The chador is the least of their problems. In Tehran Lara Marlowe finds increasing freedom and assertiveness among Iranian women beneath the international perception of oppression
Masoumeh Soltan Bolaghi stands at the top of the stairs, jumping from foot to foot with child-like excitement. A missing tooth leaves a gap in her radiant smile, and when I reach her landing, the 51-year-old mother of four gives me a bear hug. It is a one-hour journey from Tehran to the working class dormitory town of half-finished mud brick housing estates at Kianmehr where Mrs Soltan Bolaghi lives. When she obtained her licence to drive buses and heavy lorries two years ago, she never dreamed she would become famous, she says. Iranian television has interviewed her, and every woman I spoke to cited her as proof that Iranian women are equal.
Employed by a private bus company, Mrs Soltan Bolaghi specialises in long distance hauls: the 14-hour journey to Kerman in the southeast is her regular route, but she also drives a 36-seat Mercedes bus for 16 hours to Bandar Abbas on the Gulf coast, and 18 hours to Zahedan on the Pakistani border. For the two-day trip to Kerman, she earns just £9.
"In the beginning, it was a big shock for the passengers," she says. "They wondered if I could really drive all the way to those places. They congratulated me, and they were very proud. Some of the women wept when they saw me."
Before her marriage, Mrs Soltan Bolaghi was a trained nurse. When her husband Mohamed suffered a heart attack six years ago, she took over his job as a bus driver. Iran's Islamic laws still require that a husband give permission for his wife to receive a passport or leave the country. "These are the rules," Mrs Soltan Bolaghi laughs. The regulations don't bother her. She is religious and says she would wear the hijab or Islamic covering even if it were not required. She drives in shifts with male drivers, and spends nights away from home. "My husband knows that when I decide to do something, I do it," she says. "He also knows I will never do anything immoral. He trusts me."
President Mohamed Khatami owes his election last May to the votes of many women, including Mrs Soltan Bolaghi's. "He's very open-minded," she says. "He cares about women's rights, which is important to me." Iranian officials are quick to point out how much better women have fared in the Islamic Republic than in Arab countries. In nearby Saudi Arabia, for example, women are not even allowed to drive. But the authorities are not exploiting Mrs Soltan Bolaghi for propaganda. She waits impatiently for a permit to drive to Turkey and Syria, and she would like President Khatami to help her buy her own bus. So far the government has treated her with the indifference it accords her fellow 2,000 male drivers at South Tehran's Jnoub bus terminal.
For anyone who has seen the silent, black-shrouded apparitions of the Arab Gulf states, the freedom and assertiveness of non-Arab Iranian women is amazing. The difference is partly cultural: Iranian women are by tradition allowed to keep their family names when they marry. In the Arab world, men mourn the birth of daughters, but in Iran a female child is valued. And Iran was already a developed, educated society when the revolution took place in 1979.
"Women simply refused to revert to the traditional role of housewife and mother after the revolution," says Haleh Esfandiari, a research fellow at the Wilson Centre in Washington, and author of Reconstructed Lives; Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution.
Mrs Esfandiari followed 32 Iranian working women over the past two decades: "I concluded that women are the most vocal and visible group in the Islamic Republic. At the time of the revolution, women were purged, dismissed or given early retirement. They were barred from certain fields of education. Now they have equal access to education, and there are an impressive number in decision-making positions."
Iranian women are among the country's most prominent writers, film makers and publishers. Since the revolution, they have taken jobs that would have been socially unacceptable before, such as fruit grocers and pushcart vendors. Mrs Shahla Lahiji, revolutionary Iran's first woman publisher, is enraged when the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance bans books on the grounds they are "too feminist". But she says Iranian women have been reborn in recent years. "Now they know what they want. Not only for their personal lives, but for society. No one gave anything to women; what they got they took for themselves. They are breaking the back of fundamentalism, little by little."
Through women's organisations, protest marches and the media, women exert pressure on the government. After last May's presidential election, they demanded a cabinet post and less harassment from morals police on the streets. They got both. Mrs Masoumeh Ebtekar, an immunologist and former newspaper editor, became Iran's first female vice president in August, when she was also made head of the national Organisation for the Protection of the Environment. "Humanity has lost something by keeping women backward," Mrs Ebtekar told the Tehran Times this month. "Now we have to compensate and we have to take measures very quickly."
Although an eccentric dress code remains the law of the land, enforcement has weakened since Mr Khatami's election. Women are revealing more hair under their headscarves, and bright colours bloom amid drab chadors on the streets of Tehran. When Iran qualified for the World Cup at the end of November, women briefly tore off their headscarves in celebration and defied official orders not to go the Azadi Stadium celebration.
