By Irene Escudero |
Cartagena (Colombia) (EFE).- The writer Parinoush Saniee lives with tears and worry between two countries, her native Iran and the United States. She follows what is happening in Iran with concern, and with tears that also contain the emotion for the struggle that the women there are giving, about whom she has researched and written so much.
“I am very concerned about the lives of the young women who are fighting in the streets, about the deaths in the streets, but I also maintain the hope that this fight will come to a good end,” Saniee said in an interview with EFE. from the other side of the world, from the Colombian city of Cartagena de Indias where he participated in the Hay Festival.
She gets up and goes to bed listening to the news about what is happening in her country, where in September thousands of people, especially women, dared to take to the streets, despite the repression, to protest the death of Masha Amini in a police station, after she was arrested for misplaced her veil.
However, despite the fear and tears, he is very hopeful and thinks “that society is much more open than before.”
The protests have led to state repression, reports of abuse and rape in prisons, sentences of death or many years just for going out to protest, and timid changes such as the dismantling of the morality police.
«In Iran there is a very large number of the population that have higher education and their mentality has changed towards modernism; In that sense, I have a lot of hope”, he admits first and then regrets: “but really at the level of the government and the regime I have no hope that they will take steps to open society towards democratization”.
The struggle of the women of Iran
She, who has spent her entire life studying women, their struggles and exploits in Iran and has published “The Book of My Destiny”, which is banned in her country, was caught by this explosion of visits to the country, which she goes very often despite the fact that she is a great critic and a well-known feminist.
However, he was not surprised by this outburst on the part of the women. “Although religion, laws, even social traditions, everything is against them, still Iranian women have always kept up the fight for their rights,” she says proudly.
“I have studied 5,000 years of the history of Iranian women in Iranian society and I have always seen that women have fought for their rights,” she says, adding that “especially when they are attacked and humiliated, when they are living without rights This situation automatically produces resistance, a desire to fight.
“So in that sense – he concludes – Iranian women – who are half of society – have struggled in silence, although they have not had much noise.”
It is a “silent struggle” within an “apparently patriarchal” society where in its depths “women always invent new measures to confront the prohibitions that exist in the streets.”
a history of struggle
And she says “apparently patriarchal” because she, who has dedicated her life to the study of history and society, knows well that Iran was not always one of the most oppressive states towards women.
Iran has had “queens who have ruled the country even army commanders who were women” and who have led wars, he recounts. There are also tombs of women where remains have been found indicating that they were heads of state or important positions.
Iranian society 2,000 years ago was matriarchal, he insists, and doesn’t become patriarchal until the Aryans come along and mix, but the fact that it was a women-headed society for so long made this entry not “so great a system.” hard” as in other territories such as Babylon or Syria.
For this reason, they stress, “even after the arrival of Islam, women have gone to the background of society, but always when necessary they have risen up against discrimination” and that has made “Iranian women the heroines of the time of defeat.
