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Nahal Mottaghian
Tehran, Iran

It is now summertime in Iran, and the Islamic dress code has been nothing but a nuisance. My monteau, a loose-fitting overcoat, keeps me constantly sweating, and my hijab adds a layer of heat. When I came to Iran in January of 2014, it was wintertime and cold, so the Islamic dress code didn’t bother me so much. Wearing a long coat was only logical, and wearing a hijab added a layer of warmth.

When I was preparing for this summer’s trip, my grandma advised me to arrive dressing as conservatively as possible. It was still the holy month of Ramadan when I landed on June 14, and I was told that the police were extra-sensitive about the dress code. So, I wore all gray—a gray monteau down to my ankles, a gray hijab folded for double thickness, just to be sure you couldn’t see through to my hair. I had removed my nose ring, my 3 bracelets, my 7 rings. My gray pants rose past my ankles when sitting down, so I bought men’s grey dress socks from the Istanbul airport, just to be safe.

When I arrived and looked around, I wanted to laugh out loud. I must have looked like such a fool! Iranian women were not dressed like I was. Their monteaus came in every length and  color. Their hijabs sat halfway back on their heads, revealing almost the entirety of their hair. They wore jewelry, makeup, bright-colored nail polish, and open-toed shoes.

I felt like I should have known better. I am Iranian-American. My entire family is Iranian. And I had been to Iran before.

It was easy for me to assume that this liberal style of dress was influenced by the feminist movement. I thought, look at this act of rebellion! The women’s rights movement, in action, right before my eyes!

I sat down with a friend one day and told her my thoughts. She said, “Where do you think these women buy their ‘liberal’ clothing from? Iranian shops, owned by Iranian businessmen, regulated by the Iranian government. Is it really an act of rebellion when the government is allowing it?”

I didn’t know how to answer her. But it did put some things into perspective. If people assume that Iran is under Talibanesque rule, it’s easy to be shocked by the liberal dress. And it is even easier to look at Iranian women and think, maybe they don’t have it that bad.

Yet, while the fight might start with pushing back against the dress code, it does not end there. In fact, it barely scratches the surface of the movement. 

Another friend said to me over tea, “Maybe one day, wearing a hijab won’t be mandatory. But does it really matter if I’m not wearing a hijab [if] I still don’t have the right to divorce, or to the custody of my own children?”

Nahal Mottaghian
Tehran, Iran

I grew up in a house of immigrant stories. My understanding of Iran was built on my parents’ memories of the Iran they used to know, an Iran that had not yet felt the grip of an Islamic regime. But in 1979, the Iran my parents once knew ceased to exist: the seemingly secular monarchy became a seemingly cruel Islamic republic.

Life in Iran is experienced in an entirely different way from how outsiders might imagine. The common narrative surrounding the Iranian people is that the once-free became oppressed. The common narrative surrounding Iranian women is that the once-liberated and modern became helpless and veiled.

While a lot has changed since the Islamic revolution of 1979, it is important to ask: What did women’s rights look like when Iran was a monarchy? Did women have equality before the revolution, or did the post-revolutionary forced veiling of women suddenly make the struggle for women’s rights visible to the Western world?

For this fellowship, I proposed to better understand the women’s rights movement in Iran, and I intend to work with an organization called the Feminist School, located in Tehran. This organization is made up of a group of women who are fighting to increase gender equality.

I plan to spend 9 weeks learning about how these women define what it means to be Iranian women and what the history of the fight for women’s rights looks like. I hope to avoid looking at the hijab as only a symbol of oppression and as the only symbol of oppression. I also propose sharing the voices of Muslim women and allowing them to define their own feminist ideals.

With the Iranian presidential elections around the corner, the state of the country’s politics might face a serious transition. Hassan Rouhani, the incumbent, is seen as a moderate, while his greatest competitor, Ebrahim Raisi, is considered a hard-liner. The results of the election could shift the political and social state of the country, thus making it very hard for me to follow through with my plans to work with the Feminist School. In the case I cannot go to Iran, I plan to work with the Muslim community in London, a city with Muslim immigrants from a wide range of Islamic nations, including Iran.

