Sexual Politics in Modern Iran

Janet Afary

Introduction

A few years ago, at a conference on Middle Eastern women in Bellagio, Italy, an

anthropologist asked me, “How exactly does a historian of gender go about researching
her field?” It was a surprising but valid question, given the relatively recent origin of the
field of Middle Eastern gender history. The short answer is that since there are often a
small number of historical documents that deal directly with women’s issues, much of
Middle East gender history is about rereading existing texts, asking how their authors
conceptualized masculinity and femininity for their time.
The historian must also have a keen eye for silences and gaps in historical records,
which can be very revealing. One also needs to adopt an interdisciplinary approach to
capture those subtle transformations in gender roles that are not reflected in historical
accounts. Forays into poetry, short stories, novels, cartoons, cinema, as well as works by
cultural anthropologists, sociologists, literary critics, and economists of the region can
yield great results.Perhaps the best way to answer the question, and also shed light on
the theoretical orientation of this book, is to take the reader through the processes that
led to its writing. Initially, I had hoped to explain the underlying gender dynamics of the
1979 Islamic Revolution and its aftermath, here building on the important contributions
of Eliz Sanasarian (1982), Parvin Paidar (1995), and more recently Hamideh Sedghi
(2007) on women’s history and gender policies of the twentieth century.
However, my conceptions of the book expanded after conducting a series of seminars at
Purdue University on the Critical Theory of the Frankfurt School, the French post-
structuralist philosopher Michel Foucault, contemporary feminist theory, and also co-
authoring, with Kevin Anderson,
Foucault and the Iranian Revolution (2005). I gradually concluded that these theoretical
writings could provide valuable insights into (1) the exuberance with which women
from the bazaar and clerical families
had embraced the Islamic Revolution and (2) the role of the Islamist state in releasing
lower middle-class youth from the grips of their highly patriarchal families.
Historians of theMiddle East in the US seldom employ the perspectives of the Frankfurt
School with respect to the family and the authoritarian character. Michel Foucault
belongs to a different branch of critical theory, but he had also theorized the impact of
modernity on the family. As against most members of the Frankfurt School, who had
followed Freud’s views on sexuality and modernity more or less uncritically, Foucault
offered original insights on sexuality by making homosexuality as central as
heterosexuality. Once that was done, the attack on homosexuality that accompanied the
vaunted sexual liberation of the early twentieth century could be discerned more clearly.
Whether or not one agreed with
Foucault’s overall perspectives on modernity, it was hard not to appreciate his
enormous contribution to our understanding of modern sexuality. But what were the
consequences of modernity for gender and sexuality in the Middle East, where even
talking about the pervasive homoeroticism of the region’s premodern culture had been
labeled “Orientalism”? Increasingly, I found that sexuality occupied an undeniably
crucial place in Iran’s history. One could not simply talk about gender and women’s
rights, particularly rights within marriage, without also addressing the subject of same-
sex relations.

The publication of Sirus Shamisa’s Shahedbazi dar Adabiyat-e Farsi (2002), which
deals with same-sex relations in Persian literature, gave me a wonderful excuse to
revisit some of the medieval Persian classics
from this angle, works that I reread alongside scholarly commentaries on Sufism, most
notably those of Annemarie Schimmel (1975) and Julie Scott Meisami (1987). I
emerged from this excursion with a new appreciation for the Foucauldian concept of the
“ethics of love” as I concentrated on the rituals of male courtship in Persian literature. I
also realized that Sufi love, which had always been celebrated for its religious and
ethnic tolerance and its break with orthodoxy, might also have embodied a new
“ethics of love.” This literary-philosophical tradition seemed to break with the
conventional status-defined homosexuality of the Middle Eastern/ Muslim world and its
rigidly hierarchical social order, aspiring to a new and more reciprocal (homosexual)
love. To pursue the concept of love in modern Persian literature, I also reread many of
the literary works of the twentieth century, particularly from the formative period of the
1920s through the 1940s. One of the major preoccupations of the writers of this era had
been the ideal of companionate marriage. Some, such as Bozorg ‘Alavi, were
celebrating companionate
marriage with the understanding that it would not necessarily provide greater happiness
for women. Others, such as Sadeq Hedayat, lamented the loss of a world where
sexualities were more ambivalent, and heterosexuality was not yet normative in the
modern sense.

