Khomeini's unlikely legacy to women's rights
Colin Freeman

June 19, 2005 - (Scotland on Sunday) She may be the granddaughter of the Islamic revolution, but today, Zahra Eshraghi worries about work-life balance like any other modern woman.

Twenty-seven years after her grandfather, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, wrote the constitution that condemned Iran's women to a life of veiled drudgery, Eshraghi wants it changed to recognise her twin roles as dutiful wife and feminist politician.

"I work hard during the day, but when I come home at 5pm I am a mother of two children," she says, smoothing down a black headscarf that is worn under protest. "Our constitution still says the man is the boss and that the woman is a loyal wife who sacrifices herself for her family.

"But society here has changed, especially in the last 10 years. If my grandfather were here now, I am sure he would have had very different ideas."

Posthumously recasting Khomeini as a progressive feminist, rather than a firebrand Islamist, is not the only way that Eshraghi, 41, wants to dismantle his legacy. A leading light in Iran's reformist movement, she also seeks an end to compulsory headscarves for women, a general curbing of the power of mullahs, and the right to have stood in Friday's presidential elections.

"The constitution my grandfather approved says that only a man can be president," she says. "We would like to change the wording from 'man' to 'anyone'.

"But discrimination here is not just in the constitution. As a woman, if I want to get a passport to leave the country, have surgery, even to breathe almost, I must have permission from my husband."

Eshraghi is just one of many Iranians with impeccable revolutionary credentials who are now questioning her grandfather's clerical regime.

Her husband, Mohammad Reza Khatami, was a teenage revolutionary who was part of the group that stormed the US embassy in 1980 and took its diplomats hostage for 444 days.

Today, though, he is the running-mate of Mostapha Moin, a popular reformist candidate in last Friday's presidential elections.

The fact that members of the former aristocracy of Iran's Islamic revolution are now its most prominent critics, reflects nostalgia for Khomeini's era as much as disillusionment.

Tehran is still plastered with portraits recalling the days of his fiery rule, alongside the occasional 'Down with the USA' slogan and the road behind the British embassy called Bobby Sands Street. Those who were close to Khomeini, either by blood or deed, are still felt to be the best judges of where the mullahs who took over after his death in 1989 have gone wrong.

It is no coincidence, for example, that the front-runner in the presidential polls is Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who studied under Khomeini and helped him kick out the Shah in 1979.

Like many Iranians, Eshraghi, a philosophy graduate who is also head of the youth department in the interior ministry, maintains her grandfather was a misunderstood man, whose pious mission was corrupted by some of those around him.

She says: "It is such a pity for him - wherever you go all over the world, you find people saying things against him. He loved freedom and liberty, that was why he came here in the first place. I believe many of the people who surrounded him had frozen minds. They were the decision makers." But while her status as the offspring of the nation's founding father garners her huge influence, the mullahs have not taken kindly to her using it to undermine their authority.

In last year's parliamentary elections - in which women were allowed to compete - Iran's hardline guardian council vetoed Eshraghi's candidacy on the basis that she was guilty of "non-respect for Islam" and "disloyal to the constitution and Islamic republic".

Among the reasons given was her outspoken attacks on women's dress codes, and the fact that she greeted Shirin Ebadi, the human rights activist and fellow feminist, who won the 2003 Nobel Peace Prize, on her return from receiving her award. Her husband, likewise, was vetoed because of his alleged lack of loyalty to current supreme religious leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

But whatever their frustrations, neither Eshraghi nor her husband talk of another revolution. "Some people say the reformists have done nothing, but the way forward now is step-by-step, not overnight," she says.

"If I said in an interview a year ago that the constitution needed changing, I would probably have ended up in jail. But I know my grandfather would be backing me. He was always a moderniser, a reformist - and if he was alive today, he would have had me to listen to."

from: http://news.scotsman.com/politics.cfm?id=673792005