Tavaana Interview Transcript

Vision and Motivation

Becoming a social activist is never disconnected from one’s natural inclinations. As a child, I grew up in a social context of naked violence and I became extremely sensitive to brutality. I was born in the southern port-city of Ahwaz. There, we lived on the edge between the Arab ethnic communities, with their given culture, and the non-Arab Iranians. I am 65 now and I used to go to high school there. Back then, the two communities lived next to each other in a peaceful coexistence, without major problems, although totally separate from each other. Every now and then though, we witnessed Honor Killings among Arabs. Quite openly, they used to kill girls and sometimes put their severed heads at their door steps. Their families, although perhaps guilty of murdering their own daughter or sister, would, after the killing and because of that Honor thing, see their respectability increase, say as shopkeepers, in their neighborhood! This was part of the emotional surrounding I grew up in.

At the same time, there was an entirely new world that was developing in parallel to this: various Clubs would be established for the employees of the Oil Industry, the Rail- Road company or those of the Gubernatorial or other Public Offices. We used to go to Abadan quite often, which looked like a little London. Later, when I went for the first time to real London, I thought that I had already been in “London”, that is in oil-rich Abadan and its surrounding cities. This was the paradoxical environment I grew up in: the traditional violence and the modern life.

At age 19, I started my higher education at the University of as a Law and Political Sciences student. Back then, the first two undergraduate years were general, so you could study Law, Economics and even Islamic theology. As a professional, I started my career within the Welfare Organization. There, I could connect with social classes, including the working class. The Organization would allocate resources to those in need,

www.tavaana.org according to its means and budget. There, as a Labor Auditor, I found out that we have, next to our political problems, a number of social problems as well. As women, back then, we really had no problem at all to enter these domains. As Auditor as I said, I could visit any workplace and I can say that there was no factory, either big or small, even those like the Crystal manufacturing Units employing children, in Tehran and its periphery, that I did not visit.

I grew more and more sensitive to social problems and realized that problems could not be solved solely through legislation and regulation. I understood that child labor had no immediate solution. In parallel, I started a semi-professional career as journalist writing about social problems I would encounter in my real life as a Labor Auditor of the Welfare Organization.

This is all to say that you do not get involved with social activism all of a sudden. So, although I had been sensitized to these problems since the age of 6 or 7, but it was not until much later that I really got involved with them. The turning point, unfortunately, came with the 1979 revolution and its shocking consequences. The turning point came when, after the revolution, women who, prior to that, enjoyed a high social status, were treated as prostitutes, like whores of the royal period. The movements that followed resulted from this original post-revolutionary insult.

Leadership

Well! Part of it has to do with your own past as a person, and part of it is contextual and has to do with your country’s past, in our case and, in particular, post-revolutionary Iran. The political context was against the emergence of a leader amongst us. Each time someone appeared to be emerging as a leader, the political situation would undermine that potential leader.

As you may know, the newspaper Keyhan became instrumental in this domain. For instance, so long as I had not entered the monthly magazine Zanan – Women, in Persian –Keyhan would leave me alone. The conservatives behind Keyhan considered

www.tavaana.org the monthly Zanan as their factional tribune dedicated to their sole views and saw me as an infiltrator planning to use that organ to propagate different opinions. So, immediately after that, Keyhan started to demolish my name, my family, and what we may call social esteem and respectability. They went so far as to say that I had opened a closed house, employing call-girls for foreign diplomats!

So, the consequence is that in a political situation like this, what you get is a variety of minor leaders. Although we can currently see that mister Mussavi has achieved some degree of leadership, but what you really have is a spectrum of minor leaders and not a leader in the general sense of the word. Personally, I think that I handled this situation with some intelligence. You know, it wasn’t easy for a woman like me who had been tagged as pre-revolutionary, who had her unveiled pictures accompanying her articles and so on, it wasn’t easy to get into this post-revolutionary intellectual and cultural world.

So I started to learn their own language, jargon and code. I started this in the judiciary system. At the beginning, they wouldn’t even let us in the courtroom and would throw us out. There were three of us, women, back then. And none could stand all of this insult. But, little by little, as lawyers, we started to have the upper hand over the Islamic judges, who were all mullahs. Then, I started to adapt my writing as a journalist so they could not accuse us of subversion and anti-Islamic behavior. So, to become a leader in specific situations and contexts, you need to adapt yourself so that you are not eliminated right from the beginning. And that’s what I did for over 20 years, although at the end I was eliminated.

Goals and Objectives

In a way, I acted as my own Expediency Council, discerning what was appropriate for me. In non-democratic countries like Iran, it seems to me that every social and political activists wakes up in the morning with his or her own political thermometer. Each day,

www.tavaana.org that will indicate whether he or she can speak up, or should have a low profile, or shut it up and go off the air for a while. Activists in this kind of countries, interiorize this behavior as a second nature or instinct. So, in a way, your objectives become short-term ones, almost daily objectives.