Reading through several new books on homosexuality in the Middle East, including
some of the unpublished works of Everett Rowson who was kind enough to share his
work withme, reassured me that I was on the right track. Khaled El-Rouayheb (2005),
Walter Andrews and Mehmet Kalpakli (2005) had suggested a link between gender
segregation and the pervasive homoeroticism of the Muslim Middle East, indicating that
these relationships were fueled by a need for companionship rather than lack of sex.
Both of these works addressed the idealistic as well as the abusive dimensions of same-
sex relations. Afsaneh Najmabadi had adopted a less critical attitude toward status-
defined homosexuality in
nineteenth-century Iran and also resisted a connection between gender segregation and
homoeroticism. But her new work also linked male homosexual practices to women’s
demands for more companionate marriages (2005, 8).

Late nineteenth-century intellectuals such as Mirza Fath Ali Akhundzadeh and Mirza
Aqa Khan Kermani had initiated the debate on normative heterosexuality and
companionate marriage. In recent theories of sexuality, normative sexuality has come to
mean accepting heterosexual relations (and rejecting homosexual ones) as the only
proper and healthy sexual behavior. In the twenty-first century, notions of normative
heterosexuality are seen as oppressive. However, early twentieth-century advocates of
women’s rights in Iran and the Middle East saw this problem differently.
They regarded normative heterosexuality as an advance because they believed it meant
a man would actually love a woman, rather than merely maintain her as an object of
procreation.

During the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, liberal and leftist publications

campaigned for companionate marriage but not yet normative heterosexuality. The
latter gradually impacted Iran from the north and the west. The more modernist Shiʿi
Azeri intellectuals of the Russian Caucasus initiated a wide criticism of homosexuality,
especially the Tbilisi-based newspaper Molla Nasreddin. This illustrated satirical paper,
which circulated among Iranian intellectuals and ordinary people alike, was
enormously popular in the region because of its graphic cartoons. The paper was also
known for its advocacy of companionate marriage and opposition to both pedophilia
and pederasty.
For details on the contemporary gay subculture in Iran, I turned to GLBT (Gay-Lesbian-
Bisexual-Transgendered) activists inside Iran and abroad. After the public hanging of
two teenagers in Mashhad in the summer of 2005 on charges of homosexuality, I began
a discussion with editors of MAHA, one of the first electronic journals of the Iranian
GLBT community, and other members of this community such as Arsham Parsi. I also
read through publications such as Homan, Cheragh, and Hamjens-e Man, which have
done much to illuminate the practices of homosexuality and heterosexuality in
contemporary Iranian society.

I became aware of a number of other fundamental cultural changes the nation had
experienced in the twentieth century, in the process of developing a series of lectures on
the evolution of democracy in modern Iran. Iran has undergone not one but several
paradigm shifts with respect to gender and sexuality, around the notions of social
justice, purity, adulthood, and agency. At the same time it would be an
overgeneralization to speak of a complete change of mores in modern Iran, as if earlier
notions of justice, purity, and adulthood have been discarded and new ones havetaken
their place entirely. I began to think about a paradigm shift around the concept of purity,
partly under the influence of Mary Douglas’s important work, Purity and Danger
([1966] 2002). I was interested in the nature of this change – from religious/ritualistic
notions of purity to modern concepts of hygiene – and its implications for women’s
bodies. A second distinct paradigm shift involved age and adulthood. Earlier, girls were
married young, often at or before puberty, while status-defined homosexuality involved
sex between adolescent and sometimes younger boys and adult men. Social attitudes
about the proper age for sex would change, especially by the 1930s. The legal age of
marriage for girls would increase to fifteen while adult men’s sex with boys would be
prohibited
A third paradigm shift involved notions of social justice. In premodern n Iran, as in
Greco-Roman or medieval European societies, distributive justice had applied different
standards to different social groups in order to maintain a social hierarchy. In contrast,
modern justice aspires to treat people of different classes, ethnicities, and genders as
formally equal. That (male) Iranian citizens had to be treated equally before the law
regardless of their social status or religion, that mutilation constituted cruel and
inhuman punishment, that Iran should resolutely adhere to international anti-slavery
conventions, and that laws should be uniformly applied in different cities and towns,
were all principles that were introduced during
the course of the Constitutional Revolution. However, family law, including the rights
of women in marriage and divorce, inheritance, and child custody, continued to be
defined according to old concepts of justice. The contrast between modern and
premodern, shari ʿa-based,1 ideals of justice remained a persistent theme in the
struggles for women’s rights.

