• April 7, 2021
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In Iran, women are sentenced to long prison terms only for taking off their veils for a short time. Iranian women also get their faces disfigured for the same reason. Journalist Suzanne Gottfarb writes about those who risk their lives because they turn out to be bareheaded.

Suzanne Gottfarb

Yasman Ariani, 16 years in prison.

Monireh Arabshali, 16 years in prison.

Mojgan Keshavarz, 5.5 years in prison.

Rahele Ahmadi, 4.5 years in prison.

Saba Kordafshar, 24 years in prison.

These are some of the women imprisoned in Iran. Their only crime is that they have filmed themselves bareheaded and sent their videos to the exile and journalist Masih Alinejad, who has made it their life’s work to be the voice of these women. Masih, who has more than five million followers on social media, publishes these videos in his TV show “Tablet – voice of America”.

In Iran, Masih was a political journalist but asked so oppositional questions that she was eventually forced to leave her homeland. In 2014, she started the protest movement My Stolen Freedom in New York, followed by White Wednesday, My camera is my weapon and most recently Men in hijab, where men dressed in hijab stand next to their bareheaded wives, sisters and mothers. It started with Masih photoshopping a picture of Iran’s foreign minister wearing a hijab. That image received an incredible 13 million views.

In other words, Masih has become a nail in the coffin of the regime and a factor of power to be reckoned with. The chairman of the Revolutionary Court has, in his own high person, felt compelled to go out on Iranian state television to warn women. Anyone who takes off his veil and sends his videos to Masih risks imprisonment for between one and ten years.

About this, the Swedish-Iranian filmmaker Nahid Persson has made a documentary, “Hear my voice – the revolution of the veil”, which is available on Svt.play and is sold to several countries.

“More and more people are being imprisoned, more and more people are being executed in Iran,” says Nahid, who herself fled to Sweden from Iran after the revolution in 1979, when her two younger brothers, aged 15 and 17, were imprisoned. The 17-year-old brother was executed.

– The regime in Iran is no better than IS. They oppress, kidnap, mutilate, whip, imprison and execute their own citizens. This is the most political film I’ve made.

Women in Iran are also attacked with acid. The young and radiantly beautiful Masoumeh Atai is now blind with a disfigured face.

– I have twelve videos from women who have been subjected to acid attacks, Masih says on the phone from New York.

– Some have been attacked by strangers on the street because they did not wear the hijab. In other cases, it is family members who, because of divorce and the like, have punished them in this brutal way. The most horrible thing is that men who throw acid go free, while women are sentenced to long prison terms just because they claim their human right to rule over their own bodies.

In Iran, gender apartheid prevails . You are oppressed only by being born a woman. A woman is not allowed to dress as she pleases, not to sing or dance, not to cycle, swim or play football. Because of his activities, Masih receives daily death threats. Iranian men threaten to throw acid in her face, to skin her, to slaughter her.

And the regime has put a price on her obsessive-compulsive disorder, where the large curly hair adorned with a flower has become a symbol of women’s freedom. Her autobiography consistently bears the title “The wind in my hair”. Now Masih’s older brother Ali has also been sentenced to eight years in prison.

– They tried to get him to lure me to Turkey, where I would be taken on to Iran to stand trial, she says, but he refused. Instead, he warned me. That’s his only crime. He is not politically active in any way. He has two small children. They are holding him hostage to keep me quiet.

Masih gets overwhelmed by videos. From International Women’s Day on March 8, bareheaded women can be seen handing out flowers in the subway. Several of them are now in prison.

A mother shouts out in despair after her daughter received a long sentence: “Women who take off their veils spend their best years in prison,” she shouts. “Why are you silent around the world?” Because of this video, she herself was sentenced to 4.5 years in prison.

But during Sweden’s only hijab demonstration, Swedish feminists in 2013, led by Gudrun Schyman – then spokesperson for the Feminist Initiative – instead put on veils and demonstrated for the right to wear the hijab without being harassed.

– The world is truly upside down, says Nahid Persson. Of course I am for religious freedom. Adult women get to decide for themselves. But I believe that the hijab is an oppressive garment, which, for example, should not be allowed for minors in schools.

Men in Iran are freer but only as long as they do not oppose themselves. Inside a prison, Kurdish Shahram Akmadi films with a smuggled mobile phone. He is sentenced to death for “warfare against God.” His brother has already been executed. And in December last year, Nahid’s good friend, the journalist Ruhollah Zam, was hanged, publishing news critical of the regime from his platform in Paris.

