Iranian Women & Gender in the Iran-Iraq War
This book is about the role of women in the war that raged for eight long years in the 1980s. Female volunteers played a significant role in a variety of ways that have never been examined and through it all some challenged their dictated gender roles and others simply accepted them but they remained as one body to defend their country. After reading it, you will realize the important contributions that women made in one of the most challenging times in all of Iranian history.
Iranian Women and Gender was a challenging book to research, write, and to put together! It was difficult to research due to the sensitive nature of field work in Iran, emotionally draining to write as it brought back sad personal memories, and harder to intellectualize because it is multifaceted.
I broke down emotionally many times over the years while writing it, and experienced a sort of PTSD, and went through the experience of war in many ways I had when it actually raged. Those familiar with PTSD can tell you not the personal unpleasant feelings one experiecnes but how the same feelings affect their famlilies around them.
I’m happy to share some never before published images in my book such as the one on the left. It is a Revolutionary Guards volunteer application that belongs to a 24-year-old Sima Hamidnia. She signed up as a seamstress and launderer sometime in 1984-85. One of millions of Iranian women who took part in the war in various ways.
Below you can read part of the Preface, and listen to some related audio files.
From the preface
The freezing wind was so bitter and relentless that it forced me to remain inside the dark military tent to prevent further cracking of the skin on my face. The tent was one of the tens of thousands set up across Iran by the Red Crescent, which was collecting public donations for the Iran-Iraq war. The year was 1982, and I was fourteen, a volunteer among a sea of volunteers that wanted to defend their nation.
Another volunteer and I stood behind a long table; our tent was situated in the middle of a grassy knoll near the three-way intersection where the narrow Shah Abbas Street joined the newer Bozorgmehr Boulevard east of the city of Isfahan. Women and children, young and old men were donating everything from canned goods and traditional Isfahani wheat crackers to homemade jam, sweaters, socks, and cash, stuffing the latter into a tin box. I had been at my post for three hours since school got out and it was right before the call to prayer when a middle-aged woman approached the tent. She walked up to the table murmuring something under her breath, and while she secured her chador on her head by biting on the black cloth, she pulled off two gold bangles from her wrist and put them on the table in front of me. I remember staring at her and then at the 18 karat gold bangles that I knew cost a fortune. I picked up the pair and said “God Bless!” She said something like, “Sell them and spend the money to defeat the bastard Saddam.”
For years, I recalled that episode while I tried to forget many other memories that originated in the strange four-year period of my involvement in the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88.
Twenty-six years later, when I returned to my hometown of Ahvaz in the southwest and took a short trip to Khorramshahr, I went sightseeing and asked my taxi driver to take me to the legendary Jame mosque. For those familiar with the history of the Iran-Iraq War, the struggle that took place at the Jame mosque is the epitome of Iranian resistance against the enemy. It is synonymous with how the city resisted the Iraqi invasion and how its residents sacrificed their lives to keep it from falling into the hands of the enemy.
In this struggle, gender lines faded and camaraderie was felt in its truest sense. If we were to use the term “Sacred Defense,” which is how the Islamic Republic refers to the eight-year conflict, this mosque represents the meaning of the compound term of sacred and defense, in a religious and national sense. During the Battle for Khorramshahr (September 22—October 26, 1980), this mosque served as a place of worship, an emergency room, a battlefield kitchen, a civilian shelter, an ammunition depot and, most of all, a logistics center coordinating everything for city dwellers now turned volunteer fighters to prevent its fall.
As I entered the mosque on that hot summer day in 2009, I came across the portraits of many martyrs mounted on the wall of the interior of the building. I slowly looked at the black and white photos of young and old men, noticing how some barely had sprouted mustaches--much like myself 26 years ago--while others looked old enough to be grandfathers. The male-dominated presentation of the war memorial suddenly reminded me of another group of martyrs, the female volunteers who had died alongside males fighting the same war. There was not a single photo of a woman on that wall, although I knew Shahnaz Hajishah was one of the young females who had been martyred by Iraqi artillery only two blocks from this place before the city collapsed. Since I knew there were many women martyrs that had died in the city and near the mosque, I sensed that a part of history was missing. It was then that I recalled with particular immediacy the chador-wearing middle-aged woman 26 years earlier in front of my Red Crescent donation tent--that memory convinced me that this historical gap must be filled.
