by Carol McQueen

Roksana Bahramitash hates assumptions and stereotypes, because more often than not they are wrong. Upon learning that she is from Iran, her students almost invariably assume that she must have immigrated to Canada as a young girl since, in their eyes, a country under Islamic rule does not allow women access to education.

They are wrong. Bahramitash obtained her master’s degree in Iran after placing second in nationwide entrance exams, and came to Montreal in 1991 to do her PhD in sociology at McGill after winning an Iranian government scholarship.

“To them, having an educated woman from Iran was a very strange idea, a bit of a shock,” she explained.

Even more shocking to some perhaps is the possibility that political Islam, or Islamist rule, might actually have advanced the cause of women in some Muslim countries in terms of employment.

This is what Bahramitash, a post-doctoral research fellow at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute, hopes to uncover and explain with the $10,000 Aileen D. Ross Fellowship she has been awarded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). The fellowship is given to a researcher in sociology, with a particular focus on poverty.

“In the West, I’ve become very sensitized toward stereotypes, toward this negative image of women in the Muslim world, toward the fact that women in the Muslim world are regarded as victims,” Bahramitash said.

She feels that such stereotyping has potentially serious implications in the current context of the American-led war on terrorism, since leaders can use common misperceptions about the treatment of women in Muslim countries as a means to build public support for military action.

Bahramitash’s own interest in the relationship between Islamist rule and female employment stemmed from her experience during the revolution in Iran. On the one hand, as a middle-class woman who had enjoyed relative freedom under the shah, she now had to wear a veil. On the other hand, the revolution politicized and mobilized working-class and peasant women.

“It gave these women a public role because of street marches, because of the formation of women’s branches of peoples’ movements,” Bahramitash said. So although she acknowledges that “religion has sometimes been very oppressive toward the role of women in Islamic countries,” she also recognizes that the “question is extremely complex.”

Bahramitash chose to stay with the Islamist movement in Iran, helping to organize literacy campaigns for women and assisting women to take advantage of the now religious duty to study. “The fact that the Islamist regime made education a religious duty meant that you now have a high number of educated women, in some cases, more educated women than educated men,” explained Bahramitash. At present, women make up 52 per cent of those in higher education in Iran, and some provinces are considering implementing male quotas in medical school because of the high rate of female students.

Bahramitash’s preliminary findings also indicate that female employment in Iran has risen under Islamist rule, particularly in the last 10 years. She hopes to accumulate more data from two other countries, Turkey and Egypt, where she will travel in December to do her field work.
Her specific research also relates to her broader concern about female poverty in the world, something that she herself has experienced first hand.

Bahramitash raised her four children alone in a new country while completing her doctorate, even having to live on welfare at one point to survive. “I look on my struggle with poverty as an asset,” she said, “I am not just an academic that studies the poverty of others. I am that other. I am the object I study.”

She sees the rise in female employment in Iran and other Muslim countries as part of a global trend in the world economy. More and more women are entering the formal and informal job markets because more income is needed to support their families.

“Whether that employment has translated into their economic empowerment is not necessarily clear,” she said, since women most often work in “jobs that are unprotected, unregulated and without any benefits.”

Once she finishes this current project, Bahramitash hopes to turn her attention to Muslim women’s employment in Quebec. Holders of stereotypes and assumptions beware.

Roksana Bahramitash will be teaching a course on Women in the Muslim World next semester. See http://artsandscience.concordia.ca/wsdb/COURSESWNTR.html for more details.