control and sexuality

Control and Sexuality: The Revival of Zina Laws in Muslim Contextsover 77 per cent of the votes, showed the strength of their mass support. However, eventhough the reformists now dominated government and parliament, they were unable tofulfill their election promises. Instead, they were locked in a fierce political battle with theiropponents, who were now aligned with the theocratic side of the Islamic Republic. Usingtheir power over the unelected institutions, conservatives managed to frustrate many ofthe reformists’ initiatives and their legislative moves in the Sixth Parliament (2000–04). Theyalso silenced key reformist personalities, first by assassinating, then by prosecuting andjailing them, and they closed down the vibrant free press that was one of the reformists’main early achievements and platforms.Gender issues became a major arena of confrontation between reformists andconservatives. As regards the politics of gender and law, the reformist phase wasmarked by two developments. First, the working relationship forged in previous phasesbetween women of opposing political tendencies in Parliament broke down. Womenparliamentarians had lobbied strongly for the co-operation of eminent clerics and theseminaries in pushing for legislation; this had produced a fragile consensus on the needto reform laws related to women and the family, and led to the enactment of a number ofmeasures redressing the gender discrimination introduced soon after the Revolution. Butin the conservative-dominated Fifth Parliament (1996–2000), the newly created ‘Women’sCommission’ proposed two bills that became infamous for their anti-women slant. Thefirst, ‘Adaptation of Medical Services to Religious Law’, extended the imposition of gendersegregation to medicine, a realm that had been left more or less unscathed since theRevolution. The second, ‘Banning the Exploitation of Women’s Images and the Creation ofConflicts between Men and Women by Propagating Women’s Rights outside the Legal andIslamic Framework’, sought to prohibit the lively press debate on women’s rights as well aspress coverage of the dynamic film industry. These bills were a prelude to invoking ‘shari’a’and Islam once again to silence other voices in society (Mir-Hosseini 2002).Reform of family law and women’s rights were central issues in the reformists’ successfulcampaign for the 2000 parliamentary elections, but the Guardian Council frustrated theirsubsequent legislative moves. Although they did not take any serious initiatives in thearea of criminal law, reformists presented 41 bills that aimed to modify, in various ways,the inequalities that women face in law; the Guardian Council rejected almost all of them,including the proposal to join CEDAW. Eventually 21 of the bills were passed into law,albeit in some cases with their gender-egalitarian tone and intent weakened or nullified.A bill aimed at restoring the minimum age of marriage to 18 (as set by the 1975 FPL) wasaltered to 13 for girls and 15 for boys (as in the 1935 Civil Code). Another bill to make accessto divorce equal for men and women was reduced to expanding women’s grounds fordivorce and custody rights. Most importantly, the Guardian Council rejected the proposalto join CEDAW.The second development during the reformist phase was the emergence of a lively, iffragile, civil society and an independent press, nurtured by the liberal policies of Khatami’s106