Hassan Rouhani’s Women’s Rights Conundrum

Shortly before Iranian President Hassan Rouhani‘s planned visit to France was postponed in the wake of the attacks in Paris, two French journalists showed Mr. Rouhani a picture from the Facebook page of a female journalist. Masih Alinejad has been waging a campaign against the enforced wearing of Islamic head dress, or hijab. They asked President Rouhani whether the photo, which showed an Iranian woman with her hair uncovered, shocked or offended him.

People are free to dress as they like in the privacy of their homes, Mr. Rouhani said, but they have to obey the law requiring women to cover their hair in public. In Iran, showing a bit of hair can be punishable by flogging.

What President Rouhani did not say is that women are not necessarily safe in the privacy of their homes. Representatives of the neighborhood revolutionary committees often crash private parties to ensure that women are dressed appropriately (read: covered) and that there is no improper mixing of the sexes. In principle, Iranian women are barred from social interactions with men who are not their immediate relatives.

In the crazy patchwork that is the Islamic Republic, men and women routinely mix in workplaces, sit next to strangers in shared taxis, and stand in line next to each other in shops and banks. Yet such home raids still take place. Even in Evin prison, where I was held for 105 days in 2007, two male interrogators–sometimes individually, sometimes together–spent eight and nine hours a day alone with me in a small interrogation room. It never seemed to occur to these Intelligence Ministry agents that they were breaking their own rules.

Iran’s attempt at segregating men and women in the public sphere has failed. So, too, its effort to require Islamic head dress. The hijab became mandatory for women when the Islamic Republic was established 36 years ago; while many Iranian women long ago began wearing much looser forms of head cover, the ruling clerics remain obsessed with women’s attire, behavior, and presence in public. For three and a half decades, regulations and ploys have been used to relegate women to their homes. But obligatory early retirement, expulsion from jobs, restrictions on areas of specialization in college or the workplace, arrests, imprisonment, and even incidents of acid attacks to disfigure women walking on the street have failed to intimidate Iranian women. They are a visible, dynamic presence on Iranian streets, university campuses, and workplaces. And they want their rights.

The French journalists who asked President Rouhani about the hijab touched on a hot-button issue. Conservatives and reformists argue over women’s dress and “proper” behavior. A high-ranking cleric, Ayatollah Nasser Makarem-Shirazi, a few years ago blamed increases in divorce, crime, and rape on improperly dressed women. Another conservative cleric, Hojatoleslam Mohammad Reza Zaeri, a proponent of the hijab, said this summer that requiring the hijab was a mistake.

So far, President Rouhani has kept out of the debate, perhaps because he knows that for Iran’s supreme leader, the hijab is a pillar of the Islamic Republic. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei‘s attitude emboldens the morals police to harass women on the streets of Tehran.

Women voted for Mr. Rouhani in large numbers in 2013 hoping he would rein in the security forces, end the arbitrary arrests of female activists, expand women’s job opportunities, and possibly appoint women to his Cabinet. Mr. Rouhani did appoint four women as vice presidents and three women as governors in small towns. But he has fallen short. A scathing report last month by Ahmed Shaheed, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in Iran, says that President Rouhani has sought to improve the status of women but that women have fared poorly under his administration. It paints a grim picture of the status of women in Iran.

The report confirms what many have long suspected: When it comes to civil rights, including women’s rights, President Rouhani’s hands are tied. His reformist inclinations have been frustrated by conservative clerics, the security agencies, and right-wing members of parliament. Perhaps one of these days Mr. Rouhani will strike back at his opponents. He should hurry. He is up for reelection in February, and he will need women’s votes to win.

Haleh Esfandiari is a public policy fellow at Middle East program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She was held in solitary confinement in Evin Prison in Tehran for 105 days in 2007. The views expressed here are her own. 

This article originally appeared in the Wall Street Journal Think Tank Blog here: http://blogs.wsj.com/washwire/2015/11/17/hassan-rouhanis-womens-rights-conundrum/