Narges Mohammadi: Iran’s prisoner of conscience, a campaigner of women’s freedom

In her first reaction, Mohammadi, who has been spending her days and nights in the cold and concrete confines of a dimly lit cell of Iran’s notorious Evin Prison since she was last incarcerated in November 2021, said that the Prize only strengthens her resolve to fight oppression even if it entails spending the rest of her life behind bars. “I will never stop striving for the realisation of democracy, freedom and equality. Standing alongside the brave mothers of Iran...I will continue to fight against the relentless discrimination, tyranny, and gender-based oppression,” ” she said in a statement released through The New York Times.

An indomitable fighter

A prominent target of Iranian government’s repression, Mohammadi has kept on fighting the good fight even in the face of repeated imprisonments over the last 22 years. Her activism has meant the world to her since she was a student. Born on April 21, 1972, into a middle-class family in Zanjan, Mohammadi pursued a degree in nuclear physics at the International Imam Khomeini University in Qazvin. It was during her college years that she became deeply involved in student activism, championing the cause of human rights and social justice. She also established a student organisation called Tashakkol Daaneshjuyi Roshangaraan (‘Enlightened Student Group’) and wrote articles on women’s issues. Her early activism during her student days led to her arrest on two occasions, foreshadowing the longer periods of incarceration she would later endure.

Mohammadi’s father worked as a cook and a farmer, and her mother came from a politically engaged family, which exposed her to the consequences of dissent early on. In the wake of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, she was a witness to the arrests of her activist uncle and two cousins. In an interview to New York Times, she recalls how her childhood memories propelled her to be an activist. Two particular images stand out: the image of her mother packing a red plastic basket with fruits every week for prison visits with her brother, and the sight of her mother sitting on the floor, eagerly listening to the names of prisoners being executed daily on TV when Mohammadi was just nine. One day, it was the turn of her mother’s nephew. When the anchor announced his name, her mother burst into a heart-wrenching wail, crumbling in grief on the carpet. That sight stayed with Mohammadi; over the years, it became a driving force behind her lifelong commitment to oppose executions.

After completing her studies, Mohammadi began her professional career as an engineer at the Iran Engineering Inspection Corporation, a position she was forced to quit by the government in 2009. Simultaneously, she continued to write for reformist publications and newspapers, raising awareness about gender equality and democratic concerns. She even wrote a book of political essays titled The Reforms, the Strategy, and the Tactics. From the early 1990s onward, she became a steadfast advocate for human rights, the rule of law, and democracy in Iran, a key figure of the feminist movement and a tireless campaigner against all forms of discrimination — based on gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, or class. Her commitment to these causes has defined her life.

Her many battles

According to the Academy, she has been arrested by Iranian authorities 13 times and sentenced to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes. In 2003, the year Ebadi received the Nobel, Mohammadi became involved with the Defenders of Human Rights Center (DHRC) in Tehran, an organisation founded by the former. In 1998, Mohammadi was arrested for her criticisms of Iran’s government and spent a year in prison. In April 2010, the Islamic Revolutionary Court summoned her for being a member DHRC. Released briefly on bail, she was re-arrested several days later and detained in Evin Prison. “While in custody, her health declined, and she developed an epilepsy-like disease causing her to periodically lose muscle control. After a month, she was released and allowed to go to the hospital. In July 2011, she was prosecuted again, and found guilty of ‘acting against the national security, membership of the DHRC, and propaganda against the regime (nezam),” writes Nayereh Esfahlani Tohidi, the Iranian-born American professor in her introduction to Mohammadi’s book, White Torture: Interviews with Iranian Women Prisoners, translated by Amir Rezanezhad (Oneworld), which was published in November last year.

In her preface (written in March 2022) to the book, she informs us: “I am writing this preface in the final hours of my home leave. Very soon I will be forced to return to prison.” On November 16, 2021, Mohammadi was arrested for the twelfth time (for White Torture) and sentenced to solitary confinement for the fourth time in her life. She spent 64 days in confinement in Ward 209 of Evin Prison, run by the Islamic Republic of Iran’s Ministry of Intelligence. “They accused me of blackening the name of Iran across the world. Now they were determined to prove that my campaign to end solitary confinement had failed,” writes Mohammadi.

