Prof. Homa Hoodfar/Concordia University

The widespread protests that have rocked Iran and riveted the world since the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 16^th continue after seven weeks. Homa Hoodfar, professor emerita of anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal, brings to the story both her academic expertise in the hijab and women’s roles in Muslim societies and her personal experience of being detained in Evin prison for 112 days in 2016 for “dabbling in feminism and security matters”. Policy Associate Editor Lisa Van Dusen interviewed Prof. Hoodfar by email for this Policy Q&A.

November 4, 2022.

Lisa Van Dusen: Prof. Hoodfar, as you know, Friday the 4th of November is the anniversary of the 1979 siege of the US Embassy in Tehran by Iranian students during the Islamic Revolution. It is also the anniversary of the 2009 demonstrations asserting that America was not the enemy, but the regime was.

Homa Hoodfar: Indeed, Friday, 4 November is an interesting day to observe, particularly inside the country where no doubt the regime will try to bring its military guard to the street with slogans against the USA. I doubt many of the Iranian public and those who are protesting would know why the students took over the embassy and why the government did not solve the problem quickly. The issue of American interference in the affairs of Iran was the concern of the older generations. Even in the 2019 protests, one of the frequently shown slogans was; Our enemy is in here; they lie when they say it is America, which rhymes nicely: domshman-e-ma haminjast, dorouq migan emricast. The regime has, over the years, blamed American interference for all its shortcomings. While two generations ago, that would strike a chord with the Iranians who had experienced American interference, this new generation has little experience of US interference except the sanctions over Iran’s nuclear power, which most Iranians do not want anyway. They also see little difference between past American interference and what the Iranian regime is doing in Syria, Iraq and Lebanon.

LVD: Some observers are saying about these protests, “This time is different.” Do you think that’s correct, and if so, why?

Homa Hoodfar: It is very different. Iranian women have always participated in modern/street politics in Iran. Starting from the protests against the British tobacco monopoly in 1890 through the constitutional movement of 1905-11 to the nationalist movement of the 1950s and the 1979 revolution. In none of these movements — especially the 1979 revolution — were women’s demands the main concern of the protest. This time, women’s rights are the focus but of course, they impact everyone and so have brought together all strata of the society, from different ethnicities, religious minorities and different classes. Moreover, the protest is not concentrated in the metropolitan and big cities but also in smaller towns across Iran. The fact that the main slogan of the protest is Kurdish is also very significant. In the past, the Kurdish Iranians’ call for the restoration of their rights as a minority often went unheard by the wider population.

LVD: If these protests do nothing to change the status quo, restore women’s freedoms and improve the lives of Iranians — men and women — what will?

Homa Hoodfar: Every revolution has many layers. The most prominent ones are social and political. This uprising has already achieved its goal of social revolution by making women its centrepiece and by bringing the concerns of minorities to the forefront of demands for change. This is something that the 1979 revolution, one of the most significant revolutions in history, did not do. In any case, even if this uprising does not bring the regime down, it has already achieved its most important goal, which is the social revolution. But given the extent of dissatisfaction and alienation of the public, particularly the low-income groups normally considered the regime’s base, I doubt that this regime, in its current form and with the current constitution, which in any case it did not respect, will last long.

I recall when one of the officials was criticized for not pushing hard for women to observe the hijab, he responded by saying ‘If we follow the letter of the law, we need to put 10 million women in jail’.

LVD:  Are you concerned that the protests are serving as a round-up of dissident suspects, as happened in Egypt with so many Arab Spring protesters?

Homa Hoodfar: While that might be one of the outcomes, this regime has done that systematically, particularly over the last few years. Moreover, this uprising which is now on the verge of its eighth week, is entering a revolutionary phase and is leaderless. It incorporates all segments of society, even schoolchildren. How many people do they want to put in jail? I recall when one of the officials was criticized for not pushing hard for women to observe the hijab, he responded by saying if we follow the letter of the law, we need to put 10 million women in jail. We simply do not have the capacity in our prisons. In a way, their solution had been making the whole of Iran a prison. People have to live a double life — a private life and a public one. They are simply fed up with this, and at this stage, they have decided to pay whatever the price of politically and socially rejecting the current system.

LVD: The abuse of power inherent in such practices is certainly not abstract for you. In February, 2016, when you were in Iran to visit family and to conduct academic research, the Revolutionary Guard raided the flat you were staying in, confiscated your passports, brought you in for questioning repeatedly then arrested you for “dabbling in feminism and security matters”. You spent 112 days in the notorious Evin prison — “notorious” now being part of the institution’s global brand.

Homa Hoodfar: Obviously, I had not expected the arrest, given that I had been going back and forth for my research and I had kept a low profile. But there are no rules on when one of the many intelligence bodies wants to arrest you. Feminism is not against the law, but it goes against the ideology of the regime. What had angered them was that not only had I not denied that I was a feminist, I had told them that every sentence I had ever written was from my feminist perspective. I also told them that feminism is not western and gave them examples of the nineteen century Iranian women with no link to the west or even knowing any foreign languages did engage in promoting women’s rights. I added even if it is western, it is not a problem. We do not need to re-invent the wheel. After all, republicanism is a western concept, and parliament is western and many more, but we have proudly adopted it and made it our own. They just did not like that I was not fearful of responding to them and also in turn, questioned them.

LVD: At a moment in history when the absurd proposition of citizens, notably in America, voting for their own disenfranchisement by supporting brazenly anti-democracy parties has become a possibility, can you explain what it’s like to live in fear of your own government, of knowing that, at any moment, you can be stripped of your rights and freedoms because the regime is threatened by your words?

Homa Hoodfar: In Iran, people have lived in a state of political and legal insecurity for decades. Because regardless of how careful one might be, given that the level of state interference in the lives of individuals and families is so unprecedented, that has made people live with the risk for decades. To give you an example, when I was in Evin prison, one of the young sex workers who had been brought to my cell as punishment for both her and me said to me that in Iran, no one can live by the law, because they have made everything illegal. Even if the intelligence services go to the home of Ayatollah Khamenei, they can arrest him for breaking the law, because for sure there would something that is against the law. Maybe a book, a song, a photo, or something illegal. So, fear of the law and even morality is so common that it has become meaningless. In any case, since the regime invents laws on the fly for its purposes it does not matter what the people do. There is no law against feminism in Iran, and yet they publicly announced that I was arrested for “dabbling in feminism”.

Homa Hoodfar is Professor of Anthropology, Emerita, at Concordia University. Her primary research and expertise lies at the intersection of political economy, gender and citizenship rights and gender and the public sphere in Muslim contexts. 

Policy Magazine Associate Editor and Deputy Publisher Lisa Van Dusen served as a senior writer at Maclean’s, as Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, as international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News and as an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.