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SECULARISMS
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-4149-9
Chapter One
(UN)VEILING FEMINISM
Afsaneh Najmabadi
Contrary to what the title of this essay may conjure, this essay is not about (un)veiling as a contemporary practice in Islamicate societies-about which there is now a very lively and enormous literature. It is about how feminism itself may have worked as a veil, about the veiling work of feminism as a boundary marker for the secularism of Iranian modernity. My hope in rethinking the history of feminism is to seek out possibilities for the present moment of Iranian politics. I mean to be provocative but not accusatory, seeking to unpack the implications of feminism's imbrication in the secularism of modernity. By unfolding the veiling work of Iranian feminism in its past history, I hope to envisage possibilities for "building working alliances" in contemporary Iranian gender politics.
Let me emphasize at the outset my refusal to generalize the ideas of this essay to all Islamicate societies. One of the problems with current discussions of Islam and feminism is ahistorical generalizations. These generalizations screen away vast historical and contemporary differences among countries as diverse as Algeria, Turkey, Afghanistan, and Indonesia, to name just a few. My argument assumes historical specificity; it assumes that to understand what is going on in Iran today, we need to look at the specific contingent configurations of the politics of modernity in that country. What may or may not be generalizable cannot be known from what is assumed to be Islamic, modern, feminist, or secular by any prior definition of these terms. For instance, the configurations of Islam, feminism, nationalism, and secularism that are now unfolding in Iran have very much to do with the fact that an Islamic republic has been in power for the past twenty-eight years, one that came out of a mass popular revolution. As a very hybridized phenomenon, these developments go beyond previously dominant and accepted political paradigms. We have an unshaped and fluid muddle with women as key producers of it. Two concepts, feminism and civil society, move through this complex reconfiguration and acquire new meanings while crafting a discursive space more marked by opacity than transparency, thereby challenging our previous certainty about what divides Islam from un-Islam, secular from religious. Consider this: The editors of Iran's two most prominent feminist women's periodicals, Zanan (Women) and Huquq-i zanan (Women's Rights), had previously been editors of Zan-i ruz (Today's Woman), a women's weekly published by the Kayhan Institute. This institute is possibly the most ideologically and viciously rigid Islamist cultural organization in Iran (a self-conscious ideological state apparatus if there ever was one), and it publishes a large number of dailies, weeklies, and other periodicals marketed to different segments of the population. How can we make sense of this bastion of Islamist hard-liners producing a lineage of feminist editors? What is the meaning of these emergences in the overall political mapping of contemporary Iran?
WOMAN AND THE CULTURE OF REVOLUTION
The legal and social restrictions that women have faced in Iran since the 1979 revolution are widely reported. Seemingly trivial matters, such as the shape and color of a woman's scarf or the thickness of her stockings, have been matters of public policy and disciplinary measures. Women are far from legal equals of men. Despite years of hard work by women activists, both inside and outside the parliament, many discriminatory laws passed within the first few months and years of the Islamic Republic remain on the books and in full force. Many secular feminists continue to feel silenced, if not repressed or exiled, by the dominant cultural and political climate.
Yet the past two decades have also witnessed an incredible flourishing of women's intellectual and cultural production. Twenty-eight years after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran, not only have women not disappeared from public life but they have an unmistakably active and growing presence in practically every field of artistic creation, professional achievement, educational and industrial institutions, political participation, and even in sports activities. It would be tempting for a secular feminist such as myself to claim that Iranian women have achieved all this despite the Islamic Republic, against the Islamic Republic, and even against Islam as the dominant discourse. Indeed, for some women it has been this deep existential sense of proving themselves against all odds that became the creative energy of their productions.
Yet it is not only oppositional energy that accounts for this creative outpouring. The rise of the Islamist movement in the 1970s in Iran signified the emergence of a new political sociability and the dominance of a new discourse, within which woman-as-culture occupied a central position. In this paradigm, imperialist domination of Islamicate societies was seen to have been achieved not through military or economic supremacy, as earlier generations of nationalists and socialists had argued, but through the undermining of religion and culture mediated through woman. This centrality of gender to the construction of an Islamist political discourse turned what had been marginal, postponed, and illegitimate into the central, immediate, and authentic. The so-called woman question acquired immediacy and urgency not only for the discontented but even more so for the supporters of the new order. In particular, female supporters of the Islamic Republic were placed in a position to take responsibility for its misogyny: to deny it, to justify it, to challenge it, to oppose it, but not to ignore it. Almost overnight, words such as androcracy (mardsalari) and misogyny (zan'sitizi) became common parlance. Moreover, the Islamist movement's and the Islamic Republic's claim of representing the ideal divine solution for all societal problems put them in continuous contestation with feminism as far as women's issues were concerned. Outright rejection of feminism gave way to a hybrid dynamic of outdoing and embracing it.
New configurations of Islam, revolution, and feminism have thus emerged. A recent women's publication has listed over forty women's organizations (many official and government-affiliated, but a substantial number nongovernmental) and ten women's periodicals of various political shades including a daily, Zan (Woman), owned and directed by Fa'izah Hashemi Rafsanjani, a member of the parliament from Tehran and a daughter of Hujjat al-Islam Hashemi Rafsanjani, a former president of the country.
