Iran’s 1979 Islamic revolution was a defining event that changed how we think about the relationship between religion and modernity. Ayatollah Khomeini’s mass mobilisation of Islam showed that modernisation by no means implies a linear process of religious decline.
In August 2016, shortly after I was arrested by the Iranian Ministry of Intelligence, one of my interrogators asked me what I thought of the antagonism between Iran and the United States. I told him frankly that like many Americans, I did not believe that Iran and the United States should be enemies. I said that I thought President Barack Obama should visit Tehran and turn a new page in the relationship, just as President Richard Nixon had done by going to Beijing in 1972. The interrogator sneered. The U.S. president would never be welcome in his country, he told me.
The ripple effects of the 2017 “#MeToo” movement shook Iranian social media this week as rape allegations were levelled against some of the country’s most prominent figures. The movement, which has led to the arrest of at least one alleged rapist so far, has triggered a broader conversation around sexual violence and harassment — an unspoken topic in Islamic Iran.
The accused range from Revolutionary Guard commanders to renowned artists and ordinary citizens —implying a deep and systemic crisis of moral legitimacy at the heart of the regime not unlike the one recently faced by the Catholic Church: The theocracy that has touted itself as the guardian of good conduct and high virtue proves to have done no better, and possibly worse, than the Western societies it has so scathingly criticized.
Reporters Without Borders (RSF) calls on the UN special rapporteur on human rights in Iran to inspect the country’s prisons as soon as possible, now that the revelation of a cover-up of coronavirus deaths in Iran has increased concern about the degree to which prisoners of conscience, including journalists, are exposed to the virus in its over-crowded jails. The BBC’s Persian service revealed on 3 August that leaked Iranian government data showed that the real death toll from Covid-19 in Iran was nearly 42,000 – three times the figure of 14,400 that the Iranian health ministry gave on 20 July.
Heidi Hautala, Vice President in charge of Democracy, Human Rights and the Sakharov Community, and Maria Arena, Chair of the Sub-Committee on Human Rights issued the following statement on Nasrin Sotoudeh's renewed hunger strike and increased pressure on her family:
In 2019, the Islamic Republic of Iran marked its fortieth anniversary in power. It proudly staged ceremonies to commemorate this milestone, but before the year was out it would face widespread, bitter protests of a sort that have become familiar, denying its legitimacy and demanding an end to undemocratic rule by Shia Muslim clerics. The early months of 2020 brought the regime more high-profile troubles. These included the accidental shootdown of a civilian airliner and now encompass Iranian society's suffering as part of the covid-19 pandemic—a suffering that has grown worse even as top officials have refused to acknowledge the true extent and severity of what the disease has wrought for the people of Iran.
The outbreak of COVID-19 in Iran has continued to threaten the health and safety of imprisoned human rights defenders, like Nasrin Sotoudeh and Yasaman Aryani, in the country’s overcrowded and unhygienic prisons.
His tone was frantic. He was scared and paranoid, deleting his WhatsApp messages as soon as I had read them. Masoud Molavi Vardanjani wanted to speak to someone “in Washington”. I was cautious, too. I am just a journalist, I insisted. Who would I know “in Washington”? And how can I even be sure it’s you, I asked, and not some Iranian regime operative up to some trickery?
The hidden role of a British secret service officer who led the coup that permanently altered the Middle East is to be revealed for the first time since an Observer news story was suppressed in 1985.
