On my first day in the Islamic Republic of Iran, all I could think about was my hijab, the Islamic covering which I was required to wear as a matter of law whenever I was in a public space. My headscarf itched under my chin; my coat felt tight under my arms. I worried about the inch of hair that was showing; I reached up constantly to adjust it, smoothing, checking. I felt oppressed. I saw how men walked and worked, wearing trousers and shirts just as they liked. Watching the women, I noted the variations of hijab: trousered legs and thigh-length jackets, sheer flowered headscarves, blue headcoverings with a hole for the face that came down to the breast bone, knee-length manteaus and black chadors-tents of sheer rayon that fell from the forehead in a mass of folds to the ankle. They seemed difficult to control. The women who wore them were constantly hitching a fold under an arm, grasping a hem with their fingers, drawing it close in around the eyebrows.
Then, after a few days, I got used to the headscarf. I stopped fidgeting and felt normal. As Iranian women often reminded me, "Hijab! It's nothing. In Iran, we have much more important battles to fight."
In Iran, two women are the equivalent to one man as witnesses in a court of law. A woman must have permission from her husband if she wants to leave the country. Men can take up to four wives, but a woman must have her father's permission to marry. Men are granted divorces relatively easily; a woman has to prove abandonment, addiction or impotence. After a divorce, women have custody of boys only until the age of two and girls until they are seven.
However, Iran is also a country where 62 per cent of university students are women, where women work in ministries, schools and hospitals, where they can run their own businesses, drive and vote. There are several female MPs and a female minister of the environment. Iran is a country where, professionally, women can do almost anything.
I was new and confused, a western woman trying to unravel law from religion from culture. I came up with a Venn diagram of three intersecting circles: one for the Islamic Republic and the laws of the mullahs, one for the Koran and its directives from the prophet Muhammad, and one for the culture of the Iranian people-customs and traditions that stretch back millennia, long before Islam came to Persia.
Iran is full of anomalies. In the Tehran bazaar I saw women covered in flapping black chadors shopping for short-sleeved, bare-shouldered white wedding dresses. Eminem is predictably outlawed and predictably popular. But Dariush, a banned Iranian singer who lives in LA and sings traditional Iranian songs backed with drum machines, is more popular. The 14th-century poet Hafiz, who praises women and wine, is so much a part of the national soul that even clerics recite him. At a party, my host offered me a glass of smuggled Australian Shiraz (the fabled Persian grape) and told me that he had paid off the police not to harass female guests for scant hijab and being seen with men who were not of their immediate family. Yet more than half of Iranian women choose to wear the unwieldy chador, even though a full length manteau is acceptable to the authorities.
In the midst of all of this, at the heart of my western questions about sex and freedom, religion and female independence, I found the strangest anomaly of all: the sigheh.
The sigheh is a form of temporary marriage peculiar to the Shi'a branch of Islam. In its fundamentals it is just like a regular marriage, a contract in which women are entitled to a mehriyeh-an amount of money-and in which any children born of the union are considered legitimate. The only difference is that the sigheh has a time limit that may be as long as many years or as short as a few hours.
This sounds like an excellent way to avoid the illegality of adultery and sex outside marriage, punishable by stoning (though this almost never happens), lashes and fines. In reality, the practice of sigheh is the ultimate oddity in Iran-a sexual freedom sanctioned by the religious establishment but taboo in society.
"In Iranian society, women do not like to admit to sigheh," Shirin Ebadi, a specialist in family law, explained. A married man may take as many women as sigheh as he likes. Married women, however, may not enter into a sigheh. A divorced woman may arrange a sigheh freely; an unmarried woman must have the permission of her father.
Ebadi has several certificates from foreign human rights organisations in her office as well as a green, flowery towel framed and hanging on her wall-a souvenir from her 25 days detained in prison for defending a group of students who had been assaulted by vigilantes after student unrest in 1999. She is as outspoken as any woman I spoke to in Iran. "Our problem is not religion, it is the ruling male chauvinist culture," she told me.
I was continually impressed in Iran by women who had stuck their heads above the parapet and suffered the consequences. One afternoon I met Manijeh Hekmat, a director who had recently finished a film entitled Women's Prison, in which the prison warden was characterised as a dictator, inmates were shown without hijab and there was a lesbian subplot. Unsurprisingly, the film was banned. Hekmat was tired of her failed efforts to get through the censor. "Prison conditions are the reflection of society," she said, planting her red Doc Martens squarely on the floor and pulling her long hijab coat over her knees.
