The University of Connecticut Women’s Center hosted a celebration for International Women’s Day in the Student Union Ballroom on Tuesday, March 25. To close out the event, the center invited Nasim Basiri, a visiting assistant professor at the department of social and critical inquiry at UConn’s Stamford campus and an Iranian native, to share what feminism looks like in the Middle East.
To begin her presentation, Basiri provided background of the 1979 Iranian Revolution. She said that the revolution initially began as a demonstration of solidarity among the civilians against the then Shah of Iran, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi and his dictatorship. However, she described that religious fundamentalist “stole” the revolution from the activists. The result was a huge transformation of life for women and queer people, and for the worse.
According to Basiri, the religious fundamentalists who took control of Iran implemented a patriarchal interpretation of Islam into Iranian Law. She said that this new order shook whatever rights women had even under the dictatorship.
She talked about the ways women and girls are discouraged from going to school. Boys and girls have separate institutions from the time they’re in kindergarten. Girls have limited access to various fields of study. While Basiri did not specify these fields in her presentation, women are barred from studying areas such as computer science, political science and business administration, according to the Human Rights Watch.
“The government is against knowledge,” Basiri said.
Basiri comes from a family of activists and feminists. She did not involve much of her personal story in her presentation, but she did say that many of her family members have been arrested, some even multiple times.
She said father was arrested when he was a teenager when he was caught reading a book the government was against. Basiri shared that she had been arrested multiple times herself and called it “a psychopathic system of government.”
Basiri also explained the role of morality police in Iran. She said that these officers search in crowded public places for women not properly wearing a hijab. If a woman is found breaking the dress code, she will be arrested and kept in a police station for days. Before being released, she will be asked to agree to recognize the dress code moving forward. If she is caught again, she will be arrested and/or fined.
Basiri said women are arrested every day in Iran for breaking the dress code. Many women in Iran refuse to wear a hijab in public as a form of resistance, according to Basiri. She shared that none of her sisters wear a hijab, but her mother does.
During her presentation, Basiri shared two photographs. One featured her and a close friend visiting Iran in which they were not properly wearing hijabs. Though it appeared in the photo that they were in a more secluded area, Basiri described feeling scared that she would get arrested for breaking the dress code. In the other picture, Basiri, her sister and a few others stood in the middle of a very crowded street. Basiri’s sister was standing tall without a hijab.
The purpose of Basiri’s presentation was to show that feminism doesn’t look the same worldwide — because it can’t.
Iranian women practice feminism and resistance by pursuing education and negotiating traditional expectations within their families, according to Basiri. These forms of resistance are possible due to the Iranian Feminist Revolution of 2022, the biggest, most recent push for the cause.
Basiri said that some western feminists often criticize Middle Eastern feminists, calling them Islamophobic. Basiri said that these critics don’t often understand that the interpretations of Islam by the government and the people don’t align.
Basiri said that the mass media often avoids covering violence and killings. She also said that the Iranian government has been trying to divert media attention toward the Israel-Palestine conflict to distract from what’s happening in Iran. Because of this Basiri asks American universities to give space to Iranian activists to share their stories, saying that “Americans have a lot of power.”