– He was tricked into going to Iraq, where he was kidnapped, Nahid says. That he was the son of a mullah did not save his life.

Right now, the Swedish-Iranian researcher Ahmadreza Djalali is also in solitary confinement in Iran after a death sentence for alleged espionage.

– Djalali’s mother has also contacted me and asked me to be her voice, Masih says.

– Iran calls the United States the great Satan and Israel the little Satan. But it is not them but us, the Iranian women, who are the enemies of the regime. Change must come from the people. Not from us activists. A flower does not make a garden. But if everyone sows a seed, the world will be full of flowers.

Author and journalist.

SVENKA DAGBLADET

  • October 14, 2020
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Promoting the cause of democracy and human rights in Iran should be a pillar of any U.S. national security strategy.

by Masih Alinejad

Outside of the United States, few peoples in the world are more impacted by the results of the U.S. presidential election than the citizens of Iran. President Donald Trump has subjected Iranians to the most punishing sanctions regime in the world, while also making clear his desire to make a deal that will make Iran “very rich, very quickly.” While Vice President Joe Biden has been critical of Trump’s Iran strategy, his own strategy views Iran—and its 80 million inhabitants—primarily through the prism of another nuclear deal. Both miss the point.

For years, U.S. administrations have sought to address the symptoms of Iranian malignancy—its nuclear ambitions and regional extremism—while ignoring the underlying cause, the nature of the Iranian regime. The reality is that as long as Iran is led by a small clique of unaccountable men who rule with an iron fist, America’s four decades of hostility with Iran will never be resolved. For this reason, promoting the cause of democracy and human rights in Iran should be a pillar of any U.S. national security strategy.

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  • September 2, 2020
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Vahid Yucesoy

A woman walking along a busy street. A total stranger accosting her, insulting her, and threatening to get her arrested, all because of not “properly” observing her compulsory hijab. These scenes have become commonplace in Iran since the revolution that has imposed a compulsory dress code on women. But increasingly, women have been defying their harassers with a simple tool: Their cameras.

Lately, authorities in the Islamic Republic have intensified their witch-hunt against unveiled women or those that they deem to be “badly-veiled” in a bid to assert their fraying control over society. Countless videos coming Iran report on a spike in street harassment by authorities directed at women. Many of these women take enormous risks to film their harassers, some of whom are affiliated with the regime. That they’re willing to take such risks to film is testimony to how fed up they are with incessant government interference in their private lives.

Despite such a drive from authorities, they have admitted to their weakness in the face of rising tide of civil disobedience amongst Iranian women: the police clearly have a difficulty to police women’s hijab in Iran.

Iranian women have been resisting compulsory dress code ever since it became a law in the early years of the revolution. Such resistance has taken various forms. From starting to exchange chadors with ‘manteaux’, to challenging the government’s color restrictions by wearing bright colors, to challenging the Islamic interpretation of hijab’s forms and dark colors.

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  • May 28, 2019
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Imagine that you are a woman leading a relatively normal life. You take the metro or bus to work or university. You socialize with friends. You may be able to afford a smartphone and enjoy posting selfies on social media. You may sometimes be lucky enough to take walks on the beach and feel the sea air in your hair.

Now imagine that before you step foot outside your front door to do any of those things, you must stop and check that your hair is properly covered with a headscarf and that you have covered up your arms and legs.

This may seem extreme but failing to do so could carry serious consequences for you. You know that, as soon as you leave your home, your body and clothing will be assessed by strangers. You will face “morality checkpoints” where state agents will decide if you have failed to comply with the state’s strict dress code for women. If you “fail” their test, you may be arrested and, in some cases, even tortured and sentenced to a prison term or flogging.

So, every day, before you leave your home, you must decide the level of risk you are willing to take. Do you want to exercise your freedom today and wear what you want, or will you play it safe to avoid arrest, assault and being denied entry to your work place or university?

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  • January 24, 2019
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In the forty years since Iran’s 1979 revolution, no aspect of U.S. policy toward Tehran has produced more heat—and less light—than the question of external efforts to advance political change in Iran. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo stepped squarely into that contested terrain with his speech last year to an audience of Iranian-Americans at the Reagan Library, coming down forcefully in favor of strenuous American and international advocacy but offering little in the way of specific fresh ideas. “While it is ultimately up to the Iranian people to determine the direction of their country,” Pompeo said, “the United States, in the spirit of our own freedoms, will support the long-ignored voice of the Iranian people. Our hope is that ultimately the regime will make meaningful changes in its behavior both inside of Iran and globally.”

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