What Did Ayatollah Khomeini do with WOMEN? *Warning REAL FOOTAGE JJ

When Ayatollah Khomeini returned to  Iran, most people assumed the revolution was about ending the previous brutal  regime. Millions had marched for that. But very quickly, something else became clear. The  new government wasn’t just replacing one ruler; it was rebuilding society from scratch, and  women were about to pay the heaviest price.

By the late 1970s, Tehran looked much like  other modern capital cities around the world. Women wearing jeans walked alongside women wearing  headscarves. Both were making their own choice. The changes had started in 1936 when Reza Shah  Pahlavi, the father of the last Shah, banned the hijab completely. Police were ordered to remove  veils from women in public, often by force.

That was its own form of oppression because  many women wanted to wear religious coverings. But despite the harsh methods, the government had  set a clear direction. Over the next forty years, that direction continued moving toward greater  legal rights and opportunities for women. One of the biggest turning points came  in 1963 when Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi gave women the right to vote as part of a  reform program known as the White Revolution.

That same year, six women won seats in  the Majlis, Iran’s parliament. In 1967, the Family Protection Law changed divorce  and child custody laws in ways that gave women legal rights they had never had  before. The law was expanded again in 1975. One of the most important changes was raising  the minimum legal marriage age for girls to 18.

By the mid-1970s, women made up about  one-third of all university students in Iran. Mahnaz Afkhami served as Minister of Women’s  Affairs from 1976 to 1978. Women worked as judges, lawyers, doctors, professors, television  presenters, and government officials. Female news anchors appeared regularly on  national television.

In Iran’s cities, educated professional women were not unusual. They were a  normal and visible part of everyday public life. But everything that had been  built over those decades was about to be dismantled  in less than four years. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini was born on  September 24, 1902, in the small town of Khomein in central Iran.

He came from a religious  family and spent most of his life studying and teaching Shia Islamic law in the religious city  of Qom. His views on women were never a secret. Long before he became famous, they were already a  central part of how he saw religion and society. In 1941, he published a book called Kashf  al-Asrar, or Revelation of Secrets. In it, he attacked the Shah’s modernization programs,  especially policies that encouraged men and women to mix in public and laws that discouraged  traditional Islamic dress.

Khomeini believed that women entering public and professional life  was not progress but a threat to Islamic values. In 1963, when the Shah announced that women  would receive the right to vote as part of the White Revolution, Khomeini became  one of the leading voices opposing it. He called the reform un-Islamic and helped  organize protests against it.

The Shah’s security forces arrested him, and after a period  in prison he was forced into exile in 1964. He was first sent to Turkey and later moved to  the Shia holy city of Najaf in Iraq, where he spent the next fourteen years teaching, writing,  and building support among religious followers. Those fourteen years were far from quiet.

During  that time, Khomeini developed his most important political idea, known as Velayat-e Faqih,  meaning “Guardianship of the Islamic Jurist.” The theory argued that the highest political  authority in a truly Islamic state should belong to a senior religious scholar who governs  according to his interpretation of Islamic law. In 1978, as protests against the Shah  spread across Iran, Khomeini left Najaf and moved to a rented house in Neauphle-le-Ch  teau, a small village outside Paris.

From there, he recorded speeches on cassette  tapes that were secretly smuggled into Iran. The recordings were copied millions of  times and spread across the country. Khomeini became the voice of the revolution.  He spoke about justice, Islamic government, and ending the Shah’s authoritarian rule.

When  Western reporters asked him whether women in an Islamic Republic would be forced to wear  the hijab, he avoided giving a clear answer. That lack of clarity was part of the plan. On January 16, 1979, Shah Mohammad Reza  Pahlavi boarded a plane and left Iran. He would never return.

Just over two weeks later,  on February 1, 1979, Ruhollah Khomeini flew into Tehran from Paris. Millions of people  filled the streets to welcome him home. A large number of those people were women. This is the part of the story that many people  never hear because it does not fit the simple version of events. Iranian women were not  just watching the Islamic Revolution happen. They helped make it happen.

Women from  the communist Tudeh Party, women from the Marxist-Leninist Mojahedin-e Khalq organization,  better known as the MEK, religious women who believed an Islamic government would bring  justice, and secular middle-class women who hated the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, all  stood together. They marched in demonstrations. They carried signs. They organized protests. Some  even stood in front of tanks during the unrest.

Many secular and left-wing women also chose  to wear headscarves during the protests. For them, it was a political symbol and a way  of rejecting what they saw as the Shah’s forced Westernization of Iranian society. They wore  the veil by choice as an act of resistance. Just 34 days after returning, Khomeini made  his first major move against women’s freedoms.

On March 7, 1979, he announced that  women working in government offices would be required to wear the  hijab. The timing was deliberate. The announcement came only one day before  International Women’s Day on March 8. The next day, thousands of women flooded  the streets of Tehran. They marched to places like the Ministry of Justice, the  Palace of Justice, and Tehran University.

They demanded answers. They wanted to know what  had happened to the promises of freedom that had been made during the revolution. Supporters  of Khomeini responded with hostility. Women protesters were hit with rocks and eggs. Some  were physically attacked. They were called agents of imperialism, enemies of Islam, and traitors  to the very revolution they had helped create.

