Like most religious women who wanted to get something done, she built the foundations of her case on the prophet’s hadith. Muhammad is on the record as recommending that Muslims have “strong bodies.” He also said: “You shall excel in all respects if you are the believers.” Faezeh argued that sports should be part of the search for excellence, and that these recommendations applied equally to women and men. Women, as the lynchpins of the Islamic family, needed the physical and mental benefits that sports could provide. Fine, the conservatives responded; let them follow a program of exercise in the privacy of their homes. Faezeh responded that women and girls shouldn’t be robbed of the social benefits of teamwork and competition.
The prophet is said to have praised three sports in particular: swimming, archery and horseback riding. Since the hadith, “Teach your children swimming and archery,” used the Arabic word awalaad, which may be translated either as “sons” or “children,” and not the more specific awalaad wa binaat—sons and daughters—some strict parents argued that only sons were meant to take part in such pursuits. But archery’s modern equivalent, pistol or rifle shooting, was a useful skill in a revolutionary country recently at war and was one of the few sports that could be done in a chador. So shooting ranges were among the first sports facilities to welcome women, at first as members of civil defense militias, and later just as women looking for a hobby that would get them out of the house.
Faezeh argued that Iran’s Islamic government could differentiate itself from the old shah regime by demonstrating that it was interested in “sports for all women,” rather than the elite squad of topflight athletes the shah had encouraged to show off amid the “corruption” of mixed international competitions. Her arguments led to the handing back of sports facilities for certain “women’s hours” each week, and more emphasis on sports in girls’ schools. Eventually Tehran’s woodsy “Runners’ Park” banned men three days a week, between eight and four, so women could jog without hijab.
Then Faezeh began to tackle the much more difficult question of international competition. Many Islamic countries kept their women out of international arenas: sometimes because of considerations of modesty, sometimes because of lack of money, and sometimes both. With tight sports budgets, countries such as Pakistan that had many Olympic-class women competitors sent none of them to the Barcelona Olympics. “The men, basically, are better than we, and the government selects those who are in with a chance,” said Firhana Ayaz, a sports writer with the Pakistan Observer. But she also saw a growing Islamic influence behind such decisions. In Pakistan most women athletes played in modest costumes of loose, long T-shirts over long pants, but that was no longer seen as adequate in some circles. “Mullahs have been making an issue of field hockey lately, because you have to run and bend. And during the Olympics, none of the women’s events were televised, because of pressure from the mullahs.”
When Hassiba Boulmerka, the Algerian runner, won a gold medal for her country at the Barcelona Olympics, she made a moving speech about her victory, saying she was glad to show that a Muslim woman could achieve such things. But not all of the Islamic world cheered her triumph. In Algeria the main Muslim political party, the Islamic Salvation Front, denounced her from the mosques for running “half naked” in shorts and a vest, and forced her to leave the country to avoid harassment while she trained.
While some Iranians joined in branding Hassiba “a phony Muslim,” Faezeh Hashemi saw the danger in such denunciations from Islamists who weren’t offering any positive alternatives. Muslims, she said, should be happy if any Muslim sportswoman excelled. All Muslim countries had different traditions, she said, and it was up to Iran to demonstrate the superiority of a truly Islamic system. She argued that the “oppressors,” meaning Western countries, used Muslim women’s absence from the sports field as an example of women’s inferior position in Islamic countries. “If Islamic countries can’t come up with their own principles for women’s competition,” she said in one widely reported speech, “then the way dictated by Western oppressing countries will be imposed on us.” Iran sent men’s teams to international contests. Why not, she said, let those women who excelled in any of the five sports that could be done in hijab go too?
In September 1990 she won her point, and when the Iranian team joined the march at the opening of the Asian Games in Beijing, six chador-clad women—the Iranian shooting team—led the way. One of them, an eighteen-year-old student named Elham Hashemi, managed to break the Iranian men’s record.
