[What the current Iranian anti-Islamist national uprising, the
Iranian feminist Revolution of 2022, has thus far demonstrated is that
the power of the reactionary clergy over the consciousness of Iranian
society with its dark spell after centuries has finally been broken en
masse – and for the good. Whatever the outcome of current events –
whether the regime falls in short order or over a protracted period
– there is no going back.]
[[link removed]]

A FEMINIST REVOLUTION IN IRAN?  
[[link removed]]


 

Wahid Azal
September 30, 2022
CounterPunch
[[link removed]]


*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

_ What the current Iranian anti-Islamist national uprising, the
Iranian feminist Revolution of 2022, has thus far demonstrated is that
the power of the reactionary clergy over the consciousness of Iranian
society with its dark spell after centuries has finally been broken en
masse – and for the good. Whatever the outcome of current events –
whether the regime falls in short order or over a protracted period
– there is no going back. _

Students of Amir Kabir university protest against Hijab and the
Islamic Republic., Public Domain

 

‘_We have given the power of the world and its leadership over to
women! O you women of the world, be you responsible with it, if you be
just and fair!_’ – FIRST GATE OF THE FIFTEENTH UNITY OF THE
BAYĀN

As several historical narratives have detailed,[1]
[[link removed]] during
the summer of 1848 as revolutions were raging across Europe, and
closely contemporaneous with the publication of the COMMUNIST
MANIFESTO by Marx and Engels; an ancestor of mine and iconclastic
revolutionary Bābī leader and Iranian Shiʿite woman hailed by the
Bāb as the ‘return’of Fāṭima (i.e. the prophet Muḥammad’s
daughter), and known to posterity as Ṭāhirih Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn (the
Pure Solace of the Eyes) (d. 1852), appeared publicly unveiled atop a
make-shift dā’is in the hamlet of Badasht northern Iran, Semnan
province, where Bābī leaders and laity had gathered at the time on
their leader’s behest, i.e. the Bāb (himself incarcerated at the
time in Iranian Azerbaijān), in order to determine the fate of their
movement. Creating an uproar that resonates to this very day by
scandalizing the orthodox religious establishment for appearing
publicly unveiled, there Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn is apparently credited for
proclaiming the abrogation of the Islamic dispensation altogether with
its _sharīʿa_, declaring her own divinity in the process, while
promulgating a new scripture on behalf of the Bāb superceding the
Qurān known as the Bayān (exposition). A few accounts have
dramatized words uttered by her to the effect that, ‘I am the word
which the Qāʾim [i.e. the Islamic messiah] has uttered putting the
kings and rulers of the earth to flight!’[2]
[[link removed]]

Four years later in the late summer of 1852, as the absolutist Qājār
monarchy and its reactionary clerical allies had struggled on the
brink of collapse to put down Bābī uprisings throughout Iran with
the heresy it represented to them; and following a four year
incarceration by government forces as a vocal religio-political
dissident; on the back of a failed Bābī assassination attempt on the
life of the Qājār monarch, Nāṣiruddīn Shāh (d. 1896); by royal
edict Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn was strangled to death with her body buried
somewhere in the royal gardens (bāgh-i-ilkhānī) of Tehran.[3]
[[link removed]] Although
neither Bahāism nor a modern Iranian feminist movement were to emerge
for a few more decades yet from 1852, both movements have subsequently
claimed her as theirs, and often for contradictory reasons. Twentieth
century Iranian feminists and activists such as Sadīqa Dawlatābādī
(d. 1961)[4]
[[link removed]] or
the modernist poet and iconoclast Forough Farrokhzād (d. 1967)[5]
[[link removed]] were
inspired by her example. There is even speculation that the
Islamo-Marxist ideologue of the Islamic Revolution himself, ʿAlī
Sharīʿatī (d. 1977),[6]
[[link removed]] was
secretly a Bābī – his uncompromising anti-clericalism being
implicit evidence to that end, not to mention that his late wife never
donned the ḥijāb until forced to by the Khomeinist state.
Sharīʿatī’s series of Hosseiniyah-Ershād lectures bound as a
single volume, entitled ‘Fāṭima is Fāṭima’ (fāṭima,
fāṭima hast),[7]
[[link removed]] also
seems to be a bow to Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn rather than the Fāṭima of
orthodox Shiʿite piety.

