TEHRAN — As dawn breaks over the towering Elborz Mountains, Elaheh Adeli throws a baggy coat over her sweats, covers her bobbed hair and runs to an outdoor lot to engage in what, for an Iranian woman, is a blatantly defiant act. She plays basketball with her husband and his pals.
For 15 years, Simin Ekrami has worked artistic magic with chunks of wood, clay and plaster of Paris. But lately the barefoot, denim-clad sculptor has worked on what was once unthinkable in the Islamic Republic: uncovered and anatomically correct figures of women. Although she ducks descriptions, her husband openly calls them nudes.
During Iran's 1979 revolution, Mahboobeh Abbas-Gholizadeh campaigned hard against the monarchy, and she later studied at one of the famed seminaries in the city of Qom. Now the editor of the women's intellectual magazine Farzaneh--and a divorced mother of two girls who smokes Marlboros and likes mountain climbing--she writes editorials challenging the same revolution. She says it hasn't done enough for women.
A revolution has erupted within Iran's revolution. Its pace is slower. It rarely speaks with a single voice. And it still faces obstacles so formidable that, by comparison, ending 2,500 years of monarchy looks almost easy.
But the passions that have emerged from disparate corners of Iranian society to inspire a vibrant women's movement are just as deep as those of 1979.
"Ironically, the [1979] revolution appears to have given women a keener sense of their rights, created among them a sense of community and turned them into an informal constituency or pressure group," said Haleh Esfandiari of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, author of "Reconstructed Lives: Women and Iran's Islamic Revolution."
"In Iran today, women are regarded with awe because of the combative attitude they adopted toward the state's attempts to interfere in their private and public lives."
That combative spirit is now visible in virtually every aspect of Iranian life, from the 84 women's basketball teams in five Tehran leagues to the unprecedented 200 women who ran in 1996 elections for the 270-seat parliament, from the women's groups now on the Internet to new laws improving women's rights in divorce, employment, dowries and child custody.
Iran's movement, however, differs from women's lib in the West. It often works from within Islam. The majority of women are adapting traditions and reinterpreting Koranic verse rather than rejecting either outright.
