I am taking part in a uni course about the Feminist revolution in Iran. The lecturer has been going over the Iranian revolution in 1979 in a very, shall we say, interesting way.
I do not want to discredit their pov on this as I am obviously a Westoid, but the way this is being framed is that before the revolution things were better for women. The lecturer said the revolution happened because people disliked the Shah having more than others, but she did not elaborate this in any way. One would think the complaints of people were pretty big for them to start a revolution? But I know very little about this.
After the revolution women were to have equal rights, but over the next years the dictatorship which is named as Islamic removed them and things like the hijab became mandatory. She stated that people were given false promises and betrayed and this is why the people sided with the revolution. Where does this framing come from? Was it the same people going for revolution that ended up in places of power?
Now my understanding is that the social democratic movement there was destroyed by the West in the 50s and the following twenty+ years under the Shah led to a sort of pseudorevolution that wasn’t entirely progressive in nature. Is this correct or wrong?
Also how did the revolutionary force become so deeply conservative? The lecturer told us that before this there was no national religion as such and things like wearing a scarf were personal choices. This was then turned into a mandatory thing starting from workplace dresscode to eventually all public life, however at home people to this day do not follow these norms.
The Women Life Freedom movement is then a result of the way these last decades have eroded all womens rights.
I will include the following questions as well:
If this reactionary tendency in societies is always high, how do we make sure our revolution does not lead to something like this? Or was this all external influence?
If we accept that there always tends to be external influence, what can we do to make sure the reactionary force does not get on top and be in a position to dictate things like womens rights? (I am spesifically thinking of Hamas in Palestine now being the force that is driving change, if they stay in power, won’t that easily result in a second Iran when it comes to Islamic nationalism/minority rights?)
How then can we engage in critical support of operators who have a high chance of creating systems of oppression?
Any history on Iran, feminism and ML and other thought very welcome.
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Fact: Iran has better maternity benefits than the first world, progressive United States and Australia
Fact: Iran is a much safer country (and especially for women) compared to most American cities.
Source: Many Iranian friends who have lived in both Iran and Western countries. My friend (Iranian, to be clear) told me that she had traveled all across Iran by herself and never once felt unsafe, unlike when she was other Western countries. It’s anecdotal but I can believe that.
Of course, Iran is ruled by a conservative regime with religious restrictions. However, I get the sense that enforcement is not as strict as many would think. For example, Islam forbids the drinking of alcohol, but every Iranian I know of told me that everyone back home knew where to get alcoholic drinks. And yes, people do drink alcohol in Iran even though it is explicitly forbidden.
I also don’t think there is strict enforcement for hijab wearing, even though there are definitely a lot of rooms for improvement - I have seen Iranian instagrammers (my friends showed them to me, though admittedly they are the more educated/upper middle class types), they look no different than your average Western instagram accounts, no traces of hijab or anything, though I do have a couple friends who choose to wear them.
I’m curious how much (anything you’ve said) is actually true in practice, or if the sample size of (people who can travel internationally) ∪ (people who have big instagrams) ends up being biased in favor of the rules-dont-apply-to-the-rich type stuff.
The maternity benefits and the safety aspect compared to Western countries are definitely true.
The rest are anecdotes that I gathered from talking to people. Clearly, like every other country, there are wealth disparities and privileges that come with it. The people I talk to are mostly middle class, academic types, not the super wealthy ones - most of them did their undergraduate degrees in Iran and then pursued their Masters/PhD overseas (that’s how I came to know them), so we’re not talking about super rich kids. Also I wasn’t talking about big instagram accounts, just friends showing me their friends/family members who have a small following (i.e. average instagrammers) because they wanted to show me what life was like back home in Iran. But yes, definitely more privileged compared to your average working class people.
The lecturer said the revolution happened because people disliked the Shah having more than others, but she did not elaborate this in any way.
The revolution happened because the Shah was an imperialist dog ruining the lives of the people and his agents disappeared and murdered anyone who opposed this.
Now my understanding is that the social democratic movement there was destroyed by the West in the 50s and the following twenty+ years under the Shah led to a sort of pseudorevolution that wasn’t entirely progressive in nature. Is this correct or wrong?
As far as I know, your understanding is generally correct.
The CIA imposed the Shah on Iran, and when it was clear he was on the way out, the assisted the Ayatollahs. Both political systems were imposed on Iran by outside pressure - in the first case entirely, and in the second case only partly.
Edit: removed some text, had misread your comment.
I’m not an expert but I think your prof is full of it.
From what I remember all those pictures we see of women in Tehran from the Shah’s era are wild outliers. Most Persian women lived in rural areas where they lived extremely restricted lives. The Ayatollah and his followers won the Revolution because there were lots of them and they were much better organized than any other faction. Iirc after the Islamic Revolution women’s lives did improve in some ways - More access to education, more literacy, more university graduates. The regime goes back and forth on the hijab thing and Iranian women are always pushing the limit on what they can get away with without setting off the morality police.
