Articles
Obama, Ahmadinejad, and the Women of Iran
This month, for the first time in 30 years, formal negotiations between the United States and Iran took place in a relatively positive atmosphere. As President Obama had promised during his campaign, dialogue took the place of diatribe. This is an important development. Why now and why during the term of the holocaust-denying, US-bashing President Ahmadinejad? The reason lies not in the often tried and unsuccessful economic and military threats. Nor is it due simply to the president’s call for discussion. Every president since Jimmy Carter has attempted some sort of negotiation with Iran. For an explanation, we need to look at the extraordinary uprising of the Iranian people during and after the botched elections of last June. Day after day, masses of women and men jammed the streets of Tehran and other cities. They shouted slogans from rooftops and braved the batons and bullets of government thugs, singing songs …
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A Beaten Path
At the time of the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, Iran was a society organized on precepts that for centuries has defined the subordinate position of women as the natural order of things. The nascent civil society faced the issue of women mostly as a problem between traditionalism and modernism. But as the moderns grew in size and influence, women received more support. The frame of reference for this support, however, remained largely traditional. Women were allowed to get an education, but essentially in order to become better mothers and wives, producing and training more capable men for the “betterment” of society. The process nevertheless brought the genders together, allowing women to gain experience in the mechanisms of their own society, including the operations of the Iranian government and the market. These changes, of course, had produced palpable social tension. In mid-twentieth century Iran, women’s groups and organizations sought to bring …
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Women are Driving Iran Toward Democracy
The images from Iran in the last two weeks have stunned the world: hundreds of thousands of women and men marching peacefully, first in support of reformist candidates and later protesting the government’s version of the results. Women played a prominent role at every level in this movement; in fact what unfolded in Iran would not have been possible without them. It is their quiet and thoughtful community organization, constituency building, message development, and pioneering use of the internet in recent years that accounts for the scope of the protest in Iran. Their grassroots mobilization has showed that more lies at the heart of democratization than burning tires and shouting slogans, and that a democracy requires more than ballot boxes and purple-inked fingers. And that accomplishment will prove consequential not only for Iran’s future but also for the future of the whole Middle East. As a student of the women’s …
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Women, Rights, and Security in Iran
Women in Iran must be free to choose what to think, what to say, what to do, and, of course, how to relate, or not to relate, to God In the past, human security was defined mainly in terms of state security. A half-century of international dialogue on rights, development, and peace, however, has led us to broaden our understanding of the concept of human security by placing the individual person at its center. In this construction, human security is different from human rights writ large and more than the conditions arising from the interactions of states or of state and society. Nevertheless, it is closely connected with peace, rights, and development. What distinguishes human security from these older concepts is the condition of the individual in society. Possibly, the quality that affects this condition most is empowerment – the curve that connects powerlessness and control. It is with this …
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Information and Communication Technologies for Women’s Empowerment and Social Change
The Information and Communication Technology (ICT) revolution that the world has witnessed in the past decades has been potent and widespread. Today, we are living in an information age where technologies have drastically reduced the size of the globe by practically overcoming barriers of distance and time. We connect, communicate, and collaborate at speeds and costs that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. The information age has changed the dynamics of society and the nature of power. It has impacted the economics of production, distribution, and consumption. It has given rise to a whole new world teeming with possibilities and pitfalls for large multi-national corporations as well as for communities and individuals. A fundamental characteristic of the new information technology is that it can be deployed relatively inexpensively to all parts of the world. It can enable disadvantaged individuals and communities to participate in the national and global …
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Searching for the Sources of the Self
In Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (Cambridge: Harvard University, 1989) Charles Taylor introduces the concept of identity as follows: “…the question is often spontaneously phrased by people in the form: Who am I? But this can’t necessarily be answered by giving name and genealogy. What does answer this question for us is an understanding of what is of crucial importance to us. To know who I am is a species of knowing where I stand. My identity is defined by the commitments and identifications which provide the frame or horizon within which I can try to determine from case to case what is good, or valuable, or what ought to be done, or what I endorse or oppose. In other words, it is the horizon within which I am capable of taking a stand.” It is about this horizon that I wish to speak – about …
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The Women’s Organization of Iran: Evolutionary Politics and Revolutionary Change
This article is an account of the women’s movement in pre-revolutionary Iran. The focus is on the activities of the Women’s Organization of Iran (WOI) and its interactions with the government, the court, the clergy, and other conservative forces during the two decades preceding the Islamic revolution. Much of the article, particularly where the story of WOI is concerned, is based on the author’s personal knowledge and experience as WOI’s secretary general between 1970 and 1978. WOI was a link in a chain of events that began with the first progressive impulses in Iran’s recent history. It is important to place it in historical perspective on issues of culture change, political power, socioeconomic development, and institution building. Introduction The dynamics and contradictions of social, economic, and political relationships that allowed the Iranian women’s movement to go forward despite strong and seemingly immovable historical and traditional obstacles are not only of …
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Human Security: A Conversation
On May 12, 2002, Women’s Learning Partnership for Rights, Development, and Peace (WLP), an international nongovernmental organization dedicated to empowering women living in the Global South, organized a conversation to map out an approach to a definition of the concept of human security. The participants–Mahnaz Afkhami (Iran/ U.S.), Kumi Naidoo (South Africa), Jacqueline Pitanguy (Brazil), and Aruna Rao (India), co-chair and commissioners of the Commission on Globalization–discussed the concept of human security in order to identify the parameters as well as the limits of the traditional definition of human security, and to broaden it to encompass a wider spectrum of both human material and spiritual needs. The participants agreed to base their discussion on a value system that puts people’s welfare at, the center; emphasizes power sharing at all levels; and promotes an economic framework that encourages sustainable development, social justice, human rights, gender equality; and democracy. The conversation is …
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Epilogue: Our Shared Human Values
The century just passed was marked by unprecedented violence and cruelty. Most nations suffered or contributed to war, destruction, and genocide, the most egregious of which– the two world wars and the Holocaust–began and occurred mainly in the West. Untold numbers were sacrificed at the altar of ideology, religion, or ethnicity. Innocent people were led in droves to destruction in various gulags–prisons large enough to pass for cities and cities confined enough to pass for prisons. Women and children everywhere suffered most from violence not of their making, perpetrated against them in national ways, in ethnic animosities, in petty neighborhood fights, and at home. Many of us have lived most of our lives under the threat of total annihilation because mankind achieved the technological know-how to self-destruct. The end of the Cold War removed the immediate causes of wholesale destruction–but not the threat contained in our knowledge. We must tame …
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Death of the Patriarch
I was born in Kerman, a sleepy desert city in the south of Iran known for its carpets and pistachios. In those days, these native commodities also determined the position and attitude of those whose lives depended on the production and marketing of each. My nanny Fatima, who instilled in me my first notions of how the world is ordered, told me at a very early age that those who dealt with carpets dealt with money. They were merchants. They were called aqa or mister. A whole other category of people, among whom my family had a rather prominent position, dealt with land and its produce. They were called khan.The third category of people were workers, who were called adama or human beings. My nanny was a member of this last category. I later learned to appreciate the subtle value system implied by this categorization. The house in which I …
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