“Once again they would subject me to this torture and demonstrate to activists all over the globe that the government reigns supreme. I was illegally sentenced to eight years and two months in prison, and seventy-four lashes by the primary court, which was subsequently commuted to six years in prison, with the same number of lashes. As a result, I am serving two separate sentences: a prior one of thirty months in prison and eighty lashes, as well as this recent one. When taken together with an earlier sentence, I now face over thirty years in prison. But nothing will stop me from continuing my struggle against solitary confinement. Having been granted temporary release due to my poor health following a heart attack in Qarchak Prison and cardiac surgery, I declare once more that this is a cruel and inhumane punishment. I will not rest until it is abolished. They will put me behind bars again. But I will not stop campaigning until human rights and justice prevail in my country,” she declares.

Speaking truth to power

The book, which has also made into an award-winning documentary, is replete with horrifying accounts of women subjected to white torture, a brutal psychological torture technique aimed at complete sensory deprivation and isolation. As Shannon Woodcock, historian and author of Life is War: Surviving Dictatorship in Communist Albania (2016), writes in her introduction to the book, it is a record of the cruelty of white torture and the strength women prisoner have for to find to live through it. “These are the words of people who understand the fears and weaknesses of the regime better than the regime itself, and they document how the tools of torture fail to separate them from their humanity and their belief in justice and love. This volume speaks truth to power, against the full force of the state. These women document the way the Iranian state tries to separate their souls from their bodies through white torture, and in doing so they build something bigger and more powerful than individual survival — they build networks of solidarity,” Woodcock writes.

“The Islamic regime has used legislation and physical coercion to create a society in which women and ethnic and religious minorities have restricted rights of movement, education and employment. Individuals who politically organize, protest or speak against the state are flogged, imprisoned and executed. As you will see, the Iranian state targets and persecutes families across generations, threatening to incarcerate and torture political prisoners’ children – and sometimes doing so – to further push families into total socio-economic exclusion and isolation. The Islamic Republic of Iran is a carceral state: the intense cruelty and torture in prisons dictates a lesson to the world at large,” underlines the historian.

When Mohammadi was briefly released from prison in October 2020 —the pandemic was raging and there was an international outcry over her deteriorating health — she had to stay away from her family. As refugees, her husband and children could not travel to Iran without getting arrested, and the Iranian government refused to issue an exit visa for her. A few weeks after being released, she lost her mother, Ozra Bazargan, to Covid-19 and subsequently had to take care of her ailing father. All this while, she was not granted a reprieve from the surveillance, threats or harassment by the Iranian security agents.

The audacity of ideals

In the last couple of years, the Raisi regime has been vehement, unrelenting. And Mohammadi, in turn, has been unyielding. In December 2019, she held a sit-in strike in Evin Prison. “We witnessed the presence of a large number of security forces and intelligence agents alongside the prison authorities. The prison governor threatened that our action would not go without punishment, and our visiting hours and phone calls were cancelled consequently,” she writes, detailing what she had to undergo. “On 24 December, I was shown a letter that my lawyer was in the prison to meet me. It turned out, it was a lie and there was no lawyer there. They took me to the prison governor’s room, where he, in the presence of the agents from the Ministry of Intelligence, started shouting obscenities. I left the room and heard them running after me. He took my arms and wrenched them violently in order to stop me, and then they dragged me in the corridor. While I was resisting, they bashed my hand to the door, and the smashed glass panel of the door cut my hands. My hands bleeding and wrenched, they threw me into an ambulance and started driving.”

