FACE OF THE FUTURE
Homa Hoodfar, who spent 121 days in an Iranian jail for ‘dabbling in feminism’, hails the Iranian women who are protesting against hijab laws and demanding equal rights
On International Women’s Day last year – 8 March 2016 – I walked the streets of Tehran by walking in the streets, riding the Metro to attend a discussion group and reading some Happy Women’s Day greetings on social media. In my heart and mind, I celebrated these Iranian women in the women-only train compartments in their colourful outfits and loose scarves, resisting the regime’s attempt to control their bodies and eliminate their choices.
I celebrated their incredible entrepreneurship, which has turned the women’s sections of the busy Tehran Metro into platforms for public discussion on matters that concern them and a shopping mecca full of women from all walks of life, shopping for an incredible variety of goods despite ongoing pressure from the authorities to shut down their informal and innovative methods of boarding and exiting the trains to sell
their kitchen equipment, clothing, makeup, sports gear and other goods. On a high note, I went to sleep that night feeling optimistic as I prepared to leave Iran two days later. But on the following evening, as I was packing, my apartment was raided by Revolutionary Guards. I was eventually arrested and ultimately sent to Evin prison, charged with “dabbling in feminism and security matters” – a crime that does not actually exist.
Knowing that my incarceration was just one tiny incident amid a huge history of women’s struggles helped keep my spirits up for the 121 days I was in prison. So did the songs that played in my head: The feminist anthem of my youth, “Bread and Roses”, and the Iranian song “Zan” (Woman) by Ziba Shirazi, telling Ayatollah Khomeini that women are softer than flower petals and stronger than iron, do not try to veil us, reminding him that he and all other men owe their very existences to women.
Unified global voices
As we remember the struggles that have brought us closer towards gender equality, we also must consider the social and legal inequalities women continue to face worldwide. While women’s quests for gender equality, dignity and justice are arguably universal, strategies and solutions vary widely under a vast range of social, cultural and political conditions and constraints. Not recognising this multiplicity has undermined feminist solidarity and has prevented a diversity of strategic solutions.
As an Iranian woman, I well know the fragility of gains women have made. I recall my pain and frustration in the weeks following the 1979 revolution, when Ayatollah Khomeini and others in charge passed sharia laws in conjunction with practices straight out of the Middle Ages, and rendered Iranian women secondclass citizens. In Pakistan, President Zia ul-Haq soon followed Khomeini’s lead.
These developments encouraged Algerian Islamists who kidnapped and sexually enslaved women throughout the 1980s. They harassed unveiled women, and women working and studying outside the home. A similar story unfolded in Sudan. In Afghanistan, beginning in 1994, the Taliban, once considered US allies and championed as freedom fighters by western media, took the oppression of women to new levels.
Throughout the 1980s, Amnesty International – then the most prominent of human rights’ organisations – refused to campaign for jailed and tortured gender activists, insisting they were not political activists and so outside their mandate. Amnesty also refused to condemn governments that ignored non-state actors’ violations against women. Among feminists and within women’s organisations, frustration and disappointment with Amnesty deepened.
This disappointment, spurred the emergence of a truly transnational women’s movement. At that time, I could not imagine Amnesty would one day take the lead in campaigning to free me from Iran’s Evin prison 25 years later.
But that was during the 1990s, and well before Amnesty’s change in mandate. The internet and social media, and even affordable international telephone connections and fax machines, were not yet a reality.
Though it may seem obvious to younger generations, the ideas of ‘women’s rights as human rights’ is only 25 years old, and is still frighteningly tenuous in many contexts
Determined to establish women’s rights as human rights through the development of global legal tools and political and social structures, women formed networks such as Development Alternatives with Women for a New Era (Dawn),Women Living Under Muslim Laws and the Women’s Global Network for Reproductive Rights.
Advocates of all ages, nationalities, religions, gender orientation and political affiliations mobilised to research, and collected thousands of testimonies of violence against women: Second World War rape survivors; German women raped by Russian soldiers; Korean women used as sexual slaves for Japanese military personnel; Bangladeshi women raped during the 10-month Liberation War of 1971; Bosnian women raped as part of the “ethnic cleansing strategies”.
The data was presented at regional meetings, national and international tribunals and finally at the UN
Human Rights Committee in June 1993 that established women’s rights are human rights with the Declaration on the Elimination of Violence against Women. The global demand for gender equity and justice is also reflected in the 1995 Beijing Platform for Action signed by UN members at the 1995 Women’s Conference in Beijing. These declarations provided women around the world a framework for working towards gender justice and for holding their national governments accountable in the process. But even though change continues to ripple, the full achievement of the goals laid out 30 years ago are far from realised.
The North America-based #MeToo and #TimesUp movements are among many ongoing fights against the commodification and victimisation of women as sexual objects and the gendered power differentials that persist in ways that gravely constrain the lives of girls and women everywhere.
Though it may seem obvious to younger generations, the ideas of “women’s rights as human rights” is only 25 years old, and is still frighteningly tenuous in many contexts.
1979: Imposition of the hijab
As an Iranian, this is not a hypothetical issue for me. In 1979, I saw how easily the limited reforms and modest gains that Iranian women had previously struggled for were annulled within two weeks of the end of the revolution. As post-revolution generations of Iranians have learned, without protection and nurturing, rights perish.
In the early days of the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI), leaders decided that women would collectively symbolise the Islamicisation of the nation to Iranians and the world. On 7 March 1979, the IRI imposed a compulsory hijab for women. The next morning, thousands of women all across the country poured into city streets to protest compulsory veiling.