These issues alerted me to the category of class, which some of us who have turned to
cultural history have tended to play down. The idea that Muslim societies could ban
homosexuality but tolerate semi-covert man–boy relationships was corroborated in Iran.
However, these relations varied in many ways, and, as in the Greco-Roman world, the
degree of class difference between the boy and the man often determined how overt the
relationship might be. The same was true of the institution of temporary marriage. As
Shahla Haeri has shown in her pioneering study, temporary marriage was more than an
outlet for sexual pleasure. It was also a means of circumventing social segregation
(Haeri 1989). But
an important element in the institution of temporary marriage was also class. Temporary
wives provided a lucrative source of income for bazaar merchants, who kept these
women in their employ. High-status men
who kept boy concubines or contracted temporary marriage disapproved of their own
daughters becoming temporary wives or their sons becoming boy concubines, unless the
prospective male partners were of much higher social status. The institution of slavery
also had a profound effect on gender and sexual mores, as master–slave relations
transformed all other social relations, particularly those of marriage.
The marriage and divorce certificates and police reports which Mansoureh Ettehadieh
and her student Elham Malekzadeh kindly forwarded from Tehran, provided another
venue for examining the concept
of agency in nineteenth-century Iran. I also pored over numerous harem memoirs, as
well as accounts by European travelers written in English, French, and occasionally
German. In reading the European memoirs I had expected to find mostly Orientalist
perspectives on Iranian women’s passivity and submission. To be sure, there was plenty
of that. But I also discovered some surprisingly different accounts, especially in the
works of women travelers and male court physicians. These narratives, court
certificates, and police reports chronicled women’s resistance, highlighting the
usefulness of the veil in secret sexual encounters, the preponderance of hymen repair
and abortion, and women’s appeals to police to control unruly husbands.

In a visit to Iran in spring 2005, I noticed some dramatic changes in sexual mores and
realized that the nation was quietly moving toward a sexual revolution. It was a
revolution that was taking place behind the hijab and closed doors, and also working
itself out at different stages in rural communities, as Erika Friedl, Mary Hegland, and
Soraya Tremayne, who have carried out ethnographic work in villages, have
demonstrated. Soon a group of courageous Iranian feminists affiliated with the online
journal Zanestan began the Million Signatures Campaign, demanding equal rights for
women in marriage and the family. The state has tried to bring an end to this campaign
and other recent feminist efforts through harassment and intimidation. Zanestan has
been blocked, forcing the editors to launch the campaign from other Internet sites. In
January 2008, the large-circulation feminist magazine Zanan was also shut down after
sixteen years of publication on the grounds that it showed Iranian women in a “dark
light” and was a “threat to the psychological security of society.” This book is dedicated
to these courageous feminists in the hope that it might give historical context to their
efforts. What follows is the largely untold story of Iran’s unfinished sexual revolution,
while we listen to the voices of young Iranian women and men who are making history
on the ground even as these words are being written.

Most studies of nineteenth-century Iran have painted a chaotic social canvas, focusing
on imperialist designs, the intrigues of Qajar rulers, or the poverty, hunger, and ill
health of the masses. A focus on the evolution of the institution of marriage offers a
different perspective. Qajar Iran had a rigidly hierarchical social order, with a clearly
defined class, ethnic, and religious structure and an entrenched pattern of family
obligations. Religious beliefs provided the basis for shared values. Many cherished a
relative sense of security fostered by communal identities. Marriage was nearly
universal, holding families and communities together. Parents found a spouse for their
son or daughter and provided the means for their marriage. At or before puberty, the
young bride moved in with the groom’s family, where the mother-in-law taught her how
to be a wife and mother. Reported crimes were low in a world where girls, boys, and
women endured or quietly resisted incest, sexual molestation, and rape.
Monogamy was the norm for the vast majority of urban, rural, and tribal communities.
But among the upper classes, the practices of polygamy and of keeping boy concubines
were common. Three prevalent types of legally sanctioned, heterosexual intimacy
existed among the urban elites of this period: nekah, or formal marriage; sigheh, or
temporary marriage; and slave concubinage. Nekah was usually contracted between a
man and woman of more or less equal social status.
A wife in a nekah marriage was known as an ʿaqdi wife. Nekah was intended to be
permanent, but the husband could terminate it by divorce. Sigheh, a Shiʿi institution,
was a renewable contract of marriage for a defined duration, from a few hours to ninety-
nine years. Sigheh provided sex for pleasure and was often contracted between a lower-
class woman and a man of higher social standing. The wife in a sigheh marriage was
also known as a sigheh. The institution differed from European concubinage in that the
recognized children of a sigheh marriage were considered legitimate and eligible for
inheritance, although the father could easily deny his paternity (Haeri 1989). The third
form of recognized heterosexual intimacy involved the purchase or inheritance of a
female slave. Having borne a master’s child, the slave continued to work as a
maid/concubine in the house, though she would normally be manumitted upon the
master’s death. The children were free and legitimate, provided that the master
recognized them. All three of these forms of heterosexual intimacy could be found in
the elite harems, together with male slaves and concubines

