Women, Life, Freedom: Inside Iran's New Revolution - Pardis Mahdavi

Hi, everyone. Good evening. Welcome to the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum. My name is Rukmini Banerjee, and I am one of your 3 Athenaeum fellows for the year. On September 20— on September 13th, 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini was arrested by Iran's morality police for improperly wearing her hijab. According to her family and local media, she was severely beaten and died 3 days later while still in police custody. Her death sparked widespread protests across Iran. Ordinary women and girls became revolutionaries, refusing to allow Mahsa's death to be in vain. To speak about the realities that Iranian women face in the fight against the morality police and the worldwide phenomenon of misogyny that we all experience, we have with us today Professor Pardis Mahdavi. Mahdavi. Professor Mahdavi is the Provost and Executive Vice President at the University of Montana. She previously served as a professor of anthropology and dean at Arizona State University and the University of Denver. She is also a member of the Claremont College family, having spent 11 years at Pomona College from 2006 to 2017 in various roles. Professor Mahdavi's research interests are cross-disciplinary, spanning both wide and deep. They include gendered labor, human trafficking, migration, transnational feminism, and much, much more. She is the author of 7 books and numerous journal and news articles. She is a lifetime member on the Council of Foreign Relations and has been a fellow at the Social Sciences Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies, Google Ideas, and the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. She has also been a member of the Colorado Commission of Higher Education since 2018. Today, Professor Mahdavi will highlight the revolutionary efforts occurring in Iran and the dramatic changes that are rocking the nation. To supplement this discussion, Professor Mahdavi will draw upon her own research in sexual politics in Iran, as well as her personal experiences at the hands of the morality police. Before we get started, a few quick reminders. Please take this time to silence and put away your cell phones. We have an incredibly important presentation for you here today, So be present, get ready to listen and to ask engaging questions and discuss in a wonderful dialogue. As always, video and audio recording by the audience is strictly prohibited. Per college policy, it is always recommended to wear a mask when not actively eating or drinking. Welcome to the Athenaeum.

Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much for such a lovely introduction. It's wonderful to be back here at the Ath. It's great to be back in Claremont, and especially a treat to be back at the Claremont Colleges. I forgot how good your campuses smell, so it's been really nice being here. Before I jump into my talk, I wanna wish Olivia a happy birthday. Thank you for being here tonight. She chose to celebrate her birthday by being at the Ath listening to me with a whole table of friends. I'm incredibly honored, thank you. I hope I don't disappoint. So, I think most of you who are gathered here with us this evening have been following the ongoing protests in Iran. And what I thought I would do is try to provide some context and some historical background to what we're seeing today. And a lot of people ask, how is this moment different? So, if you've been following Iran in the last 40 years or so, you've probably seen waves of protests that have erupted. You've seen people pouring into the streets. You've seen anti-Americanism. You've seen pro-Americanism. You've seen different things. What defines our current moment today, and how is this different from the protests you've seen even in the last 5 years? There are 3 main differences, and that's kind of what I wanna talk about, drawing on my own experiences, but also, I've become very involved with some of the networks that right now are seeking to support the protesters. But the 3 main differences, if you take nothing else home from tonight, I hope that you take these 3 home with you. The first is that this movement is truly intergenerational, right? So one of the main differences is that the people leading this movement are not only women, but they are young women, right? Even as young as the age of 12. You see schoolgirls standing up and speaking out against the regime. There was something my parents talked a lot about when they left Iran. They fled Iran during the revolution, and they talked about seeing kids in schools tearing up pages out of their textbooks and tearing up images of the Shah. You see that same thing happening today with images of the Supreme Leader and images in textbooks or narratives around the Islamists. in power. You see young schoolgirls tearing up or setting fire to those images. And we can start to see that these schoolgirls are the ones who are fearless. They lead the movement. And we call them, a lot of us who are now, have been following this, we call them children of the resistance. So, my generation, we were the children of the revolution. And some years ago, I stood before you here in the Ath, and I talked about what it is to be a child of the revolution. That's those of us who were born kind of right around the revolution, and in the 1980s, et cetera. This generation are the next generation, that's sort of like my daughter's age. My daughter's 12, and we call them children of