and agreed to give the sole Iranian woman who won a gold medal at the Asian Games last month a free apartment like it is giving the 19 men who won gold.
Khadijeh Azadpur complained last week that all the Iranian athletes sent to the Asian Games in Guangzhou, China, had been told they would get a free apartment if they won a gold medal, but that after she won a gold medal in wushu, the Chinese martial art, she was told she would have to get married first to qualify for the apartment. (See last week’s Iran Times, page ten.)
A few days later, the Tabnak website quoted Ali Saeedlu, appointed by President Ahmadi-nejad to run the Physical Education Organization and oversee Iranian sports, as saying that all gold medal winners would get apartments.
Tabnak quoted Saeedlu as indicating all unmarried athletes, both male and female, had at first been denied free housing. But Azadpur said she was the only one denied an apartment.
Tabnak further quoted Saeedlu as saying all gold medal winners were receiving 150 gold coins, while silver medallists got 75 gold coins and bronze medallists 50 gold coins. The story did not say which gold coin they would receive so it wasn’t possible to value that award, but the largest Iranian gold coin, the Azadi, contains 8.1 grams of gold, which is worth about $350 currently. At that rate, each gold medallist would receive about $52,500 worth of gold coins.
Altogether, Iranian athletes won 59 medals in the Asian Games, with women winning 14 of them.
Azadpur is the first Iranian woman athlete to win a gold medal in any event since the revolution.
But she could also be the last. A very prominent cleric, Grand Ayatollah Safi Gol-payegani, last month said that sending women to sports events was a disgrace and should be halted. Golpayegani, 91, is a source of emulation and one of the country’s half-dozen senior-most clergymen.
If his comment on women athletes is just a one-time remark, it is likely to be ignored and forgotten. But if he chooses to repeat it and campaign to end the dispatch of female athletes to international events, he has the power to prevail.
Golpayegani said, “These games and others like them are creations of our enemies so that Muslim women lose their Islamic chastity and dignity.” He was also quoted as saying that Western culture has a “dirty” approach toward women, including even those in positions of influence, which sounded like he might be thinking of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
And Golpayegani’s view is not an isolated one. Over the years, a number of clerics have criticized the whole idea of allowing women to engage in any kind of athletic events, even including mere bicycling in city parks.
In 2008, Ahmad Alam-ol-Hoda, the Friday prayer leader in Mashhad, described the sending of women to the Olympics that year as “waging war on Islamic values.” And Ayatollah Abbas Kabi, who teaches in the Qom seminary system, called it “bizarre” and “deplorable” that state television had broadcast film last month of Iranian women actually competing in events at the Asian Games.
Iran sent 88 sportswomen to the Asian Games in China, by far the largest contingent of women it has ever sent to an international sports event.