Iranian Women’s One Million Signatures

"Noushin Khorasani is an Iranian activist and one of the founders of the One Million Signatures campaign to get signatures for a petitions to revise all sorts of laws, particularly the family law, to make them gender-equal. Khorasani, like Mernissi, emphasises the question of citizenship; she talks about the new citizen and how citizenship has to be gender-equal in law as well as in practice. Her book is a splendid set of articles, almost a case study, of how to build a social movement in the 21st century in order to effect legal change. So if the Indonesian document is the vision, this book is about how to achieve results through a broad social movement. And it’s especially compelling because the million signatures campaign is very much a grassroots movement. Volunteers fan out over the countryside, in urban areas they go across class divisions. All kinds of people come on board. As Khorasani emphasised, simply by circulating a petition there’s a lot of spreading the word about the basic ideas and demands, and it’s also about engaging with the folks who are signing and finding out from them what they think, what they want. And so it’s a constant putting together of people’s demands and questions. It’s very organic – not top down in the usual sense, even though, of course, there are steering committees, organisers, etc. So that’s pretty exciting and inspiring. So much criticism is levelled against all kinds of feminist and equality movements for being elitist and to some extent these criticisms are well founded, and also to some extent it’s very difficult for these movements not to be elitist. But this movement in Iran is very much connected with the broader population. As Wadud does in interpreting the Qur’an, Khorasani stresses the necessity of connecting with people’s lived experiences in order to achieve social justice. Khorasani points out that the demands for legal reform come from what people need in their daily lives, what they suffer in their daily lives. So the legal reform movement is very pragmatic, demand-based, and non-ideological – and informed by the needs and desires of the broad population. Khorasani relates how just before the presidential elections of last year there was a convergence of women’s movements, voicing their demands. They contacted the two major opposition candidates, Mousavi and Karroubi, and asked them to take a stand on their positions on legal reform and equality for women. The convergence between the million signatures campaign and the election campaign was impressive. She stresses: ‘We’re not interesting in testing who is religious or non-religious; we’re pragmatic and non-ideological, and we can focus on achieving results.’ Khorasani says quite simply that there’s a choice to be made between democracy and dictatorship. They were steaming ahead but then they were stopped. The problem is that last spring repression was getting beefed up even before the elections and then afterwards the campaign was muted – it was silenced by the government. It seems only to be dormant and, like so much else, the word has spread and hopes that have been raised cannot be erased just like that. Repression, as terrible as it is, is not eradication. Khorasani’s book of this vast movement helps us see that. The Muslim world, as we know, spans the globe today way beyond the older Muslim societies in Africa and Asia, so Muslims and Islam are present in the West as well. I think more and more of what we’ve talked about ­– these new egalitarian ideas about Islam – are getting into the Muslim mainstream as well as into other worlds. But there is still more ignorance than knowledge or exposure to new ways of thinking about Islam and gender out there. Even when introduced to the new ideas about Islam, many Muslims and non-Muslims, for their different reasons, are often resistant to this new thinking. Many initiatives have stalled, conservatism is even more rampant than before and many governments in Muslim majority countries are clamping down, claiming security concerns. There’s state repression – as Mernissi says in her book, fear of democracy big-time – and a vast gender-reactionary sea is sweeping through these societies. So in the short term, things are very, very difficult. But I am at heart an optimist, and there is another sea swelling – other currents moving in a different direction. In spite of all the repression and reactionary intransigence there are also very strong insistent movements for democracy – as we see in the case of Iran – and people are using religious and secular arguments to open up space for democracy. So I do think repressive regimes and patriarchalists of all stripes, wherever they are, and whether secular or religious, feel and fear the death knell. They know their hoodwinking is laid bare and that their power and privilege is highly endangered – because no genie, especially the genie of justice, can be put back in the bottle."