By the Atlanta Olympics in 1996, Faezeh hoped to be able to send a squad of hijab-wearing equestrians as well. I doubted she’d win that one. It’s quite possible to show-jump wearing a neck-hiding wimple under a riding helmet and a tunic covering the legs down to the tops of riding boots, but what if a rider fell off her horse and was photographed with limbs sprawled and, heaven forfend, scarf askew? Conservatives were already arguing against women archers being allowed to compete in front of men, because the motion of pulling back the bowstring was too revealing, even in a chador.
For most of Iran’s women athletes—runners, swimmers, high jumpers—competing in hijab wasn’t even a remote possibility. It was for them that Faezeh had come up with the notion of an alternative Olympics, the Islamic Women’s Games, where women athletes from Muslim countries would gather in hijab for an opening ceremony that both men and women could attend. Afterward, the athletes would toss off their coverings and compete against each other with only women watching.
The paradox of her scheme was that the strict Muslim countries whose women could have benefited from the games’ women-only environment had no women athletes to send. In Saudi Arabia and most of the Gulf States, there were no women’s sporting organizations of any kind. Women’s competition, even strictly segregated, didn’t exist. Wealthy women who wanted to keep fit maintained well-equipped gyms in their homes and hired personal trainers. The rest led completely sedentary lives.
The countries that jumped at Iran’s invitation were the former Soviet Muslim republics, whose women athletes had been trained in the Soviet sports juggernaut. None of them had ever veiled; few had cracked the binding on a Koran. But, with the collapse of the Soviet system, nominally Muslim republics such as Azerbaijan were strapped for cash for luxuries such as sports. “Our entire budget for this year is enough to send one athlete to one competition—so long as it’s in Europe,” sighed Alyev Mouslim, the Azerbaijani team manager. For him, an all-expenses-paid trip for a hundred and twenty women athletes—even if they had to veil and sit on a bus for the twenty-six-hour bus ride from Baku—was an offer too good to refuse.
As always with Iran, politics played a part. Iran was prepared to pay for big teams from the former Soviet republics because it was anxious to extend its influence there. But it balked at footing the bill for countries such as Sudan, that were already firmly in its orbit. So the cash-strapped Sudanese didn’t send women to the games. Nor did countries such as Egypt, which had sour relations with the Iranian government. Others sent tiny teams as a good-will gesture. “We are here to say ‘yes’ to the Iranian system,” said a diminutive table-tennis player from the five-woman Maldives squad. “But from a sports point of view, it’s pointless for us,” she said, shivering as a light snow fell outside Tehran’s underheated table-tennis center. “We’re from the equator. It’s impossible to get warmed up in this place.”
In the end, the former Soviet republics had the biggest teams, in every sense. Altogether, four republics sent 332 athletes, most of them tall, big-boned blondes who towered over the 51 women from the small squads sent by Malaysia, Syria, Pakistan, Maldive and Bangladesh.
Some of the women were national champions; one or two were Olympians. But for all but the shooting team in the 122-member Iranian squad, this chance at international competition was a first. Under their chadors, their faces shone as they marched into the 12,000-seat Azadi stadium.
During the games men were banished from the stands at all but the shooting ra
nge. At the swimming complex, schoolgirls filled the spectators’ benches, peering down at the unfamiliar sight of Iranian lane judges uniformed in fetching purple miniskirts and acid-green T-shirts.
At the track stadium Padideh, the torchbearer, had shaken off her hijab in favor of black Lycra shorts and had literally risen to the occasion by adding nine centimeters to her personal best in the high jump. Her jump, at 1.67 meters, wasn’t good enough to beat the Kyrgyzistan champion, but it broke the Iranian record, set before the revolution. That afternoon, back at the athletes’ hotel, Padideh was ebullient. At heats for the 400-meter race, she had made the final four and was beginning to allow herself to hope that the next day might bring her a medal.
Although Padideh’s mother had been a sportswoman during the days of the shah, Padideh had grown up knowing nothing but segregated sports. “This is nice for us,” she said, waving a hand at the foyer full of women athletes. “Our way of thinking, our culture is this way,” said Padideh. “It would be hard for us, now, to compete in front of men.”
