Women, Modernity and Tradition in Iran: Aroos-e Atash (Bride of Fire)

Kian Tajbakhsh
Published in French, Esprit (Paris), Juillet 2003, 157-166; in Persian, in Gofte-Gu Quarterly 38, Fall 2003, 149-158.

The province of Khuzistan, in the south-west of Iran, has at least three prominent characteristics: it is the center of the oil industry of Iran, it borders Iraq, (and as a consequence suffered greatly during the long war with that country), and it is home to Iran’s Arab tribes, one of many ethnic minorities that make up Iran’s population. Khuzistan has a population about four million of which one million are ethic Arabs. Their first language is not the official language (Arabic rather than Persian), they do not practice the official religion (Sunni rather than Shia Islam) but they are Iranian citizens.

I had traveled to the province to study some of the ways in which these villages and their agricultural cooperatives were dealing with the prospect of the building of a huge dam which would flood their area. We were meeting people from the villages, interviewing village elders and members of agricultural cooperatives. I was interested in finding out how much of the “traditional” patterns of authority and decision making – tribal, patriarchal, male dominated – still persisted and how they might cope with challenges that were facing the agricultural sector. The area were in visiting was near the Iraqi border, dry, very little green, poor and obviously neglected since the end of the war. Like Abadan the center of the oil refineries, it was too close to the Iraqi border to be worth investing much money for reconstruction: who knows if it would be again the scene of another war. Many of the villages were newly built on sites of former villages that had been destroyed during the war. As a result, the villages all seemed half-built, incomplete houses made of rough concrete blocks, unpainted. There seemed to be no village “life” a main public area, around the mosque maybe or a shop where residents would gather. Moreover, driving around the country side I noticed very few women, either working in the fields or just milling about. So one of the questions I had was about the role of women in working in the fields.

We were sitting in the house of the village elder. Like many houses we visited it consisted of one large room for guests and the family, and perhaps one or two bedrooms room and a kitchen. These were out of sight. Present were the three members of the village council, all Arabs ethnics, wearing the recognizable Arab dress and headdress, the son of the village elder with his young child and some other members of the village. Do women from your village work in the fields? “No, this would not be right. I am able to provide for my wife and daughter and so there’s no need. If my wife needs any provisions I will buy them for her.” Bearing in mind that he might consider it impolite to contradict his father in public, I turned to the young man and asked him. Well he said, the situation with my wife and sister is now different than my mothers. My sister has a college degree (in accounting) and it is probable that she will be have a direct role in the family business in the future.”

It was then that I asked about the recently released film “Bride of Fire”, a tragedy in which a young woman from an Arab tribe, prevented from marrying her non-Arab Persian lover is forced against her wishes to marry her cousin. It all ends badly: she commits suicide by burning herself and both men are killed. Was it true that there had been protests and that one theatre that had shown the film in Ahwaz (one of the regional capitals) was burnt down by those angry at the way Arab men were portrayed? Is it true that the custom that cousin’s must marry each other are still enforced? How much are the relations between men and women changing among the Arab tribes of Khuzistan?

