Iran - Andrew Burke [38]
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On the street, especially in Tehran, you will see that superficially the dress code has eased and the sea of black chadors is offset by shorter, tighter, brightly coloured coats and headscarves worn far back on elaborate hairstyles. Young girls have lost the fear of being seen outside the home with unrelated men, and many defy the regular clampdowns. Activists such as Shirin Ebadi, who works as a lawyer and champions human rights, are insistent that within Islam are enshrined all human rights and that all that is needed is more intelligent interpretation.
Any visit to an Iranian home will leave you in no doubt as to who is really in charge of family life – which is the most important institution in Iran. Iranian women are feisty and powerful and they continue to educate themselves. Most women in Iran will tell you that the hejab is the least of their worries; what is more important is to change the institutional discrimination inherent in Iranian society and the law. As ex-Reformist MP Elaheh Koulaie says: ‘We have to change the perceptions that Iranians have of themselves, the perception of the role of men and women’.
After conservatives regained control of the Majlis in 2004 Click here, and hardline Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was elected president in 2005, many feared the recently won reforms would be rescinded. For two years nothing much changed. But in mid-2007 the government began acting on restrictive laws that hadn’t been enforced for years. In Tehran women wearing too much make-up and not enough scarf were arrested; across the country female university students were told to start wearing a maqneh or stop coming to class. It was part of a broader crackdown that also targeted satellite TV dishes and opposition media.
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Through its portrayal of Behnaz Jafari, an ambitious young Tehran actress, Pirooz Kalantari’s 1999 film Alone in Tehran shows the difficulty of being an independent woman in Iran.
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These sort of crackdowns happen periodically in Iran, often as a means to divert the public focus from other domestic political issues (this one coincided with a deeply unpopular petrol price rise). But by late 2007 it seemed there had been a lasting tightening of official attitudes.
For women, the immediate future looks much less optimistic than it was a few years ago. However, no matter how Iran’s political landscape changes, it seems certain Iranian women will continue to assert their rights and slowly chip away at the repressive system, be it with a defiant splash of red lipstick, making visionary movies or becoming expert at interpreting the law and winning the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Arts Kamin Mohammadi
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CARPETS
ARCHITECTURE
PAINTING
CALLIGRAPHY
MINIATURES
ILLUSTRATED MANUSCRIPTS
GLASSWARE
LACQUER WORK
MARQUETRY
METALWORK
POTTERY
TEXTILES
MODERN ART
MUSIC
LITERATURE
CINEMA
THEATRE
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Most Iranian art forms predate the Arab conquest, but since nearly all of them reached their peak within the Islamic era, religious influences are rarely completely absent. What distinguishes Iran from other Islamic countries, however, is that the Persian culture that predates the Islamic conquest was already over a thousand years old when the Arabs arrived.
In Iran Islamic art favours the non-representational, the derivative and the stylised over the figurative and the true-to-life. Geometrical shapes and complex floral patterns are especially popular in Iranian art. Traditionally, Islam has forbidden the representation of living beings, but if you’re more used to travelling in Sunni Islamic countries, where such images rarely appear, the portraiture and images of animals in Iran might come as a surprise.
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CARPETS
The best-known Iranian cultural export, the Persian carpet, is far more than just a floor covering