Official translators milled among the athletes, facilitating conversations. Each of them wore the usual Iranian attire—black hood and long tunic—but with a vivid, color-coded athletes’ warmup jacket pulled incongruously on top. Indigo and acid green meant the translator spoke English; pink and chrome yellow, Russian; lime and sky blue, Arabic. As conversations bounced from Farsi to Urdu to English, the hotel lobby filled with a pleasant, feminine buzz. It reminded me of sports day at my all-girl high school.
But in one corner a group of men sat self-consciously, murmuring together in Russian, without the aid of the young women translators. Alyev Mouslim, the Azerbaijani team’s administrator, sighed as he leaned against the wall, waiting for the elevator marked “Special for Men.” He was finding it hard to manage athletes who disappeared early in the morning on women-only buses, bound for arenas he wasn’t allowed to enter. “Actually,” he said, “I don’t have it so bad; I don’t have to coach.” The Kyrgyzistan volleyball coach had had to wait outside during his team’s matches for one of the women to grab a scarf and come out to tell him what was happening so he could make decisions on tactics. Alyev shrugged. “If we can play chess without seeing the board, why not this, too?”
I wondered if he was bored, being unable to go to the matches. “Not at all,” he said. “I have my hands full with all the problems my team is having acclimating to these regulations.” Some of the women had fallen foul of the Iranians because their big floral scarves kept slipping off. “It seems like the biggest fault here is if anybody sees your hair. But if God doesn’t like this, why did he give you eyes?” Others resented the rule against women going out alone to tour the city between their events. The Iranian officials were taking a hyper-protective attitude toward their women guests, insisting that they travel only on official buses, and only with an official translator along. As someone who had wandered the streets of Tehran at all hours unmolested, I thought the rule silly, and likely to give the wrong impression. For a woman alone, Tehran was one of the safest cities in the world.
Murshida Mustakim thought the rule was pretty stupid, too. She had stunned one of the gun-toting male Revolutionary Guards who had tried to block her exit from the hotel. “I told him I was a retired superintendent of the Malaysian police force, and that I’d spent an entire career giving orders to boys like him,” she said. “Then I told him to get out of my way.” Murshida, a towering woman with the shoulders of a longshoreman, had come to Tehran as coach of the shooting team, who were all policewomen on the Malaysian force.
For her, trips to countries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, which she’d visited as a pilgrim to Mecca, were like visits to the past. In her lifetime Malaysia had moved away from a doctrinaire approach to Islam. “When I was growing up, there was a lot of difficulty about girls being uncovered for sports,” she said. While Malaysians’ figure-hugging sarongs wouldn’t have passed muster as hijab in Tehran, conservative Malays believed that their ankle length provided an essential degree of Muslim modesty. Murshida had been a hurdle racer. “I used to unwrap my sarong just before the starter’s pistol, run the race in shorts, and then quickly retie the sarong at the finish line.” These days, she said, most Malaysian Muslims were relaxed about their faith and accepted women’s right to dress as they pleased and participate in society alongside men. But even her distant country hadn’t been entirely immune to the Islamic revival, and many young women had started wearing long veils that covered the head and upper body. In one state, Kelantan, local voters had recently ushered in a fundamentalist mini-state, complete with “morals patrols” to catch unmarried couples dating.
I sat beside Murshida on the bus to one of the Iranians’ official outings: a trip to the tomb of Ayatollah Khomeini. Most of the excursions had followed a similar theme: a visit to the Museum of Reversion and Admonition, a.k.a. the former shah’s palace; a tour of an exhibition entitled “The Dignity and Prestige of Women in the Islamic System.” Before the buses set off for the long drive to Khomeini’s gold-domed shrine on the southern edge of the city, chador-wearing Iranian officials boarded, carrying boxes of Kleenex. At first I had the bizarre thought that they were arming us against the onrush of emotion we would no doubt feel at the sight of Khomeini’s grave. But then I realized that what they were worried about was the lipstick that some of the non-Iranian athletes were wearing. Murshida politely took a proffered tissue and swiped at her glossy red lips. “Well,” she said, “there’d be one good thing about staying here: I could save a fortune on makeup.”