What happened after the March protests was not  a slow shift toward religious conservatism. It was a rapid and organized effort  to strip away women’s rights. The new government moved from the top  down, changing laws and institutions with remarkable speed because it already knew  exactly what kind of society it wanted to build.

One of the first targets was the Family Protection  Laws of 1967 and 1975. These laws had given women important legal rights in divorce cases, raised  the minimum marriage age for girls to 18, and improved a mother’s chances of gaining  custody of her children. After the revolution, these protections were quickly suspended.

By  1979, the minimum legal marriage age for girls had been lowered to 9 lunar years,  which is about 8 and a half years in the solar calendar used internationally.  For boys, the minimum age was set at 15. This decision came directly from Khomeini’s  interpretation of traditional Islamic law. Women also lost their place in the judiciary.

On  May 12, 1979, Khomeini declared that judges had to be adult men, which automatically excluded  women under his religious interpretation. Around 20 women had been serving as judges  under the Shah’s government. Almost overnight, they were removed from their positions or  reassigned to lower administrative jobs. One of those women was Shirin Ebadi.

She had been  a judge since 1969 and served as president of the Tehran City Court. After the revolution, she was  stripped of her judgeship and given the title of legal clerk in the same court she had once  led. She spent the following decades fighting for legal reform and human rights inside Iran.  In 2003, she became the first Iranian to win the Nobel Peace Prize. But in 1979, there was nothing  she could legally do to challenge her removal.

The new Iranian constitution,  approved in December 1979, made gender inequality part of  the foundation of the state. The constitution stated that women had rights,  but only within the limits of Islamic law. In 1983, mandatory hijab became a criminal law  with official punishments.

Women who appeared in public without proper Islamic dress could face 74  lashes or a financial penalty. Proper dress meant fully covering the hair, wearing loose-fitting  clothing, and avoiding visible makeup or nail polish. Revolutionary morality forces, known  as the Komiteh, were given the power to enforce these rules.

Their officers could stop women in  public, inspect their appearance, question them, and detain them immediately if they  believed the rules had been broken. During the same period, women were pushed out  of many professions and educational fields. Jobs in mining, certain agricultural sectors,  and several technical university programs were declared unsuitable for women and became  off-limits.

Female singers were forbidden from performing before male audiences. The  government’s reasoning was that these professions and activities placed women in situations  that violated Islamic standards of modesty. One of the most famous victims of these  restrictions was Googoosh, Iran’s biggest pop star before the revolution.

She had tens of millions  of fans across the country and throughout the Middle East. After the new government took power,  she was no longer allowed to perform publicly. She remained in Iran and spent more than twenty  years in a form of silent internal exile, unable to sing for an audience despite being  one of the country’s most beloved entertainers. The legal changes made after the  revolution were not just words on paper.

They affected the everyday lives  of millions of ordinary Iranians. Nowhere was this more obvious than  inside the country’s courtrooms, where women quickly found themselves treated  as second-class citizens under the law. The Islamic Penal Code, which was developed during  the early 1980s and formally codified in 1983, stated that a woman’s testimony was worth only  half that of a man.

In serious criminal cases, the testimony of one woman alone was  often not enough to secure a conviction. In many situations, two women were needed to equal  the testimony of one man. In some cases involving financial disputes or accusations of adultery,  a woman’s testimony was not accepted at all. The law also formalized the “diyya”  system, often called blood money.

This was financial compensation paid to the family  of a victim after a death or serious injury. Under the new system, if a woman was killed, her family  received exactly half the compensation that would be paid if the victim had been a man. This was not  just a symbolic rule.

It appeared in actual court decisions and insurance settlements across Iran  throughout the 1980s and for many years afterward. Child custody laws were changed as well. Fathers  automatically received custody of boys older than two years and girls older than seven years. A  divorced woman who remarried lost custody of her children altogether. For many women, divorce  no longer meant only the end of a marriage.

It often meant losing daily contact  with their children as well. On September 22, 1980, the military of Saddam  Hussein’s Iraq crossed the Iranian border, beginning a brutal war that would last eight  years. The conflict became one of the deadliest wars of the late twentieth century, killing  somewhere between 500,000 and one million people.

The war changed almost every part of life inside  Iran, including the situation facing women. With hundreds of thousands of  men sent to the front lines, the government suddenly faced a problem. While its ideology pushed women toward the home,  the country needed workers to keep functioning. Women stepped into roles that became essential to  the war effort.

They worked as nurses and medical staff in hospitals treating wounded soldiers. They  worked in government offices, factories, schools, and countless other jobs needed to keep  society running. Many women were forced to manage entire households on their own while  husbands, fathers, and sons were away fighting. The war exposed a contradiction  inside the Islamic Republic.

The government wanted women  focused on domestic life, but the realities of an eight-year war made  female labor necessary for the country’s survival. At the same time, the war gave the government  a powerful excuse to crush opposition. Any criticism of the regime could  be labeled counter-revolutionary or portrayed as helping the enemy.