resistance, because they were born into a time when my generation was already protesting, when my generation was already pushing back on an Islamist regime. For those of you who don't know, Iran had a revolution in 1978-79 where an Islamist regime came to power. When they came to power, they enacted what are called pronatalist policies, and these policies encouraged families to have as many children as possible. How did they do this? Any family that had 3 kids or more got a tax break. Any family that had 5 kids or more got a free plot of land. So you had a huge spike in the population between 1978 and 1990. Those are the children of the revolution. The people leading what we're seeing today are the children of those children. So, it's truly intergenerational. The second point is that it's a networked movement. And what I mean by that is, beyond social media, this is a movement that's harnessed the power of underground networks that were built starting as early as 2009 with the Green Movement in Iran, going into the Arab Spring of 2011, and I'm going to talk a little bit about some of those underground networks. And then finally, at the heart of this movement is actually feminism, and feminist resistance. And I think one of the important things to think about when we're looking at this resistance is not that it's going back to a Westernization, and I'll talk about Westoxication in a little bit, but rather that this is a global feminism that is organic, that actually comes from generations, and a thousands-of-year-old history in Persia, Persia, of thinking about the role of women, and thinking about the role of human rights, equality, and democracy. And so, when people say, well, is this, are they just trying to be Westernized? It's like, actually, if you think about the first Declaration of Human Rights, that was written by Cyrus in Persia, thousands of years ago. So, this is a global feminist movement that really makes us rethink feminism, because we have this notion that feminism is something that comes from the United States, or the West, a very Eurocentric notion of what feminism is. And this really challenges us, because it's a different kind of feminism. It's a networked feminism. There's no one person with the microphone up front. It is a wide network, and it is a movement that is causing absolute change. So, some of you who've been following probably know, and I know we've got someone wearing the shirt in the audience, Women, Life, Freedom. That is the slogan, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi. Yeah, thanks for standing up there. That is the slogan that has animated the protests that we're seeing today, and the sounds of those chanting protests fill the streets of more than 85 cities in Iran as we speak. Though the demonstrations erupted months ago, dissenters have not backed down, and the movement's momentum is only increasing. One of the things I often tell people is it's more likely that we outside of Iran will lose attention, patience, and interest in the situation in Iran before the protesters actually do. They are willing to die for what they believe in. Try to think about that. There have been numerous waves of protests in Iran over the past 3 decades, but what we're witnessing today may finally be the tipping point for the next Iranian revolution. As the protest slogan makes clear, feminism plays a central role in bringing the movement forward. According to Nobel Peace Prize winner and Iranian human rights lawyer Shirin Ebadi, who, by the way, I met for the first time in this very room at the Ath in 2008. So it's a real full-circle moment for me, Priya. Thank you. Ebadi has said many times that women are the path to democracy in Iran. We're seeing this play out in real time today. The catalyzing moment for the current protests took place in September of 2022, when Mahsa Jina Amini, a young Kurdish Iranian woman, stepped off a train at the Tehran station and was promptly arrested by the Gashte-Ershad, which is the morality police. She was on holiday with her brother. She arrived in Tehran expecting to go sightseeing, young woman, and she was taken into custody. Her crime was she had a few strands of hair showing from underneath her headscarf and lipstick the shade that I'm wearing tonight. That was her crime. She was taken in by the morality police, and I'll talk a little bit about them in a moment, and faced severe brutality and died in police custody less than 3 days later. Now, who are the morality police? Who are the Gashte-e-Ershad? And unfortunately, how do I know about them? So the morality police are an arm of law enforcement that was brought into power when the Islamist regime in the 1970s came to power. They are legally charged with upholding right and forbidding wrong. That is their charge on the books. So you can see that that is a pretty wide spectrum. The morality police walk the streets of Iran, looking to ensure that austerity is maintained. So that means no slipping headscarves, no lipstick, lipstick, no nail polish, no heterosocializing, no drinking, dance, drugs. There's a famous quote from Ayatollah Khomeini that says, the Islamic Revolution is about— is not about fun. In fact, there's no fun to be had in the Islamic Republic. That is this very famous quote, and the morality police are charged with ensuring that there is no fun to be had in the Islamic Republic. Now, how do you police fun? Right? How are you charged with upholding a value system that is ever-changing? But that is what the Gashte-e