As demonstrators continue to risk and lose their lives challenging Iran’s regime, Aida Tavassoli recalls the shame and rage she felt growing up under it – and urges the world to support the protests.
I have a picture of my mum, dad, my sister, and me outside our home. It’s 1980 and we are living in the port city of Bandar-Abbas in Iran, near the Persian Gulf. It’s hot and humid. My sister and I are wearing colourful dresses. My mum, who up until then had always worn her hair uncovered, is wearing a headscarf with a small tie under her neck, and a long dark brown uniform with matching trousers she’d made herself. My dad is wearing the same kind of clothes he’d always worn.
My mum was a high school teacher. Up to that date, I remember her long brown hair, and her ordinary work clothes. Suddenly her world changed and so did ours as her daughters. Her hair and her body became the object of political maneuvers by the men in power, Ruhollah Khomeini’s men. It was those men who redefined the “path to heaven” for women and brought compulsory dress code and hijab to Iran. Some women followed suit, as has been the case throughout history — women have been brainwashed into being another pillar in the patriarchal structure that oppresses women.
Music and dancing were banned soon after and women were also banned from singing – a woman’s voice was considered another temptation for men to commit sins and derail the revolutionary values. Expressing happiness became a sin. The reason given was that expressing happiness for a non-religious reason would take our minds off God and the revolutionary values. The 1979 revolution in Iran had been hijacked by clergymen and the country was turned into a theocracy. Women became the target of the regime and harsh rules, and regulations were introduced to control every move they made.
The regime also had an obsession with erasing anything from Iran’s past. For years people were not allowed to choose Persian names for their children and Persian names were also banned for companies and shops.
A couple of years after that photo was taken my family moved to the city of gardens and poetry, Shiraz, and that’s where I started primary school. I loved Shiraz, despite the claws of the morality police (called Komiteh) getting tighter and tighter around our necks through ever-increasing patrols. Wearing a loose hijab or being inappropriately dresssed in the eyes of the morality police was the main reason a woman would get harassed and even arrested. If a woman was unfortunate enough to be caught with a man who was not a close relative, she could be arrested, interrogated, physically tested — and if found to be not a virgin — flogged.
I chose to leave the house less and less as a teenager, it was just not worth the stress. In addition to all the restrictions the regime had imposed on us women, sexual violence and harassment on the streets was constant at the time, and women didn’t feel comfortable going to the police to report such incidents. It was obvious that we women were alone, and no one would hear us or want to help us.
Those of us who were not religious (or did not want to pretend we were religious) and not connected to those in power were pushed to the margins of society and feared retribution by the regime and its people. The propaganda at girls’ schools was widespread; frequently we had lectures by clergymen telling us what wearing the hijab would mean: that hijab would make us look like a pearl in an oyster shell exposed only when it is right. In other words we should be hidden away until a man made us his own.
An obsession with the sexualisation of women’s bodies became the norm. Soon a new technology was introduced to manage female physicality on popular foreign imported TV shows. If a woman’s neck or chest was showing, the focus would zoom in on her face, removing the rest of her body from the frame. As a young woman, it was so humiliating to watch. Women’s arms, legs and any other body parts apart from their faces started getting blanked out with thick black markers on all product packaging, even imported Turkish stockings. We were being erased from everywhere because of our gender. The breasts were cut off the mannequins in shops and it became impossible to search for the word “woman” using internet search engines. George Orwell’s 1984 is the closest description of the state of Iran. Big Brother was truly watching.
A few years into the revolution, even female TV presenters began appearing fully covered in black chadors.
Everything became about what we women wore, how we interacted with men, and how we behaved. There was always a big controversy on TV and radio if a male celebrity accidentally shook a woman’s hand, as any type of touching was banned. From a very early age, I was aware of all these discriminations, and I used to dream of living in a world where I could be treated as an equal to a man, of having the freedom of choice to live like a man.
When I was as young as six years old, I noticed I wasn’t as free to ride a bike as boys were, and I used to think about getting on a bike and escaping. I made a plan: I would shave my head, wear shorts and a t-shirt, and, since my ears were not pierced like other girls my age, I thought I could trick people into thinking that I was in fact not a girl and could freely bike away to a faraway place. That of course never happened, but I did a lot of planning around it.
Years passed and the pain of dealing with being an outsider, an unequal, an untrustworthy cause of all evil and a second-class citizen never became ordinary or easy to handle. In fact, it got harder and harder to stand. I started planning to leave the country and go somewhere I would be treated as an equal to a man. I learnt English and applied to study at Victoria University in Wellington. I wanted to go to a country of natural beauty and where better than the end of the world where it rained all the time and as a result had such lush green spaces? I used to dream of tramping in the bush on my own, the freedom, the feeling of wind in my hair… I started writing down a list of what I would need. I got my cousin involved with all the planning, we filled up pages of a notebook with all the equipment we would need for tramping. By that time, when I was about 14 years old, my family had moved to the city of Karaj, 40km away from Tehran.