Not necessarily. At the final day of track events, makeup-less athletes and officials filed off the buses and past the guards at the stadium door. Inside, they shook off their hijab and raced for the women’s changing room to powder noses and apply mascara. Everyone wanted to look her best for the videotaped record of the games that a camerawoman was making for later screening at women’s gatherings all over Iran.
Padideh, the Iranian runner, sat by herself, nervously fingering worry beads as she waited for her shot at a medal in the 400 meters final. The night before, I’d commiserated with a Pakistani runner who had blown her heat and missed a chance at the final of her best event. It was a disaster for her, but by the next day she was already looking forward to another chance at the Asian Games, or the Pan-Pacifies, or one of half a dozen international contests she would attend in the following year or two.
For Padideh, everything rested on this one brief race. It would be four years before she had another chance at international competition. As she crouched at the starting line, her leggy, foallike figure looked frail alongside the muscular athletes from Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzistan and Azerbaijan. At the crack of the starter’s pistol, she sped away, her long, loping stride keeping pace with that of her meatier competitors.
But it was a brief illusion of parity. A third of the way through the race, she had already fallen behind, and the strain of her initial effort showed in her face. For Padideh, training had to fit in between university classes, in the brief women’s hours allowed at her nearby stadium. She had never worked out with weights or been trained by a professional coach. She fell across the finish line more than three seconds behind the winner and almost two seconds shy of the third-place runner. Collapsing on the ground, she grasped at her chest and gulped for air between sobs of pain and disappointment.
It was impossible to say whether Padideh could have been a champion in a different time and place, in a system that cared less for modesty and more for methodical training. But her time in the 400 meters, though nowhere near good enough to beat the competition, had shaved a remarkable eight seconds from her previous personal best.
At the farewell dinner after the games’ closing ceremony, Padideh had regained her composure and spoke proudly of the bronze medal she’d helped win for the Iranian relay team. “Of course, I would have liked a medal of my own,” she said, “and now I’ll never get one.” I reminded her that Pakistan and Azerbaijan had both talked of hos
ting an Islamic Women’s Games in four years’ time. Perhaps she would win her medal then.
She shook her head and gave a swift, sad smile. “No,” she said, looking away. “Someone else maybe. For me, I think, it’s just too late.”
Chapter 12
A DIFFERENT DRUMMER
“O true believers, turn unto God with a sincere repentance: peradventure your God will do away from you your evil deeds, and will admit you into gardens, through which rivers flow.”
THE KORAN
THE CHAPTER OF BANNING
Soheir el-Babli, the doyen of the Cairo stage, seemed to have it all. One of the biggest box-office draws in a city that has always loved its performers, her starring role as “Attiya, the Terrorist Woman,” had been packing them in for a year at the 700-seat Misr Art Theater.
Then, suddenly, as the play was about to begin its second season in July 1993, she quit. She was, she said, renouncing show business for good and adopting the Islamic veil.
Soheir’s retirement was part of a wave of resignations by women artists that had begun with Cairo’s belly dancers back in the late 1980s. Soon, dozens of singers and actresses also were hanging up their spangles, wiping off their makeup, donning hijab and haranguing their former audiences about the evils of the artists’ world. By the spring of 1992 the unthinkable had happened: the musicals with dancing that had enlivened the nightly celebrations of Ramadan were banned as un-Islamic, depriving hundreds of artists of work.
But when Soheir resigned, the artists’ world fought back. The play’s producer-director had already reworked the script for the second season to include references to the recent wave of terrorist bombings by Islamic extremists. To replace Soheir, he chose his own twenty-two-year-old daughter, a student at American University in Cairo, whose only theatrical experience had been student productions.