Nahal Mottaghian
Tehran, Iran

In 1997, Mohammad Khatami was elected president of Iran, and he served two terms. He ran on a platform of reform. His presidency allowed for liberal changes in Iranian social life—liberal, in the context of Iran. This slight sense of social freedom was lost when Mahmoud Ahmadinejad took office in 2005.

A friend of mine was a women’s studies major during the Khatami years. The field at that time, she told me, was in stark contrast to the field today. She worked alongside internationally educated female scholars. She was involved in debates that pulled from traditions and ideals of not only the rest of the Muslim world but from the Western world as well. Today, many of her former professors have been silenced, the debates have become centered on interpretations of the Quran, and finding work has become increasingly difficult.

I asked if there is hope for moving towards full gender equality in Iran and if it is realistic to advocate for policy change. She told me that she and her colleagues had successfully advocated for changing erse, the inheritance law, which stemmed from the Quran. It deemed that when a woman passes away, her husband gets full inheritance of her property.  However, when a man passes away, his wife inherits the value of the trees on his property.

To change erse, the women started by researching why it came to be. What they found was that at the time the law was written, date trees were considered extremely valuable, meaning that female widows walked away with something far more valuable than the property itself. Today, however, this does not translate: trees hold much less value than property does.

The women felt that Parliament would likely agree to change erse if they could show that this idea no longer made sense, that other Islamic nations weren’t using it, and that there were alternate Islamic interpretations of it. This is exactly what they did, and they were able to convince the members of Parliament that this law did not translate in today’s society.

And if one can change a law taken directly from the Quran, one can change laws that are based on interpretations of regulations in the Quran. It is just a matter of working from the bottom up.

Nahal Mottaghian
Tehran, Iran

I don’t want to generalize the Iranian women’s rights movement in any way. I don’t want to simplify it to just a few groups of women fighting for a few different things. The reality is that all women in Iran view their rights differently, and all women prioritize laws they feel are worth fighting for in different ways. However, there are three groups of women’s rights advocates that, I believe, show the range of the movement.

In this age of social media and constant connectivity, My Stealthy Freedom, an internet campaign encouraging Iranian women to share photos of themselves without their hijabs on social media, has gained an incredible international following. The campaign was started in 2014 by Iranian journalist Masih Alinejad, who is currently living in exile. It has expanded to including “White Wednesdays”: Alinejad encourages women in Iran to to wear white hijabs on Wednesdays as a symbol of unity and peaceful protest.

I met a woman in a white hijab on a Wednesday who told me, “It is a way to look around and know who is on your side and [who is] against the mandatory veiling of women.” 

While My Stealthy Freedom is seen as a movement of liberal women, there are conservative women also working to increase gender equality. Politician Azam Taleghani, as the daughter of an Ayatollah, is a conservative and pious woman, and she is advocating for an increase in women’s roles in government. She was the first woman to register her name as a candidate for president and has registered three times. Each time, she was denied candidacy by the Guardian Council, which ultimately decides who is fit to run for president. There is little chance she will see this change in her lifetime; she is 73. But her purpose in trying is to point out the blatant gender discrimination in presidential elections.

There are also women who fall somewhere in the middle. There are scholars, politicians, and advocates, like those in the Feminist School, who are  working towards changing discriminatory laws such as unfair marriage laws, and laws ranging from custody battles to honor killings. These women must analyze the laws, prove why they should be changed, prove that people want them changed (by getting signatures for petitions), and take up the issue before Parliament. The women of the Feminist School have released a list of laws they are working to change, including those for a women’s right to a divorce, custody, stoning, and much more.

All of these women I’ve mentioned, whether liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between, are working towards a collective cause.