The position of an ʿaqdi was relatively stable. By her early thirties, she might be the
mother of several grown children and even the matriarch of a family. However,
arranged marriage, polygamy, and the extended family often led to weak emotional
bonds between an ʿaqdi wife and her husband. While divorce was rare within the rural
and urban lower classes, it was more acceptable among the urban middle and upper
classes. Strong social ties between the two families, and the financial obligations of a
man after divorce, made it difficult, however. The remarriage of a divorced woman
from these social strata was justifiable and incurred little stigma. Strong bonds of love
might develop initially in a nekah marriage, but
sustaining them proved daunting. Family interference and lack of privacy created severe
obstacles. Physical intimacy might be confined to the bed, where sex took place quickly
and furtively, soon interrupted by children who shared their parents’ room. In time, the
lack of reliable contraceptives, multiple pregnancies, and high infant mortality rates
would exhaust the wife. In addition, social norms encouraged her to minimize her erotic
attachment to her husband, and to divert her attention to motherhood and other familial
pursuits that earned her more respect and authority.

In elite families, the burdens of physical labor were less onerous, but the impediments
to creating and maintaining strong conjugal relations were even more tenacious. Aman’s
rights to divorce and polygamy undermined the couple’s emotional investment in one
another. The fact that children of all polygamous unions (and any offspring from
temporary marriage or a slave concubine) had formal inheritance rights, also weakened
the ties between husband and wife (Hodgson 1974, I:341). These male prerogatives
reduced the wife’s emotional commitment to the husband. Often, romantic feelings for
her husband would be transformed over time into a close attachment to her son.
Similarly, a husband’s easy access to other women and the presence of the mother-in-
law in the house reduced his commitment to the happiness of his wife.

However, girls and wives did not always succumb to these pressures. There were no
“Great Refusals” in this period, no large-scale public forms of resistance, but in James
Scott’s apt characterization, numerous smaller and more readily available “weapons of
the weak” were deployed in daily life (Scott 1985). Young women resisted their
parents’ choice of suitors and attempted to exercise some influence over the process.
Aided by resourceful midwives and love brokers, women underwent secret hymen
repair
and abortions, and sought medicinal, magical, and even illicit solutions to a husband’s
infertility. Wives exercised a measure of control in bed, in the kitchen, and in the
general management of the house and the children. Their influence manifested itself in
their propensity to withhold or grant favors. A wife could refuse to share in her
husband’s pleasure in bed, event if she complied with his demand for sexual intimacy.
She gained prestige by organizing elaborate dinner parties, keeping her house
meticulously
clean, and developing extensive information about his relatives. She often called on
relatives, neighbors, and even the police in cases of domestic violence. Combined with
her skills as a hostess, the decline of erotic bonds with her husband as she grew older
might boost her stock in the eyes of her mother-in-law, who had less fear of her
daughter-in-law’s sway over her son. Often the wife’s ties with her mother-in-law and
sisters-in-law effectively isolated the husband among the household’s most powerful
women. Alternatively, the wife could strike a balance in her own house by reinforcing
her relationship with the family into which her sister-in-law had married. Should her
concerted efforts to control her husband fail, a woman could resist her husband’s
decision to take another wife and try to wreck his second wedding, sometimes by
attempting suicide. Overall, the wife invested less in the emotional relationship with her
husband and more in the relationship with her children and his or her kin. As she grew
older,
the wife could become a powerful matriarch who exercised control over the life of her
sons and her daughters-in-law, thereby also asserting increased authority over her
husband in his old age.

Nineteenth-century Iranian society did not adhere to modern definitions or sensibilities

concerning same-sex relations. Although legally prohibited, homosexual sex was
common, and homoerotic passion was
accommodated. Falling in love with a youth and celebrating that love were recognized
practices, as long as the lovers remained circumspect and observed certain conventions.
Elite urban men often flouted these conventions.
In the royal court and among government officials, wealthy merchants, and clerics, the
practice of keeping boy concubines was widespread and commonly known; close,
homosexual relations between
free adult men were less often discussed or divulged, however. Among married women,
same-sex relations known as sisterhood vows were also culturally recognized practices.
Although we have much less information on female homosexuality, we know that such
courtships involved an exchange of gifts, travel to a shrine, and cultivation of affection
between the partners. Finally, while people were expected to observe rigid social
hierarchies, such social orders could be breached in both heterosexual and
homosexual unions. The slave who gave birth to a son could become a sigheh wife. The
favorite sigheh often became an ‘aqdi, and the chosen boy concubine could rise to a
high post at the royal court.

