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TIME - Partners with CNN
A woman
talks to journalists after registering as a candidate for President of Iran,
despite a ban on such announcements by the Interior Ministry
Morteza Nikoubazl / Reuters
Every four years, hundreds of Iranians
register to stand as candidates in the country's presidential election. Women
have signed up to run since 1997 — yet no female has ever been certified by the
government to run for President. This month, 42 women were among the 475 people
who signed up, harboring hope that this time, there was a real chance for a
female candidate to stand.
Indeed,
expectations had been raised when the spokesman of the Guardian Council — the
powerful body that vets the candidates — announced on April 11 that it
"has never announced its opinion on whether a registrant is a man or a
woman. Whenever a woman has been disqualified, it has been because she's lacked
general competence." That was a tantalizing hint of a liberal
interpretation for words in the constitution that are often perceived to block
the candidacy of women.
Standing in the way of women has been
Article 115 of Iran's constitution, where an Arabic phrase, rejale
mazhabi-siasi, defining the qualification of candidates appears to be
applied exclusively as "religious and political men" — even though it
can also be read as "religious and political personalities." Says
Jamileh Kadivar, a former member of parliament who heads women's affairs for
the campaign of presidential candidate Mehdi Karroubi: "We are dealing
with both legal and institutional discrimination." Among the women who
registered this time, the most prominent was the conservative politician Rafat
Bayat. She was disqualified in 2005 but insisted on standing again, because,
she explained, "I am a political personality!"
However, the interpretation of the word
rejale rests with the jurists and clerics who make up the Guardian
Council. All of them, of course, are men. And on Wednesday, they chose the
candidates for the presidency. All of them, once again, were men.
Women take some comfort in the fact
that they are a constituency that most presidential candidates — with the
notable exception of the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — are courting. Karroubi
announced on Tuesday that he could consider women for six of his Cabinet posts,
including the ministries of Foreign Affairs and Islamic Guidance and Culture.
Similarly, the aide of another candidate, Mohsen Rezai, told TIME that Rezai
will consider a woman as "Hillary Clinton's Iranian counterpart."
"The fact that the candidates are talking about women in their Cabinets is
a step forward," says Shadi Sadr, lawyer and women's rights activist.
"It shows that our grass-roots efforts have yielded results."
Although women play important public
roles in various sectors of Iranian society and constitute the majority of
university students, no woman thus far has been appointed to a significant
ministry in post-revolutionary
Women, however, are not a solid
ideological bloc. Reformist women like Ebtekar and Sadr stand in almost direct
opposition to would-be presidential candidates like Bayat who, despite her
outspokenness, espouses a different vision of women's rights. A representative
in
"We don't believe in 100% gender
equality," Bayat told TIME in her office as head of a governmental
institute of higher education. "We believe in the equality of
opportunities." How then does she qualify to run for the presidency? She
argues that she has held important political positions as well as fulfilled her
role as a mother of three children. "They should take that into
consideration," she said, sitting behind an image of revolutionary founder
Ayatullah Ruhollah Khomeini (commonly referred to as the Imam in
Azam Taleghani, a political activist
and the first woman to have registered as a presidential candidate in 1997, decided
not to register this year, though she has done so in previous rounds. As the
daughter of one of the revolution's most prominent ayatullahs, she carries a
name with religious capital. "I knew that they wouldn't qualify any women,
just like they haven't in all previous elections, so there was no point in
registering," Taleghani told TIME. "It's convenient for them to say
that it's not because we're women but because we don't qualify as
religious-political personalities. It lifts the weight off their shoulders, but
what are we all then? Heathens?"
Even Bayat, who plays by conservative
rules and is not one to push boundaries, said, "Let's face it: the
decision makers are all men." With some resignation and an office that
barely speaks of serious campaign preparation, she added, "Not one man
among the candidates has so far stood up and asked the Guardian Council to
consider women candidates with full equality." She adds, "They said
gender wasn't an issue, but it was because they didn't consider the imbalance
of opportunities between the genders."
Still, Sadr said, there is reason for
hope. "The fact that dozens of women have registered for the last several
rounds of the presidential elections is in itself a good sign. It has shown its
impact already in the fact that the candidates talk about giving Cabinet
positions to women."
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