Azadeh Moaveni

Late last year, I sat sipping coffee at an ultra-modern shopping mall in Dubai, watching Iranian women on holiday glide past me with shopping bags and euphoric expressions. Although it was gulf-hot outside, many were dressed as they would be in Tehran, in snug coats known as manteau and gem-colored head scarves, an ensemble that is both the uniform and sartorial legacy of Islamic Revolution. A contingent settled down near me with vanilla lattes ordered in smooth English, and I eavesdropped on their conversation, trying to understand why women Westernized enough to hang out at Starbucks were wearing the veil, which is mandatory in Iran but optional in the shopping fun-park of Dubai. Watching them, a rather terrible thought occurred to me: I have been wrong about the veil all these years. I used to believe, as do many Iranians who wish their country to be a different place, that if given the choice, the majority of women here would elect to bare their heads in public.

After all, women in Iran are more educated than ever, demanding legal rights and participating in the workforce alongside men as no time before in the country’s history. Important role models such as the Nobel peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi — middle-class and religiously observant — make a point of going unveiled outside the country. And anyone surveying women on the street in Tehran, diaphanous veils sliding back on their heads with graceful negligence, would imagine the scarves disappearing along with the laws mandating them. But if that were the case, so many Iranian women wouldn’t be packing their veils for trips abroad. What I’ve come to believe since that afternoon in Dubai is that for many, hedjab (as the practice of veiling is called in Iran) has become second-nature, a strand of middle-class morality woven as much from habit as belief. While Iranian women may object to its being forced upon them, the quarrel is with legal coercion, not the hedjab itself.

The striking fact is that the Iranian government, despite its overall failure in building a pious society, has successfully instilled the hedjab as a value among Iranian women who resent most of the regime’s other proscriptions. If you stopped the veiled women shoppers in Dubai and asked their opinion about their government, they would likely tell you it was repressive, that clerics were disastrous at running countries, and that Dubai was a far nicer place to live. So why has the regime succeeded with the veil, while its attempts to control Iranians’ appetite for alcohol, pornography, and American films, have failed? Because the veil has an authentic and long-standing place in Iranian culture, one that predates the revolution. Imposing the veil on a society with a tradition of modesty taboos is an entirely different proposition than imposing prohibition and anti-Americanism on a society with a historical fondness for wine and American culture.

I’m still not certain whether the hedjab has nosed its way into the middle-class value system, or whether the middle-class has swelled to include Iranians from the working-class and the provinces who have imported their more conservative values into city-life. What is clear, though, is that like so many seemingly fixed beliefs, it can be tinkered with for the sake of an attractive marriage proposal. In the Iran of today, where marrying ‘up’ to improve one’s social or financial standing is more imperative than in a Jane Austen novel, women commonly adjust their head covering to match their prospective partner’s degree of religiosity. A woman who previously went bare-headed might begin wrapping herself in multiple layers of chador, while a chadori from birth might downgrade to a simple headscarf. Moral fluidity is how Iranians navigate their culturally chaotic society, and the hedjab is no exception.

What remains is that in a society where laws force religious observance and determine how women can dress, the lines between an individual’s ‘real’ values, the force of habit, and social background blur. The other day, a friend came to visit me with her five year-old daughter. As they prepared to leave, the little girl proudly pulled out a cherry-red veil from her purse and tied it on with an innocent flourish. Only the most religiously extreme families force girls that young to wear hedjab, and I looked at my friend inquiringly. She insists on wearing it, she told me despairingly, she thinks it makes her look like her mommy. The little girl beamed beneath her scarf, imagining herself quite grown-up.