The longer-term goal was to find an audience. Not in your own circle, that’s no achievement, but within what the regime would say, “This is my audience”. Therefore, in my domain, the long-term objective was to find an audience among women who wore the Islamic veil on a voluntary basis, not among those who were forced to. And I finally succeeded in building my own audience among young veiled high school girls and religious female students. When the Islamic prosecutor said: “Mrs. Kar, we no longer want to see you in this arena, simply because, according to our investigation, you are influencing religious girls”. There, I understood that I had attained my goal.

Civic Environment

It would be difficult to get into all the details of the different periods of my life as an activist. The Shah’s time was not easy either. If, for instance, we wanted to talk about women’s rights, our own intellectual friends would censure us. And their argument was that, “please, Mehrangiz, do not get involved in these issues, otherwise people would think that you belong to Her Royal Highness Ashraf Pahlavi!” Therefore, in those days too we had our own “pressure groups” and these were the intellectuals.

In other words, we have had in this country, not only a political despotism and a religious despotism but an intellectual despotism as well. Intellectual pressure groups would not put you in prison because you pursued women’s rights; they would destroy your social and intellectual credibility and respectability. The paradox in those days was that, the political context would allow you to defend women’s rights, but the intellectual one would not! The paradoxical situation back then was that the religious despotism was the opposition itself, taking its orders from Qom or Nadjaf or later from Paris; the intellectual despotism was sovereign in the intellectual arena; and the political

www.tavaana.org despotism would leave you alone, doing whatever you wanted to do, except getting involved in what was considered as the royal political domain. I regret that I got influenced by that intellectual atmosphere, preventing me from doing what I should have done back then. That is my regret.

The revolutionary period had its own peculiarities as well. The 30-year revolutionary period has not been the same all along. At the beginning we could write and speak our mind. But then came the repression of all political groups and organizations, the war with Iraq, and the increasing tension with the US. The hostage crisis affected us all, since, from that point on, we were not only the remaining symbols of heresy, blasphemy and the vestige of the royal political culture, we also became the symbols of US imperialism. We were tagged like this just because we belonged to the generation that had been educated in the time of the Shah, had chosen her husband freely, had been to night clubs, wore no veil and so on. All of a sudden, all this royal background became an enormously dark and disastrous burden for all of us.

With the War, the martyrs joined the alive in the attacks against us. The newspaper Keyhan, under the increasing control of Hossein Shariatmadari, became a media launch pad for these attacks. And we had no choice but to pursue our activities in the middle of all of this. With the end of the War and the beginning of Rafsanjani’s presidency, a different set of policies were adopted. Monthly publications like Adineh, Donyaye Sokhan, Gardoon… were allowed to circulate. As second class citizens, we started to find our way into this newly opened public sphere. My involvement in the monthly magazine Zanan (Women) is a different story. I have to add to this my professional activity as a lawyer. That was my main incentive for subsequent work. It was as a lawyer that I found out that the current judiciary leads inexorably towards nothing else but corruption.

Audience

At the beginning, I had to face mounting problems. I used to wear an Islamic head cap- like veil called Maghna’e. In my work, I used the very legal jargon of the religious

www.tavaana.org authorities. So, my own political family rose against me and accused me of becoming a Hezbollahi, that is, as religious as the ones in power. Abroad, in for example, I had to face the opposition of my own political family once again just because I had chosen not to use a subversive, regime change language so I could continue my work once back in Iran.

At a certain point, I noticed that both the religious and the non-religious interlocutors had become my audience. This was an achievement in itself. Its credit should not be given to me alone. The monthly magazine Zanan played in that regard a landmark role. Miss Shahla Sherkat and her advisers who were also in charge of the monthly magazine Kyan, played a significant role in women’s affairs in the post-revolutionary period. Our collaboration put Shahla Sherkat under the scrutiny of the authorities as well, seen as an infiltrator trying to penetrate the exclusive domain of female religious audience. Shahla and I had come from opposing horizons: she had come from a religious, veiled background; I had come from a non-religious or what you would call a chic background. At some point, we got together, joined our forces and like all those people coming from different horizons to gather their forces and fight a common enemy who is doing his best to divide us, Shahla and I decided to address our combined audience, religious and non-religious.

You see, things have changed. My audience today is not the same as it used to be height years ago when I could address it directly from within the country; today, my audience’s familiarity with my work comes, say, from reading my papers in Rooz, an online daily published from abroad. Back in Iran, among my interlocutors, I had deeply religious young men and women, and that was a matter of great satisfaction for me. I am not Dr Soroush, the Iranian philosopher who had come from a religious background to begin with and is now an outspoken voice of religious reformism. I had come from a non- religious background and had found a religious audience.

