Not since 1979, when leading American feminist Kate Millett joined thousands of women in protest of Iran’s revolutionary officials’ plan to reinstitute mandatory veiling, have Iranian women had a global advocate. That changed this September, when Georgian-American chess champion Nazi Paikidze announced she would not don the hijab to attend the 2017 World Chess Tournament in Tehran. She refused to attend the games on the basis of “sex discrimination” and has since been joined by several other players.
In the 37 years stretching between Millett and Paikidze, the cause of human rights in Iran mostly languished in anonymity. The world turned its back on Iran, yes, but the cause was also buried by design from within.
From its inception, the Islamic Republic of Iran made a point of defining itself as “distinct”: Muslim but, unlike the majority of the Muslims in the region, Shiite; housed among Arabs but, unlike them, ethnically Persian; a revolutionary government but, unlike its neighbors who were allied with the U.S., staunchly against the “Great Satan.” Iran had invented an effective political decoy drawn on so often and so vociferously that intellectuals and diplomats — from French philosopher Michel Foucault to several national security advisers — started to look at post-revolutionary Iran as an intriguing anomaly in the region, a political case study rather than another tyranny. Italy covered its celebrated nudes to welcome the rulers in its official halls. The French did without wine at their state dinners when Iran was in attendance.
When Iran violated international laws, experts hit the Islamic books and hired Shiism scholars to explain acts that should have been deemed unacceptable. Activists and political groups in the West hesitated to condemn the torture of political prisoners or the assassination of dissidents in diaspora, unsure of how to speak against those who were the enemy of their enemy.
In a region that is otherwise steeped in barbaric violence, especially against women, Iran’s movement for equality remains a beacon of hope.
In its nearly 37-year rule, the Iranian regime’s greatest industry is the manufacturing of enemies — an expertise that has been widely exported. When the wealthy and educated elite fled in the wake of the 1979 revolution, the Ayatollah branded them “violators against God and morality.” When news of the 1979 women’s protest aired on television, the protestors were described as “prostitutes” who could not embrace the veil because they had no virtue. When droves of Bahais, a religious minority, were rounded up from their homes never to be heard from again, they were not missing neighbors but expendable “infidels.” When Kurdish regions were bombed and scores of Kurds executed, they were “separatists” receiving their due. Marxists and socialists, “sowers of corruption on earth,” were imprisoned and executed by the thousands in virtual silence.
And when I and a handful of other women wrote the memoirs of our experiences in post-revolutionary Iran, several U.S.-based Iranian professors branded us “native informants.” We had found the freedom to speak and, as we began to exercise that freedom, we were hit with a tsunami of slander.
Today, it is vital that the plight of women in Iran claims its rightful place in our global consciousness. In a region that is otherwise steeped in barbaric violence, especially against women, Iran’s movement for equality remains a beacon of hope.
Not surprisingly, many have called for a lifting of the boycott on Tehran’s chess tournament and have shunned women from the outside for meddling in the affairs of Iranian women. Once again, women are counseled to turn a deaf ear on their natural allies and trust in “quiet and slow reform.” But Paikidze is doing for the cause of gender equality in Iran what Ray Charles did when he refused to perform in the segregated American South. She is refusing to play by the rules of the oppressors. Where would the civil rights movement be if high profile advocates had not rained on the Jim Crow parade?
There has been no greater plague on human rights campaigns in Iran than “relativism” and its post-modern peddlers. The only thing relativist arguments achieve is to disband the hard-earned solidarity established despite border lines by the idealism of the 20th century. Now relativists are bullying female chess players and their supporters into withdrawing their boycott, accusing them of “cultural meddling.”
Paikidze refuses to don a hijab, the traditional dress for women in Iran | Morteza Nikoubazl/Reuters
Women are women wherever they may be, and as such they have the right to make their own decisions — be it about their dress or their reproductive rights. Those who argue that female activists in Iran should keep their “foreign” sympathizers at bay and opt for slow reform have not suffered under the mandatory veil for the longest 37 years of their lives. No doubt if a well-meaning bus-driver had quietly allowed Rosa Parks to sit at the front of the bus, she would have gotten off and waited for the next bus, for any right that is earned as a mere hush-hush favor, without a binding social contract, can just as hush-hushedly be taken away.
If a movement for equality were to reject global support, it would betray a lack of conviction in its cause. To keep a struggle “local,” is to reduce the gravity of its historic plight, as if fighting for the freedom to choose how to dress were a mere squabble to be settled by the village chief. It infantilizes women by belittling their concerns. To become equal citizens, Iranian women cannot be expected to behave as defenseless minors, at the mercy of governmental masters. As for the rest of us, we must steel ourselves against academic fatwas and relativist opinions. We must keep doing what women do best: stand together in sisterhood.
Roya Hakakian is the author of two books of poetry in Persian and the memoir “Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran” (Broadway Books, 2005).