Mehrangiz Kar’s "Crossing the Red Line: The Struggle for Human Rights in Iran"

 

The book begins with the birth of Ms. Kar in the south-western Iranian city of Ahvaz, where tribal and patriarchal traditions rule uncontested and where “honor” killings of women for having illegitimate relations with men were all too common. Ms. Kar recounts instances in which these men, in an attempt to reclaim their lost honor, reenacted a barbaric ritual after their crimes by placing their victims’ heads on poles in front of their houses. These savage customs were Ms. Kar’s first impressions of women’s trampled lives in a country characterized by reactionary religious mores.

 

Ms. Kar speaks of her mother, Batoul, as a formative influence in her life. Batoul, who was forced into marriage with Mostafa, Mehrangiz Kar’s father, literally at gunpoint, gradually matures into a fiercely independent woman, taking charge of all household affairs. Unlike her illiterate and often drunken husband, Batoul eventually learns how to read and write, allowing her to unlock the secrets of the poetry of Hafez, Iran’s great 14th century lyric poet. The association of Batoul with Hafez’s poetry brings to her a defiant quality that symbolizes undermining of the clergy and its hypocrisy. After all, Hafez’s poetry vibrates with devastating attacks on the clerical establishment of his own time, exposing the deceit and fraudulent piety of its members. The link with Hafez becomes even more pronounced as Ms. Kar places her mother in direct opposition to Bibi, her grandmother, who figures in the book as a backward-looking character adhering blindly to a traditional notion of Islam. By describing the perpetual friction between her mother and grandmother as the inevitable outcome of the clash between modernity and tradition, Ms. Kar points to a fundamental tension that has characterized Iranian society since the Constitutional Revolution of 1906. While Bibi enshrouds human existence in Koranic scriptures, Batoul courageously denounces Sheikh Fazl Allah Nouri who, as the most reactionary opponent of the democratic ideals of the Constitutional Revolution, tried to turn the clock back to the early Islamic period. As remembered by Ms. Kar, Batoul’s castigation of Sheikh Fazl Allah’s dogged defense of Sharia and nefarious attack on democracy was rooted in an acute prescience of what would happen to Iranian women if the clergy ever seized power: a total disregard for both human and women’s rights. Collisions such as these in Ms. Kar’s family mirror a dilemma that has crippled the social and political lives of Iranians. Ms. Kar effectively defines the dynamics of her private life in a larger historical context.

 

Ms. Kar’s recollections of the events that led to the overthrow of Mossadeq’s nationalist government in 1953 mark her first real encounter with Iran’s vexing political stalemates. Her memories of this restive period are largely derived from the experiences of Freydoun, her older brother, who participated in pro-Mossadeq demonstrations and gatherings. For this reason, they lack the vividness of her musings on the final defeat of Khatami’s reform movement. Ms. Kar’s remarks about the Shah’s White Revolution in 1963, demonstrate a more mature understanding of both political forces and the status of women in Iran. Here, while Ms. Kar outlines land reform, privatization, and literacy campaigns as the chief objectives of the White Revolution, she also addresses an area which has so far received little attention. According to Ms. Kar, the White Revolution marked the Shi’a clergy’s first organized onslaught on women’s rights. The Cabinet had approved a bill in 1962 allowing women to participate in Provincial Council elections. The advancement of women’s rights was an integral part of transition from a semi-feudal social structure to an industrial society, a goal that the White Revolution was pursuing. However, the clergy, with its misogynistic tendencies, rallied its strength to hamper the emancipation of women. The clerics’ protests against the Shah’s endeavors to modernize Iran culminated in the failed revolt of Khomeini’s supporters and the exile of the future leader of the Islamic Revolution in 1963.

 

Ms. Kar’s memoir offers abundant insights into the causes of the Shah’s fall and the true essence of Islamic theocracy. For example, Ms. Kar highlights the ban on Jalal Ale-Ahmad’s Weststruckness as one of the most “idiotic” actions that SAVAK (the Shah’s Organization for Intelligence and National Security) undertook. According to Ms. Kar, this mindless assault on freedom of expression only helped to secure the popularity of Ale-Ahmad among the intelligentsia and university students. In fact, people read Ale-Ahmad primarily because his works had been censored.

