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Women in Muslim countries are a curiosity for the Western world. As far back as the early 1900s, those traveling and studying the Islamic world offered different insights into the lives of women. However, Western conjecture concerning the role of women in the Muslim world has often been misunderstood and misrepresented. The veil is touted as a symbol of their bondage to a patriarchal world and their distance to foreigners, particularly males, is often interpreted as a sign of their subservience. Despite many Muslim feminists' attempts to correct such images, the idea that women in the Muslim world are degraded persists in the Western world. In this article, I will use the case of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) to examine the situation of women's education in one Muslim country.
Iranian women's roles in the educational sphere dispel some of the Western misconceptions about the role of women in an Islamic society. It is evidence that women's lower status prevalent in many Muslim societies is not a function of Islam, but rather local cultural and social milieus where Islam was adopted (Rahman, 1983). Zahra Rahnavard, an Iranian scholar and feminist, stated:
Some of the activities that result in belittling women and lowering their status are conducted in the name of Islam. But these only have a religious cover and not a religious content. If we follow the true Muhammadian religion of Islam, then women would have no problems. (cited in Afshar, 1991, p. 206)
Rahnavard stressed that Islam exalts the right of women to an education and teaches the benefits of educated women. The case of the IRI suggests that Islam does not hinder the education of girls and women.1 In its early days of power, the IRI restricted girls' and women's access to education, not because of tenets of Islam, but because the system of education was secular and Western-threatening to an Islamic society.
With the onslaught of the Iranian Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini set out to "Islamicize"2 the country, and the educational system was at the top of his social and political agenda. This system of "purification" entailed all levels of the educational system. The curriculum content was scrutinized, dissident faculty were purged, and the system was sex-segregated. Once the educational system...