On March 19, 1979, at 12:57 a.m., the Paris-Tehran flight took off with eighteen European women on board, “decided to bring Khomeini to heel”, as one of them, the Italian intellectual Maria Antonietta Macciocchi (deceased in 2007), will write. There are journalists there, Martine Storti, from Release, Michèle Manceaux (deceased in 2015), from Marie ClaireClaude Servan-Schreiber, Director of F-Magazinewriters Anne Zelensky and Paula Jacques, philosopher Catherine Clément, reporter for Paris morning, Françoise Gaspard, PS mayor of Dreux…
The delegation wishes to bear witness to the situation of Iranian women in a country which has just passed from the dictatorship of the Shah, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, to the Islamic Republic, soon to be officially proclaimed. Rouhollah Khomeyni, who had been living in exile in Neauphle-le-Château, in the Yvelines, for four months, made the same journey a few weeks earlier, on 1er February, and was triumphantly welcomed in Tehran.
After fifty-six years of authoritarian reign of the Pahlavi, the religious guide arouses a certain enthusiasm. The director of Release, Serge July, present on the plane with him, describes in his diary the Khomeini project as a “shiito-socialism” which intends to take charge of all aspects of social life. The philosopher Michel Foucault praises his “political spirituality”. “This imam was the embodiment of good, compared to the shah, who was the embodiment of evil, remembers Martine Storti, 76, in her Paris apartment. We were absolutely against the Shah, that was clear. Afterwards, instead of the shah, what? »
Bareheaded, to protest
For Iranian women, the answer to this question is beginning to become clearer. On March 6, from the holy city of Qom, where he now resides, Ayatollah Khomeini imposes the wearing of the veil. Iranian women actively participated in the revolution against the Shah. They protested veiled, to mark their opposition to this dictator installed by the CIA, who led the country towards brutal Westernization.
But, after Khomeini’s declarations, from March 8, on the occasion of International Women’s Day, and for several days, they took to the streets by the thousands, often bareheaded, to protest against the obligation to veil. . This is the first gesture of political opposition since Khomeini’s return. The anti-Shah unanimity begins to unravel. “Tehran 1979 is the beginning of everything that is happening today”, analysis Martine Storti. For Iranian feminists discovering their new political reality. And for their Western counterparts who are faced with questions and quarrels that still haunt them forty years later.
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