Gender and sexual conventions changed as a result of protracted encounters with the
Ottoman Empire, Russia, and Western Europe, the rise of democratic reforms, and the
advent of modern nationalism. By the early twentieth century, the foreign slave trade
was restricted, while the Constitutional Revolution dismantled the harems. Several
Iranian journals and many women’s associations campaigned in favor of greater
women’s rights although in the course of the revolution, the most vocal advocate of new
gender and sexual mores, the journal Molla Nasreddin, emerged from outside the
country in Tbilisi (modern Georgia). An Azeri-Iranian diaspora publication, the journal
advocated companionatemarriage and criticized sexual relationships with minor
children, including the institution of child marriage. It also suggested a link between
men’s intransigence toward gender reforms and their reluctance to abandon sex-
segregated homosocial spaces. Notably, Molla Nasreddin became the first publication in
the Shiʿi Muslim world to endorse normative heterosexuality. In the decades that
followed, other Iranian intellectuals, first in the diaspora and later within Iran, continued
to push for the type
of agenda initiated by Molla Nasreddin.

In the late 1930s, modernization in Iran came to involve the use of the police to enforce
new disciplinary practices on women’s and men’s bodies, a process that accelerated
after women were unveiled by state
decree. Women’s bodies became sites of political and cultural struggle, complicated
further by the subjection of unveiled women to an intense public gaze and sexual
harassment. Reforms in health and hygiene in this period had an equally important
impact. Old rituals of purification, which had marked public and private spaces for men
and women, were reinterpreted in light of modern sciences, which featured explanations
involving germs and sickness. With religious justifications for gender segregation
weakening, and the state encouraging greater public participation by women, social
hierarchies loosened. As a new Civil Code raised the legal age of marriage for girls to
fifteen and further eroded the hierarchies
that had enforced gender segregation, Iranian women began to assert themselves
through schools, clubs, and other institutions of civil society.
Leading intellectuals of this era such as Ahmad Kasravi developed new normative
discourses on sexuality andmarriage. Although marriages were still arranged by parents
and required paternal approval, a more companionate form of marriage gained greater
approval. Support for formal polygamy (having multiple ʿaqdi wives) and status-defined
homosexuality sharply declined, while heterosexual monogamy came to be seen as the
new norm. Paralleling earlier patterns in the West, the urban communities
of Iran became less accepting of pedophilic relationships, regardless of
context. Overt bisexuality became less prevalent among men and women of the middle
and upper classes. People of the upper classes, including a new generation of men in the
Pahlavi dynasty, also abandoned the practice of keeping multiple wives. The old middle
classes, composed of those affiliated with the bazaar, the clerical families, and the tribal
leaders, continued to practice polygamy, although even in these instances the number
was usually limited to two wives.
From 1941 to 1953, Iran experienced a period of relative political freedom from the
Pahlavi autocracy as the Allies ousted Reza Shah Pahlavi in favor of his young son
Muhammad Reza Shah, and a variety of political parties emerged. Subsequently the
struggle for the nationalization of oil, led by Prime Minister Muhammad Mosaddeq and
the National Front, set Iran against Britain. Gender issues were just beneath the surface
of these economic and political conflicts, however. Contemporary periodicals reveal
that the struggle over women’s suffrage became highly contentious during these years,
dividing the National Front. Had the Western powers allowed Mosaddeq to carry out his
twin projects of social reform and national independence, these issues might have been
resolved peacefully. Instead, the 1953 Anglo-American coup derailed the democratic
movement, and Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi returned to power.
Although the shah crushed democracy with brutality, he continued to support gender
modernization. In the 1950s and 1960s, companionate marriage and the nuclear family
began to supplant strictly arranged
unions and the remnants of formal polygamy within the new urban middle classes. In
addition, the influence of the extended family over the nuclear one was mitigated.
Young men took a more assertive part in choosing their spouses, and young urban
women gradually followed suit. A rising generation of educated women, among them
university professors, lawyers,

Members of Parliament, and leaders of the state-sponsored Women’s Organization of

