VOA news interviews Mahnaz Afkhami on her work empowering women to be leaders through the Women’s Learning Partnership. In the article, Afkhami discusses the transnational nature of the partnership, the importance of horizontal leadership, and the need to provide women with a comprehensive set of skills to succeed.
Tag: Family Law
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…
‘I Was Iran’s Last Woman Minister’
In an interview with the BBC World Service, Mahnaz Afkhami discusses her role as Minister of Women’s Affairs in Iran, Farrokhroo Parsa, and the future of women in Iran. “I have no doubt that women are going to win…history is moving in a different direction,” says Afkhami.
Women Inspiring Women
Mahnaz Afkhami is interviewed by Forbes, where she speaks about women’s rights in Iran and across the Islamic world. The interview covers myriad topics including Iran’s One Million Signatures Campaign, the push to reform family laws, and activism in Iran. “It is impossible to impose an archaic form of government on an aware and connected…
VOA Roundtable: Discriminatory Laws against Women in Iran (in Persian)
Following a violent crackdown of women’s peaceful protests in Tehran, VOA Persian aired a program on discriminatory laws against women under the Islamic Republic regime, including a Q and A with callers from all over the world with Mahnaz Afkhami as its guest. Afkhami pointed out that Iranian women had never faced such violence or…
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…
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…
Resisting Fundamentalisms
Fundamentalism is a militant reaction to modernism; that is, to changes that have come about as a result of the development of science and technology, secularization of social relations, and movement from collective to individual forms of identity and moral valuation. Fundamentalists are found in all societies and religions. Their approach to religion is basically…