Women are prominent symbols of the struggle for democracy for Iranians, from arresting the lawyer defending opposition activists to sentencing a mother to death. When Shahrzad Kariman saw her daughter Shiva Nazar Ahari being imprisoned, it was a brief moment outside the Tehran courtoom a 26-year old campaigner had been brought. We could see her for a few minutes and could not ask her how the court session went because we did not know the charges prior.”Kariman narrated to the International campaign for human rights in Iran.
Nazar Ahari was charged with the most severe crime ever levelled in Iran:muharebe, which means enmity against God, a crime punishable by death. Nazar was also accused of collaboration and assembly aimed at committing a crime, disrupting public order and spreading propaganda against the regime. But the most dangerous allegations were being denied by her family and her organization Mojahedin e-Khalq group which as accused of terrorism by the Iranian government. Her family says that she criticizes the organization (Povey, and Rostami-Povey 109).
Since the disputed elections in June 2009, she has been arrested twice and held in the Evin prison, in North Tehran. She has been held incommunicado with other several women activists while they were heading to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in the city of Qom since December. Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, a filmmaker and women’s rights activist, was among the detainees. Mahboubeh left Iran after taking part in a protest in 2007 and has been sentenced to a jail term of thirty months in absentia.
Since the stolen elections in Iran for 15 months now, these women faces and others like them have been seen from New York, London, Sydney, Berlin to Paris and the Hague. They have been appearing on human rights websites and their pictures being held aloft and used during demonstrations and are also seen daily on television screens and newspapers. They have joined the women who have become activists. They have become the symbols visible in the West of the broader social oppression and wider political in Iran under the president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad(Bano, and Kalmbach 305).
There are other images of the dead like Neda Agha-Soltan shot on June 2009 while they were attending an opposition demonstration against theft of the Iranian elections by the Supporters of Mahmoud. Suppose women have been threatened with death for being prominent activists, like Sakine Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 43-year-old mother of two. She attracted international attention after being stoned to death for adultery as a sentence. It has become a lightning rod for Iranian human rights activism, on how the judicial system has failed and how women are treated in the Islamic republic. It has been held by film stars and celebrities such as Emma Thompson France’s president wife, Nicolas Sarkozy, by foreign politicians like William Hague and lastly by institutions such as the European parliament.
Dr Ziba Mir-Hosseini, a Cambridge –based activist, argues that the struggle between despotism and democracy has been inevitable given the history of women’s rights in Iran. Since then there has been an introduction of protection law, introduced by Shah to give women equal rights in issues such as; divorce, voting and was invested with more meaning after the course. Despite that, women’s human rights were being neglected under the pretense of the protection of women’s honor.
With the introduction of a million signatures campaign, started by women’s rights activists in 2006, after the year of elections of Ahmadinejad for the first time, the scene was confronted, and the campaign was a success by forcing the shelving of the president’s new family protection law and could make polygamy easier. The emerging power of women who became great leaders in the street protests against the 2009 election result.
The final component was the stoning sentence delivered against Sakineh Mohammadi, which was charged to sideline what the women activists had long been fighting for about the broader attempt to do away with women’s rights. The prominent case of Shadi Sadr, who ran Rahai, a women’s legal advice center significantly campaigned against stoning and acted as the defence lawyer for Nazar Ahari. She was arrested while heading to Tehran University, where she plans her Friday prayers, Shadi Sadr was abducted using unmarked vehicle and taken to Evin. She was confined here and interrogated about her fellow women activists and the election issues, before being charged with interfering with national security causing riots(Fazaeli 3).
Shadi was named as a women’s rights movement leader and was accused of overthrowing the Islamic republic. Two days later she fled to Turkey attempting to defend Nazar Ahari which she never had the opportunity to meet Shiva Nazar Ahar until the day shadi was arrested and taken in the same cell she was kept.
Women have led the freedom movement against the government, which teaches people how to; think, stay in this world and clothing. The Islamic regime has been trying to eliminate women and existence from society by forcing them to stay home and never given a voice. But the Iranian women are brave; they know how to fight for their rights, and they will win this fight because they are fighting for their existence.