Ebadi and Hekmat are at the forefront of feminist argument. The more conservative women I met attending Friday prayer were not so concerned with reform. These were the traditional women of south Tehran, wives and mothers of the workmen and small shopkeepers. When they learned that I was a journalist, they crowded around me. One wanted me to know that her daughter was a doctor, but that she also knew the Koran by heart. A robust middle-aged woman told me she studied at a theocratic school, another that she had been illiterate before the revolution, "but now I have a high school diploma." "We go swimming twice a week," announced a younger woman.
This was the biggest surprise of all. Far from repressing women, the revolution freed them from the seclusion of their homes. Traditional families began to send their daughters to school and university-because they would be in hijab, and because in the Islamic Republic there were no discos, no alcohol.
In some respects, what Iranian women have gone through in the last 20 years is much the same as western women over the last 50. Education has brought women into the workforce and given them financial independence. The difference in Iran is the lack of an accompanying sexual revolution. Women are still not supposed to have sex outside marriage. Virginity is highly valued in a bride. Divorced or widowed women entering into sigheh are viewed as something between a prostitute and a mistress. For unmarried girls, sigheh is completely unacceptable.
"Men are obsessed with the blood. Our boys expect to see blood when they sleep with their wives for the first time," Massey Shiravi told me, pouring more tea, proffering another chocolate. She is a gynaecologist, sympathetic and practical. She sees women before the wedding and the day after, with parents and husbands. Always there is the question of blood. Often girls beg Shiravi to repair a hymen and, illegally, she does so. If there has been no blood on the wedding night the husband will be furious, the girl humiliated. Shiravi gives the girl a private consultation, takes a napkin, puts a spot of blood at its centre and shows it to the husband. "Men are really stupid. I make up all sorts of stories about a bruise or a blood blister, explaining why he could not produce the blood but I was able to. They believe it."
I asked her if things had changed over the 40 years she had been practising. She said no. She told me about 14 year olds beaten by their fathers because a government pathologist-the doctor who determines virginity-had found a damaged hymen; of husbands' families coming to her house in the middle of a wedding night screaming, "no blood!"; of incest cases thrown out of court...
"The trouble with Iran is that when you scratch the surface you find a lot of nasty tales," Pari told me me. Pari, a freelance journalist, had been educated in Britain and had returned to Tehran recently. She was my bridge between worlds. We were discussing things in a tea house in Tajrish. "So what do people do?" I asked, "What do girls and boys do?" "They play around," Pari said, at ease with western curiosity, "they play with it, but don't penetrate."
Sigheh is a Shi'a solution to a physical reality. It's a way of trying to organise sexual relations and the need for them within Shari'a law. There are many women, for example, who hover around the religious shrines of Qom and Mashhad offering sigheh for a couple of hours to travelling clerics and pilgrims. During the war with Iraq, the government encouraged sigheh for war widows on the grounds that they could form relationships and receive some money to relieve their plight. More recently, elements in the government have even tried to suggest that sigheh could be a way for girls and boys to get to know each other before marriage. "It's a way of trying to control what is already happening," explained Parvin Ardalan, a journalist specialising in women's issues. "They used to arrest a boy and a girl found together. They might say that they were Sigheh Mahram, which meant they were legally engaged. They would then have to go before a judge. The girl's hymen would be checked and, if she was not a virgin, she could be lashed. Nowadays there is not so much of this harassment; there are new caf?s opening all the time where boys and girls go together."
The Koran is like a handbook; its directives for how to live a good Islamic life are specific. It is not like the Bible, which is full of stories and allegories to interpret. In the holy city of Qom, the intellectual cradle of the revolution, the Grand Ayatollah Sanei explained to me, "Islam is a religion which comes as advice for the human being and there are laws which should be based upon those principles... The principles are of justice, equality and freedom and of easiness." Sex is a part of life and the Prophet is clearly in favour of it. "Islam is a very sexual religion," declared Parvin, as we sat in a kebab place one night, "it allows sexual relations for men in many cases, but the problem is women. Women are supposed to control and guard their sexuality."
Sigheh's tacit nod at sex-at women having sex-is at the nub of the ambivalence. Zahra Mostafavi is the head of the Women's Society of the Islamic Republic of Iran, an organisation which acts as a sort of think tank advising the government on women's issues. Mostafavi's conservative Islamic credentials are impeccable; she is the daughter of the late Ayatollah Khomeini. "It's a natural thing for both sexes to have sexual tendencies," she admits. For Mostafavi, and for other conservatives, sigheh is justified on two grounds: that men have these urges and they should have some legal outlet, and that women are, in fact, protected in a sigheh because they take on the rights of a real wife-albeit temporarily. "Sigheh is actually beneficial for women because it makes the man not take the relationships lightly," she says.