I painfully waited for my high school years to finish. In 1996, to get a student visa and to get into a university in New Zealand, you had to have at least one year of tertiary education in Iran for your application to be considered. I selected the easiest and shortest Computer Science degree (a two-year associate degree in a remote town in the outskirts of Tehran) just to get through that required one year of university.
We were so used to having no say or ability to question anything in Iran that when Victoria University rejected my application to study a bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, I took it as done and did not follow up to find out why. I was 19 years old at the time. I decided to transition into a bachelor’s degree in Tehran and then try again to do my Masters at Victoria. I enrolled at the Southern branch of Azad university in Tehran.
Universities in Iran were a place of oppression. What female students wore was controlled, as was whether we wore makeup or nail polish and whether we hung out with any male students. For a couple of years wearing the black chador became compulsory and I, alongside a lot of my friends, resented wearing it. We would put the chadors in our bags and just before reaching the university’s search and interrogation booth we’d bring them out and resentfully put them on. The regime must have realised that rule wasn’t working so they later dropped it; however, we were still obliged to be fully covered in long, dark, baggy uniforms (the only colours permitted were black and dark brown) and big scarves to sometimes even cover our chins. Apparently exposing our chins could also tempt men into committing sin of some sort.
This degrading view — that the essence of a woman’s existence is her sexuality, displayed in the form of body parts, which uncovered or uncontrolled will cause all hell to break loose — has been the root of the oppression of women by men for centuries. The three Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) all promote such ideas. The idea that a woman cannot be trusted and therefore should be cared for by a man is at the centre of these religions, whether it’s through having the father or older brother in complete control of a woman’s life or the husband being the “head of the house”, the ultimate decision maker and provider. Throughout history those who have stood up to such old pillars of patriarchy have been severely punished or outcast. Women trying to break free of such rules and stereotypes often suffer attempts to destroy their reputation — accusations of being promiscuous or a prostitute are still very effective in destroying a woman in a patriarchal society, especially in Iran.
Those of us who were not religious or were anti-regime were called Taghooti; a label we wore proudly. But the years of constant brainwashing at school, on TV and from the huge murals on street walls had started working on me. Deep down I started believing that although I was proudly a Taghooti, I was actually not a very good person. It was at the university dormitory that I realised I couldn’t defend my beliefs. When I told a religious roommate that it would be good to have freedom of choice not to wear hijab, I couldn’t think of an answer straight away when she harshly responded: “What’s that type of freedom you are after by not wearing the hijab?” A few years later, after I’d left the brainwashing cell of the Islamic Republic, I could be myself again and think clearly. I wished a thousand times I could see her again to give her a proper answer.
It was a cold winter day in 1997, and I wore a long dark brown coat with my usual jeans as I walked to the university. I never wore makeup and was following all the dress code rules. I arrived in the search and interrogation booth. There were two women sitting there, covered in black chadors and eating feta cheese and bread. One of them looked at me and offered me breakfast. I politely said thank you and that I had eaten, holding my breath. I sensed this offer was not genuine and that something was up. I hurried to pass. One woman stopped me and said: “What’s this coat you are wearing?” I responded: “It’s the only winter coat I have,” wondering what she meant, knowing my coat ticked all their boxes. “I know exactly why you are wearing that coat,” she told me, “You are wearing it because you want to attract the male students’ attention!”
Twenty-five years has passed but that moment remains so vivid. I’d had years of bottled-up anger, at the same time I felt I was defenseless, a nobody, powerless to defend myself from the absurdity of her accusation. It was more than I could stand. I made a decision there and then and turned around and left. That was the last time I ever attended a university in Iran. I came home feeling determined to try Victoria University again. I asked my cousin who was visiting from the US to help me call the international office at Victoria and we figured out that there was only a misunderstanding on their behalf around the American word “college” education which I had used instead of “university” education for that one year of prerequisite tertiary education. Within months I had arrived in New Zealand.
For 24 years, out of shame, I did not talk about any of the above except with my closest friends. We Iranian women and other oppressed groups of Iran have been ashamed of talking about what’s been done to us, and we have been so scared of speaking up about the atrocities we saw in the past 43 years. But we are finally shaking all that fear off and speaking up.
The empowerment and freedom of women and other oppressed groups in Iran is the empowerment and freedom of the entire nation of Iran. As we watch with admiration from afar all the brave women and schoolgirls removing their compulsory hijab, being arrested, sexually assaulted, raped and tortured by the regime forces merely because they are women and want to have a voice; as we watch our people from all walks of society and ethnicities being killed on the streets of Iran, we are more determined than ever to amplify their voices and raise awareness within the international community. History has proven that all dictatorships will eventually go; the theocratic dictatorship in Iran will be no different.
For a Free Iran