Struggle of Iran’s women holds lessons for us too

The young women of Iran are dying for the ‘right to decide for themselves what matters and what doesn’t – and to be tolerated for the choices they make’.

This week, thousands of Iranian women once again risked imprisonment, torture and death demanding freedoms we take for granted.

Triggering the protests was the most elementary of rights: a woman’s right to dress as she pleases. But no matter how elementary the right may seem, it has become symbolic of the struggle for liberty in the Muslim world.

That symbolic role did not emerge from a battle between democrats and despots; it was forged over the course of the 20th century by a confrontation between autocratic modernisers and theocratic fundamentalists.

Epitomised, and in many respects led, by Turkey’s Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the modernisers believed the Muslim world would prosper only if it was forced to discard its traditional ways.

In a landmark speech delivered in 1925, Ataturk defined bringing “the people of Turkey into a state of society entirely modern and completely civilised in spirit and form” as the overriding aim of the recently founded Turkish Republic – a republic, he emphasised, that “cannot be the land of imams, dervishes and lay brothers”.

New laws – which, among other things, gave women civil and political rights – would mould a new society, sweeping away the obscurantism that Ataturk believed had caused the Ottoman Empire’s downfall.

It is hard to overstate the changes those laws involved. Few, however, proved more controversial than the “hat reform” of 1925, which banned the fez and mandated its replacement by a Western-style hat.

Because the new hats meant that men could not touch their forehead to the ground during prayer, the change – which seemed to confirm the clerics’ charge that Ataturk wanted to destroy Islam – provoked widespread rebellions. Having crushed the rebellions, the regime brutally enforced the hat reform, including through the execution of repeat offenders.

Ataturk did not prohibit wearing the veil, although he actively discouraged it. But his emphasis on dress regulation – which he regarded as “the visible symbol of the struggle against fanaticism and ignorance” – echoed with modernisers in other Muslim lands.

Nowhere was the echo louder than in the newly established Soviet republic of Uzbekistan, where the Bolsheviks were determined to surpass Ataturk’s “bourgeois” revolution in extirpating “primordial habits and religious fanatic­ism”.

In 1923, a far-reaching campaign was launched to emancipate Uzbek women from Islam’s “slough of darkness”. With that campaign yielding few results, a decision was taken to unleash a “cultural revolution” – known as the “hujum” or “storming” – which would eradicate the head-to-toe veils that women over the age of nine wore in the presence of unrelated men.

The “storming” culminated on Soviet Women’s Day, March 8, 1927, when, under heavy police protection, carefully assembled crowds burned thousands of veils in gigantic bonfires lit next to some of Central Asia’s holiest Islamic shrines.

Coming on top of other changes aimed at dismantling traditional hierarchies, the apparent desecration brought Uzbekistan to the brink of civil war, with scores of party activists – and unveiled women – being butchered by armed gangs. Only the winding back of the campaign in 1928, and then a relentless series of purges, allowed the Bolsheviks to regain control.

Meanwhile, in neighbouring Afghanistan, King Amanullah, under the influence of his modernising wife, Queen Soraya, was moving to dramatically reform the status of women, including by imposing “civilised” styles of dress.

There too, the reaction was fierce: a first revolt was quashed, with its clerical leaders being summarily executed; unfortun­ately, the executions precipitated an uprising that forced the king to flee the country.

Yet none of those setbacks deterred Iran’s Reza Shah. A former Cossack whose autocratic rule laid the foundations of Iran’s economic development and ensured the emergence of a highly educated middle class, Reza Shah criticised his predecessors’ “unforgivable mistake” of vesting coercive powers in the Shia clerics, whom he dismissed as “a bunch of imbeciles”.

Iran’s future, said Reza Shah, depended on ensuring its women “could develop their talents and come alive to their conditions, rights and privileges”. After reforming the family law in ways that removed the clergy’s role, he set out in 1936 to eliminate the segregation of women, including by ending all forms of veiling, which he considered “savage and backward”.

Reza Shah (1878-1944).

According to Houchang Chehabi, a leading historian of interwar Iran, “forced unveiling was the policy that contributed most to Reza Shah’s unpopularity”, fuelling the revolts that drove him into exile in 1941.

That assessment is controversial; what is certain, however, is that, as Douglas Northrop put it in his brilliant study of early Soviet rule in Central Asia, the modernisers’ focus on banning the veil “elevated its importance and made it symbolic of an entire way of life”.

Imposing the veil consequently became the battle cry of the modernisers’ fundamentalist opponents, with the still-young Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini repeatedly denouncing Reza Shah’s unveiling edict as a heresy that made his regime “unclean and illegitimate”. Once Khomeini seized power in 1979, reformist theologians such as Mohsen Kadivar, who defended women’s rights, were persecuted, imprisoned or even executed.

Viewing the period as a whole, the pitched battle between autocratic modernisers and authoritarian fundamentalists entirely marginalised in Islam a key concept the West had acquired from Pauline Christianity: the notion that there existed a broad range of “matters indifferent” (or, in biblical Greek, adiaphora) that “make no difference” to a community’s prospects of salvation or its scope to live in peace, so that they could be safely left to individual choice.

Quite what fell within that category was bitterly – often murderously – disputed for centuries; but however slowly, painfully and unevenly, it was by determining that ever more areas of human conduct were “matters indifferent” that the West acquired the virtue of toleration.

A similar notion figured in the Islamic reform movements of the 19th century; however, resurgent fundamentalism caused its virtual disappearance in the 20th. Instead, every aspect of life became enveloped in the unrelenting struggle between darkness and light, hope and damnation.

That is what the young women of Iran, who envy our freedoms, are dying for: the right to decide for themselves what matters and what doesn’t – and to be tolerated for the choices they make.

But in applauding their courage, there is a question we have to ask ourselves: do we really still believe in toleration? Or have we too succumbed, like the ayatollahs, to the view that there are no “matters indifferent”? Are we not steadily expanding the range of things that cannot be thought, cannot be said, cannot be acted on, as if every contrary thought, word and deed imperilled the community’s survival?

There is a great deal more we can and must do to support Iran’s fight for freedom. Dispassionately looking at ourselves in the mirror would be a good place to start.