The numbers alone attest to the significance and complexities of these reconfigurations. A number of writers and publications speak in secular feminist language. Others are activists and writers from within an Islamist discourse. In its most radical tendency, as reflected in the pages of journals such as Zanan and Huquq-i zanan, it speaks as Muslim and feminist. Although there is a history of reinterpretive endeavors concerning women's rights within Islam going back to the mid-nineteenth century, coemergent within the complex discourses of modernity the recent efforts by many of these writers are novel in a number of important ways. For the purpose of my arguments here, the most significant difference is not only that women are prominent reinterpreters but that these interpretative ventures are carried out in the printed pages of a women's journal, in a public space, rather than the private chambers of religious scholars. The authors are posed as public intellectuals rather than as private teachers and preachers. Their audience comprises other women (and men) as citizens, rather than theological students and other clerical commentators. Not only have these openly feminist reinterpretive ventures produced a radical decentering of the clergy from the domain of interpretation but by positioning women's needs as grounds for interpretation and women as public commentators of canonical and legal texts, they promise that the political democratization currently unfolding in Iran will no longer be a "manly" preoccupation. Moreover, by declaring their interpretive enterprise open to nonbelievers and non-Muslims, emphasizing expertise rather than faith, and by placing woman, in her contemporary social concreteness and her needs and choices, in the center of their arguments, they have opened up a productive space for conversations and alliances among feminists in Iran beyond previous divisions between secular and Islamist.
It is this kind of hybridization that has been received as a threat both by what are often referred to as hard-line Islamists and by some secular feminists. Both sides have translated these fears and apprehensions into demands on women's rights activists to clarify their position by drawing clear lines between Islam and un-Islam and theocracy and secularism.
Without implying any equation in terms of political power and repressive responsibility, I want to point out some of the shared grounds between these two responses, from two opposite corners of the Iranian political map. One is the issue of an Islamic-versus-secular divide. Both sides insist, although for completely different reasons and rationales, that this is a central issue that the middle ground dissidents and reformers must clarify.
Those activists working for change in an Islamic republic, however, have an interest in not defining what is secular and in resisting the urge to draw a line between what constitutes Islamic and un-Islamic. This is not an issue of compromise with a powerful and repressive state, though that would be reason enough. Nor is it necessarily a consciously formulated tactical concession. The Islamic government, not even in its totality but that faction of it currently identified with and coalesced around Ayatollah Khamenei (whose official title is supreme leader of the revolution), along with its popular and state-sponsored and -organized base (through the many state-financed social organizations) are the ones whose world outlook is centered around a secular-religious divide. They cultivate this divide by ascribing global meaning to every small or large issue that they conceive as a potential challenge to their rule. This is particularly the case for issues broadly named cultural. They see themselves truly engaged in a culture war. From satellite dishes to computer games, from newspapers to films, from the color and shape of a woman's scarf to children's names, every small or big matter is linked to the terms of a global culture war in which the fates of Islam and the revolution are at stake. Those who resist and oppose this totalizing outlook have every stake in resisting not only the specific lines being drawn as to what constitutes Islam and what un-Islam, what is secular and what is religious, but the very notion of drawing any lines that would demarcate a religious domain from a secular domain.
The forces of resistance and reform emerging from within the Islamist movements, as well as from outside all existing political formations among a post-1979 generation (through new journals, student groups, local councils, grassroots organizations, and some government-initiated projects), are formed around incremental, pragmatic, day-to-day issues with a resistance to allowing these issues to be pushed over one or the other side of the secular-theocratic line. Whether this is a tactically motivated screening and silence, or whether that very divide is now experienced as disabling to creating spaces of resistance and change, I cannot claim to know. Given where many are coming from (i.e., Islamist movements), I tend to think it is the latter. Whatever the answer to this query, it is this very resistance to drawing a secular-theocratic dividing line that has produced expanded space even for secular forces.
Contrary to initial fears, for instance, that the emergence of women's activist currents, including feminists, from Islamist ranks would further jeopardize the already precarious social space for secular feminism, their very existence and multiplication into many feminist and gender-activist voices over the past two decades-by muddying the clear lines of what or who is Islamist-has enabled feminists who speak secularism to find more hospitable and growing cultural space. The resistance to drawing such clear lines has been exasperating to hard-line Islamists set on keeping these boundaries clear and patrolled. Unfortunately, it has also been received as unsettling and discomforting by some secular feminists who often demand that these women clarify their stance and draw this or that line, whether the line of separation of religion from government or the line of autonomy from men. This is quite a dangerous move; for if it succeeds in forcing them to choose instead of keeping the ground muddled, fluid, and shifting, it will constrict the transformative possibilities of the present moment. The fear that this kind of vexed hybridization will further reduce a precarious space for feminism, like the alarming panic of hard-line Islamists, arises from the particular ways in which feminism has been historically imbricated in the production of secularism within Iranian modernity.
RETHINKING IRANIAN MODERNITY AND SECULARISM
Since the mid-nineteenth century, Iranian politics of modernity has been marked by the emergence of a spectrum of nationalist and Islamist discourses. Within that spectrum, one notion of Iranian modernity took Europe as its model of progress and civilization (taraqqi va tamaddun)-the two central terms of that discourse-and increasingly combined that urge with a recovery of pre-Islamic Iranianism. Other trends sought to combine their nationalism, and the urge to catch up with Europe, not with a pre-Islamic recovery but with Islam by projecting Shiism as the Iranianization of Islam in its early centuries. I am emphatically putting the latter in the spectrum of modernity for two reasons: first, in order to distinguish it from countermodernist trends such as that led in the Constitutional Revolution (1906-9) by Shaykh Fazl'allah Nuri; and second because later twentieth-century developments largely led to an ejection or abandonment of what may be called an Islamist nationalist modernist trend from the complex hybridity of Iranian modernity-until its reemergence in new configurations in the late 1980s. Until recently, it had been a commonly accepted notion that since the nineteenth century, Iranian politics has been a battleground between modernity and tradition, with Islam always in the latter camp.
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