Yet much remains to be done, especially in legislation. Two months ago, 10,000 women marched through Tehran to protest the death of nineyear old Arian Golshani. Arian's mother, Nahid Najibpour, sued for custody of her children when she divorced. Arian's father Ali, a well-to-do merchant, was a convicted opium addict. Yet the Islamic court awarded custody to Ali Golshani, who remarried. "Her step-family teased Arian to the point of torture," Shirin Ebadi, Mrs Najibpour's lawyer, says. "Although they had money, they didn't give her enough food and she was malnourished; she weighed only 15 kilos when she died. Her step-family beat her. The Islamic law that gave Arian to her father killed her."
Iranian law prohibits the execution of a father or grandfather for killing his own offspring. "They think children are the property of their fathers," Mrs Ebadi says. "This is a wrong interpretation of the Koran." For this reason, Ali Golshani was sentenced to only two years in prison and three years' internal exile for the death of Arian. Her stepmother Zahra also received a two-year sentence, but Ramtin, the stepbrother who beat hear, was sentenced to execution by hanging. Fathers and grandfathers can also give permission for girls to be married from the age of nine. "It doesn't happen very often, but it remains the law," Mrs Ebadi says.
Mrs Ebadi devotes most of her time to fighting such "Islamic" laws, despite telephone and mail threats from fundamentalists. "For example," she continues, "the blood money paid by a murderer to his victim's family is half as much for a woman as for a man.
"More terrible, if a woman kills a man, the court will hang her. But if a man kills a woman, her family must pay blood money if they want a court to try him. If they do not sue, he will go to prison, but he will not be executed." At present, blood money for murdering a man is £9,600; half that amount for a woman. Inheritance laws are equally unjust; females inherit only half what male heirs receive.
SOME progress has been made in the 1990s. Iranian men are no longer allowed to divorce simply by saying "I denounce you" three times. Divorce cases must now go through Islamic courts, even if the mullahs who sit in judgement often favour men. Men must also obtain court permission to marry additional wives - they are allowed four. Feminists say the institution of muta'a or sigheh (temporary marriage) is also discriminatory.
In addition to the possibility of four wives, men are allowed muta'a contracts without their wives' knowledge, while a woman can marry only one man at a time, whether by permanent or temporary contract.
Iranian women find the Western fascination with the Islamic dress code almost laughable. "When my husband can marry three other women, when my husband can take my children, when my husband can kill me, I have more important problems," Mrs Ebadi says.
"When I find a solution for these problems, then I will worry about hijab." Haleh Esfandiari believes a majority of Iranian women would wear hijab even if the law were rescinded. "My grandmother wore hijab all her life, and refused to leave her house for seven years after the Shah's father banned the veil in 1936," she says. "The basic problem is that you don't have a choice. Just as it was wrong to abolish the right to wear the chador, it was wrong to deprive women of the choice."
Hijab laws have driven Tehran beauty parlours literally underground, lest the sight of women having their hair done excite illicit desires in passing men. On Thursday morning, the beginning of the Muslim weekend, at Shabanam basement beauty parlour in affluent North Tehran, several women crowd around a bleached blond with a bruised face to examine her recent plastic surgery. Eight others wait on a sofa, reading women's magazines and eating sticky pastries from a box.
"We have up to 60 customers every Thursday - we don't even get a chance to sit down," says the top hair stylist, Nasrineh, who wields a hairbrush and blow dryer more ably than any hairdresser I've found in Paris. It is one of the ironies of post-revolutionary Iran that the beauty industry thrives here, and being a hairdresser is one of the best paid jobs. "For six or seven months after the revolution, women stopped going to the hairdresser," Nasrineh recalls. "Once they adapted to hijab they came back."
"It is impossible to feel beautiful in hijab," Katy, a 34-year-old housewife, complains. The beauty parlour is one place where women can show off their "indoor clothes". Katy wears a bright, baggy jumper decorated with a Santa Claus and Christmas tree, and her blue jeans are tucked into knee-high leather boots.
"I do it for myself," she says of her clothes, make-up and hair style. "My husband is never home. I buy fashion magazines on the black market - they cost up to 150,000 riyals (£30)."
Mahboubeh, the salon's hair waxer, joins in: "Women with hijab care more about their looks," she says. "They want to prove that hijab has not taken anything from them." The salon is a flurry of hair streaking, nail polishing, leg waxing and eyebrow tweezing. "In Iran, you won't find one woman who doesn't do her eyebrows," Farzaneh, the eyebrow lady, says. She adds disdainfully: "I know there are women in the West who don't bother."
But for all the preening of Tehran's upper classes, Mrs Soltan Bolaghi, the bus driver, is the happiest woman I met. She loves her family, and derives satisfaction from her job: "When I'm driving, I look in the rear-view mirror and I see the passengers are happy, and I feel happy," she says. Her acceptance of hijab and laws requiring her husband's permission for travel might annoy Iranian feminists, but they reflect the contradiction between tradition and women's freedom in Iranian society. And Mrs Soltan Bolaghi has her own way of dealing with the male drivers who look askance at her on the narrow, perilous road from Tehran to Kerman: "If anyone gives me a dirty look," she says, "I overtake him at high speed, to show him my power."