Nine Parts of Desire Read Online Free PDF Page B

women. It began in 1967, after Egypt’s catastrophic loss to Israel in the Six-Day War. To explain the humiliation, Muslim philosophers pointed to the secularism of Gamal Abdel Nasser’s government, and urged Egyptians to return to the Islamic laws they had abandoned. Slowly, the number of veiled women began to increase.
    But the real surge came with Iran’s theocratic revolution, when donning hijab became a political as well as a religious act. In 1935 the shah’s father had banned the chador. Reza Shah wanted his country to look modern and he thought the ancient black cloak didn’t. But devout women, especially the elderly, couldn’t suddenly make so drastic a change. In her memoir, Daughter of Persia, Sattareh Farman Farmaian writes of her mother’s desolation. “When my mother had learned that she was to lose the age-old modesty of her veil, she was beside herself. She and all traditional people regarded Reza’s order as the worst thing he had yet done—worse than his attacking the rights of the clergy; worse even than his confiscations and murders.” Fearing the shah’s displeasure, her husband ordered her to go out in public unveiled. “The next day, weeping with rage and humiliation, she sequestered herself in her bedroom.… As she wept she struggledfutilely to hide her beautiful masses of waist-length black hair under the inadequate protection of a small French cloche.”
    For others, the so-called liberating edict became a form of imprisonment. Men who had just begun allowing their daughters to attend school revoked their permission when it meant girls walking to class uncovered. Women who disobeyed the shah’s order and ventured into the streets veiled risked having their coverings ripped off and scissored by soldiers. Chador-wearing women were forbidden to use public transportation and denied entry to many stores. Rather than risk such humiliation, many women simply stayed inside. Khomeini’s wife Khadija, for one, didn’t leave her house at all. Such confinement was a particular hardship at a time when most homes didn’t have bathrooms and women gathered to bathe and socialize during the women’s hours at local bathhouses— hamams. The ban was compulsory from 1935 until 1941, when draconian enforcement eased, but unveiling continued to be encouraged and women who wished to veil were derided as backward.
    As revolutionary pressure mounted in the late 1970s, wearing the chador became a symbol of protest against the shah and his Western backers. Some clerics advocated it for predictable reasons. If all women wore it, reasoned the Iranian cleric Ibrahim Amini, wives “could rest assured that their husbands, when not at home, would not encounter a lewd woman who might draw his attention away.” In Britain, the Muslim scholar Shabbir Akhtar came up with an alternative rationale. The aim of the veil, he wrote, “is to create a truly erotic culture in which one dispenses with the need for the artificial excitement that pornography provides.” In both cases, women are expected to sacrifice their comfort and freedom to service the requirements of male sexuality: either to repress or to stimulate the male sex urge.
    Neither of these arguments carried much weight with young intellectuals such as my Iranian interpreter, Hamideh Marefat. For her, wearing the chador was, first and foremost, a political act. Growing up in a middle-class home, she had never thought of veiling until she started attending clandestine lectures by a charismatic young intellectual named Ali Shariati. Shariati, Iranian-born and Sorbonne-educated, married his knowledge of Marxism to his own Iranian Shiite Islam, with its roots in rebellion against the status quo afterMuhammad’s death—and came up with a revolutionary creed designed to uplift the masses and challenge despots. Western dress, he said, was a form of imperialism, turning women’s beauty into a product of capitalism to be bought and sold, at the same time as it made