Sima Arshadi is a mother, chef, artist, entrepreneur, and former participant in the International Institute of Akron’s economic empowerment program. In late 2022, Sima sat down with IIA’s Liv Randall to talk about the protests led by Iranian women last year and why their slogan, “Women, Life, Freedom,” is so resonant today.
While women’s rights movements in the U.S. and Iran have raged through the same decades, progress in Iran has been much more haphazard—and deadlier. Yet, brave women in Iran continue to demand rights currently reserved for men, such as the freedom to choose how to dress. And, they are winning global support.
In 2022, TIME Magazine named the women of Iran “Heroes of the Year.” As journalist Azadeh Moaveni explains, women in Iran are agitating for equality, yes, but really it’s just “normality”: the right to basic human activities like “college and foreign travel, decent jobs, rule of law, access to the Apple Store, a meaningful role in politics, the freedom to say and wear whatever.”
These are things that women in some countries may take for granted. But not Sima. In fact, she fled Iran a decade ago because her right to simply exist as a woman—or really, a person—was under threat.
Sima was seven when the government of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi was overthrown, replacing Iran’s dynastic form of governance with an ultra-conservative interpretation of Islamic law. Her parents both believed in Christianity and held “liberal” views about the role of women in society.
“I had a wonderful childhood, I really did,” said Sima. “Although I was a girl, my dad gave me permission to do whatever I wanted. I didn’t have to ask him for permission to do everything,” like others did in the newly-defined Islamic Republic.
Sima was able to leave home, attend college, and complete her degree in library science. “I am very thankful to have had a father and mother like them,” she said. But others around her were not so lucky. When asked why she ultimately had to flee, Sima gave one word: persecution. “Exactly what women are fighting for right now,” she said. “We are fighting for our freedom.”
Sima’s sister had been killed and her eldest son arrested by the government. IIA will not ask her for details. But we will say that Sima continues to live separated from her eldest son, while her youngest has been able to join her and is studying at the University of Akron.
We sat down with Sima to learn more about the struggle for women’s liberation in Iran, since many people in the United States had not followed the movement until last fall, when 22 year-old Mahsa “Jhina” Amini was murdered by Iranian police. She had been arrested by Iran’s so-called “Morality Police” for “improper dress”—not wearing a hijab head covering as required by Iranian law—and taken to jail for what was supposed to be a brief time.
Hours later Mahsa Amini—known to her family and friends as “Jhina”— was dead at the hands of the police. Amani Al-Khatahtbeh explains:
While the “morality police” asserts itself as a spiritual authority, the reality is that it’s a government invention with no theological existence in Islam that manipulates religion to assert control over people. In Iran, the morality police use hijab as a tool to essentially diminish Iranian women from the public space, intimidating women across the country to stay home.
In other countries, including the United States, the right to wear the hijab has come under attack. For example, a young woman in Ohio forced a change in law after she was disqualified from a race for wearing a hijab. In North Carolina, three college students were murdered by a man enraged with Islamophobia.
Says Al-Khatahtbeh, “Muslim women across the East and West have been fighting for the same thing for decades: the right to choose.” She adds:
The truth is that laws forcing Muslim women to wear headscarves or take them off represent two sides of the same coin: controlling Muslim women’s right to choose. Hijab laws have nothing to do with religion or secularism. At best, they are a form of state-sanctioned sexual harassment; at worst, they represent the systemic subjugation of Muslim women, no matter what society they exist in.
Jhina’s cousin exposed the violent truth of her murder by police, and an international outcry was born. Women in Iran and around the world took to the streets, cut their hair in public, and burned hijabs in protest. In Iran, the government arrested thousands of people it deemed to be dissidents, including journalists reporting on Jhina’s murder. Hundreds of people were killed. (The final toll remains in dispute.)
But the rallying cry of “Women, Life, Freedom” has reverberated around the world. People in countries with more political freedom than in Iran have taken up the mantle as the biggest risk-takers, the bravest women and men, were killed for demanding the right to choose.
Today, the Iranian government claims to have disbanded the Morality Police, although few believe them and even fewer trust them to follow through and actually guarantee women’s rights. Count Sima among the skeptics.
She also has some strong advice for the United States, including the U.S. government writ large.
Let’s consider what the Iranian people do not want from countries like the United States. They don’t want military action from the U.S. government in direct support of the recent revolution. Lobbyists from the Islamic Republic have infiltrated the U.S. government through providing direct and indirect financial support to U.S. senators and congressmen/women. Therefore, the first thing the U.S. can do to support people of Iran is distance themselves from these lobbyists. The second action by the U.S. government would be holding the Islamic Republic regime accountable for their inhumane actions in Iran through introducing appropriate UN resolutions.
As for those of us who want to be allies in Iranian women’s fight for freedom, Sima says to “contact your government representatives at the federal, state, and local levels. Ask them to distance themselves from the lobbyists of the current regime in Iran.” She also recommends to keep listening to the women of Iran, and to share their stories on various social media platforms, such as TikTok and Instagram.
In a video produced by Devilstrip, we see the breathtakingly realistic flowers Sima forms from cold porcelain. They mimic the fresh flowers her mother used to bring home, trading the fragility of cut flowers for something that “lasts forever.”
In that same way, women in Iran are building strength and permanent change, despite the government’s efforts to enshrine their “fragility.”
“The revolution taking place in Iran is not different from any of the revolutions that have been taking place across the globe,” Sima states. “According to the first few sentences of the US Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776, ‘all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Right, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.’ As such, the revolution taking place in Iran right now, could remind other people, in other parts of the world, that freedom is the only way to live.
