Free Cultures of Fetishism by Louise J. Kaplan Page A

the Shah, particularly his adoption of Western values, was the Iranian Shiite, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. His outspoken criticism of the Shah’s regime led to his exile to Iraq in 1964. In Iraq he developed a strong religious and political following, which led to Saddam Hussein forcing him to leave the country. Speaking from Paris, Ayatollah Khomeini called for his fellow Iranians to depose the
    Shah. Counting on the fervent religious Islamism and desperate social unrest of the lower classes, he returned and led a religious revolution that led to the defeat of the Shah, who fled to Western Europe.
    In 1981, Khomeini issued a decree transforming the nation of Iran into the Islamic Republic of Iran. Soon afterward, due to a dispute over a shared waterway, the Islamic Republic of Iran was attacked by Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. From the Iranian point of view it was a war of the holy Islamics against the heathens, the Satanic forces of Hussein. This war would last eight years, killing over a million Iranians and leaving many Iranian cities and streets and homes in shambles.
    Throughout these chaotic times, from 1979 until 1989 when Khomeini died of a mysterious illness, two things remained constant: the oppression of women of all classes by the Ayatollah’s ruling government, and an unabating effort to eradicate any remaining vestiges of Westernized femininity and female power. The lower-class women, most of them religious Islamics, continued to suffer their husbands’ denigrations, but after 1979 it was the previously liber- ated middle- and upper-class women who suffered the brunt of Khomeini’s fanatical de-Westernization.
    Azar Nafisi, an upper-class Westernized college professor whose mother had been one of six women elected to Parliament in 1963, reports the situation in Reading Lolita in Tehran . 59 When she returned to Iran with her husband after studying literature in the United States, the laws governing female rights had regressed to what they had been before her grandmother’s time. After the revolution, two women who had risen to the post of cabinet minister were sentenced to death and summarily executed for warring with God and spreading prostitution.
    The shah’s SAVAT had been replaced by Khomeini’s “Blood of God” mili- tia, who focused much of their attention on the improprieties of the female population. They drove around the streets in their white Toyotas trying to ensure that women were wearing their veils and chadors properly without a speck of skin showing, were not wearing makeup or fingernail polish, were not walking through the streets with men who were not family members Young women who disobeyed the official Islamic rules were thrown into the patrol cars, “taken to jail, flogged, fined and forced to wash toilets and humiliated.” 60
    Nafisi tells the story of what happened to one of her female students. This story captures the essence of what happens to females in a country where the vast majority of men are oppressed and humiliated; men whose only oppor- tunity to survive and advance their careers and obtain food and shelter for their families is to become an Islamic thug, who drive around in a patrol car with a semi-automatic weapon looking for young women who don’t dress or behave like proper Islamic women.
    Her student, Sanaz, a very intelligent, pretty, charming girl, did not disobey Islamic strictures. But sometimes she could be obstinate and insist on doing what she wanted—no matter what. She didn’t always listen to the advice of her parents, who lived in terror of the morality squads. She and five

of her girlfriends had gone to a villa by the Caspian Sea for a two-day holiday. The first day they were there they decided to visit a nearby villa, where the fiancé of one of the girls lived. 61
    Suddenly, “they” 62 came; the morality squad had jumped over a low garden wall and surprised them. They had had a report of illegal activities and had a search warrant. Finding