By Eric Vandenbroeck and co-workers

What Narges Mohammadi’s Nobel Means For Iran

Iran, also known as Persia and officially as the Islamic Republic of Iran,[c] is a country in West Asia. It is bordered by Iraq and Turkey to the west, Azerbaijan and Armenia to the northwest, the Caspian Sea and Turkmenistan to the north, Afghanistan and Pakistan to the east, and the Gulf of Oman and the Persian Gulf to the south. It covers an area of 1.64 million square kilometers (0.63 million square miles), making it the 17th-largest country. With an estimated population of 86.8 million, Iran is the 17th-most populous country and the second-largest nation in the Middle East. Its capital and largest city is Tehran.

Sayyid Jamâl al-Din al-Afghani was probably of Iranian origin and undoubtedly influenced by the Persian intellectual climate in which, unlike the Sunni countries, Sufism and medieval Arabic falsafa (Greek-inspired philosophy) continued to play a role was a charismatic, complex figure of intrigue who practiced taqfyya or precautionary dissimulation, sometimes speaking as a Westernizing promoter of science and reason, sometimes as a revivalist of Islam.

This ambiguity is particularly evident in juxtaposing his famously religious "Refutation of the Materialists" and his secular "Response to Renan". We can say that al-Afghani began making Islam the core idea of a modern political and anti-imperial movement, an alternative to secularism, nationalism, and communism. His most prominent disciple, Muhammad `Abduh (1849-1905), crafted a more straightforward message serving the same aim. 'Abduh's Theology of Unity is founded on the tawhid, the unity of God, from which he derives a remarkable set of conclusions, most prominently that Islam is utterly compatible with modern science and technology. 'Abduh insists that reason is the heart of Islam. He argued not only that the Qur'an permits minority religious freedom but that the sword never spreads Islam. Islamic expansion is achieved only by example.

 

Narges Mohammadi

Sixteen-year-old Ali vividly remembers the last time he saw his mother at home. She made him and his twin sister, Kiana, eggs for breakfast, told them to study hard, said goodbye, and sent them to school. When they returned, she was gone.They were eight.

Their mother is Narges Mohammadi, a woman whose name has become synonymous with the fight for human rights in Iran – a battle that has cost this activist almost everything.

On Friday, she won the Nobel Peace Prize for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all,” the Norwegian Nobel Committee announced in Oslo.

Mohammadi has been a prisoner for most of the past two decades. She has been sentenced repeatedly for being the voice of the voiceless, for her unrelenting campaign against the death penalty and solitary confinement – which she has endured for weeks.

Outside the prison walls, a brutal crackdown on protest by Iranian authorities largely quelled the movement sparked by Amini’s death and the morality police resumed their headscarf patrols in July. Iranian activists this week accused them of assaulting a teenage girl for not wearing a headscarf in a Tehran metro station, leading to her hospitalization with serious injuries. Iranian authorities said low blood pressure was the cause.

 

Compulsory Hijab

Mohammadi knows all too well the price of speaking publicly. In August she was sentenced to an additional year in jail for her continued activism inside prison after she gave a media interview and a statement about sexual assaults in jail.

She was already serving time for publishing a book last year about Iran’s brutal prison methods, titled “White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Women Prisoners,” and a documentary film about prisoners in solitary confinement – a punishment Mohammadi has endured.

She says that security forces, prison authorities, and medical personnel assaulted political prisoners and women held on criminal charges.

According to Mohammadi, sexual violence against women detainees has “significantly increased” since the protests that swept Iran last year, leading her to describe the abuse as now “systematic.”

Narges Mohammadi with her children, Kiana and Ali.

“The victims had told their stories in the meetings they had with the officials who came to Qarchak prison for inspection,” Mohammadi writes. “In prison, I have heard the narratives of three protesting women who were sexually assaulted. One of them was a well-known activist of the student movement who, upon entering the prison, filed a complaint with the authorities and announced that after being arrested on the street, her one hand and one leg were cuffed and tied to the two rings on the top of the car door. And in that position, she was sexually assaulted.”

