A friend’s sister was at a party with some colleagues from her architecture firm in Tehran last week when it was raided by the Revolutionary Guards. She was so infuriated by the intrusion that she confronted the men. For this act of defiance, she was arrested and put in solitary confinement for two days, during which time her family waited outside the jail with other worried parents hoping to find out what would happen to her.
The architect was eventually freed on bail after her aunt paid for her release. This is an everyday occurrence in Iran. In fact, when I heard the story, I thought that she was lucky to have been held only for two days.
We read much about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s nuclear plans but less about the heroism of my daughter’s generation, who wear their own weapons of mass destruction — better known as fashion. They go out showing a bit of hair or wearing lipstick. For this, they are thrown into jail, flogged and fined — but the next day they go back and do it all again. These women are not for or against the veil or Islam, they are campaigning for freedom of choice. No state has the right to tell its citizens how to dress or that they should believe in its version of God.
There are many ways of being eliminated by the authorities. They can take you to jail, torture and kill you. But they can also take away every aspect of a person that makes them individual. Something deeper than bravery motivates these women. Under such a totalitarian system you feel neither fear nor courage: instead, these acts of rebellion are an instinctive reaction because the insult goes so deep, the tone of the voice of the authorities is so dehumanising. As human beings, the women of Iran have had no choice but to defend who they are.
Some of Iran’s most repressive laws target women. No woman in Iran has automatic custody of her child. If her husband dies, her father-in-law takes the child. A woman accused of adultery can be put before a court and becomes subject to the whims of a judge.
Those who argue that women in Iran don’t want freedom because of their culture are wrong and demean women. Before the revolution in 1979, Iranian women had gained many rights, even sitting as judges. But they were stripped of their powers because they were classed as too “weak”. Real Iranian culture dates back thousands of years. The women in classical stories not only chose whom they wanted to marry, but whom they wanted to be with for one night. The regime in Tehran claims that youth are corrupted by Western ideals but we don’t have to read Western feminists to discover that we deserve the right to choose our men.
The 2009 demonstrations against the corrupt elections marked the first time that the Iranian people occupied our screens on such a large scale. The world saw that the protesters were not just a Westernised minority. Women, alongside men, religious and secular, modern and traditional, young and old, poured into the streets.
Alongside these hopeful images was the heartbreaking one of the murdered protester, Neda Agha Soltan. It broke my heart that she died, but also that she should have to perish for the world to know that women like her exist. Neda was interested in music and philosophy; one of her favourite books was Wuthering Heights. There is a sense of excitement about thought, imagination and individual liberties in Iran — as a result the West’s greatest weapon against Mr Ahmadinejad is its culture.
After the protests there was a new wave of oppression, directed at university humanities departments. Twelve or more were closed for being tainted by Western thought and Ayatollah Khamenei began persistent and vicious attacks against freedom of expression and individual rights. Authors such as Dan Brown and Tracy Chevalier have been banned and the regime has even started to censor one of Iran’s most cherished poets, Nezami.
Ever since I joined my first demonstration in Iran three decades ago, people’s movements have been crushed only to return with even more momentum. There is no end to it. Demands for freedom — and the Islamic regime’s attempts to quash them — will not disappear.
I don’t want to be too optimistic about a country that is so traumatised but I am hopeful about young people’s desire for freedom. My generation didn’t witness public hangings or hear about people being stoned to death, we were not humiliated, jailed and flogged for the way we dressed, the music we listened to or the films we watched. For my children’s generation fighting for their individual freedoms is natural, a part of their daily life.
The extreme violence that the regime has shown in suppressing every protest is not a sign of strength and self-confidence, but is rooted in its extreme vulnerability. It fears both the political opposition and ordinary Iranians who defy it by refusing to submit to its daily intrusions into their private lives.
This is the thread that links the architect at the party to the women we have read so much about: Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, sentenced to be stoned to death, Neda Agha Soltan and the human rights activist Shiva Nazar Ahari. Each comes from different backgrounds and beliefs but all remind us why there is much hope in the small acts of heroism happening every day.
Azar Nafisi is the author of the award-winning international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books and Things I’ve Been Silent About.