 The conservation became animated. Yes, this is the custom here, the son of the sheikh said. But look, the elder replied, whole film portrayed us Arabs as living in a lawless state, a jungle. As a result, many people from our area were offended by the film. The fact is that that film was made by middle class people from Tehran who don’t really know about our culture. The worst thing about the film and all the media attention it received, was that we were treated as if we lived in a different country, as if we weren’t Iranians. It’s not as if these customs aren’t common in many parts of Iran. The Elder sheikh told me: “If a problem comes about in our community we know how to handle it and we would solve it before it causes a problem.” He was referring to the problem of “honor killings” of sisters and daughters, a theme that runs throughout the film. In one scene we see an interview with a prisoner who had killed his sister to avenge his “namoos” (honor), and had proudly given himself up to the local police station with her head in a bag. “If a man or woman that are betrothed don’t want to marry, the families get together with the sheikhs (or in Persian reesh sefeeds, literally “white beards” or elders), and we come to an agreement. The man can renounce the marriage and release the woman from the obligation. If the woman wants to marry someone outside the community, we draw up a contract releasing the woman from the obligation. In return, she renounces all ties to the community; neither she nor the community have any obligations or responsibilities to each other any more. She is free.”
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 “Bride of Fire”, directed by Khosrow Sinai, is a moving and well made film. It won several prizes inside Iran and became one of the most popular films of 2000. The basic story is as follows. A young mother from the Arab ethnic group of south eastern Iran moves from her small and poor village to the nearest big city with her two year old daughter, presumably because the child’s father has died. She works as a maid and brings up her daughter, Ehlam, who now in her mid twenties is graduating as a doctor. Ehlam is in love with a fellow doctor Parviz, but while reciprocating his feelings, resists his proposals for marriage because of fears that her family and her community will object for two reasons. First, because Parviz is a Farsi (i.e. a non-Arab) but more importantly because as is their custom she has been betrothed as a young child to her cousin, Farhan, who is formally uneducated and makes a living from fishing and smuggling small goods across the Gulf. Parviz is incredulous and furious that Ehlam would give any credence to what he calls backward and primitive practices that “don’t belong in the modern age and don’t become someone who is a doctor.” She replies that Parviz doesn’t understand how serious this matter is and that it is not within her power to change the situation. They try talking directly to Ehlam’s mother who angrily rejects them telling them that Farhan has always brought gifts for Ehlam indicating that he takes the betrothal seriously and that she regrets bringing her daughter to the city where she has become headstrong and disrespectful of her own people’s customs. Parviz insists on going to the village to speak to the sheikhs. Their arrival causes a stir in the village. The sheikhs reject his proposal. Ehlam tries talking to Farhan asking him to release her since they are so different and that she does not love him. Farhan interprets this to mean that he is too uneducated for her but he angrily tells her that “here the tribe speaks and has the last word.” He says that only in this way can the tribe survive. Still, Farhan is a sensitive and nuanced character who seems fully aware of the predicament he is in. Why would he want to marry a woman who loves another man? On the other hand he stands to lose face and his honor. He tells the others in the village that they had better not gossip about Ehlam or he will seal their mouths with dirt. But everyone knows the real unspoken threat: the more they gossip the more he is caught in a vice grip of tattered honor; he will have to defend it even if this means – and it is the unspoken threat of violence throughout the film – spilling blood. He beats Parviz, assuring him that he could have killed him telling him to never return to the village.
The second key figure in the village is Ehlam’s old aunt, Hashemieh. She first tries telling Ehlam to not be stupid, that she is part of this community and that Farhan, like other men in this village, still has honor which he will defend if necessary. Faced with Ehlam’s insistence — she tells her aunt “I don’t want to end up like you, all dried up and alone” – the aunt admits that her life has been a miserable and hard one because she was not allowed to marry who she loved. When her husband died she was then shunned and alone. Although like Ehlam, Hashemieh is caught between her loyalty to her community and to herself, she prevents Ehlam from leaving. Parviz and Ehlam try to escape but are chased by Farhan and his brothers and Parviz is killed. On the night of the marriage as Farhan is about to enter the bridal chamber he bends to receive a kiss and the blessings of Hashemieh. Instead, she grabs his ceremonial dagger and with it, kills him. Ehlam inside the room douses herself with petrol and sets her self ablaze.
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 The power of the film lies in the exceptional performances of Hashemieh and Farhan. They are fully realized characters far from the clichés that threatened to undo the film’s impact and believability. It is as if the director unconsciously thought he (and us Tehran urban viewers) knew enough about Parviz and Ehlam but needed to explore the two villagers in greater depth. These two characters do not fall easily into any preconceived types and thus engage our attention. Farhan is not a brutal or uncouth man. Although not urban or educated he is acutely aware of the tensions within which he is caught. He contemplates a clear set of choices (such as letting Ehlam go) but ultimately cannot imagine himself in doing so. It is ironic that given the stress on a certain type of masculinity, he doesn’t have the courage to see an alternative identity for himself or his community. (Although as the sheikhs told me, in practice, they would have found a way to end the betrothal at the cost of Ehlam’s excommunication form the community.) Hashemieh’s initial opposition to Ehlam’s rebellion, remorse over her own failed life resulting from having been victim to the community’s traditions, and final desperate act, seem entirely in proportion. She lashes out finally, both out of anger at Farhan for not being “man enough” – killing him with his own dagger, the symbol of patriarchal authority – and for her own role in pressuring Ehlam to accept a fate from which she has suffered so much.
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 When asked about why he didn’t make Farhan give up the girl, Sinai has said: “It wouldn’t have had a real explanation and would not have been in the tenor of the film which shows a closed society. During research for the film I talked with a man in jail for an honor killing who said, “in the closed environment outside my mind was closed; in the closed environment of prison my mind is more open.” Sinai adds: “Anyway I don’t believe in Farhan’s transformation. People should imagine their own solutions based on agreement. One of the problems of developing countries is that we don’t know our past well. My film is about this past even if it doesn’t please many people” (Zanan #66, p. 32). His reference to the past is intended to contrast the difference in generations depicted in the film.
 Of course the reactions to the film, in the street, in the media, and many examples of honor killings in many countries, demonstrate that unfortunately this is not a problem that is behind us. According to Sinai’s research in Khuzistan in the early 1990s one person per day entered prison for honor killings of women, which adds up to over 300 murders per year.
 The recent case of the young Kurdish woman immigrant in Sweden who was shot dead by her own father and brother (also immigrants) to avenge their honor which had been tarred by the fact that the young woman had a non-Kurdish boyfriend made the international headlines. The well known Turkish film “Yol” also depicted the problem of the striving for autonomy of a village woman caught between her “traditional” loyalty to a husband incarcerated for many years and her obligations to her own self. Like Bride of Fire but in grimmer and more powerful tones the story ends tragically, the woman imprisoned like an animal by her husband’s family, then left to die in the freezing mountains by the husband, whose eyes show that even if he wanted to, he did not have the psychological or cultural resources to live a new life with his wife, to re-describe for himself the inherited stories of what it means to be a “man”, to become a new person. [This all shows that the question is not one of contrasts between time periods but of different social beliefs and customs all existing in this time period. Perhaps it is not a question of the contrasts between modernity and tradition but of “post modernity” where all these practices, some of which we thought were from the past, all exist in simultaneity, in a pastiche, all on one canvass, side by side.]
 Significantly, the debate caused by the film in Iran rarely acknowledged the fact that these killings do take place. Although many of the responses did admit that there are customs which are unfamiliar to most Iranians they tended to make two points in response. One, that the gender relations depicted in the film are not restricted in form (though perhaps in intensity) to the Arab ethnic groups. As a result the film is pernicious in portraying the Arabs or Khuzistan as non-Iranian. And two, that even if there are problems, these were neither accurately depicted in the film (and more importantly) nor is it acknowledged that they are being tackled by members of the community itself. In an articulate critique of the film (although neglecting to mention the statistics on honor killings) the (Arab) member of Parliament from Abadan (one of the key cities of Khuzistan) defended the integrity of the local culture claiming that Ehlam demonstrated that “urbanization and modernity means loss of tradition and authenticity.” He went to say that anyway “there are plenty of educated women in our communities who do not disrespect their culture.” He stressed an important point: the film tends to contrast education and culture: “there are people in our community who cannot read or write but make their cases in courts in poetry. Are they illiterate?” We have enough culture and brains, he seemed to saying, to deal with our own problems ourselves.