But for many in the clerical establishment, the reality of the arrangement remains distasteful. Grand Ayatollah Sanei is known for his liberal views on women; he talks openly about the need for reform on issues like unequal blood money, women as valid witnesses, and getting women on the national jurisprudence committee. "I believe sigheh is a spare tyre," he told me, "really it should only be used in cases of emergency. Problems cannot be solved by sigheh; it can in fact ruin lives."
I heard many different stories about sigheh situations. They were seldom happy tales of sexual freedom; mostly they were sordid extra-marital complications. Pari told me about her neighbour who lived upstairs. A very traditional woman, she hardly left her apartment, and depended on her husband even to do the shopping. The woman could not have children, but her husband stayed with her anyway, perhaps because the apartment was in her name. One day she found a small repair in one of her husband's underpants; she knew it wasn't her repair. It turned out that he had had a sigheh with another woman for some time and had a daughter from the relationship. Pari's neighbour was distraught, but still she didn't throw him out of the house-not even when the daughter turned seven and came to live with them. "Effectively, she is bringing up this child who is not her own; it's a disaster for her," Pari said. "What about the daughter's natural mother?" I asked. "Apparently she has several other children, by other men she has had sigheh with-she was happy to have someone else bring up this child."
The emotional toll of sigheh, often just a sanctioned infidelity, is hidden. I found it almost impossible to find women who had had a sigheh to talk about it. I went to see a male notary. "Not so many sighehs are registered here," he told me. "They prefer to keep it quieter and go through a mullah. I register only about six or eight a month." There are many circumstances in which a couple might get a sigheh: young, liberal people who fancy each other, a divorcee trying to shore up her finances, or even people who work in the same office. But in practice, most sighehs occur between older men and divorced woman. "Usually the woman is having some kind of family problem," the notary told me. Legally, men must have permission from their first wife in order to get a sigheh, but we usually give it to them without this because in Shari'a law it is not required."
I leafed through photocopies of sigheh registrations. There was definitely a norm: almost three quarters of the couples had stipulated a contract for one year and the price, the mehriyeh due to the woman, was 14 gold coins. One gold coin is worth about $80. "That's not bad money," I remarked.
Finally, on my last day in Tehran, I met a woman who had had a sigheh and was willing to talk about it. Feri was not what I expected. She decanted herself from a sheer black headscarf and a slinky black coat. She had a swathe of blonde hair, high-arched tweezered eyebrows and endless legs. She was 26. "I consider it a duty as a woman to explain these things," she said. Feri was divorced and had a baby son. She was not a typical Iranian woman, but she was at the vanguard of something, young and angry. "A girl in this country has no rights," she said. "She is either under the protection of her father or her husband. She just goes from one man to another."
After her divorce, Feri had a boyfriend of whom her father disapproved. Their sigheh had been an arrangement for legal purposes only ("it didn't change anything between us," she said) but it also served as a slap in the face for Feri's father. He was furious. "He didn't want me with any man," she told me, describing him as a "savage dictator" and saying that she thought he was a typical father. "But he has made sigheh a hundred times. My mother knows this quite well. But, no, it's not allowed for his daughter."
Such double standards are manifold. They are there in the shrines where mullahs preach family values but sign short-term sighehs for travelling colleagues. One young university professor I talked to said that he understood the theory about boys and girls and free relationships, but he admitted that when he applied it to his own possible future wife, he didn't like the idea at all.
The Koran, on the other hand, is in this respect without hypocrisy. Muhammad preached kindness and consideration to women. Some practices like polygamy may seem strange to westerners, but in the context of 7th century war-torn Arabia, it allowed war widows to be taken into a family. And it may seem unfair to a western mind that a sister only inherits half the amount her brother does, but it still grants financial independence to a woman and is far fairer than primogeniture. Famously, the hijab is not compulsory in the Koran; neither is the ban on alcohol. Many of the rules we see as discriminatory were progressive for their time. And if some of the laws seem a little unbalanced for a modern society in which women work and earn, the Shi'a religion allows for modifications.
The difficulty is that Iranians live according to the laws of the Islamic Republic and the prescriptions of the prevailing social culture. In Iran, prohibitions on satellite dishes, parties, alcohol, books, independent journalism, foreign movies, American pop-on ideas and culture contrary to the revolution-are quite freely flouted by much of the urban middle class. But the constraints on the relationships between men and women are much less flouted and no one ever makes light of them. It turns out to be easier to ignore the law than to contravene sexual convention. The final irony for the westerner is that sexual attitudes are the result of a kind of collective will; in short, they are the most democratic feature of the country.