Iran (WOI), began to cautiously campaign for new laws granting women substantially
greater marital rights.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the WOI assisted in reforming the institution of marriage,
partially legalizing abortion as well. It also helped enact laws that granted women
greater rights in divorce, placing limitations on men’s unilateral right to divorce and
child custody. Polygamy was legally restricted and subject to the permission of the first
wife. The emergence of a modern gay lifestyle in a few sectors of the urban elite also
caused social anxiety.
These changes were more dramatic than their counterparts in Europe, in part because
they took place over the relatively short period of about seventy years. The triple
introduction of normative monogamy, normative heterosexuality, and companionate
marriage in the first part of the twentieth century, and the dramatic changes that took
place in the status of women and in marriage and divorce laws after 1960, caused severe
tremors in the social fabric. This had become quite evident by the 1970s.
The increasingly critical attitudes of Iranian intellectuals in the 1960s and 1970s toward
the West are correctly attributed to the CIA-backed coup of 1953, which toppled
Mosaddeq’s nationalist government. But opposition to Western influences was also
rooted in cultural anxiety. Ever since the beginning of the twentieth century, advocates
of modernity had pushed for greater women’s rights through an implicit social contract.
They had promised that if families agreed to greater educational opportunities
for their daughters, these new rights would not destroy conventional gender hierarchies.
Women tacitly promised to remain attentive wives, mothers, and daughters-in-law, even
as they assumed a more public role in society. As Nikki Keddie has pointed out, by the
mid-twentieth century, Iran had become a nation of “two cultures,” in which the new
middle classes hardly comprehended their more religious and conservative compatriots
(Keddie 2003, 102). Modern urbanites also assumed that it was only a matter of time
before the rest of society joined them. This cultural bifurcation marked the sexual mores
of Iranian society, dividing women as well as men.

Women from the educated middle classes followed the dictates of modernity and the
consumer society. They went to university, got jobs, played an active role in selecting
their mate, and entered into companionate marriages. They petitioned for divorce when
their marriages failed and
demanded child custody, which the courts were beginning to grant to mothers. Women
from the old middle classes continued to observe the veil, seldom went to university,
and entered strictly arranged marriages often before finishing high school. Some
endured an ʿaqdi or sigheh co-wife, but seldom petitioned for divorce. In their extended
families, marriage was still an institution for procreation rather than for emotional
intimacy and female sexual fulfillment.
A backlash against the gender reforms of the more modernized sectors of society was
underway by the late 1970s. Leftist critics of the Pahlavi autocracy, of Western
imperialism, and of consumerism joined forces with conservative Islamists in anti-
regime protests. To an extent, these two oppositional factions coalesced, not only on
broad political issues, but also in their criticisms of the sexual norms of the modern
urban woman. The partial confluence of the two groups’ views on cultural issues helped
make the Islamic Revolution possible. Capitalizing on these circumstances, Ayatollah
RuhollahKhomeini, who had lived in exile in Iraq and then briefly in France, managed
to assume overall leadership of the revolution and to establish the Islamic Republic in
1979. Retrogressive policies soon followed: the regime attempted to reinstate shariʿa
law and resegregate public spaces. It also abrogated reforms benefiting women in
marriage and divorce, lowered the age of marriage for girls to nine, pursued pronatalist
polices, restricted women’s employment, and mandated the hijab for all women. The
very recent toleration of a modern gay lifestyle in elite communities also vanished,
sometimes by means of executions.
Post-revolutionary Iran did not experience a wholesale return to the sexual and gender
mores of the early twentieth century, however. Parents did not return en masse to the
practice of child marriage. The mean age of women at first marriage, which had reached
nineteen in 1976, continued to climb. Although they were subject to many restrictions,
women were not forced out of public spaces such as mosques, schools, streets, and
offices, nor did Iran slide back into illiteracy. In fact, literacy rates increased
substantially after the revolution. On the whole, the Islamist regime was not altogether
antimodern and it employed various techniques of modernity. It continued the literacy
and health campaigns of the Pahlavi
era, projects that the public embraced more enthusiastically when offered by an Islamist
state that was the product of a popular uprising. The new state even adopted a
constitution, one of the characteristic features of a modern nation-state.

The Islamic Republic’s constitution granted unparalleled authority to the Shiʿi clergy.
The seventy-year struggle among the shah, the Parliament, and the clerics had resulted
in a decisive victory for the clerics,
who founded a new kind of theocracy that eliminated the position of monarch and gave
most of the executive power to the Supreme Leader, at first Ayatollah Khomeini. In
addition, the Supreme Leader appropriated many of the former powers of the
Parliament. The supervisory bodies of the new state recognized only those people who
accepted the principles of the Islamic Republic and expressed devotion to Khomeini.
Only groups that did so could participate in the political process. These changes were
accelerated by the Iran–Iraq war of 1980–1988. After 1979 the state gave men more
power over women’s sexuality and reproductive functions. In the name of protecting the
honor of women and the nation, men of all social classes gained easier access to sex
through marriage, and sometimes outside of it. Likewise, pederastic relations between
adult men and youth were ignored in the newly sex-segregated
spaces of the Islamic Republic, while claiming an openly gay or lesbian identity became
a capital offense.
The state also attempted to reverse modern trends in love and marriage. Open dating
and expressing public affection, even between married couples, could lead to arrest.The
morality police punished anyone who violated the hijab regulations or any of the other
conventions of the sex-segregated order.Unilateral,male-initiated divorce through
repudiationwas reinstated.

