“Woman, life, freedom,” the slogan used by Iranians to protest the unjustified death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, is the most appropriate description for the work of 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi, according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee.
Mohammadi is the second Iranian woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize, exactly 20 years after Shirin Ebadi won the prize for her work promoting democracy and initiating legal reform under Islamic law in 2003. Mohammadi is the fourth Nobel Peace Prize winner to be selected while still imprisoned, joining the ranks of Aung San Suu Kyi and Ales Bialiatski.
According to the Nobel Committee, Mohammadi was arrested no fewer than 13 times. She was convicted five times and sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes. Although she has been released repeatedly over the past four years, she has repeatedly become a target of Iran’s Islamist regime because of her work on behalf of women and her strong opposition to the death penalty.
To this day, she remains behind bars in Iran’s most notorious prison for political prisoners, Evin, located in the hills of northern Tehran.
I have been working on women’s rights, human rights, and gender and sexual politics in Iran for more than two decades. During my fieldwork on the sexual revolution in Iran, I had the opportunity to meet and work with Shirin Ebadi and dozens of women’s rights activists in Iran. I have witnessed the courage of Iranian women who courageously fought for change. Women’s activism in Iran is not just a new phenomenon – they have been at the forefront of calls for change in Iran for more than a century.
Activism after the Iranian Revolution
Mohammadi began finding her roots as an activist while studying at Imam Khomeini International University in the late 1980s and early 1990s, where she wrote articles denouncing the oppression women faced in Iran. After the 1979 revolution, the Islamist regime that took power under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini imposed veiling requirements and imposed strict restrictions on travel, custody, inheritance and divorce, ushering in an era of harsh repression of women.
Mohammadi was born in Zanjan, Iran, but grew up just outside Tehran in the suburb of Karaj. After graduating from high school, she moved to Qazvin, northwest of Tehran, to attend university, where she studied physics and engineering. After her arrival, she quickly became an activist and co-founded a group called Tashakkol Daaneshjooei Roshangaraan – translated as “Enlightening Student Group” – in which she wrote articles calling for the regime’s accountability.
Her writings led to her arrest twice during her studies. This was the beginning of a decades-long passion for promoting human rights in Iran that landed her repeated prison sentences. In 2002, Mohammadi co-founded the Defenders of Human Rights Center with the Ebadi, whose mission is to defend the rights of women, political prisoners and ethnic minorities in Iran.
When she was awarded the Sakharov Prize in 2018 for “defense of human rights and freedom of thought,” Mohammadi called for the abolition of the death penalty and injustices against women. She protested the detention and torture of political activists and civil rights activists and said she would not “be silent in the face of human rights violations.”
When Shirin Ebadi founded the National Peace Council for peaceful resistance to the death penalty, strict family laws and poor treatment of prisoners in 2007, Mohammadi was elected president of the 83-member body.
Reflect the call for change
Mohammadi follows a long line of women who have been at the forefront of calls for change in Iran since the era of the Persian Empire.
In 1906 there was a constitutional revolution – the Mashrouteh Revolution. This was a movement that advocated for the codification of laws and rights to protect the Iranian people when the country was threatened by colonialism. Women have been at the forefront demanding equal rights for all Iranians – especially equal rights for all genders.
Since the Iranian Revolution of 1979, women’s activism has become louder and bolder. Thousands of protesters have called for accountability, equality and human rights in the Islamic Republic over the past four decades.
In 2009, women were at the center of the Green Movement, which called for democracy and electoral transparency. The Green Movement expressed outrage over the allegedly fraudulent re-election of conservative hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
And while men and women marched side by side, it was women who led the way. Neda Aga Soltan, a 26-year-old student protester who was shot dead by a member of Iran’s paramilitary forces while peacefully supporting protests on the streets of Tehran, quickly became the face of the protests.
In 2022, women of all ages and from all religious, ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds joined protests when 22-year-old Mahsa Amini died in custody. Amini had traveled to Tehran from Kurdistan Province for a vacation with her brother. But as soon as she got off the train, Amini was arrested by the moral police. The protests following her death in custody became known around the world for her defining chant of “Zan, Zendigi, Azadi” – women, life, freedom. During these protests, 12-year-old schoolgirls stood up in public and demanded accountability from the Islamist regime.
Iranian demonstrators demand justice for Mahsa Amini during a protest in London’s Trafalgar Square. Steve Taylor/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images
These protests were not an isolated case of bravery. Rather, they were the result of decades of resistance movements led by women tired of oppression and inequality.
Sowing the seeds of contradiction
The Nobel Committee’s recognition of Mohammadi’s work puts the fight for women’s rights in the Middle East into the global spotlight.
Mohammadi’s family, the Oslo-based awards committee, and their colleagues at the Defenders of Human Rights Center have all expressed the importance of the award, not only for Mohammadi, but for all Iranian women who continue to courageously resist the Iranian regime’s oppression.
In 2022, the World Economic Forum ranked Iran among the five worst countries in the world in terms of women’s economic opportunities and empowerment, health, educational attainment and political power.
However, it is unclear whether Mohammadi knows about her victory. On October 4, she sent her family a message from prison informing them that she was being considered as a finalist. She said she would continue to strive for “democracy, freedom and equality” and vowed to remain in Iran to continue her activism. “Standing alongside the brave mothers of Iran, I will continue to fight against the repressive religious government’s relentless discrimination, tyranny and gender-based oppression until women’s liberation,” she said.
Iranian women are highly unlikely to give up the fight, even under threat of tear gas, arrest and years of imprisonment, or brutality.