Whoever wins Iran’s election, an enduring image of this extraordinary exercise in democracy will linger: young women calling for freedom, headscarves pushed back on their heads and green bands tied to arms held defiantly aloft.
Across the Muslim world, the emergence of women as a civil force is a recurring, if intermittent, theme. In the West Bank, two female judges preside in the Sharia courts. In Turkey, the defenders of the headscarf are matched in vociferousness by its critics. Bangladesh and Pakistan have had female prime ministers. Shamshad Akhtar was appointed Governor of the State Bank of Pakistan in 2006. Even in Kabul, a bastion of male politics and corruption, President Karzai could not force his patriarchal laws on to the statute book.
Individual women are giving voice to a progressive, feminist version of Islam. Some of these voices, like that of Queen Rania of Jordan, are loud; others are grassroots voices hard to hear above the clamour of the Taleban and muffled, in Western ears, by their hijab.
But the pockets of resistance to an exclusively patriarchal vision of Islam are still isolated and nascent. They are urban voices, not rural ones. They are educated, often patrician, voices. The more progressive the society, the more educated the women.
The Muslim world, whether it recognises it or not, has an interest in allowing women to be full participants in the economic and social realms. Without harnessing the potential economic power of half the workforce, Muslim societies can not hope to compete in global markets. But this leaves the proponents of a hardline patriarchal theocracy wrestling with a conundrum; exclude women from the workplace and suffer economic stagnation, or educate them and open the doors to democratic agitation.
Advertisement
Democracy and the liberation of women are prerequisites of each other. While not all educated Muslim women are feminists, no uneducated, illiterate women have the tools to challenge the patriarchy.
In Iran, a generation of women has taken to the streets to press their case for greater freedom and make a stand against a repressive president.
The focus of their democratic fervour is an unlikely hero. Mir Hossein Mousavi is a member of the Establishment, without an ounce of revolutionary glamour. His plans for social liberalisation are modest, but at least they represent an alternative to the meddlesome moralising and state snooping sponsored by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s hardline regime. But the single most transformational moment of Mr Mousavi’s campaign was his decision to allow his dynamic and more charismatic wife, Zahra Rahnavard, to campaign alongside him. Ms Rahnavard is standing up and talking of the rights of women and she has found an enthusiastic audience.
Ms Rahnavard’s female fans are a specifically Iranian phenomenon. Iranian women are educated, in the cities at least. Contraception, which is actively encouraged by Iran’s clerics, has reduced the average number of children per woman from seven in 1980 to below three. The Pill fuelled the emancipation of women in the West, and Iranian women are experiencing a similar freedom from the burden of successive pregnancies.
For many years, people hoped that economic liberalisation would unseat authoritarian governments. But choice in the marketplace has not always been followed by choice in the public square. Education and the promise of equality, however, are prompting women across the Muslim world to agitate for real democracy.
Advertisement
It is not the demand for consumer choice that threatens to topple repressive theocracies. It is the demand for an equal voice.