Iran: Women's Rights Movement and Free Media under Attack

Women's magazines notoriously come and go, operating in a volatile publishing market and sinking if they don't get the celeb/fashion/lifestyle mix right.

Things are a little different in Iran. It would be true to say that Grazia and Elle are not widely read (or indeed available) in the Iranian republic. Until a year ago, however, one Iranian women's magazine was – Zanan (in Persian "women"), an award-winning monthly founded in 1992 by Shahla Sherkat.

However, that was then. Last January, Sherkat was abruptly informed that Zanan's licence was to be cancelled. She was accused of "offering a dark picture of the Islamic Republic through the pages of Zanan". It is not clear that the order complied with Iran's own legal procedures and Sherkat continues to struggle for her right to reopen the magazine.

Iranian academics have been troubled by the suppression of what Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini, from the centre for Islamic and Middle Eastern Law at the School of Oriental and African Studies, describes as a "distinctive feminist voice in Iran". Two features of Zanan's approach and style were novel, reckons Mir-Hosseini: it explored the case for women's rights as a distinct project in post-revolutionary Iran, and it promoted a brand of feminism stemming both from Islam (while not ignoring gender inequalities in many current interpretations of sharia) and western feminism.

A leading young Iranian women's rights defender, Leila Mouri, has credited Zanan with "teaching her about women's rights" and Dr Margot Badran, a writer and journalist for the Al Ahram weekly in Cairo, says that: "Zanan's news and views spun around cyberspace so fast it was clear it was onto something: gender equality and gender justice within Islam – exactly where much of the world thought it was missing."

It seems that Zanan was finally judged too heady a mix by the ever-twitchy Iranian authorities. But it's not just Zanan that is currently under the cosh. On 21 December, the Defenders of Human Rights Centre (an NGO run by Shirin Ebadi, Iran's leading human rights lawyer and Nobel Peace prize winner) was raided and closed. The organisation was preparing an event to celebrate 60 years of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights when their offices were stormed. An outraged Ebadi has launched a campaign in defence of the centre and its works.

Meanwhile, Iran's nationwide women's rights movement, the Campaign For Equality (CFE) continues to see its supporters suffering arbitrary arrest, detention, and raids on their homes and meetings. Even a Californian graduate student, Esha Momeni, found herself in trouble when on a recent visit to her family she attempted to research CFE for her thesis. She was arrested and has still not been able to leave Iran. The closure of Zanan and the crackdown on women's activists comes against a backdrop of wider suppression of free media in Iran. This week, leading international news websites like Deutsche Welle, the Farsi version of Radio France Internationale and the pan-Arab satellite station Al-Arabiya have had their websites blocked in the country and more than 50 pro-reform online publications and scores of internet cafes have been closed or threatened with closure. For good measure, the Iranian police have seized thousands of satellite dishes from homeowners. According to Reporters without Borders, which ranks Iran 166 out of 169 in the world press freedom index, Iran now filters more websites than any country apart from China and uses hi-tech US-made filtering equipment to do so.

Repression like this breeds (and is still breeding) resistance in Iran and gaining recognition around the world. The CFE's One Million Signatures campaign (for reform of discriminatory legislation) recently received the Simone de Beauvoir award for people or groups working to promote women's rights. And Ebadi believes the Iranian feminist movement is "the strongest movement in Iran as well as in the Middle East". But its members still can't read Zanan. Or Grazia.

31 January 2009

Source: The Guardian