Her tormentors brought her to ward 209, where the prison governor told her that he would not let her return to her ward and that he would be sending her to the prison in Zanjan. “I began chanting a song about Iran and they attacked, beat, and pushed me into a car to take me away. My hands were still bleeding, as the medicine I take for my medical condition does not let the blood clot, and the intelligence agents pressed the handcuffs hard on my wounds. The blood dripped on my clothes until we reached Zanjan. December 24, 2019 was the hideous day of the blatant brutality of the prison authorities and the security forces who have taken away all the means of life from me. What keeps me on my feet in this prison, while my body bruised and wounded, is my love for the honourable, but tormented, people of this country, and my ideals of justice and freedom. To honour the innocent people’s blood shed atrociously, I pledge to speak the truth, defy tyranny, and defend the oppressed until my last breath,” she writes.

Explaining the reasons why Mohammadi commands both respect and trust across civil society and movements critical of the regime of the Islamic Republic, Tohidi writes that it is because she is a uniter, not a divider. “She has been helpful in converging progressive groups rather than splitting or polarizing them. She has avoided sectarianism and been energetic in building coalitions spanning the full spectrum of political orientations, and supportive of diversity and pluralism. These are precious characteristics rarely present among many leading politicians in Iran’s mainstream political culture,” states Tohidi, adding that Mohammadi, in her own way, is part of the growing counterculture in Iran that stands against “the violent and ascetic culture preached by fanatic Islamist extremists: a life-affirming culture that embraces the pursuit of happiness, liberty and equality.” She adds: “Unlike the religious extremists among the current rulers who sacralize asceticism or hypocritically pretend in public to be ascetic, pious and strict ‘men of god’, but behave immorally in private, she is among those who believe we should honestly and openly promote beauty, happiness, non-violence and joy.”

‘Women, life, freedom’

In the prison — separated from her husband, Taghi Rahmani, a journalist and writer, and their twins, Ali and Kiana, who have been living in exile in France since 2012 — Mohammadi, a trained singer in Persian classical music, refuses to be a victim of state atrocities, organising gatherings of women prisoners, and singing Persian rendition of the Italian protest song, Bella Ciao (Goodbye Beautiful), which has become the anthem of women’s resistance movement in Iran. During the wave of protests last year, Mohammadi expressed her support for the demonstrators and organised solidarity actions among her fellow inmates.

The prison authorities, as expected, responded by imposing even stricter conditions. Prohibited from receiving calls and visitors, she somehow managed to smuggle out an article which the New York Times published on the one-year anniversary of Amini's killing. The message was: "The more of us they lock up, the stronger we become." In captivity, Mohammadi has managed to ensure that the protests do not fizzle out.

The Peace Nobel for Mohammadi comes close on the heels of the Barbey Freedom to Write Award, bestowed on her by PEN America in May this year, and the World Press Freedom Prize by the United Nations. The Nobel Committee’s decision sends out a resounding message to Iran and its autocratic, belligerent President Ebrahim Raisi that the world is watching what has been happening in Iran. And, more importantly, the voices that the clerical, repressive regime has been trying to muzzle will not be silenced: they will tear through the mighty walls of the most dangerous prisons.

The recognition for Mohammadi, needless to say, is a shot in the arm for the ongoing struggle by the Iranian women, who have been courageously fighting for their right to make choices about their own lives and bodies, a fight that has seen them erupt into an uprising, spilling out onto the streets and making bonfires of headscarves — chanting the Kurdish slogan for women’s liberation, “Woman, life, freedom,” as well as “Death to the dictator, death to Khamenei” and “Death to the IRGC (Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps), death to the entire system!”

It will also, inevitably (one hopes), channel global attention toward the senselessness and absurdity of the misogynistic laws that treat civilians, especially women, like criminals in Iran. Announcing the award at a ceremony in the Norwegian capital of Oslo, the Nobel Committee said that it was honouring Mohammadi for “her fight against the oppression of women in Iran and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all.” In 2010, when Ebadi, who was given the Nobel Peace Prize for ׅ“her efforts for democracy and human rights,” received the Austrian’s Felix Ermacora Human Rights Award, she dedicated it to Mohammadi, saying, ‘This courageous woman deserves this award more than I do.’ Thirteen years on, Mohammadi has claimed the glory (for her guts) that is rightly hers, and made history as the second Iranian to win the Nobel Peace prize.