Irshad are charged with doing, and interestingly, how they operationalize their power shifts depending on who's in power, who's president, but also depending on the cause du jour, right? So around the elections, around New Year's time, you get a lot more arrests And almost always for the crime of violating austerity. Amini was wearing a less than opaque headscarf, right? So it was slipping back. She had red nail polish on, red lipstick on. But the interesting thing is that this is not new, right? That people have been pushing the boundaries of comportment or outerwear for a very long time. So, what I— I became involved with Iran's sexual revolution in the late 1990s. I initially went to Iran to study the women's movement, but became fascinated by what young people called an englobajensi, or a sexual revolution. This sexual revolution was about young people speaking back to a regime with which they did not agree by using their bodies and their comportment speak back. So what do I mean by that? This is a regime that came to power under a fabric of morality. In the 1970s, the Islamist regime came to power by criticizing the monarchy and their overly lavish Westoxication. So Westoxication is— قارب زیدگی. قارب زیدگی is the Persian word, and it refers to an over-fascination with the West. The regime came to power by promising to bring back Iran to this old sense of Iranian-ness. And there was this criticism of people having gotten too overly intoxicated by the West, women wearing short miniskirts, wearing red lipstick, and so the Islamic regime came to power to kind of start to course correct. Thus, the creation of the morality police. However, when the children of the revolution were born, and they started growing up, they began pushing back on this regime. They don't remember the time of the Shah when things were so bad, and certainly there are valid critiques of the time of the Shah. Certainly, the Shah had their own secret police, the SAVAK police, that arrested and murdered hundreds, if not thousands. However, they don't remember a time when Iran was so West-toxicated. What they do know is that there was a regime, that there is a regime in power that seeks to guard every one of their movements, rather than seeking to solve the unemployment problem, or rather than seeking to solve issues like around traffic, right? So, these young people speak back to the regime in the same language that the regime seeks to operationalize their power. The coin of the realm for this regime is outerwear, is comportment, is fun, right? So, they speak back, they push back on that, by engaging in behaviors that start to kind of push the boundaries. I remember when I was doing fieldwork in Iran, I had an interlocutor say to me, you know, in the United States, when you guys want to like party and have fun, you go out, but when you want to pray and be spiritual, you stay in. But in Iran, when we want to pray and be spiritual, we go out, but when we want to have fun, we go in. And as a result, they would have these very elaborate parties at different levels of the socioeconomic spectrum. And these parties were the places where they would also organize politically. So I began observing the sexual revolution in the late 1990s and began writing about it, began writing about how young people were speaking back to a regime with which they did not agree. In 2007, when I was a professor at Pomona College, I published a book called Passionate Uprisings: Iran's sexual revolution. That summer, I was invited to speak about my work, to present the results of my research in Tehran, which seemed like the right thing to do. And I was up at a podium, much like this, in 2007, July 12th, 2007, and I was speaking about the sexual revolution that I had observed. 13 minutes into my lecture, the auditorium doors burst open and a dozen members of the morality police came into the— stormed into the auditorium causing pandemonium. People were running every which way you can imagine. I, however, probably should have been running or shredding my notes or something, but I was like just in a state of suspended animation and paralysis. gripping the podium, and I kind of watched like as in slow motion as 4 of them came up onto the stage. The last thing I remember was looking up before one of them hit me on the head and I passed out. So I had firsthand experiences with the morality police, but what was interesting is that in 2007, though I was arrested by the morality police, though many of my fellow academics were arrested by the morality police, nobody talked about the morality police. outside of Iran. In fact, 2022 was the first time that anybody even had heard, outside of Iran, the phrase the morality police, right? So some people say, well, isn't that sad, or isn't that messed up? Yeah, but on the other hand, look, people are now talking about the morality police. Like, that is also a measure of success, right? And this is a success that's been building since the sexual revolution, since people have been going out, since people have been pushing back, on a regime with which they did not agree. So there's a long history of Iranian activists drawing on core principles of human rights and feminism to push issues from the margins to the stage. In 1910, you had a constitutional revolution called the Mashrut-e, where women led the right to vote. In the 1950s, feminists were among the primary supporters of democratically elected Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh. When the CIA backed a coup of