Mohammadi says she and another prisoner visited the prison’s “quarantine” area under the pretext of taking food to another inmate and saw the young woman with bruises on her stomach, arms, legs, and thighs.

For years, Mohammadi has been vocal about sexual violence against prisoners, breaking taboos in her conservative country. In 2021, she hosted a discussion via the Clubhouse social media app where women, including Mohammadi, shared their stories of assaults by government “agents” from the 1980s to 2021. She was penalized for this, according to Mohammadi and rights groups.

“Women who experience sexual harassment become filled with anger, fear, and insecurity, but when their womanhood is hidden and suppressed by ideological and religious claims, they will not only be angry and terrified, but they will also feel deceived and manipulated by the government, which is even more distressing,” she writes. Such sexual abuse “leaves such deep scars on their souls and minds that it is difficult to recover from, and perhaps they may never fully recover,” she added.

 

‘Endure All The Hardships’

Mohammadi has been banned from speaking directly with her husband and children for 18 months for refusing to be silenced behind bars.

“When your wife and the closest person to you is in prison, every single day you wake up worried that you might hear bad news,” her husband, Taghi Rahmani, told CNN in a recent interview in France, where he has lived in exile with their children since shortly after Mohammadi was imprisoned in 2015.

Rahmani and human rights groups have raised concerns about Mohammadi’s health and access to medical care after she suffered a heart attack and underwent surgery last year.

He proudly shows off the prestigious international awards he has received on her behalf. She has an “endless energy for freedom and human rights,” he said.

Taghi Rahmani, pictured in Paris, says he met Mohammadi when she attended his underground contemporary history classes in 1995.

Rahmani, who was held as a political prisoner for 14 years, met Mohammadi when she attended his underground contemporary history classes in 1995, he says.

For the past eight years, he has had to act as father and mother to their now teenage twins.

“Kiana always used to say when mom is here, dad is not. It’s not good,” he said. “But when someone chooses a path, they must endure all the hardships.”

Like his father, Ali is resolute, saying his mother must keep going “for Iran, for our future.”

“I am proud of my mom. she was not always with us, but whenever she was, she took good care of us… she was a good mom and still is… I have accepted this kind of life now. Any suffering that I have to endure does not matter.”

He said he was so eager to discover whether his mother had won that he kept scrolling on his phone in class without his teacher noticing.

“Precisely at 11 a.m., my heart stops because I see that my mother won,” he said. “I exploded with joy.”

Kiana prefers not to speak and wants her mother by her side. Her father says Kiana believes that if you bring a child into this world, you must take responsibility and raise that child.

The pain of separation from her family is one Mohammadi lives with daily. It is the cost of a sacrifice she has chosen to make for the dream of a future freedom that has defined her life.

Ali and Taghi Rahmani, seen in their apartment in Paris, say they are proud of Mohammadi's activism on behalf of Iranians.

“The moment I said goodbye to Ali and Kiana was not unlike the time I almost died in the tree-lined yard of Evin,” she writes, not specifying when that event was. “I picked the dandelions of Evin’s yard. I stood barefoot on the hot asphalt on July 14,” she said, referring to the day – only weeks after that final breakfast – on which she said goodbye to her children in prison before they left for exile in France. “My feet were burning but my heart was on fire. I sent the dandelions to the sky and my children’s hands, feet, and childish faces passed my eyes and tears fell like spring rain.

“If I look at the prison from the window of my heart, I was more of a stranger to my daughter and son than any stranger and I missed out on the best years of my life, and what went will never return. But I am sure a world without freedom, equality, and peace is not worth living or watching.

“I have chosen not to see my children or even hear their voices and be the voice of oppressed people, women and children, of my land,” she says.

 

 

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