That said, while as yet unacknowledged, the historical shadow of
Ṭāhirih Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn, the ‘Remover of the Veil’, hangs
long over current events unfolding in Iran, with Mahsa Amini (who was
murdered by the security forces of the Morality Police of the Islamic
Republic on the 13th of September 2022 which triggered current
events) becoming a sort of archetypal Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn revisited,
since Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn was the first modern Iranian woman to have
challenged the Islamic patriarchy at its root, and the ḥijāb in
particular, in the way it is once more being decisively challenged and
defied, this time by all sectors of Iranian women rather than just a
single person. The slogan of this uprising, ‘Woman, life, freedom’
(zan, zendegī, āzādī), also epitomizes what Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn and
all Iranian women who came after her have stood for, struggled and
fought for. In a sense, given its conspicuous anti-clericalism,
current events are also a reprise of the Iranian Constitutional
Revolution (1906-1909) itself from where it left off: a movement
initially spearheaded by late nineteenth century and early turn of the
twentieth century Iranian Azalī Bābīs that was originally designed
to curb both the unchecked power of the absolutist monarchy as well as
the reactionary Shiʿite clergy behind it.[8]
[[link removed]] Given
Tsarist Russian intervention in an anti-Constitutional _coup
d’etat_ in 1909 on the side of the Qājārs and some of their
clerifical allies, such as Khomeini’s bigotted anti-Bābī hero
Shaykh Faḍlullāh Nūrī (d. 1909) – an arch-reactionary figure of
the period which the Islamic Republic has gone out of its way over the
years to celebrate and lionize – this movement slowly unravelled
over the next decade before being twilighted altogether with the rise
of the Pahlavi shahs and their uber-modernist, statist and
petro-dollar dictatorship during the 1920s. But its memory and thrust
lived on because it re-appeared in a new guise during the Anglo-Soviet
occupation of Iran (1941-1946) and with the two shortlived
premierships of Mohammad Mossadegh (d. 1967)[9]
[[link removed]] in
the early 1950s.

While contemporary histories of Iran punctuate its history with
Ayatollah Khomeini (d. 1989), his Islamic Revolution of 1979 and the
veiling of women, the past forty-three years have proven that 1979 and
the Islamic Republic were in fact a historical aberration and so not a
progressive stream connecting it with the Constitutional Revolution
and its aims. So perhaps contemporary events, especially if the
mullahs’ regime were to be taken down, are a historical
self-correcting mechanism, as it were. Indeed events have proven that
Khomeini and his Islamic Revolution were in fact a counter-Revolution
vis-à-vis the Constitutional Revolution: a counter-Revolution that
has critically stymied and crippled Iranian society for the past four
decades on all fronts, and one that merely replaced the absolutism of
the former kings with that of the mullahs (what else is the system of
the Guardianship Jurisprudent and Supreme Leader other than an
absolute monarch with a turban); this, since it has been the mullahs
who always bolstered the worst excesses of entrenched power and its
patriarchy whether under the Safavids or the Qājārs and then the
Islamic Republic, i.e. the ‘black Shiʿism’ which ʿAlī
Sharīʿatī had vociferously criticized in his books and lectures, as
opposed to the people-powered ‘red Shiʿism’ that arguably was the
Shiʿism once briefly represented in Iran by the Azalī Bābīs[10]
[[link removed]] with
their revolutionary aspirations to transform Iranian society from the
authoritarianism of the royal court as well as, and especially, the
patriarchal power structures reinforced by the religious hierarchy of
the seminary with its unchecked hold and power over the consciousness
of Iranian society.

What the current Iranian anti-Islamist national uprising, the Iranian
feminist Revolution of 2022, has thus far demonstrated is that the
power of the reactionary clergy over the consciousness of Iranian
society with its dark spell after centuries has finally been broken en
masse – and for the good. Whatever the outcome of current events –
whether the regime falls in short order or over a protracted period
– there is no going back. A proverbial ‘Caesar crossing the
Rubicon’ event has indeed transpired in Iran with Iranian women
leading the charge: events the regime itself triggered it with the
murder of Mahsa Amini on 13 September 2022.

However, it should be underscored that while Western governments and
their corporate allies may be presently rubbing their hands in glee at
the prospects of the fall of the Iranian mullocracy with the markets
and profits it could potentially open up for them; the fact is that
this Iranian Revolution has a conspicuous leftwing and social
democratic thrust to it. Iranian women and men are not fighting and
dying on the streets of Iran so that the warped neoliberalism of the
mullahs is replaced with the neoliberalism of Wall Street and Davos.
They are not fighting and dying to transform Iranian society into a
comprador petro-state like it was under the Pahlavis or what occurs in
the Gulf Arab kingdoms. Iranian women are fighting and dying for their
rights as human beings against vicious religious patriarchy with the
men behind them fighting for social and economic equity that both the
shahs as well as the mullahs have denied them for over a century and
longer. When – and not if – this Revolution succeeds a native
secular social democratic order will surely replace it, and one that
will be the legacy of Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn as well as Mohammad Mossadegh
both.