Mosaddegh, feminists called on Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi to be held accountable for creating economic inequities and tension among the classes. In 1963, their activism gained women the right to vote. During the 1970s, as the Islamists rose to power, feminists activated on multiple sides of the revolution. Islamic feminists supported Islamic Marxists. Yes, these are not oxymorons. morons. There are different sects of feminism. There was a whole sect that identified as Islamic feminists, and then the Islamic Marxists, who criticized the Shah for his lavish Westoxication. But control over women and control over bodies was a key part of the platform that won the day for the regime that officially took power in '79. The might of the clerics was made visible through their policing of women's bodies, which were to be cloaked from head to toe in a black chador. Women were told to stay home, that they had no place in the public sphere, and their rights evaporated virtually overnight. Islamic feminists felt betrayed. Secular feminists felt vulnerable to attack, and a new era of feminist organizing was born. By the 1990s, various feminist factions had started coming together to push back against the regime. Along with the young feminists born during and immediately after the revolution, this is the group who created the sexual revolution. Their maxim, the personal is political, was the foundation of their resistance and transmitted across borders. One strand of hair at a time, one sexually defiant act after another, activists used their bodies to speak back to a regime with which they did not agree. Women were again front and center in the Green Movement in 2009, demanding the removal of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The graphic image of Neda Agha-Soltan, a young woman who was gunned down during the protests, served as a rallying call for women across the Middle East, serving— setting off a chain reaction that led to the Arab Spring in 2011. Women are at the forefront of resistance because we have the most to lose, says Donya, a 28-year-old protester from Shiraz. Donya was one of the lead organizers of the protests in her hometown, having cut her activist teeth during the Green Movement. At age 15, Donya took to the streets to protest the fraudulent election of Ahmadinejad and his repression of women's rights. Donya, who also identifies as LGBTQ, says, quote, the conservative Islamists want to squash everything about our personhood, about who we are, but we can't let this stand, so we protest. We protest for the old woman digging in the garbage for food, for everyone who fights for their dignity. More recently, the My Stealthy Freedom movement was started in 2014 by feminist activist Masih Alinejad. At Alinejad's urging, Iranian women began taking photographs of themselves in public places without the hijab and posting them on her My Stealthy Freedom page. The protests struck a nerve. garnering more than a million likes on social media. We all have stealthy moments, Ali Nejat wrote, but we become powerful as a group when we stop living a lie. Many credit the My Stealthy Freedom movement with laying the foundation for the anti-government protests that rocked Iran in December of 2017 and January of 2018. Ali Nejat, like other feminists, activists, and journalists, myself included, was exiled from Iran for her defiance of the regime. According to Kiran Nazish, the founder of the Coalition for Women in Journalism and Free Speech, the number of Iranian women journalists living in prison or in exile is the highest of any ethnic group in the world, among the highest of any countries we have ever tracked. Life in exile can be as precarious as life in prison, Nazish says. Women even in the diaspora face threats from members of the regime or supporters who find their way into every corner corner. This was demonstrated just a couple of months ago in July of 2022, when Masih Alinejad was forced to leave her Brooklyn apartment because an armed Iranian man with a loaded AK-47 rifle was arrested outside her apartment. Authorities said the gunman had been seen waiting outside her home for 2 days before he was taken into custody. Once conservative President Ebrahim Raisi took power in Iran last year, feminist organizers began scrambling to get their message out to the world. Imprisoned Iranian human rights lawyer and feminist Nasrin Sotoudeh has been a central part of this passionate call for action. Don't back down no matter what, she told me on the phone last summer. Tell all of the people, the women, the men, the young, the old, to keep fighting no matter what it costs us. The government can't be allowed to continue getting away with abusing us, with starving us. And get everyone around the world to join us to demand accountability and democracy, end quote. In a recent interview with CNN's Christiane Amanpour, human rights lawyer Ebadi said, the Iranian people have tried every possible way to create change in Iran, and unfortunately, the government turned a deaf ear to people's demands. Feminist activists inside and outside of Iran have called on global feminist communities for support. These are the underground networks that I've been studying for more than 20 years. They've asked their allies to join them to ensure that their message is heard and amplified around the world. And the global community has finally responded. While feminist organizers have ushered in a major social upheaval over the past 5 years by bringing the movements