Can Iran's Islamic rulers deal with the challenges of a burgeoning women's liberation movement?

By SCOTT MACLEOD /TEHRAN

ver since its 1979 revolution the image of Iran's women has been the long, black chador. To the outside world, Iranian women appear to live in medieval isolation, obedient to their husbands and to the mullahs who make the rules on what they can wear, where they can go and whom they can kiss.

So how to explain Faezeh Hashemi, a mother of two children who has become the most outspoken member of the Iranian parliament? She recently joined a political demonstration that was violently broken up by thugs after she criticized the policies of Islamic hard-liners. What about magazine editor Shahla Sherkat, whose monthly Zanan (Women) has won an enthusiastic readership by exposing the often tragic results of laws favoring men in child custody cases? Or Sherin Ebadi, an internationally recognized human rights lawyer who took on the defense of an Iranian writer accused of espionage?

During the past few years women of Iran have launched a struggle to moderate Iran's hard-line policies and ease the strict social guidelines put in place by the late Ayatullah Khomeini's Islamic Revolution. "By their sheer numbers, women are challenging the Islamic Republic to change," says political scientist Farideh Farhi, a former professor at the university of Hawaii. "Women have refused to play dead."

Such activism is striking, especially in comparison with such countries as Saudi Arabia, where the ruling royal family still forbids women to drive, or Afghanistan, where the new Taliban regime limited education for girls. In Iran, women are demanding and sometimes winning modification of discriminatory legislation. For example, a husband may no longer obtain a divorce automatically and without sizable alimony. This year, for the first time, more women than men took university entrance exams, and women are moving up in sectors like banking and taking jobs once exclusively male, such as bus driving.

Moreover, women have achieved power in politics that no ayatullah can afford to ignore: opinion surveys show that more than 80% of women, often disregarding their husbands' preferences, favored President Mohammed Khatami in last year's presidential election. That propelled the moderate reformer to a surprise win and put political and social change on Iran's agenda. Since Khatami's inauguration a year ago women have taken advantage of the loosening climate to increase their visibility in everything from politics to sports. Khatami appointed the country's first female vice president, hosted an international women's sporting competition and has fostered the opening of a wide debate on women's rights. Iranian feminists optimistically held the "first annual" fair of women publishers, and women led a 10,000-strong protest demonstration against discriminatory child custody laws. About 5,000 defied public segregation regulations to attend a welcome home celebration for Iran's World Cup football squad.

The progress is relative, of course, and often literally cosmetic. More Iranian women are discarding the drab black chador in favor of tailored raincoats in bright colors. Young women can be seen holding hands with their boyfriends in public, behavior that can still get them into trouble. Hard-liners, including powerful figures like Supreme Leader Ayatullah Ali Khamenei, cannot give in to such change without abandoning the Islamic codes that stand behind their claim to theocratic rule. They have proposed new legislation aimed at blocking the incipient feminist revolution, including a law that would ban the voicing of opinions critical of what the mullahs deem to be the proper role of women.

And, despite their growing power, women are very much second-class citizens in the Islamic Republic. They technically remain the virtual property of men: girls can be married off age nine, wives may not go out after dark without their husbands' consent, and mothers have no rights to child custody following a divorce. Publisher Shahla Lahiji feels Khatami has done too little to pay his political debt to women, but concedes, "We know it is not easy."

What they do have is the right to vote, and they are using it. Besides their role in putting Khatami into the presidency, women voters made Faezeh Hashemi the second-biggest vote-getter nationwide in 1996 legislative elections. Hashemi's success lies partly in fact that she stands as a symbol of both past and future. She is the daughter of former President Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a shrewd politician who straddles the fence between hard-liners and moderates, favors bright colors but wears the chador out of respect for her tradition-minded supporters. But as Iran's husbands are fast discovering, there is a growing determination beneath those long, black garments.