READ THIS NOW

Samizdata.net has posted a letter from The Student Movement Coordination Committee for Democracy in Iran on the status of woman in Iran and Islam. I don't think I have read anything as recklessly brave since the death of the USSR. Here's a taste:

Yes, during this hundred year period, only in the years of the rule of the Pahlavi kings has it been that Iranian women were able to possess unprecedented progressive rights in an Islamic country. These rights that mainly due to the backwards religious beliefs of the Iran of the times and the fear of the women from the religionists was mainly implemented from top-down at the request of a great many progressive and educated women, began with the unprecedented order of the "unveiling" by the late Reza Shah. An unprecedented order that for many of the women at the advent of the Constitutionalist era and their descendants meant the arrival of the nullification of "sexual slavery" and prejudice in our country, which led to many interpretations and radical changes and reactions in the years after it, and which continues to stir resistance in the Iran of today following this order, it was on "17th Dey 1314" (January 7, 1936) that suddenly half of the country that was condemned, till then, to covering their entire bodies, masking their faces and staying at home found the opportunity to tend to any education and career. Unprecedented opportunities for the entire region that until 50 years later and with the cancellation of these rights, simultaneous with the fall of the Kingdom of the departed late Mohammad Reza Shah, had continued and which even today do not exist in many countries in the region.

This is, at least putatively, an Iranian woman praising her country's pagan past, condemning 1400 years of Islam in terms that would make Harry blush, praising the Shah and condemning the revolution. No moderation here. Go read it, now.

Posted by David Cohen at March 9, 2003 10:34 PM