Young religious students would come to see me on my way to work and ask me questions on how best I could assist them in getting young, religious female students, under the double social and familial pressure, involved in social matters. I remember that one day, a young religious-looking man was standing next to my office. I got scared

www.tavaana.org at first but when he came in he said, “Don’t be afraid, Miss Kar! I just wanted to ask you whether there is a book or something like this on prison standards.” I gave him a charter I had in my office on how prisons should be organized based on accepted standards. He went out, made a copy of it and brought it back to me. During these past 8 years when I have been away from my country, I have seen him several times on photographs on his way to jail. Today, there are thousands of young men and women just like him, ready to pay the price for their opposition to religious backwardness.

Supporters and Opponents

My opponents, as I said, were to be found among the extremes of the political spectrum, from the religious to the non-religious end. There were those who criticized us because we were not subversive enough – in their view, a radical stance we could not afford since that would mean the end of any activity inside Iran and, ultimately, prison and death. And there were those who would attack us from the official radical point of view. Official organs like Keyhan, Keyhan International, Sarallah and so on, would present me as a “CIA” or “Mossad” or “intelligence service” agent!

And once they found out that I am married to Siamak Pourzand, a well known journalist of the Shah’s time, they even became more virulent in their attacks against me. Once arrested, I found out in white-cover official publications that, by falsifying my writings, they had presented me not as an opponent to the legislator but as opposed to the theologian. I had been charged with both a legal offense and a sin! By intentionally blurring the borderline between “sin” and “legal offense”, they could present us both as an “offender” and as “apostate”!

In those days, before you could hear of “reformism” and “reformers”, there were, next to the radical opponents as I just described, those who, say in the Islamic Guidance Ministry, would adopt a more conciliatory approach to us. This group of opponents, the “moderates” as we called them, would tell us, “Well, why don’t you use this word instead of this one in your book”? And the radicals among our own camp who opposed us, did so

www.tavaana.org on grounds that we had chosen to stay in the country and work there or that we had become close to the so-called reformists and so on. The peak of their opposition came in at the Berlin Conference, some ten years ago, where they openly opposed me and people like me.

Outreach Activities

To get my message across, all I had to do was to look at the body of laws, before and after the revolution and analyze the changes that had occurred in the post-revolutionary period with regard to the laws pertaining to basic Human Rights ad to women’s rights. That was a good starting point, although criticizing laws in Iran is not always easy, because of the blurred nature of the borderline between what is of a legislative nature and what is of a religious one. The authorities, who maintain the lack of clarity in this domain, could attack you at any given time on charges of offending Islam itself.

And our instrument in getting our message across was the press mainly and in particular after the end of the War, where a number of print media could see the day. During the War, there was no free press at all. During the peace time, some windows were allowed, although whatever was there was surrounded by rattle-snakes and vipers! In the sense that they were careful not to allow anyone writing in the press to deviate, even slightly, from what had been allowed.

I used these windows. I was also the first Iranian lawyer to accept to talk to BBC Persian Service and to give an interview to the BBC reporter in Tehran. During the reform movement, as the mullahs say, the number of pulpits increased, some of them in the mosques. The students helped a lot to make this happen. The Office for the Consolidation of Unity played an important role in that process. In Tehran and in various cities across Iran, I used these new opportunities while staying within the limits of the current law and not outside of it.

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Coalition-Building

Sure! All these efforts had an impact. The political situation was a particular one but yet, you could see that activists would not let down their efforts and would accept to pay the price for it. We can see today that despite the political situation, you have a good number of civil societies and organizations that are being active. It was not the same when we were involved in this kind of activities, in the sense that if they arrested you, your activities would end with you. If they ordered an editor not to publish anything from you, that was the end of it. It is no longer the same today.

But, I knew from the beginning, from the time I first saw the young religious looking men and women I described before around my office, I knew from then that something was about to change. A certain social category which, unfortunately, had been neglected during the Shah’s time, not so much economically than culturally neglected, I knew from my observations in the religious sectors of the society and the women in particular, that something big was about to happen, that we were entering a new era, that there were going to be struggles, many struggles, but that at the end things were going in the right direction. In the sense that two kinds of people were getting together, the religious and the non-religious ones.

But, I also have to add my deep sorrow. This regime, instead of creating job opportunities for the youth, has created killing opportunities. When you see individuals beating to death their own sisters and brothers in the streets just because they reject the results of an election, you can’t but think of them as having been trained for this as their primary occupation for life. But, having said that, I think that on the long run, things are going in the right direction. Currently, the Iranian society has not yet reached its equilibrium point. But it will eventually reach that point.

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