A lot of western Feminist discourse portrays Iranian women as helpless victims of the regime and it’s restrictive laws but that’s BS. There are a number of feminist tendencies in Iran, both ones that recognizable to Western Feminists and some Islamic Feminisms that are very different from what the West considers Feminism.
The Shah was a vicious bastard. The SAVAK intelligence agency was one of the most violent and horrific in the world. The Shah was installed in a coup after the democratically elected Mosadegh was thrown out by the Americans and British in 53. The Shah worked closely with British and US forces. Life under the Shah was very repressive. Sure, women didn’t have to cover their hair, but it was a western backed monarchy and just as shitty as any other western backed monarchy.
The idea that there was no national religion is silly. Even if it wasn’t legislated Persian has been heavily Shi’a for centuries and centuries.
Kurds in Iran are pretty hostile to the government and afaik kind of do their own thing.
In general, you should be deeply suspicious of any westerner who starts talking about the rights of women under oppressive regimes. A lot of the time “The rights of women” are used as an excuse to justify violent intervention, sanctions, coups, and invasions. Westerners meddling in foreign women’s rights struggles often turn the matter from an internal disgreement to Western political aggression, causing the regime to re-trench in order to prevent Western forces from exploiting a civil rights movement to attack the foreign nation.
Look at how The West is slaughtering Palestinians, or how useless America’s invasion of Afghanistan was, and so forth. Look back at the rights women lost when the Fourth Reich seized control of the GDR and dismantled all it’s progressive gains. Abortion isn’t even legal in German y, it’s against the law but mostly unenforced. Abortion is illegal in much of the US, women don’t get parental leave. Western commitment to Women’s Rights is mostly a bad joke, so when they start telling you we need to intervene in some other country for the sake of women treat them as sus.
Thank you so much for this answer. Gave me lot to think about and read about. What throws me most with this course is the teacher is from Iran, this course is about the Women Life Freedom movement spesifically. I get that no nation or people are a monolith in any way, same as their view of history or the rights of women, but I struggle to undestand how positively she seems to be framing the Shah era. Also stated that many women worked and studied in uni at the time.
How much is the history of the revolution talked about in Iran and how might it be framed? She said that in schools history is only taught for the time after the revolution and everything before that is not taught at all. Like history starts from the revolution.
The way she said all actors and performers left the country after the revolution also felt a bit odd.
Is there a particular propaganda angle where all this might be coming from?
It may not necessarily be propaganda… The revolution was 45 years ago. If the prof is 60-70, they would have been in their early 20s. Not to say theyre misremembering their experience but they may have totally had a different class upbringing or really never saw what others went thru. It could definitely be the more affluent kids were able to just leave or defect.
Its also very easy to have a specific angled perspective in regard to feminism. Not only is the US propaganda far reaching, but you can almost definitely say women are strongest voting block in the US while also flipping the coin and seeing women’s rights being ripped up. It depends on who you ask and their background. This and its easy to make a living as a grifter like Yeonmi Park.
Some people are sold about their “newfound freedom” or positions, others know how to make tenure. Who knows…
This is all very true. They were not born at the time.
I was just thinking on how if you asked me ten years ago what does gender equality or womens rights look like in my country I would have given you two wildly different answer then and now.
Same goes for the history of my country. The only difference is today I have engaged with histories not written by the mainstream. But in those answers you would get two totally different sounding countries.
A lot of Iranians were profiting personally from the Shah’s corruption, and they and their descendants are extremely upset and will do anything to demonize Iran today. This is much more common in the diaspora than in those who stayed in Iran, for obvious reasons.
People have different personal experiences and that colors their perception. I know a Brazilian who was around for the military dictatorship and says it wasn’t so bad. You can imagine that his family was not among the poor farmers that had been receiving literacy education for the first time in their lineage before the junta canned it, let alone among the protestors who were tortured to death.
Some other information you might be interested in:
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The Shah represented the imperialist order. He was literally installed by the West in a coup. His policies served the West and were very unpopular in Iran.
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The revolution had many groups and they all tried to become the leaders. There was a very strong socialist contingent as well but it was preferentially targeted for destruction by the West and the Ayatollahs were funded. This was after it was clear the revolution would succeed. The West preferred a religious group to socialists. Now they complain that the religious group does the things it said it would. The reality is that the West opposes Iran on imperialist grounds, not moral.
Re: external influence: if you’re in the US you’re in the external influence. That’s not something to worry about right now. The conditions under which there’s revolution in the US will look very strange to us and we would cross that bridge when it arrived.
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