Mehrangiz Kar 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 Tehran 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 Iran 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.