Protests over  women’s rights could be dismissed as threats to national unity during wartime. In this atmosphere,  organized resistance became extremely difficult. Women’s organizations that had opposed  the new restrictions were shut down. The Women’s Organization of Iran, which  had been one of the country’s largest institutions advocating for women’s rights  under the Shah, was dissolved in 1979.

Independent feminist publications were closed.  Women’s groups connected to communist and Marxist movements were banned outright, and many of  their members were arrested and imprisoned. The crackdown became even more severe in 1981. In  June of that year, the Mojahedin-e Khalq, or MEK, launched an armed uprising against the Islamic  Republic.

The government responded with a massive campaign of arrests and executions that extended  far beyond the MEK itself. Left-wing groups across the political spectrum were targeted. Thousands  of political prisoners were arrested and sent to prisons such as Evin Prison in Tehran. Many were  young women who had been active in student groups, labor organizations, or opposition  movements before and after the revolution.

Then came one of the darkest episodes  in the history of the Islamic Republic. During the summer of 1988, Khomeini issued  a secret fatwa authorizing the execution of political prisoners who refused to abandon their  political beliefs. Over the following weeks, prison authorities carried out mass executions  of prisoners who had already been tried and were already serving sentences. Historians  still debate the exact number of victims.

Estimates range from about 4,500 to as many as  30,000 people. Most serious researchers place the minimum death toll at roughly 5,000. Among those  executed were hundreds of women, including some teenage girls who had been arrested for activities  such as distributing political leaflets. One allegation from this period became  particularly controversial and was later publicly condemned by Grand Ayatollah Hossein-Ali  Montazeri, who at the time was Khomeini’s chosen successor. In his memoirs, Montazeri wrote  that prison officials arranged temporary

Islamic marriages for some young female  political prisoners before their executions. According to accounts he cited, this was done  because certain interpretations of Islamic law held that virgin women should not be executed.  A prison guard would be assigned as the woman’s husband through a brief religious ceremony,  after which the execution would take place.

Montazeri, despite being one of the senior  figures who helped create the Islamic Republic, openly condemned the practice and described  it as a crime. His criticism put him on a direct collision course with Khomeini. Within  months, he was removed from his position as Khomeini’s designated successor, ending his  path to becoming Iran’s next supreme leader.

Despite everything that had happened, Iranian  women did not simply accept the new system. From the very first protests on March 8, 1979,  they continued to resist. Sometimes they did so openly. Other times they fought back in ways  the government could not easily see or control. Throughout the 1980s, underground networks began  to appear across the country.

Women shared legal advice and information about their rights.  They helped the families of political prisoners and kept feminist ideas alive through secret  newsletters, private meetings, and informal discussion groups. In some rural areas, where  educational opportunities for women had become more limited, women organized unofficial classes  in their homes so girls could continue learning.

In Tehran and other major cities, private homes  became part of a hidden world that existed beyond the reach of the state. As long as the curtains  stayed shut and nobody informed the authorities, this private world remained largely invisible. One of the women documenting these changes was  lawyer Mehrangiz Kar, who was born in 1944.

During the 1980s and 1990s, she carefully  recorded how discrimination against women operated inside Iran’s legal system. She published  detailed studies showing how the new laws affected real women in real court cases. In 2000, she was  arrested after attending a conference in Berlin where she openly criticized the Islamic Republic.

But her work survived and became an important record of what life under the new legal  system actually looked like for Iranian women. Writers also found ways to challenge the system. Shahrnush Parsipur used fiction and symbolism  to explore the restrictions placed on women. Her stories discussed subjects that could  not be criticized directly.

For a time, this allowed her work to avoid censorship.  Eventually, however, the authorities stepped in. Her 1989 novel *Women Without Men* was  banned, and she was later imprisoned. Iranian cinema became another unexpected space  where women’s experiences could still be explored. Director Rakhshan Bani-Etemad, who  began making films during the 1980s, focused much of her work on the lives of ordinary  Iranian women.

Her films examined the struggles of both working-class and middle-class women.  Although the movies passed government censorship, they often revealed social realities that  the authorities preferred people not discuss. Over time, many Iranian women became  experts at living two separate lives. One was the public life that followed  the rules of the Islamic Republic.

The other was the private life  that existed behind closed doors. On June 3, 1989, Ruhollah Khomeini died of heart  failure at the age of 86. The reaction across Iran was enormous. Millions of people poured into  the streets to mourn him. Many were openly crying and grieving.

The funeral crowd was so large and  emotional that people surged toward the coffin, trying to touch it. The situation became so  chaotic that the coffin was nearly torn apart. Eventually, Khomeini’s body had to be  transported to the burial site by helicopter. When he died, Khomeini had achieved something  few modern political leaders ever accomplish. In just ten years, he had transformed an entire  country according to his religious vision.

Iran’s population was about 40 million people, and nearly every major institution had been  reshaped to fit his interpretation of Islamic law. After Khomeini’s death, an entire generation  of women grew up inside the Islamic Republic. Unlike their mothers, they had known no other  system.

Yet many of them had become increasingly educated, politically aware, and determined to  challenge the restrictions placed upon them.