The Book of Modesty: An Interview with Shervin Vakili on the Evolution of Women's Representation in Iranian Culture and Its Comparison with European Civilization

From a mythological perspective, what kinds of representations of women have appeared in Iranian literature and miniature painting (throughout history)? The temptress, the demonic, a mediator of spirituality, a symbol of materialism, or something along these lines?

It should be noted that, fundamentally, woman is one of the most pivotal themes in the realm of culture. That is, the focal point of artistic representation since the Neolithic era has been the representation of the female form, and women have always held a key position in literature, religion, and collective rituals. For this reason, there is remarkable diversity in the discourses concerning the definition of the feminine, and practically all the aspects you mentioned can be found in the various intellectual currents of a civilizational sphere. Nevertheless, the main binary we have is the two manifestations of woman as mother and as wife. That is, we have a contrasting semantic pair, which in Semitic narratives, for example, is formulated as the opposition between Eve and Mary. Eve is a manifestation of woman as wife and object of sexual desire, and is therefore represented as seductive, beautiful, and attractive, while also being considered a symbol of sin, deceit, and material hedonism in ascetic religions like Christianity. In contrast, we have the image of Mary, whose maternal aspect is prominent, and who is depicted in the Christian faith as so desexualized that, contrary to the explicit text of the Gospels, she has been considered a virgin since the fourth century AD onwards. In contrast to Eve, Mary is considered a symbol of piety, chastity, and benevolence. This binary has, on one side, the earthly, lustful, pleasurable, and sinful Eve, who gives birth to sinful children like Cain; and opposite her, it places the holy Mary, who is heavenly, pure, ascetic, and immaculate, and the child born of her is the son and incarnation of God, namely Jesus Christ. This binary is seen in different forms in all civilizations. The most important distinction is that in the Iranian world, this binary is relatively faint and marginal, whereas in Europe, the entire image of femininity revolves around these two poles.

So the European image of women was more narrow-minded and ascetic than that of Iranians? Doesn't this contradict the common perception held by Iranians and Europeans today?

Yes, such a theoretical contradiction exists among the general populace. The reason is that ordinary people—both Iranian and European—only hold the memory of their last two or three generations in mind and are not sufficiently familiar with historical sources. A review of literary sources, religious treatises, and historical texts clearly reveals that in the Iranian world, we have had a dominant and powerful central image of femininity that was situated in the middle of the aforementioned binary, and the binary itself was essentially insignificant. Throughout Iran's five-thousand-year history, the primary representation of women has been a mixture of sexual desire and lust, and social agency, and all of this has been valued. In contrast, we have groups of ascetics, world-renouncers, or dogmatic zealots who negated femininity altogether and believed in the said binary, and they have always been on the margins of society and, fortunately, have not played a decisive role in the general behavior of the people. In European civilization, we see the exact opposite. That is, in ancient Greece and Rome, women were fundamentally considered a kind of inferior sex and a lowly, defective form of men, and were deprived of civil and political rights, and after the rise of Christianity, their image, with these same presuppositions, was reduced to the Eve-Mary binary. In Europe, until the seventeenth century, feminine images outside this binary are rare, exceptional, and marginalized. In the Iranian world, we see the reverse. That is, even pious and Sufi women like Rabi'a are spokespersons for love, and in our mythology and literature, women have always been depicted as a mixture of heavenly purity and earthly desire. It suffices to consider the extent to which Zuleikha has been praised in Iranian civilization, and over the past thousand years, about a hundred complete verse epics have been composed about her, in all of which Zuleikha has been one of the two main heroes. In contrast, in European civilization, this woman essentially has no name and, quoting the Bible, is called "Potiphar's wife" or "the wife of the Aziz of Egypt." Other examples are abundant. From Tahmineh to Manijeh, Vis, and Gordafarid, everywhere in literature we encounter active and sexually agentive women who are rarely condemned, like Sudabeh...

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PDF file of the interview with Shervin Vakili; "The Book of Modesty"

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Shervin Vakili's Telegram

www.soshians.ir

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