 

Before the Islamic Revolution, Ms. Kar had worked for Zan-e Rooz (Today’s Woman), a monthly magazine that had turned into a platform for promoting Western culture and the concept of equality between men and women. Her real engagement with women’s issues, however, began right after the seizure of power by the Islamists and their crackdown on the rights of women. Indeed, Ms. Kar identifies the International Women’s Day on March 8, 1979 as the turning point that unambiguously established the course of her future activities as a feminist. Incensed by the fundamentalists’ frantic belligerence toward the most basic rights of women, Ms. Kar joined the demonstrators who had gathered in front of the judiciary building to protest against the law of “forced hejab.” This demonstration was disrupted by the violent intervention of the regime’s thugs who insulted, threatened, and beat women, sealing the event in Ms. Kar’s memory as the declaration of war on women by the Islamic Republic.

 

Ms. Kar elucidates, with remarkable acumen, the factors that pushed the discussion of women’s rights to the margin after 1979. One of the most significant factors that, in the early days of the Revolution, forced women intellectuals into silence in the face of the Islamic Republic’s assaults on human rights was their fear that they might be labeled as the supporters of the monarchy. Their retreat, however, irrevocably halted their attempts to promote women-oriented agendas. Opposition leaders made a similar strategic miscalculation in their almost blind focus on dismantling the monarchy. They believed the fallacy that Khomeini’s obscurantist rule was much more tolerable than the Shah’s tyranny. As Ms. Kar puts it, the absence of a critical perspective on Khomeini’s leadership among the intellectuals allowed their rights and demands to be marginalized by the Islamic Republic.

                                               

The last chapters of Crossing the Red Line: the Struggle for Human Rights in Iran reflect the central place that Ms. Kar and Shirin Ebadi came to occupy in the battle for women’s rights during the agitations of Khatami’s reform movement. Ms. Kar accurately describes the inefficacy of Khatami’s government in setting in motion the reform process. She points to two main obstacles that prevented Khatami’s government from keeping pace with the changes that were occurring in Iranian society: the lack of brave and decisive leadership and a defective legal system that allowed conservatives to stifle the press. Nonetheless, as Ms. Kar suggests, the reform movement gave impetus to a number of positive changes. One of its most valuable achievements was the democratization of organizations such as Tahkim-e Vahdat (the Office for Consolidation of Unity) which, before the reform era, had collaborated with the regime’s most conservative factions to suppress all opposition at universities. The emergence of a new generation of liberal-minded students had transformed Tahkim-e Vahdat into an organization which openly criticized the reform government – with such slogans as “Bypass Khatami.” This period also saw religious and secular intellectuals forge alliances as many religious thinkers, such as Abdolkarim Soroush, readily embraced the possibility of separation between state and religion. Although the reform government lacked a well-developed plan to ensure the establishment of civil society in Iran, it generated wave after wave of discourses on human and women’s rights in the press and within student communities.

 

Ms. Kar never loses sight of the question of women’s rights in her book and, interspersed with her assessments of the fortunes and failures of the reform movement, she frequently returns to the regime’s maneuvers to hinder any public discussion of women’s issues. Ms. Kar speaks of the strategy of “women against women” through which the women Members of Parliament (MPs) during the Fifth Parliament colluded with the fundamentalist faction to curtail her and Shirin Ebadi’s activities in the Iranian press. In fact, one woman MP, Mrs. Vahid Dastjerdi, not only presented the Fifth Parliament with a proposal against the publication of articles about women’s rights in the press but went as far as to indirectly threaten Ms. Kar and Shirin Ebadi with retaliatory action by vigilantes.

 

Crossing the Red Line: the Struggle for Human Rights in Iran provides the reader with one of the most accessible accounts of the Islamic Revolution and its aftermath. It brims with a wealth of knowledge and immediacy. Lenin wrote What is to be Done? as an acutely practical appraisal of Russia’s condition on the eve the October Revolution. Ms. Kar’s thoughts on the situation of women in Iran display the same practical urgency.