During the Iran–Iraq War and in its aftermath, the new theocratic state encouraged
polygamy, including temporary marriage, as solutions for war widows and disabled war
veterans, and as outlets for those constrained by the strict regulations against dating. We
know from the work of Foucault that in Europe a pervasive discourse about sexuality
belied the repressive and puritanical morality associated with Victorian England, where
sexuality came under increasing state regulation. The state involved itself in even the
most prosaic issues of gender and sexuality, ranging from marriage and fertility to the
sexual conduct of partners. As Foucault – who called this state intervention in sexuality
a form of “governmentality” – and recent feminist scholars have shown, some of the
most radical transformations in gender and marriage relations arose beneath the calls for
sexual purity in the Victorian era. Such theoretical perspectives can also help to
conceptualize changes in post-revolutionary Iran’s economic and sociological indices,
including literacy rates, infant mortality, and fertility rates. To be sure, the Islamic
Republic instituted a reversal in women’s rights, gay rights, and human rights more
broadly. But it also developed policies that have directly affected the sexual conduct of
its citizens in ways that are hardly traditional. Indeed, various factions inside the regime
have actively deployed whatmight be called a new sexual economy.

The effects of this new economy have proven ambiguous. Its accompanying laws have
denied women many basic rights in marriage and divorce, but they have also
contributed to numerous state initiatives promoting literacy, health, and infrastructural
improvements that benefited the urban and
rural poor. Many of the traditions instituted by the state were in reality “invented
traditions,” a term coined by the historian Eric Hobsbawm. Here are three examples: At
the turn of the twentieth century, social custom, religion, class, and ethnicity determined
a woman’s outer clothing. Lower-class and many
non-Muslim women wore looser veils, while upper-class urban women were fully
veiled. Veiling was thus a class and social marker that more respectable women and
their families observed as a way of setting themselves apart from the lower orders. For a
short period between 1936 and 1941, the state imposed unveiling. The police ordered all
urban women to take off their veils and encouraged then to wear modern dresses and
hats. But Iranian society had never experienced what it has endured since
1979 – morality squads dragging respectable women to police stations and flogging
them for sporting nail polish or makeup, wearing their hijab too loosely, or showing
strands of hair. other sources indicate that honor killings were rare in premodern Iran,
usually confined to the Kurdish and Arab peripheries of the nation.
Most families quietly resolved problems of honor through hymen repair, abortion, or
hasty marriage. With regard to married women’s extramarital affairs, the husband and
family usually handled such matters discreetly, rather than lose honor in the community.
Occasionally clerics or the community took action, executing a prostitute or some other
low-status transgressor of sexual boundaries. But the post-1979 Islamist state
established a new type of “honor killing,” one that was adjudicated and
enforced by the state, rather than the father, the brother, or the community. The idea that
the state would drag an urban, middle-class woman to court and possibly execute her on
charges of adultery, even if her family and community vigorously protested, was
unprecedented not just in Iran but in the Muslim world. A third example is the
execution of homosexuals. In premodern Iran, discreet homosexual relations were a
common practice despite religious prohibitions. The punishment of homosexuality
required repeated
offenses and the testimony of four adult male witnesses, though even then repentance
was possible. Cases actually reported to the police in urban middle-class communities
might involve male prostitution in a
residential neighborhood and pedophilia but not pederasty. However, the Islamic
Republic broke these traditions and also did away with the religious requirement for
witnesses. The state continued to ignore homosexual relations in religious seminaries
and bazaars, but from time to time prosecuted young urban gay men if a single person
reported them or simply after a medical examination. After 2005, an official policy of
active entrapment via Internet chat rooms was also initiated.

