Top Iran female photographer held for posing as man at football
AN AWARD-winning Iranian photojournalist has been arrested for disguising herself as a man to enter a football stadium to circumvent the country’s ban on women attending matches.
Forough Alaei won the prestigious World Press Photo award 2019 for her work depicting impassioned female supporters attempting to watch live football matches in Iran.
One of the prize-winning images shows a woman having a fake beard applied and in another she is seen watching a game in a Tehran stadium surrounded by male supporters. Ms Alaei was honoured for her “passion giving a voice to her subjects in Iran”.
Alaei was among six females known to have been detained this week, including Zahra Khoshnavaz, another prominent women’s rights activist.
According to reports from Iran, the arrested individuals, locally known as “The Liberation Girls”, have been transferred to the notorious Gharchak prison in the religious town of Varamin in Tehran province.
Human Rights Watch has called for their “immediate and unconditional” release. “Iranian women should not be spending a second in prison because authorities accuse them of peacefully attempting to defy a ridiculous ban that denies women and girls equal rights to attend a football match,” said Minky Worden, director of global initiatives at the group.
Since the Islamic Revolution in 1979, Iranian women have been banned from attending football matches as the clerical regime regards watching men playing football in shorts as “promoting promiscuity”.
“The attendance of women at football stadiums would only create social ills and has no religious justification as it leads to sinful acts. We will deal with full force against those who want to break this rule,” cleric Mohammad Jafar Montazeri, Iran’s public prosecutor has told Mehr news agency. However, in recent years, and with the arrival of a younger generation that seeks greater social freedoms, Iranian women have been entering stadiums dressed in suits and wearing fake moustaches on their faces to bypass the security forces at the gates.
The six arrested females had used the same disguise last February to attend Azadi stadium where their favourite team, Persepolis, were receiving the trophy for winning Iran’s top league. Iranian women’s rights activists have long been campaigning for the freedom to enter sport stadiums; in recent years they have been allowed to attend volleyball matches, but only if accompanied accompanie by their spouses and they sit in designated areas. Fifa, football’s international governing body, has raised the issue with Iranian authorities on several occasions but the clerical regime has defended its position by arguing that the decision is based on its “religious values”.
In a letter to the head of Iran’s Football Federation in June, the president of Fifa demanded to be informed by September of the “concrete steps” the Iranian government would be taking to lift its ban on women entering stadiums.