that were on the margins to the center, the protests we see in Iran right now are also bringing feminism forward from the margins into the spotlight. Here's a quote from a young man, activist, who I interviewed a few weeks ago. It started with feminism and women's rights, but now it's the rights of all people. Reza was beaten within inches of his life in October by members of the morality police, but he continues to protest every day. We are all Mahsa Amini, he says. Until women like Mahsa can be safe in Iran, nobody is safe. Amid the increasing waves of protests from the capital to the rural outskirts, Iranians from a variety of backgrounds are taking up the feminist cause. Pushing for equality and rights for all. These protests have caught the attention of the global community, at last. Feminist organizing in Iran has finally emerged on a global stage. But at the same time, Iranian women are facing harrowing consequences for their work. Political prisoners, including noted women's rights activists such as Nasrin Sotoudeh, Yasaman Aryanee, Nazanin Zahraei-Ratcliffe, etc., face beatings in prisons and flogging for their crimes. Like I faced, and have been threatened with death on numerous occasions. Though the regime tries to mute their protests, feminists still fight back through the press and politics. We will not be silenced, reads a sign carried by schoolgirls no more than age 12, protesting in Ardabil, where a teenage girl was repeatedly beaten to death by security forces after refusing to sing the pro-government anthem. Schoolgirls have shown their courage through repeated social media posts, waving their hijabs and defying the regime. Their bravery has been an inspiration and a call to action to people around the world. When I first began my fieldwork in the late 1990s, women were regularly denied access to employment, healthcare, and even their own bank accounts without a male present. They were frequently arrested by the morality police for showing a few strands of hair or a few inches of skin. Sometimes women were sent to the public squares for flogging, Other times, they were subjected to invasive virginity testing. These infringements of basic human rights never made the local press, let alone sent shockwaves throughout the global community, like we're seeing today. In years past, when feminists like Sotoudeh and Ali Nejat, and hundreds of Iranian women journalists were harassed, arrested, subjected to brutality, their fates slowly began to surface in human rights reports in the papers. But in Iran, and still in much of the mainstream global media, they were eclipsed. These atrocities against women were seen, or perhaps siloed, as cultural or religious issues, not human rights violations. This time, it's different. Women ages 12 to 72 are marching alongside one another in this truly intergenerational display of resistance. And one of the things I talk a lot about is that, you know, the children of the revolution talk a lot about intergenerational trauma, yes, right? A lot of people talk about intergenerational trauma. One of the things that's been most salient for me is drawing on intergenerational strength. So, yes, we inherit trauma from our ancestors. Yes, my parents fled a war. Yes, my grandmother was a sharpshooter on horseback and did a lot of crazy things. However, when I'm in a tough situation, I try to harness their intergenerational strength, and that's what we see on the streets of Iran today. Men of all ages and socioeconomic backgrounds are protesting alongside them, and the international community is standing beside and behind them, organizing in support, chanting women, life, freedom to bring all these issues to center stage. If we are all Mahsa, one young man said, then we must all fight. Still, some questions persist. One of the most interesting things to me has been, and I've recently started interviewing folks around this issue, is while women are at the forefront of this, and feminism certainly is an anchoring pole, why are all the public executions men? Why are most of the arrests men? Why are most of the public floggings men? When I started interviewing members of the morality police who have defected, including my own interrogator, the response was fascinating to me. They reported that the members of the regime in power didn't think women were enough of a threat to warrant an execution, or to warrant a public flogging. a longer stay in prisons. When I was released after 33 days, the last thing that my captor said to me was, you're not worth a spot in Evin. Get out of Iran and never come back. So it's this misogyny that runs at such a deep level, that is so deeply entrenched, that means that women are not even— even though they're at the forefront of this, they're not even seen as powerful enough to be at the forefront. These are some of the persisting questions that keep me up at night. Is this a revolution? Is this a transnational moment where another Arab Spring is going to come? Why are there more executions of men? How are we going to put a transitional government into place? What's the role of the diaspora, and how can we help? Thanks to activists over the decades, human rights are understood as central to a thriving democracy. Bringing a resistance that began at the margins into the mainstream in a global call for change. And thanks to this resistance, feminism is brought forward as one of the most powerful catalysts for social transformation of our time. It's important we continue the fight. Thanks. Thank you.