San José State University’s Campus Reading Program hosted an online discussion panel about the status, history and resistance efforts on women’s rights and autonomy in Afghanistan and Iran on Wednesday morning.
This included discussions on women’s reproductive and bodily rights.
The Campus Reading Program was launched by the SJSU Academic Senate in 2005 and is dedicated to fostering a reading-positive culture at SJSU, according to its website.
Every academic year a volunteer group of faculty and staff select a book the campus is encouraged to read and discuss, according to the same website.
This year's book, “Darius The Great Is Not Okay,” by Adib Khorram, is a coming-of-age story detailing the experiences of Darius, according to Adib Khorram’s website.
Darius is a half-Persian boy who visits Iran for the first time and encounters Persian customs, traditions and foods, according to the same website.
The announcement that “Darius The Great Is Not Okay” was the Campus Reading Program’s book of the year prompted the program to create a series of panels that share similar topics, including the Global Assault on Women’s Rights.
Persis Karim, chair of Iranian Diaspora studies and professor at San Francisco State University, said the discussion panel was inspired by some of the topics the book touches on including discrimination against certain women and other minority groups in Iran.
“The panel is about the huge assault on women's rights laws globally,” Karim said. “But we are going to be highlighting the particular egregious conditions of women in Iran and Afghanistan.”
Karim said the panel was also inspired by the 2022 Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran.
The Women, Life, Freedom movement and protests started in Sept. 2022 after a young woman, Mahsa Amini died in police custody after being arrested by the Iranian morality police, according to a Sept. 20, 2022 New York Times article.
Amini was arrested for allegedly violating Iran’s hijab law, according to the same article.
Her death catalyzed the eruption of the movement when young women started protesting in many cities and college campuses in Tehran, the capital of Iran, according to the same source.
Halima Kazem-Stojanovic, journalist, historian, project manager at Stanford University and former justice studies professor at SJSU, said most people have little understanding and knowledge about women’s roles in Iranian and Afghanistan history.
“Afghan women have shaped the politics of their time and interacted with Afghan regimes and foreign empires,” Kazem-Stojanovic said.
She said there have been many distinct emancipation periods and feminist movements about appropriate modern femininity, from 1919 to 2021 in Afghanistan.
Kazem-Stojanovic said studying Afghanistan history reveals that women used tactics to include themselves in negotiations, important affairs were played out on gendered ground.
“Elite women within the monarchy and other educated women maneuvered to obtain power and high positions for themselves,” Kazem-Stojanovic said.
Kazem-Stojanovic said before the fall of the Islamic Republic, the United States funded and sponsored women’s rights and gender equality across a range of sectors including politics and business, education and maternal health.
The fall of the Islamic Republic happened in August of 2021 when President Ashraf Ghani fled the capital city by helicopter to the neighboring country of Uzbekistan, leaving Afghanistan in the hands of the Taliban, according to an article by Journal of Democracy.
The Taliban is an Islamic-fundamentalist group who were previously in power from 1996 to 2001 and fell after a U.S.-led invasion, according to a website by the Director of National Intelligence.
The group imposes a harsh interpretation of Islamic law and are oppressors of Afghan women and other religious and ethnic minority groups, according to an article by the Council on Foreign Relations.
Kazem-Stojanovic said in 2020 the U.S. led so-called peace talks with the Taliban, which resulted in the U.S. withdrawal, the fall of the Islamic Republic on August 15, 2021 and the start to a new world of turmoil for young Afghan women.
“So on Aug. 15, 2021, everything changed for women and girls in Afghanistan, with the world they knew from the last 20 years was no longer,” Kazem-Stojanovic said.
Kazem-Stojanovic said the Taliban enforced a complete ban on women working outside of their home, enforcement of a strict dress code, a ban on being in public without a close male relative and a ban on women attending universities.
She also said women became reproductive hostages in their own homes, basically overnight.
Kazem-Stojanovic said similar to the eruption of the Women, Life, Freedom protests in Iran, Afghanistan women took to the streets in December 2021 to resist the oppression of the Taliban and called for Food, Work and Freedom.
“Since then, hundreds of women have been arrested, tortured and many are still held in custody,” Kazem-Stojanovic said.
English professor at SFSU Persis M. Karim said the topic of women’s rights and autonomy of their own body is important to discuss because it’s one of the major issues of our time.
Karim said it can resonate with some of the struggles women are facing in the U.S.
“It's not as bad as what's happening in Iran and Afghanistan, but it is a religious attack on women's autonomy,” Karim said. “It's based on people who believe that women should not have the right to make decisions about their own reproductive rights.”
Ahoura Zandiatashbar, assistant professor of Urban & Regional Planning at SJSU, said discrimination in these countries comes in the form of stripping people, primarily women, of the basic human right of choosing the clothes they want to wear.
“Women have always been the group that have been discriminated against,” Zandiatashbar said. “This discriminatory behavior is unfortunately rooted in the propaganda and the ideological agendas of those in power.”
Zandiatashbar said sports are another host of discrimination against women.
“When you see biking on the streets in Iran it’s usually men biking, on public streets rather than women,” Zandiatashbar said. “Because women biking is questionable.”
He said with other sports like swimming, women have to deal with discrimination and pressure to be fully covered versus men who don’t have to worry about that at all.
Zandiatashbar said even though women endure a lot of discrimination because of social norms and government codes, he does not believe they are sitting back and allowing discrimination, violence, oppression and inequality to happen.
“Females are going straight towards what they want, and fighting to get it,” Zandiatashbar said.
Tanya Saroj Bakhru, a professor in women, gender and sexuality studies, said women need both the power and resources to make decisions about their own bodies and need wellness of their whole self to participate in society.
“Bodily integrity is the right to security and control over one's body, it means that one's body is part of the whole self and wellness of the whole self is necessary for full participation in society,” Bakhru said. “To have bodily integrity means to be free from coercion or violence, it means being able to enjoy one's body in terms of health, procreation and sexuality.”
