Women’s roles in premodern Iran are very different from how the west might perceive them. While we in the west tend to view gender in all cultures through the same lense as our own, gender in the binary is often very uniquely western. Thus, women’s roles and struggles in societies around the world differ drastically from those of women in premodern western countries. For example, Najmabadi’s book highlights an issue that women of Iran faced that would not have occurred in many western societies. In her book, the struggles of women to pry the attentions of their husbands away from their young male lovers is a key issue. For the women of this society, femininity was the not the ultimate goal to achieve maximum attractiveness. Rather, these women would often draw mustaches on their faces so as to appear more like the young men they competed with. Thus, they were not viewed only as objects as sexual desire to lusted after by men, but as only one the options presented to a very specific population of men.

These problems are so unlike those of the women of the west, that to analyze the struggles of modern women through a western lense would be to completely disregard this complex history. The choice or lack thereof to veil is one that many western societies would label as a global feminist issue, demonizing the veil as an inherently misogynistic tool of the patriarchy, yet to many Iranian women, even those who may not necessarily wish to veil, this is not the case. Rather, the rigid binary systems that led to these conditions are an introduction from the west. They are a form of ongoing imperialism rather than one of patriarchal dominance. They oppress all Iranians, not just women. This strict definition of gender and the roles belonging to each sex is a concept that was introduced by Europeans, and in a way, forced onto the Iranian public, so that their histories of gender fluidity might be erased in favour of a more western view of the age old practice of the necessity of women to act only as objects of desire for the men in their lives.

“When a man pinches a woman’s bottom or grabs her breast on the street, modernity’s heterosocial promise has become a nightmare.  Woman’s voluntary reveiling in the 1970s in many urban centers of Islamic countries acquires a somewhat different meaning in this trajectory.  But that is a story for another time.”  Pg. 155

“From the late nineteenth century, a great deal of cultural criticism has been expended on the farangi’ma’ab.  In fact, through [the] mid-twentieth century, the prime figure of modernity’s excess was not female; the so-called Westoxicated woman did not become the main demon of gharbzadegi (Westoxication) until the 1960s and 1970s.”  Pg. 138

“The issue of women’s veil and unveil, compulsory or consensual, in Islamicate societies and communities has taken center stage in discussions of ‘the status of women’ in these societies on an international scale.  The veil, in its hypervisibility, has come to serve as a sign for more than gender; it has come to be read for ‘the state of modernity.’  This hypervisibility has compounded the erasure of that other excess figure of Iranian modernity by continuing the prior work of making woman stand as a privileged mark of modernity.”  Pg. 242

How does Najmabadi’s account of gender fluidity in premodern Islamic Iran help us to understand the ongoing debate and attention to the status of women in postrevolutionary Iran?

While watching “The Cow” I began seriously pondering to what extent we can assign any intangible qualities to modernity. If the cow is indeed a metaphor for Iran’s oil, and the storyline intended to mirror the crisis Iran experienced under Shah Pahlavi in the 1970’s, then the films seems to carry a message of continuity rather than one of disjointed eras or irreconcilable contrasts. Modernity is, after all, not a scientific construct; rather it is whatever society construes it to be at any given flashpoint. As historians and sociologists were first grappling with the concept of modernity, they would have doubtless viewed oil as a definitively modern resource; the “black gold” made valuable by the legacy of the Industrial Revolution and used to power most of the world’s most “advanced” technologies. The cow, meanwhile, would have been seen as a rather archaic economic resource, intrinsically linked to the sustenance farming that Rostow saw as defining the “traditional society” which was lowest on his five-staged pyramid of development. However, it can be said that the cow was viewed and treated by its owner in the exact same fashion as Pahlavi and his cronies viewed and treated their resource of oil . Both became a singular obsession; both led their owners into inhabiting a distorted reality that led to their ultimate downfall.
Thus to me “The Cow” illustrates an argument by which the concept of modernity works best and most cohesively when applied solely to the material realm. It is easy to say the cow is a “pre-modern” resource and oil is a “modern” resource; that said, it is much more difficult to find differences in the human flaws that governed the management of both the cow and oil. The allegory of the cow points to characteristics such as greed, pride, and tunnel vision that have transcended eras and cultures to define the human condition.

The plot focuses on a childless peasant who lives with his wife and their cow. For the desperately impoverished hamlet in which they live, the cow is a primary source of sustenance. Accordingly, the man dotes on the cow, adoring his as cow as if it were his child, taking the cow to graze in the open fields and carefully washing it. His connection to this cow is so strong that when the animal dies under mysterious circumstances while the man leaves to go to the capital, the villagers conspire to lie to him about the fate of his cow, fearing that the truth would break him. Despite these efforts to obscure the truth, the man does not believe the others, eventually turning insane and believing himself to be a cow before coming to an untimely end.

Given the ambiguities surrounding many of the plot points, like what exactly happened to the cow, much of the film itself is left to the interpretation of the viewer. One interpretation of the movie that is very much in keeping with the themes of our class is that the cow can be seen as symbolizing the oil of Iran. The cow is so central to the functioning of the village that its demise leads to a major disruption in the village. Indeed many of the villagers are dependent on this singular cow. Similarly, around this time oil was itself central to the functioning of Iran, to the extent that a threat to its supply constituted a threat to national stability.

Another possible interpretation of the film that would speak to the themes of the course are to consider the village and centrality of the cow to its way of life as representing the inertia of a traditional, culturally authentic lifestyle. As this lifestyle is rudely and abruptly disrupted by the death of the cow, rather than rapidly adapt to changing realities, i.e. quickly adapt Western attitudes and technologies, the erstwhile cow owner chooses to live in a state of denial. This eventuates in the man’s death, while can be read as the filmmaker’s caution to Iran against a refusal to adapt to changing realities.

This anxiety about change and the struggle to reconcile change to traditional culture and ways of life are unique to the Iranian experience of the period. Rather than attempting to whitewash the difficult transition Iran underwent at the time, the film allegorically presents a complete image of the challenges of culturally authentic modernization.

I came away from The Cow with an ambivalent impression of modernity. I first noticed modernity’s presence in the character of the chief, whom I see as being representative of the village as a whole. Much like his counterpart in The Grocer and the Chief, He sees himself becoming impotent in the face of modernity. The interactions with Saffan’s son and his ceding of authority to Eslam in the Hassan case both represent this loss of power and control. This change is not presented in any negative light. The chief willingly gives over authority to Eslam and everyone seems to agree he is the best man for the job. The Eslam-Hassan dynamic became for me symbolic of the local modernist attempting to pull his compatriots into modernity.

If we take Kapuscinski’s claim that Iranians under the Shah retreated into premodern tradition as a place to “seek shelter” (K, 113), we might take Hassan as undergoing similar psychological trauma with the death of his cow, especially if the Bolouris are thought of as representing the Shah’s regime. Iranians watching The Cow in Tehran would know the feeling of anxiety about losing everything at any moment which induces Hassan to sleep with his cow for fear of the Bolouris. His psychotic break and retreat into animalism would likely garner some sympathy among viewers. However, Hassan’s condition is also wild and terrifying, the dark scenes in the cow shed at once provoke sympathy and disgust.

Eslam, meanwhile, seems to embody local modernist thinkers, who both harbor deep faith in the source of modernity (i.e. the city) but also empathize with their compatriots and see them as modern individuals. Eslam’s continual entreaties to Hassan to remember his name and identity as an individual reflect this. But there is ambivalence around Eslam. In the scene when he whips Hassan, the film shows the temptation Eslam feels to view Hassan as beneath him or even subhuman. There seems to be both support for modernist thinkers and concern.