Lipstick revolution: Iran’s women are taking on the mullahs
See all: It started with a switch from hijabs to Herms headscarves. Now, after 30 years of Sharia law, the fight for women’s rights is gathering pace. Katherine Butler meets the Iranian rally drivers, bloggers and film-makers demanding change. Zohreh Vatankhah slides into the driving seat of her BMW X3, flicks a switch to some pulsating Persian pop and we’re soon zipping along the narrow lanes near her home in northern Tehran, almost in the foothills of the snow-capped Alborz mountains. Most Iranians behave in traffic as if they are in charge of dodgems, not potentially lethal vehicles: the traffic is heart-stoppingly dangerous, but with this woman I can relax. A professional racing driver, she’s used to competing, and winning, at speeds of up to 180mph. She’s glamorous, too, wearing high-heeled boots over her jeans (a controversial look in the eyes of the Iranian morality police) and a Rolex on her wrist. When she’s not confounding stereotypes of Iranian women by beating men on the rally circuits, she’s climbing mountains (she recently conquered Mount Damavand, the highest peak in the Middle East), or, here, in the axis of evil, sworn enemy of the United States, watching US (banned but tolerated) satellite TV channels; 24 is one of her favourite shows. “I LOVE Barack Obama,” she says, “and Michelle, she’s so stylish and so smart.” At 31, Vatankhah was born a year before Iran’s Islamic revolution. In February 1978, Tehran had nightclubs and dancing and girls-about-town who dressed as fashionably as their counterparts in Europe. A year later, the Shah had fled from his Peacock Throne; Iran was reborn as an Islamic Republic and women, many of whom supported the overthrow, were waking up to find their lives drastically changed. Not only obliged to cover up from head to toe, and banned from singing or performing in public to conform with Ayatollah Khomeini’s narrow interpretation of Sharia law, they were also, as Shirin Ebadi, Nobel prize winner and Iran’s first woman found to her cost, sidelined from[…]