When Haleh Esfandiari speaks about women in Iran, she does so based on intensely personal experience.
Esfandiari, founder and director of the Middle East Program at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, will deliver the 2 p.m. Interfaith Lecture Wednesday in the Hall of Philosophy as part of this week’s theme, “Women of the Middle East.” It will be Esfandiari’s second Interfaith Lecture at Chautauqua Institution, as she also spoke in 2008.
She grew up in Iran, where she worked as a journalist and deputy secretary general of the Women’s Organization of Iran. She now lives in the U.S., but was taken prisoner in her native country in 2007 while visiting her mother and spent 105 days in solitary confinement. She is the author of several books on the Middle East, including a memoir about her imprisonment, titled My Prison, My Home: One Woman’s Story of Captivity in Iran.
Esfandiari’s lecture, “Iranian Women: Between Resistance and Repression,” will focus on the overall experience of women in Iran, although her personal experience does tie into this broader picture.
"(Based on) the knowledge I gained from being interrogated by people of the Iranian Intelligence Ministry about the mindset of the Iranian regime, on the one hand, and also as someone who has been in the past part of the Iranian women’s movement, I can share a lot of my own experience with you,” Esfandiari said.
The Wilson Center’s Middle East Program has three main objectives: the analysis of development in the Middle East; the role of women and young people in the region; and the study of civil society, Islam and democracy. Esfandiari said she has always been interested in the study of the Middle East, but the topic of women in the Middle East is her special interest.
Wednesday, Esfandiari will explain the Iranian women’s movement, tracing its roots to the 19th and 20th centuries to provide a historical context. Her lecture will also discuss Iranian women’s struggles against restriction of their rights in the last 30 years. Finally, she said, she will spend “quite a substantial amount of time” discussing women’s roles in the 2009 Iranian presidential election.
Audience members this afternoon might be surprised to hear about the level of advancement of Iranian women, Esfandiari said.
"(Americans) believe the stereotyped pictures that they see,” she said. “That’s not the case with Iranian women. Iranian women have been at the forefront of change in Iran. … The changes that have taken place in Iran have been picked up and sometimes copied for other parts of the region.”
American audiences tend to be quite receptive to this new insight about Iranian women, she said.
Esfandiari said during her time in Iran’s Evin Prison, which is notorious for torture and execution, she benefited from the networking of women both in the Middle East and across the world. She was unaware at the time that anyone was helping her because she was cut off from the rest of the world, but in addition to her family and her colleagues at the Wilson Center, friends in Iraq, Kuwait, Lebanon and as far away as Japan and Brazil petitioned for her release.
“The networking among women is amazing,” she said.
Being held prisoner as a 67-year-old grandmother also reminded Esfandiari to appreciate things many people take for granted, she said. For example, prisoners in America have the right to access their lawyers.
“You learn to appreciate the value of a democratic system,” she said. “You learn to appreciate the value of freedom. You don’t take your life and even your everyday life, the little things — just looking out the window and seeing the sun or the moon — for granted.”
In anticipation of her lecture, Esfandiari said she does wish for one of those simple things in life: sunshine Wednesday at Chautauqua. When she lectured in 2008, it was raining.
However, she said she was extremely impressed by the knowledgeable and sophisticated audience because they stood in the rain under umbrellas to hear her speak. She said she looks forward to insightful questions from Chautauquans Wednesday, but hopes they can leave their umbrellas at home.