While some sectors of the global Left may sceptically be looking on at
current events in Iran as some kind of a predictable ‘regime
change’ event orchestrated by the West, let me assure the readership
that the Iranian feminist Revolution of 2022 is far from this in its
on-the-ground motivations and thrust. The people of Iran are simply
sick and tired of the corrupt, heavy-handed totalitarian theocracy
foisted upon them by the ayatollahs, with its medieval dress codes,
which has literally impoverished them culturally as well as materially
during four decades. No need to mention that the majority of this
generation fighting and dying on the streets of Iran presently
didn’t even sign up for the theocracy. As such it is a duty of what
remains of a Western Left – namely, those not seduced by the black
propaganda of the Kremlin, its alt-media ecology online and social
media mouthpieces – to support the women and men of Iran in their
struggle against the totalitarian Khomeinist theocracy and its
patriarchal nightmare. Western feminists especially hold a solemn duty
in supporting their Iranian sisters arm and arm, shoulder to shoulder
until victory because should this Revolution succeed – which I am
confidant it will – it will also have been their Revolution for the
liberation of women everywhere, and it will be a world-historical
game-changer like none other before it, not to mention hammering a
nail in the coffin of Islamism everywhere since Islamist government
was a trend Khomeini and his counter-Revolution first set. Let
Ṭāhirih Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn, the ‘Remover of the Veil’, the
‘return’ of Fātima, be the example – and maybe, whether as
herself or as Fātima al-Zahrāʾ, even the leader of this Iranian
Woman’s Revolution against Islamist patriarchy.

To Women, Life and Freedom in Iran and across the world! Yā
Ṣāḥibu-z-Zamān Fātima!

NOTES

1. Such as _nuqṭat’ul-kāf_ (The Point of the Letter K)
attributed to Ḥājjī Mīrzā Jānī Kāshānī, ed. E.G. Browne
(Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1910). ↑
[[link removed]]

2. See the chapter _Qurrat’ul-ʿAyn: The Removal of the Veil_ in
Abbas Amanat, ‘_Resurrection and Renewal: The Making of the Bābī
movement in Iran, 1844-50’ _(Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1989): 295-315. ↑
[[link removed]]

3. Presently, the most detailed and reliable academic monograph in any
language on Qurrat’ul-Ayn remains Soraya Adambakan’s 2008 doctoral
dissertation (in German), ‘_Qurrat al-‘Ayn Eine Studie der
religiösen und gesellschaftlichen Folgen ihres Wirkens_’ (Berlin:
Klaus Schwarz Verlag, 2008); Denis MacEoin’s ‘_The Messiah of
Shīrāz_’ (Leiden: EJ Brill, 2009) is among the more reliable
current studies on the Bābī movement of 19th century Iran.
Tendentious and sectarian Bahāʾī accounts should generally be
avoided even when crafted as academic studies. ↑
[[link removed]]

4. [link removed] (retrieved 28
September 2022). ↑
[[link removed]]

5. [link removed] (retrieved 28
September 2022). ↑
[[link removed]]

6. [link removed] (retrieved 28
September 2022). ↑
[[link removed]]

7. [link removed] ↑
[[link removed]]

8. See Siyyid Miqdād Nabavī-Razavī’s seminally important
‘_tarikh-i-maktum: nigāhī bi-talāsh-hā’i
sīyāsī-i-fa’’alan azalī dar mukhālifat ba ḥukūmat-i-qajār
va tadaruk-i-inqilāb-i-mashrūtih _(Concealed History: An
investigation into the role of Azalī [Bābī] activists in opposition
to the Qājār regime and the genesis of the Constitutional
Revolution)’, Tehran, 2014; also see, Janet Afary, ‘_The Iranian
Constitutional Revolution, 1906-1911_’ (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1996). ↑
[[link removed]]

9. [link removed] (retrieved 28
September 2022). ↑
[[link removed]]

10. [link removed] (retrieved
28 September 2022).

_WAHID AZAL is an independent scholar and political commentator
living in Berlin, Germany. He can be reached on his email
at [email protected]_

_At COUNTERPUNCH, we don't shake our readers down for money every
month or every quarter. We only ask you twice a year, but when we ask
we really mean it. So, please, help as much as you can. Donate
$4/month. Get subscription to CounterPunch+
All contributions are tax-deductible. PLEASE DONATE TODAY.
[[link removed]]_

* Iran
[[link removed]]
* Women
[[link removed]]
* Human Rights
[[link removed]]
* Inequality
[[link removed]]
* religion
[[link removed]]
* Politics
[[link removed]]

*
[[link removed]]
*
[[link removed]]
*
*
[[link removed]]

 

 

 

INTERPRET THE WORLD AND CHANGE IT

 

 

Submit via web
[[link removed]]

Submit via email
Frequently asked questions
[[link removed]]

Manage subscription
[[link removed]]

Visit xxxxxx.org
[[link removed]]

Twitter [[link removed]]

Facebook [[link removed]]

 




[link removed]

To unsubscribe, click the following link:
[link removed]