http://www.smh.com.au/world/women-change-the-colour-of-irans-election-20090607-bzuy.html
Women change the colour of Iran's election June 8, 2009 Zahra Rahnavard has been campaigning alongside her husband. Photo: AFP A candidate's wife has injected gender reform into the poll, writes Colin Freeman in Tehran. IF HIS performance in the television studios is anything to go by, Mir-Hossein Mousavi is scarcely the obvious choice to oust President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and bring Iran back in from the cold. A former hardliner whose plodding style evokes comparisons with Leonid Brezhnev, he is as much a blast from Iran's revolutionary past as a breath of fresh reformist air. Yet the bespectacled 67-year-old, who was prime minister during the country's revolutionary heyday in the 1980s, has come out of retirement in an attempt to end what he describes as Mr Ahmadinejad's "disgraceful" presidency. In his attempts to convince voters that he is now an agent of change, he has deployed a weapon no Iranian politician has dared use before - his wife. He is the first politician in 30 years to campaign with his spouse beside him - a bold nod to equality that has given credibility to his pledges to take Iran down the more liberal route. Mr Mousavi's wife, Zahra Rahnavard, a grandmother, painter and former university chancellor, is no Michelle Obama. Ms Rahnavard, 61, sticks to the chador, the all-encompassing charcoal cloak that has long symbolised Islamic conservatism. But that has not stopped supporters hailing her as Iran's first-ever "First Lady", and on the campaign trail her speeches in favour of greater women's rights have stolen the show for her quietly spoken husband. "Why are there no women presidential candidates or cabinet ministers?" she asked women in her audience in Tabriz last week, referring to a political scene still dominated largely by bearded clerics. "Getting rid of discrimination and demanding equal rights is the No. 1 priority for women in Iran." Thanks to the "Zahra factor" Mr Mousavi is now the strongest of three challengers to Mr Ahmadinejad in this Friday's poll. In a sign that the President is perhaps sensitive to the threat Ms Rahnavard poses, he used a US-style televised debate on Wednesday to suggest she had used bogus academic qualifications to gain her university chancellorship. The comments, which visibly angered Mr Mousavi, drew Mr Ahmadinejad a public rebuke from the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. However, the real challenge for Mr Mousavi lies in rebranding himself and his wife as a reformist couple to the outside world, given their respective pasts as hardliners. Mr Mousavi, who was prime minister from 1981 to 1989, was once branded a terrorist kingpin by the Reagan administration, although he fashioned a new role as an adviser to the previous reformist president, Mohammad Khatami, in the 1990s. His wife once wrote a play about Salman Rushdie, the author who was the subject of a fatwa from the late Ayatollah Khomeini, which cast Rushdie as the devil. She is also the author of an essay titled The Colonial Motives For The Unveiling Of Women And The Beauty Of The Veil. Yet to their own constituencies such credentials are helpful for reassuring voters anxious about reaching out to the West. For Ms Rahnavard the veil is not a symbol of oppression, but one of emancipation, worn in similar spirit to the baggy jumpers, sensible shoes and other plain garb of many 1980s Western feminists. In her view it takes women away "from being mere objects and makes them intellectually and spiritually valued people". In 2000, though, she led a successful campaign for women to wear colours other than the decreed all-black garb. Today she backs her husband's calls to scrap morality patrols, the hardline squads that harass young women for wearing their mandatory headscarves too loosely. Most polls predict Friday's vote will go to a second round, with Mr Ahmadinejad - whose own wife keeps a low profile - then possibly narrowly snatching victory. Telegraph, London [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
