Iran’s female musicians hope for more freedom

Until two days before her concert at one of Tehran’s leading music venues, Jivar Sheikholeslami, a 32-year-old Iranian singer in an all-female folklore band, did not know if she would get official permission for the performance.

For more than 30 years, female singers in Iran have not been able to sing solo or perform to a mixed audience. It is illegal to take pictures of them singing or to record their performances. Even group performances to all-women audiences, such as that planned this week at Andisheh hall, have been closely monitored since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.

“Why should I be kept under so much stress before my performance?” she says. “If the female voice was against religion, God would have created us mute.”

But the concert did take place, amid growing hopes that female singers might have more freedom under Hassan Rouhani, president, who swept to power in June promising a weary population that hardline policies would be softened.

International attention has focused on the softening of his rhetoric on the nuclear crisis and his attempts to ease international sanctions that have battered the economy. But within the Islamic Republic, many hope that there will also be an easing of restrictions on cultural life.

Since 1979, the Iranian leadership has banned music that promotes “decadent western culture” and could distance Muslims from God. Pop and rock music has been discouraged and rap is banned. In the years after the revolution, clerics shut down a flourishing pop scene as well as cabarets, bars and dancing clubs. But many continued to listen to their favourite singers – some of whom decamped to Los Angeles – on smuggled videos and satellite television. While male singers and mixed bands can perform traditional and Iranian pop music, women face many restrictions. Iran’s supreme leader and ultimate decision maker, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had previously said that women could sing to a mixed crowd provided no sins and coquetry were involved, comments widely interpreted to mean that women singers should wear Islamic dress and sing traditional music.

But hopes are high that the new government could signal change.

Last week, Ali Jannati, Iran’s new culture minister, raised expectations that a more than 30-year old taboo could be broken when he said that some religious decrees did not explicitly ban women singing from singing solo. The new administration is likely to face numerous challenges in its attempts to soften the rules. Hardliners remain resistant to change and senior clergy oppose the loosening of restrictions on female performers. This week, Bahar, a reformist newspaper, was shut down on charges of publishing an allegedly anti-religion article.
"Hundreds of women, who found out about the concert on the internet, lined up outside the hall. Security guards checked their heads were covered and took their mobile phones to make sure they could not record the concert."

There is clearly demand to see women perform, as Jivar’s concert this week made clear. While there were billboards across Tehran advertising this weekend’s concert by a group of traditional male singers, there were no advertisements for Jivar, not even at the Andisheh concert hall itself. Still, hundreds of women, who found out about the concert on internet, lined up outside the hall on Wednesday. Security guards checked their heads were covered and then took their mobile phones to make sure they could not record the concert. “Happiness with torture,” murmured one woman in the queue.

Inside the concert hall, women removed their headscarves, whistled and danced in their seats. “Please support women bands and inform others about our concert,” Jivar told her audience. “Don’t let them [hardliners] disappoint us. That’s what they wish.” The time is ripe for change, musicians say. There should be “an end to anomalies about women singing but it probably needs a few more years to bear fruit,” says a musician who advises authorities about art. “We need to argue in simple terms to religious people that music is like a knife which can be used both for surgery and murder.”

Mahsa Vahdat, a prominent singer of mystic music – melancholy tunes inspired by poets such as Hafez, Sadi and Rumi – is pleased that the “disturbing heavy silence” about women singing solo has been broken. But she doubts a breakthrough is imminent. “It is the officials who have to change their mentalities. Who would be [sexually] provoked by Hafez poetry?” she says. “The government has a political problem with women's’ voices … [because] singing will give women power and huge influence.”

She has refused to adapt to the censorship. She neither sings with men or sings to female-only audiences, choosing instead to perform outside Iran. In Tehran, some bookshops quietly sell her bootleg CDs – notably the “Twinkling of Hope” which she sang two years ago when many people were still traumatised by the 2009 anti-regime street protesters and deaths of tens of people.

“One of the duties of my art at the moment is to keep hope alive in the hearts of the youth,” she says. “For centuries, Iran’s art has suffered from censorship but what has kept it alive is hope.”

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2013.