Iran’s Guardian Council, the highly effective physique answerable for electoral oversight, caught the general public without warning by asserting that girls might run for the presidency within the 2021 polls that may determine the successor to Hassan Rouhani.
Some ladies’s rights activists welcomed the announcement as a harbinger of change in a extremely conservative, patriarchal society. Others steered the gesture was grandstanding by the federal government to attract extra voters to the poll field and polish its picture.
Greater than 60% of college college students in Iran are feminine. Among the nation’s most sensible authors, academicians, scientists, artists, philanthropists and media personalities are ladies. International examples are 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi, the late arithmetic prodigy and recipient of the Fields Medal Maryam Mirzakhani, and Anousheh Ansari, the primary feminine area explorer, who’s Iranian-American.
But the highway to justice and elimination of disparities that forged a darkish shadow over the fortunes of Iranian ladies stays rocky. The Statistical Heart of Iran reported in 2014 that girls constituted solely 16.6% of the workforce.
Iranian ladies proceed to complain about stringent male-guardianship legal guidelines, a inflexible obligatory hijab code, and being excluded from social and cultural participation.
Leila Alikarami (above) is an Iranian lawyer and human-rights advocate. She is an affiliate member of the Heart for Iranian Research on the College of Oriental and African Research in London. She can also be the recipient of an Anna Politkovskaya Award from RAW (Attain All Ladies) in Warfare.
Asia Instances spoke to Dr Alikarami about ladies being permitted to run for the presidency and the beneficial properties and challenges of the ladies’s rights motion in Iran.
Kourosh Ziabari: Is the Guardian Council’s backtracking from its long-standing place about ladies’s eligibility for working in presidential elections a big precursor of change? Is that this one thing that ought to make Iranian ladies optimistic concerning the future?
Leila Alikarami: Based mostly on Article 115 of the structure, the president have to be elected from amongst non secular and political personalities – rejal – who possess particular {qualifications} talked about in the identical article.
Throughout the ratification of the structure, there was disagreement amongst members of the Guardian Council about this time period. There have been two opinions concerning the phrase rejal. One view was that rejal refers to each women and men. Subsequently, each women and men are eligible to be candidates for presidency. The opposite group believed that the president ought to solely be elected from amongst males.
On the finish, the phrase rejal was accredited, which in Arabic refers to each women and men.
Subsequently, primarily based on the structure, there is no such thing as a restriction for girls to be president. Nevertheless, we have now witnessed that the paradox of Article 115 prevented ladies from being certified as candidates for the presidency.
Ladies have been making use of for candidacy since 1997 and have been disqualified each single time. The late Azam Taleqani tried very arduous to deal with this problem all through her lifetime. She utilized in 2001, 2009 and in 2017. She was disqualified every time after the vetting course of carried out by the Guardian Council. The Council didn’t explain disqualifying her and different ladies.
As there is no such thing as a consensus concerning the phrase rejal, the current place of the Guardian Council wouldn’t change the present scenario for girls. Majles [the parliament] is clarifying the factors for qualification of the candidates, which didn’t embrace the definition of the phrase rejal. Subsequently, the paradox of Article 115 stays the identical as earlier than.
As ladies are, in observe, excluded probably due to their gender and slim interpretation of the phrase rejal, Iranian legislators ought to deal with this problem clearly and settle the paradox of legislation.
KZ: Does it make you proud that there are feminine vice-presidents and cupboard members within the administration and feminine members of parliament? Are they representing the voices and aspirations of the collective of Iranian ladies with all of their variations and heterogeneous pursuits?
LA: Iranian ladies are extremely educated and gifted. They make up half of college graduates in Iran, for instance. Nonetheless, I can’t say that I’m proud that a number of ladies are amongst the high-level politicians in Iran. Sadly, we should not have [anywhere] near the variety of ladies current in decision-making positions that one would need to see.
In keeping with the 2020 International Gender Hole Report, Iran ranks among the many worst nations by way of feminine political empowerment. Furthermore, most girls who rise to the extent of decision-makers don’t often advocate for a ladies’s rights agenda, and people who do are sometimes shortly pushed out of presidency by socially conservative forces.
KZ: What are essentially the most notable calls for Iranian ladies are preventing for? Are you constructive that below the present political local weather, Iranian ladies could make headway in securing extra civil liberties and private, social freedoms?
LA: Iranian ladies are nonetheless preventing for gender equality. They’ve suffered authorized discrimination each earlier than and after the 1979 revolution. Their battle to convey the nation’s legal guidelines in keeping with social realities is an ongoing course of.
Regardless of intervals of intense bargaining and large-scale campaigns, which obtain standard assist even from inside the complicated echelons of the Islamic Republic’s political elite, the underlying political-legal framework has resisted this spherical of efforts to result in tangible change.
