Chapter 5 - A Civil Society-Led Revolution? Promoting Civil Society and Women’s Rights in the Middle East

Summary

When we started the One Million Signatures campaign in Iran in 2006, we were aware that demanding a change to laws that discriminate against women in an Islamic state could result in a backlash. The goal of the One Million Signatures campaign is modest and straightforward: to press for reform, from inside Iran, to the laws that make an Iranian woman or girl’s life legally worth half that of a man’s.

We set out to do so by educating the people of Iran, because we knew that both culture and law had to be changed in order to achieve equal rights for women. We engaged in face-to-face discussions with the public about these discriminatory laws, and encouraged Iranians to join us—their mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters—in this struggle. We then asked members of the public to sign a petition addressed to the Iranian Parliament asking for the reform of laws that discriminated against women.

We fully anticipated accusations that our demands contradicted Sharia, or Islamic, law and that we were “promoting a Western agenda.” For that reason, we made an effort to explain in our materials and during our discussions with the public that our demands for change and equality did not in fact contradict Islam, and instead helped promote progress in Iran.

We built our case to ordinary Iranian people by explaining that Islamic scholars offered various interpretations to Sharia law when it came to women’s rights. We referred to the cultural advancement of Iranian society and the social achievements of Iranian women, and explained the negative impact of legal discrimination on the lives of women, the structure of the family, and society as a whole.

We discussed—but eventually decided not to tackle directly—the issue of the hijab, the Islamic dress code for women, which we felt should be voluntary rather than compulsory—because we realized it was an ideologically charged issue and could hijack the overall goal of pressing for improvements in many other areas that affect women’s everyday lives. Thus, we generally referred to imposed veiling as a form of legal discrimination in our literature, but did not highlight it as one of our main petition demands.