Women and Gender III: Women's Work and Safety

We talked a little more again about women, gender and Islam in Iran, and how the university is now over 60% women students, with an increasing number of women in the workforce by choice. Our guide says much has changed even over the past five years. Some women in the cities do elect not to get married, because they are enjoying their careers and lives, and it is becoming more common to rent an apartment on one’s own. Previously, a woman had to be past child-bearing age in order to rent an apartment or a hotel room on her own.

In some places, it’s considered impossible to adapt the laws as they were written originally in the Qur’an, even if times have changed. However, clerics here apparently do try to make modern applications. Here's a story from a different situation, but one which demonstrates the need for change: There was a court case where a man struck a pedestrian with his car and killed him. The Qur’an says that the compensation for an accidental death should be 70 camels. This man happened to keep camels and brought 70 with him to the courthouse on the day of his trial. The court realized then that they couldn’t hold him to further punishment because of the Qur’anic teaching. However, where do you keep 70 camels today? Especially if you’re in an apartment in Tehran? So afterwards, they assessed the monetary value of the camels and set that as the compensation instead.

And so goes the logic with women’s age for marriage and other life prospects here. In the time of the Qur’an, and even into the past century, it was a fact of survival that women needed to marry early, in their teens. Not so in today’s society, and survival if anything now means education.

I know from my work for a year in a grassroots Arab women’s domestic violence program that the rates of domestic and sexual violence are the same for women in the East as in the West; only the language of justification and the kinds of perpetrators change. Overall, for both cultures it is a language of possessiveness, control, and domination. In the East, boyfriends and strangers are less involved, but abuse or molestation by a relative or spousal abuse takes its place. In the West, women don’t live in as close contact with extended male family members, but are more likely to experience acquaintance or ‘date’ rape or abuse from a boyfriend, or teachers, clergy, or doctors, etc.

It occurred to me again, though I don’t think I ever wrote about this, that there are some universal problems and cultures that are trying to address them in their own finite human ways. How do we prevent a child or female relative from being abused? How do we prevent adultery, or teen pregnancy, or broken marriages, or drug addiction? How can as many people as possible be in stable families and housed and employed? And this is where certainly extremists in all religions head off into some solutions that seem worse than the problem. The weight of the ‘punishment’ is often equal to the perceived threat to the society. Societies become more conservative as they perceive themselves to be under threat. I wonder if this isn’t what leads to the rise and fall of local, national, and even global civilizations.