Sovereign Remedy

As I write, students from Teheran University have spent the last week protesting a new law meant to stifle freedom of the press. The government's response has been prompt: Security forces raided a university dormitory, beating students and tossing them out windows. Riots ensued. Yesterday, police fired tear gas at demonstrators as tens of thousands of uniformed and plainclothes security forces, soldiers, Revolutionary Guards, intelligence operatives, and antiriot units with helmets and shields stood by, watching baton-wielding vigilantes and street thugs rampage. Two days ago, eighteen cities throughout Iran reported widespread demonstrations. It is now Wednesday, July 14, and the prevailing sentiment, despite the vehemence of the protests and the reaction of the security forces, is that the ongoing student protests do not represent a full-bore counterrevolutionary movement against the Islamic republic. Clear heads on the ground in Teheran feel certain that the students, and their sympathizers, from retirees to laborers, mean to signal - in the most forceful terms possible - their support for rapid progress toward democracy, a stronger economy, and the cultural freedom promised by the reform president Mohammed Khatami, whom they brought to power in a landslide election two years ago. If not exactly counterrevolutionaries, these students still represent a formidable force: Two-thirds of Iran's population is twenty-five years old or younger. More important, they remember almost nothing of the 1979 revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini and the hard-liners to power.

There is a fundamental difference between turmoil today and the revolution two decades back: the present chaos. Twenty years ago there was a single and definable goal: to bring down Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi and to replace his Western-leaning, modern-style regime with an Islamic government. That there are no clearly definable sides to the conflict today is precisely what makes the unfolding situation so dangerous. It has become increasingly difficult to know who is working for whom. After a Monday meeting with the Ayatollah Khamenei, the man in control of Iran's security apparatus and army, the popularly elected Khatami stopped calling the demonstrators "university students" and began to refer to them as "rioters who are believed to be backed by terrorist groups."

These uneasy developments form the backdrop against which Shirin Neshat's wildly praised recent video work, for which she won a Golden Lion at this summer's Venice Biennale, has emerged. Until the appearance of Turbulent, 1998, a delicate form of allegory expressing complex political sentiment, and especially Rapture, 1999, the work of the New York-based, Iranian-born artist - self-portraits in which she is posed behind a chador, holding a gun - has been the inconspicuous (and rather transparent) agent of another weary rivulet of multiculturalism. With every appearance of her photographs, the routine Western reading of "gender politics in Islam" was rehearsed and recycled as critics and art historians bore down on the "subject" of her art: how the social, political, and psychological dimensions of women's lives in contemporary Islamic societies are defined by absolute submission. The message one seemed to take away from her photographs was that the level of acquiescence is such that it carries with it a built-in threshold beyond which a woman would just let her revolver do her talking for her. But when students are being thrown from windows, this all seems, well, a mite sentimental and anemic, if not sophomoric.

It also seems a bit contrary to the current situation. Consider the following: Before the '79 revolution, only 35 percent of women in Iran were literate; that figure now stands at 74 percent. Under the shah, women made up one-third of the university population; today it's one-half. One in three physicians in Iran are women; so are 30 percent of this year's Harvard Business School class. These numbers, by the way, come from the West, not from the Khatami government. It is undeniable that significant strides have taken place under Khatami, and it is just as true that higher education, promoted under his version of Islamic government, has had a hand in stirring the unrest he has just ordered put down. As far as gender politics in Iran is concerned, there is no question that reform is being carried forward, but it is important as well to know what kind of reform, where it is headed, and how far there is to go.

The ham-fisted (if not entirely undeserved) readings of Neshat's earlier photographs - where gender politics is the one size that fits all - simply stopped with the imagined situation of women in the Islamic republic. They were never nimble enough to account for the evolving political and social policies of rectification, including the broad-based gains of Khatami's reform government (however modest these appear by Western standards). In turn, the meaning of Neshat's art was arrested, made to appear narrow and incapacitated where real-time politics was concerned. But current events have intervened, and the present din in Iran has helped liberate a complex of meaning that suggests the work is more far-reaching than we had come to imagine.