Urban Iranian women reacted in very different ways to the 1979 revolution. On the one
hand, modern women from the new urban middle and upper classes resisted the severe
restrictions the new regime imposed on their lives. Some fled the country, forming a
significant part of the Iranian diaspora in cities such as London, Paris, Vienna,
Frankfurt, Toronto, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Chicago. On the other hand,
women from the old middle classes tended to embrace the revolution’s culturally
conservative ideology and helped to enforce its policies. The regime gained additional
recruits through recognizing and subsidizing the families of war veterans and martyrs.
Paradoxically, women who joined the regime’s Islamist organizations were often able to
free themselves fromthe strictures of the patriarchal family and avoid strictly arranged
marriages, or marriage altogether. They joined the literacy and health corps, volunteered
for the reconstruction program, enlisted in the auxiliary military organizations that aided
the war effort, or signed up for female morality squads that monitored the lives of more
modern-oriented women and men.
By the 1990s, a generation of Islamist women that had pursued graduate degrees had
risen to prominence. Some were relatives of high-ranking male Islamists; others were
related to war veterans and martyrs, or had themselves participated in the war. One
might consider them an Islamist “New Class,” similar to the Nomenklatura in the Soviet
Union (Djilas 1983). Soon, women in these culturally conservative social sectors were
marrying later than previously. The number of arrangedmarriages among them shrank,
and that of more companionate marriages grew, reducing the vast cultural gap on gender
issues that had existed in the 1970s.
In the 1990s, as the state responded to the increase in fertility by reversing course and
encouraging smaller families, the result was even more dramatic. Without relenting on
many other women’s rights issues, a comprehensive family planning program in both
rural and urban communities
was established alongside the literacy and health campaigns. Family planning classes
offered sex education for prospective couples and encouraged them to limit their
offspring to two. By enlisting tens of
thousands of female volunteers as counselors, and by providing free contraceptives for
married couples, the family planning program contributed to a major decrease in
fertility rates
This birth control campaign showed that the state could adopt a somewhat liberal and
tolerant discourse on sexuality in order to achieve its goals – in this case, population
control. On most other gender issues, though, the state followed a patriarchal hard line.
It stalled, halted, or reversed some previous reforms regarding the legal age of marriage
for girls, polygamy, unequal inheritance rights, domestic violence, and divorce. On
these issues, the regime often followed a misogynistic reading of Islam, insisting that
this was the only proper interpretation of the shariʿa. In response to this intransigence,
battles for a more tolerant society have been fought in numerous and sometimes
unlikely sites since the liberalization of the mid-1990s. Writers, journalists, lawyers,
artists, musicians, fashion designers, actors, film directors, college students, and
homemakers became activists in the Reform Movement. Reformists came from many
different social and religious backgrounds. Somewere leftist Islamists who had
participated in the revolution, fought in the war, and contributed to subsequent literacy,
health, reconstruction, and family-planning campaigns. Many were increasingly
dissatisfied with the theocratic state and the losses from the war, in which nearly a
million people were injured or killed on both sides. Reformist Islamists and more
secular opposition sectors, which were repressed but never extinguished, sometimes
reached a provisional agreement to unite for a common cause. The new Reformist
organizations were reinforced by the increasing numbers of youth influenced
by satellite television and the Internet, who chafed under the restrictions of the
theocratic state and its morality police. By the first decade of the twenty-first century,
the institution of marriage
had irrevocably changed. Both husband and wife entered marriage with greater
expectations about companionship and emotional intimacy, hopes that often remained
unfulfilled. These rising expectations contributed in turn to an increase in
unhappymarriages and a rising divorce rate, despite limitations on women’s right to
initiate divorce. In the absence of legal reforms that would have granted women greater
rights within the family, and economic reforms that would have provided them with
greater
financial autonomy from fathers and husbands, social problems among women and girls
increased. Since 2000, hundreds of thousands of young women have run away from
home, but they have too often ended up in domestic prostitution rings or in the Persian
Gulf sex trade. Drug addiction, risky sexual behavior among urban youth, and suicide
rates among impoverished rural women were also on the increase.
Today we are witnessing a sexual awakening that builds on the nation’s rich religious,
cultural, and social repertoire in order to challenge the theocratic regime and to work for
a more democratic society. Unlike struggles in the West, where feminist movements
emerged out of democratic societies and attempted to expand the limited rights of
liberal democratic states, these struggles in Iran are taking place under an authoritarian
system. Iranian cinema, women’s magazines, secular and Muslim feminists, advocates
of women’s rights in various government posts, human rights activists, and supporters
of modern gay and lesbian lifestyles are all contributing to new discourses on gender,
sexuality, and modernity. These new discourses transcend earlier internal religious
disputes and ideological divisions between the West and the Middle East. They favor
more egalitarian gender relations, sweeping reforms in marriage and
family laws, and liberal readings of Islamic law. They also call for a new relationship to
the outside world and to the complex phenomenon of modernity itself. Iranian society
may be approaching a critical stage in a sexual revolution that began more than a
century ago.
This book offers a preliminary study of the evolution of marriage and Iran’s sexual
revolution since the nineteenth century. The coming years will no doubt see a deluge of
publications on this subject, filling in gaps, offering rebuttals, and illustrating variations
on these themes according to region, social class, and religious affiliation, all of which I
shall welcome.Until then, I hope that my broad sketch will be useful to those who care
about gender, sexuality, women’s rights, and the rights of sexual minorities.