family and the broader sphere of the Islamic society to actively "translate" their previously recognized "weak" and "feminine" virtues into the broader discourse of a just Islamic society. This "translation" constitutes the discourse of Zanan journal which has engaged in reinterpreting Islamic resources from a women’s view. Zanan seeks to radically alter the meaning of fundamental concepts such as "justice," "equality" and "fairness" in the dominant Islamist discourse of the Islamic Republic of Iran by reinterpreting the Qoranic verses in favor of women’s rights. The Islamic feminist movement represented by Zanan, has broadened the public sphere of the civil society by constituting women as autonomous individuals and citizens, whose role as mothers are praised by Islam, and can freely engage in the public debates in the society.