From Tehran to Los Angeles to Tehran: Transnational Solidarity Politics in the One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law

Abstract

From Tehran to Los Angeles to Tehran:Transnational Solidarity Politics in the One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law Catherine Sameh (bio) The One Million Signatures Campaign to End Discriminatory Law began in Iran in 2006, after two years of crackdowns by hard-liners within the government.1 As public protests for changes in women’s rights vis-à-vis family law became less possible, activists began a new strategy to raise awareness about women’s compromised legal status and to bring about reforms in family law. The goals of the campaign were initially to collect one million signatures through door-to-door direct contact, gatherings, and the Internet “in support of changes to discriminatory laws against women” and to promote dialogue and discussion among women and men in meetings and public seminars and conferences (Change for Equality 2006). The collection of signatures was the first phase of the campaign; in the second phase, campaign activists hope to work with supportive legal experts to draft new legislation to replace unjust laws. The laws they seek to challenge are mostly family laws pertaining to custody, marriage, inheritance, and divorce, among other issues. While the campaign uses novel tactics, like street theater and door-to-door petitioning, women’s political participation in Iran has a long history. As scholars (Afary 1996; Paidar 1995) have argued, women were key players in the Constitutional Revolution of 1905–11, shaping a national struggle to reform the corrupt Qajar dynasty (1796–1925) and organizing a women’s movement with more long-term goals of emancipation. The Pahlavi era (1925–79) saw the state-building project as intertwined with questions of gender and women’s status (Najmabadi 1998; Paidar 1995). As Paidar asserts, the project of modern statehood was a coercive one, and [End Page 166] many reforms for women, such as compulsory unveiling, in 1936, were instituted violently. Moreover, as Najmabadi (1998) argues, the constitutional period and the era of the Pahlavis each enabled and constrained women’s possibilities, through the regulation of women’s bodies and gendered ideologies. The shah’s top-down implementation of political change included limited reforms in health, fertility, and education that benefited primarily middle- and upper-class women. By 1976, the literacy rate among rural women was only 16.5 percent, a mere 15 percent increase over twenty years (Paidar 1995, 162). Even for middle- and upper-class women, ideas about the patriarchal control of women in the family remained dominant. By the late 1970s, deep resentment of the shah’s modernizing program, which was not only coercive but also shut out vast sectors of society, had infiltrated many corners of Iran. The 1979 revolution was a broad-based oppositional movement against the corrupt dictatorship of the shah, and its ideological theorists mobilized a discourse of gender equality that gave women a key role in the revolution and postrevolutionary society. Ali Shari’ati, the popular leftist Islamic theorist of the revolution, gave frequent lectures based on his book Fatima Is Fatima. Drawing on the founding period of Islam, Shari’ati argued that women should emulate Fatima, the prophet Muhammad’s daughter, who was “the center of a family of fighters. She took on responsibilities and became socially engaged, equally to men but in a different way” (quoted in Keddie 2003, 205). As Keddie argues, Shari’ati formulated this “separate but equal” doctrine as an antidote to the West’s notion of a liberated woman, hyperindividualistic and sexually objectified, but also in response to women’s seclusion within patriarchal notions of Islam. In this sense, he appealed to national anti-imperialist sentiments that ran deep during the reign of the shah (205). Like Shari’ati, but from a conservative or traditionalist perspective, Ayatollah Khomeini argued for women’s freedom within Islam. He asserted, “As for women, Islam has never been against their freedom. It is, to the contrary, opposed to the idea of woman-as-object and it gives her back her dignity” (qtd. in Sanasarian 1982, 117). Khomeini, too, drew on a growing critique of “Westoxification,” the consumerist, sexually exploitative, and individualist trends thought to be promoted by the West. But as the revolutionary regime began repealing some of women...