The film character Ehlam has interesting echoes in the real life story of Zeenat Daryaee. Zeenat is from a small poor village called Salakh on the island of Qeshm in the Persian Gulf, whose residents although Iranian citizens include ethnic Arabs. Her claim to fame is that in a society in which married women should never be seen in public without the borgha (the black face mask common among women in the south of Iran) and certainly not heard very much, she has removed her borgha, trained as a health worker, and when unsuccessful at lobbying for a clinic and school for her village, ran for the city council elections and ended up getting the most votes. A documentary film and several articles have described her story. Her father was the enlightened head elder (kadkhoda) of the village and encouraged her to learn first-aid not for money but “to help the people of our village” he told her. She tells the story of an incident when she was about fifteen years old: during a wedding ceremony a child was injured, bleeding profusely. The man holding the child was doing nothing. She rushed into the men’s section, told the man to put the child down (the demand had to be repeated more harshly apparently because the man was so much in shock at Zeenat’s behavior he didn’t respond), pulled a headscarf from a girl’s head and dressed the wound, and saved the child’s life. Later she recalls, her brother beat her because she had behaved in an undignified manner. After her father died, her husband, Ahmadi, at first resisted her plans to go to train as a health worker. He then agreed because he was afraid of losing her: “If I put too much pressure on her she might leave.” The clinic regulations required her to remove her borgha, which she did without hesitation but which took time for her husband to accept. He says how at first he was under a lot of pressure from the people around him, who say: a man whose wife does not wear a borgha is not a man, he has no gheirat (honor). Having received her training she works relentlessly at the clinic and helping people in myriad ways. Ahmadi now says: the important thing is that the people receive some services, not who does it.
 When city council elections were held in 1998 (for the first time in Iran since the 1979 revolution) she ran in a group in which her husband was listed first and she second. (She was the only woman). She received 550 votes and her husband 400. Zeenat says that after 13 years working in the village people have come to accept her, even the older women who don’t approve of her headstrong and unconventional ways. Slogans painted on the village walls during the elections said: “Zeenat is a hard worker and is worthy of election.” She continues to face many obstacles just for being a woman. For example, although the rule is that the candidate with the most votes becomes council head, she says: “Unfortunately people are not ready for a woman head of the village council. I accepted the lowest position (secretary) not to offend anybody.” Ahmadi is head. And although she is village representative to the district council, the district chief who is also the local religious leader, holds the meetings in the mosque, but says that women should not speak in the mosque — effectively preventing her from participating. Still, she is known throughout the south and her example has influenced a new generation of women. Her sister-in-law is now a health worker and has removed her borgha. Her house has modern appliances and this is important because she and Ahmadi are willing to spend on their children’s education. She says that in these parts it is not a priority to spend money especially for a girl’s education.
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 Zeenat is an example of the ways in which social change and in gender relations is coming about in Iran and at the hands of individuals. The councils elections did succeed in bringing women into positions of public responsibility all over Iran, although in cities women clearly faced less obstacles, where they made up almost 10 percent of the elected councilors whereas in rural areas they made up 1 percent. Overall one third of male candidates were elected whereas one tenth of women were elected. Zeenat’s story of having been denied the top council post is repeated over again by other women candidates, even those (mostly in the large cities) with PhDs or professionals with years of management experience. The need for a supportive husband in some official position is also a common theme. The persistent discrimination in most parts of Iran tends to be mostly “soft” and social not legal. In this Iran is hardly alone. Films like Bride of Fire and stories like Zeenat’s are clearly two dimensions of the current reality: despite legal and real gains, tragedy and blocked dreams and opportunities; despite backward superstitions and unfair prejudice, new opportunities which are grabbed and used as best as they can be.