The global-local intersection of feminism in Muslim societies: the cases of Iran and Azerbaijan

Social Research, Fall, 2002 by Nayereh Tohidi

In late 1999, following an intense campaign and petitions, Azerbaijani Islamic women activists won a court case in support of their demand for the right to choose a hair-covered picture for a woman's passport. Previously, the authorities in Azerbaijan refused to issue a passport with a picture of a woman wearing a headscarf. There were, however, local reasons in addition to the international influence of political Islam behind this pro-headscarf trend. Many of the Azeri Shiite women who have begun to wear the headscarf have been able to travel to Iran for a pilgrimage to Mashhad or have made a pilgrimage to Mecca (in Saudi Arabia). One resolution they make during such pilgrimages is to wear modest dress for the rest of their lives. These pilgrimages earn women the honorific rifles of Mashhadi khanim or Hajjiyeh khanim; wearing a headscarf would signify the right to such rifles, which are also indicative of class status.

Another effect Iran has had on gender issues in Shiite-majority Azerbaijan concerns the so far failed attempts to formally restore the sharia in family law. Some religious authorities and even some women have suggested legalization of "conditional polygyny" and an informal revival of the practice of temporary marriage as a solution to the current imbalance in sex ratios (Tohidi, 2000). Because of growing economic hardships, war, the exodus of young males, and the tradition of endogamy, a large number of young women are finding no chance to marry and raise a family. In the strongly family-centered society of Azerbaijan, this is viewed as a "catastrophe" for women. In the mid-1990s, due to the growing rate of marriage between Azeri women and Iranian male visitors to Baku (some already married), the Iranian authorities, worried about unwanted political implications, introduced rules and legal restrictions against such transnational marriages. In this case too, the gender-related effects of the interplay between certain recent consequences of globalization (such as labor force migration) and local demographic and cultural attributes are clearly observable.

The Pragmatist Approach

The second category, which has gradually replaced the first, draws from the new elite of professional and highly educated Islamic women, well connected to state organs and the new bureaucracy. Their active presence at international conferences and their work to establish international connections are supposed to be in the service of public relations and diplomatic strengthening of the Islamic state, especially its gender image. Yet, in the process of their own experience with sexist barriers at the local levels and their contacts with the international community, especially with women's organizations and feminist discourses, many have come to be less ideological, more open-minded and pragmatic, and more conscious of women's rights.

During the 1990s in many countries (for example in Latin America, as demonstrated by Mendoza, 2000), the locus of feminist activism moved extensively into the transnational arena. In Iran and Azerbaijan, women's local activism not only became increasingly mediated by the transnational and global factors, it also experienced a shift toward de-ideologization, de-radicalization, and pragmatism. This was in part due to the UN-sponsored regional and world conferences on women that stimulated the globalization of the local and pragmaticization of the ideal by facilitating transnational and international interactions, and interfaith and beyond confessional dialogue for both Islamist women activists and secular feminists. During the Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing it was clear how the earlier, strict ideological or missionary approach of the Islamic Republic of Iran's delegations was giving way to a relatively moderate and pragmatic approach informed by UN language and contemporary debates on gender issues. This was striking when compared with the missionary discourse, sectarianism, intolerance, hostility toward diversity, and ignorance about feminism and women's issues both nationally and internationally displayed by the Iranian delegations at the Third World Conference on Women in Nairobi in 1985. I was present at both conferences as an NGO member and participant observer, and I noticed both changes and continuities in the quantity and quality and the class composition and appearance of the delegations from one conference to the other. At the Beijing conference, the diversity and difference in discourse and behavior of the Iranian participants were obvious. Their relatively tolerant attitude toward women of different persuasions, nationalities, cultures, and sexual orientations was reflective of the changes under way within Iran (Ghoraishi, 1996; Tohidi, 1996b).