ROKSANA BAHRAMITASH and HOMA HOODFAR review the film The Circle, directed by Jafar Panahi, who won the Cannes Film Festival’s Camera d’Or for The White Balloon, 1995. [Roksana Bahramitash is a faculty member at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute at Concordia University and a research associate at the McGill Institute of Islamic Studies. Homa Hoodfar is a professor of anthropology at Concordia and a founding members of Women Living Under Muslim Law, an international organization which campaigns on Muslim women's rights issues].
The movie The Circle, reviewed glowingly by The Gazette (March 9) and other Montreal media, only reinforces those stereotypes and, in turn, will feed racism in the name of feminism. The film relentlessly portrays Iran as backward and repressive, and Iranian women as victims unable to transform their lives.
Such portrayals have a history dating to colonial times. The British, for example, used repressive treatment of women in India to denounce all of Indian culture as backward, and to legitimize their presence as the ruling power. It is certainly true that burning widows was -- and is – a repugnant practice, but the use made of it in the West was opportunistic. Similarly, Britain's Lord Cromer, as de facto ruler of Egypt, denounced Islamic practices such as the veiling of women, while back home he was among the leaders of the elite combating the extension of the vote to women.
In Muslim countries today, the oppressive aspects of certain laws enforced in some countries, including Iran, are used to depict Muslims in general as backward and, therefore, badly in need of being taught civilized practices by the West. This trend is now reaching a fever pitch because of the situation in Afghanistan, even though that regime has been denounced as aberrant and even un-Islamic by most countries where Islam is important, including Iran.
Obviously, there are misogynous practices and violations of modern conceptions of women's rights in Muslim countries, just as there are in Christian societies. But a movie like The Circle tells at most only half the story. It therefore creates three distinct kinds of problems for those of us intent on familiarizing people with the realities of women's situation in the Muslim world.
First, it ignores completely the multiplicity of women's acts of resistance to and subversion of oppressive practices. Second, it presents the story of Iranian women as one of continuous defeat. As a result, they seem in dire need of a white knight to ride in from the West, much as the Crusaders did, to rescue them. Third, it compromises Muslim women's position and poisons the atmosphere among family, friends and community. When one of our teenage daughters saw the movie, she whispered: "I will never go back to Iran" because of her shame about being Iranian.
Anyone viewing this film would have no idea that, despite facing oppressive measures, Iranian women have assiduously come to occupy considerable space in the public arena and are constantly pushing to expand that space. For instance, 54 per cent of recent entrants to Iranian universities were women. The women's press in Iran produces vibrant magazines and books which constantly take the authorities to task despite threat of closure. It is their defiance, activism and resistance at home, not the rush to collect medals in Venice, which has brought about much of the loosening of legal limitations on women.
Incidentally, we hear remarkably little about this, given the Western media's chronic preoccupation with condemning the Islamic Republic of Iran. Rarely in North America are Iranian women given credit for their successes, including their daring candidacies in parliamentary and presidential elections, or their courage in demanding an end to discriminatory treatment.
During the last two parliamentary elections, women voted en masse for candidates with the most liberal views on women. During the last national municipal elections, a considerable number of women, in small villages as well as cities, stood for election many successfully. Women's education levels are rising at a much faster rate than men's.
Those of us who travel to Iran have witnessed the dynamic atmosphere and met enthusiastic women determined to reform things such as restrictive and discriminatory family laws. Therefore, we find the message of a fictional work like The Circle objectionable and the adulation in the Western media troublesome. Inevitably, we ask ourselves why someone would make a film with such a defeatist attitude and, more importantly, why this film would be praised as feminist and as a celebration of freedom of speech in the West.
Interestingly, the movie was made by a man, evidently seeking Hollywood success. There are many other Iranian movies, technically and aesthetically of higher quality, which present a far more honest and accurate picture that have received no acclaim in the West. Evidently they failed to conform to approved stereotypes or serve the politically correct agenda.
More interestingly, Iranian movies about Iranian women made by Iranian women depict things quite differently. They certainly show problems, serious ones, but also indigenous solutions. They show Iranian women to be courageous, resilient, and intent on improving their own situation.
No doubt there is still a long way to go for women, but they have the strength and courage to do it, something conspicuously absent from a movie like The Circle.
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