There are numerous causes to clarify these challenges in Iran. However the actual problem is the assorted interpretations of sharia legislation and, extra necessary, the resistance of the conservative institution to vital enhancements within the standing of ladies.
The hardliners within the authorities mistakenly noticed ladies’s rights advocates as political opponents and labored to manage, confront and repress them. But they explicitly expressed their main goal: to vary the legal guidelines that discriminate towards ladies in Iran. These don’t embrace constitutional provisions, however only a deal with altering provisions in civil and prison codes.
Robust opposition proven by Iran’s non secular and conservative institution to vary or amend the codes has decreased the chance of any substantial constructive reforms for Iranian ladies within the foreseeable future.
KZ: Saudi Arabia has currently launched a sequence of reforms pertaining to ladies’s rights, together with abandoning its strict costume code, lifting a ban on feminine singers performing publicly and permitting ladies into stadiums. We all know that Saudi Arabia is a conservative Sunni kingdom and hosts the 2 holiest websites of Islam. Do you suppose such reforms are replicable within the context of Iran, a equally conservative theocracy? Or will resistance by the non secular authorities preclude ladies from reaching equality and improved rights?
LA: The current transfer towards reforms in Saudi Arabia is a transparent signal of the political will of the Saudi authorities to vary the face of the nation on the subject of half of its inhabitants. Central to the reforms has been the obvious break between the state and hardline clerics.
To maneuver forward with its reforms, Saudi Arabia understands that it has no selection however to half methods with such voices and moderately transfer to extra tightly management them. This has not been the case in Iran, the place a robust connection between hardline clerics and the ruling authorities nonetheless persists.
In fact, one can’t separate faith and custom from both society. Saudi Arabia seems to have opened up alternatives for girls by realizing that the nation can’t advance till ladies’s rights are improved within the kingdom.
However it’s clear that within the case of Iran, ladies are unlikely to have the ability to successfully proceed the development of their rights till non secular figures change their outlook towards ladies and the federal government demonstrates political will to interact in such reforms, too.
KZ: Do you attribute the restrictions, discrimination and violence Iranian ladies face in numerous elements of their day by day life to the edicts of Islam and that the faith is inherently misogynistic? Or is it that there’s nothing inherently bigoted in Islam and they’re the non secular hardliners who’re cracking down on the Iranian ladies’s train of their private and social rights by abusing and contorting Islam?
LA: I feel the issue of inequality lies in custom and the interior contradiction between the beliefs of sharia and the norms of Muslim societies. The non secular edicts harming ladies’s rights are restricted readings of versatile Islamic authorized thought.
Islam launched the fitting of ladies to obtain a hard and fast share of inheritance at a time when no such system was in place, bringing a few huge change in Arab societies.
Whereas Iran is a society with quickly altering norms in relation to ladies’s social standing – literacy and primary-school enrollment charges for girls and women are estimated at greater than 99% and 100% respectively, and gender disparity in secondary and tertiary training is reportedly nearly non-existent – discourse with respect to ladies’s rights has its place in Islam.
It’s a discourse that challenges hardline Muslims who oppose ladies’s rights on the grounds that they aren’t Islamic, and in addition speaks to a authorities and authorized system that claims it’s primarily based on Islamic legislation.
However Islamic discourse is necessary for the typical one who desires to marry his or her non secular beliefs with a perception in human rights, equality and dignity. These individuals are empowered to face behind their human-rights ideas, with out abandoning their non secular beliefs. So to construct a broad motion and unite like-minded individuals, you will need to have the ability to argue that Islam and human rights usually are not mutually unique and that Islam helps human rights.
Ladies’s rights is a matter that can not be simply or shortly modified even inside the authorized and political system of the Islamic Republic. This was additionally a lesson from Iran’s reform period of 1997 to 2001, throughout which ladies’s rights activists and reformist politicians tried unsuccessfully to convey about Iran’s accession to the Conference on the Elimination of All Types of Discrimination Towards Ladies, the first human-rights treaty safeguarding the rights and equality of ladies.
And born out of political rivalry, there may be a scarcity of political will that hinders ladies’s rights reforms in Iran’s authorized system. Adopting a sharia-based technique supported by well-known clerics to fight discriminatory legal guidelines justified by the federal government’s interpretation of sharia, nonetheless, has confirmed to be an efficient technique to achieve the assist of the general public.
Naturally, this isn’t a matter that may be resolved in a single day however requires a gentle and systematic method.
Kourosh Ziabari is a journalist primarily based in Iran. He’s the recipient of a Chevening Award from the UK’s International and Commonwealth Workplace. He’s additionally an American Center Jap Community for Dialogue at Stanford (AMENDS) Fellow.
