Nasrin Alavi
The claim of rights by women in modern Iran builds on the pioneering work of earlier generations, reports Nasrin Alavi.
Iranians are the first to know how easy it is for a whole nation to be reduced to the rants of a senseless politician, or for images of a handful of shroud-wearing crazies burning the American flag in Tehran to reach the western media's front-pages. But how easy is it for thousands of Iranian teachers protesting outside the Iranian majlis (parliament) - as they did on Saturday 3 March 2007 - to merit any attention?
Not very, is the answer - and especially when the drums of war are being sounded. At such times, it is more convenient to dehumanise the prospective enemy than to see this enemy as it is - composed not of 70 million Mahmoud Ahmadinejad clones but of diligent nurses, factory workers, dear uncles and aunts, poets, writers, filmmakers, students cramming for their exams, lovelorn teenagers, and, yes, protesting teachers.
It is not only teachers who are protesting. On Sunday 4 March, around thirty-three Iranian women (see photos one & two) - as far removed from Ahmadinejad as you can get - were arrested in Tehran. These women had gathered outside Tehran's revolutionary court in solidarity with five of their friends, charged with organising a rally in June 2006 against discriminatory laws against women.
Only two days earlier, they had published an open letter asserting their rights to the freedom of peaceful assembly that are afforded them by the Islamic Republic's constitutional laws:
"International Women's Day is soon upon us as our nation endures a grave period. The internal policies of domination, duress and an ineffectual foreign policy - with an insistence on pursuing a nuclear energy programme - when we have lost the confidence and trust of the world; as the confrontational issues and the continuous warmongering policies of the United State and its allies around the world with the pretext of exporting democracy and human right through sanctions and military attack has presented us with a mounting predicament. On one side - with the absence of a democratic structure - we witness decisions being made on our behalf without our presence or the presence of our legitimate leaders. While at the other end we feel the circle of the siege around us increasingly tighten as we are threatened with sanctions and the nightmare of war....
... we announce our protest against all paternalistic policies, whether they be in the name of dishonest interpretations of Islam or with the pretext of human rights and democracy and we believe what the world community should insist upon debates on democracy and human rights and not nuclear energy, and all within peaceful diplomatic dialogue, not war and destruction....
... Despite all the pressures and obstacles the Iranian women's movement in now within its most enduring and active periods in recent history."
Women in Iran: repression and resistance Shadi Sadr, publisher, lawyer and journalist, and another one of the women under arrest, wrote in 2004:
"Today Iranian women... have imposed themselves on a male-dominated society which still believes women should stay at home. Perhaps nobody sees us, but we exist and we make our mark on the world around us. I assure you that if you look around carefully, everywhere you will see our footsteps."
Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani wrote before her arrest:
"Perhaps we will be imprisoned and become weary with the continuous summons to court. Perhaps we will not be able to continue along our path and educate our female counterparts about the existence of such discriminatory laws. But, what will you do with the countless women who come into contact with the court system - in fact, these very courts are the best educational facilities for women, through which they quickly learn that in fact they have no rights. Yes, perhaps with your security planning and your modern technology, you may be able to isolate and paralyse the current generation of Iranian women's rights activists, and stop the progression of our campaign, but what will you do with the love that we plant in the hearts of our children? Perhaps with your advanced technology, you will be able to attack the hearts of our personal computers, but what will you do with our dreams?"
Nasrin Alavi is the author of We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs (Portobello Books, 2005). She spent her formative years in Iran, attended university in Britain and worked in London, and then returned to her birthplace to work for an NGO for a number of years. Today she lives in Britain.http://www.opendemocracy.net/articles/ViewPopUpArticle.jsp?id=3&articleId=4406
