Persian text
Whether in exile in refugee camps, in prisons inside Iran, or working late into the night sending their messages around the country and across the world, women in Iran have not yielded to oppression. Their mobile phones, web sites and blogs carry their words across the nation and throughout the world. Their voice resonates with others who rise up in their support. They are at the forefront of the green movement for change. They know they can change their country and they say “Yes, we will.”
In the Women’s Learning Partnership blog
This month, for the first time in 30 years, formal negotiations between the United States and Iran took place in a relatively positive atmosphere. As President Obama had promised during his campaign, dialogue took the place of diatribe. This is an important development.
In The Huffington Post
Iranian Women are bringing new support, dynamism and confidence to the global movement for women’s rights and human rights, by sharing their experiences via the Internet with women in other Muslim societies, and by documenting their years of dialogue, grassroots activism and refusal to be silenced in a new English translation of the book, Iranian Women’s One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality: The Inside Story.
In Iranian Women’s One Million Signatures: Campaign for Equality The Inside Story by Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani / Women’s Learning Partnership Translation Series
Iran’s One Million Signatures Campaign for the Reform of Discriminatory Laws is an extraordinary phenomenon. It is democratic, nonhierarchical, open, and evolving in a polity that is none of those things. The campaign brings to mind the image of raindrops falling, forming rivulets, and then converging on an ever-larger scale until they become a river. The genius of the movement lies in its capacity to connect its members’ thoughts and deeds in ways that adapt and change as conditions require. The context is on the one hand the clash between an Iranian civil society with a century-old record of growing sophistication and important roles for women, and on the other an archaic legal…
In International Museum of Women, Economica: Women and the Global Economy
Women’s empowerment is a process, a holistic approach that involves raising consciousness, building skills and reforming unjust laws that limit women’s education, their employment, their participation in decision making, and above all, their opportunities for economic independence.
In the Women’s Learning Partnership blog
The images from Iran in the last two weeks have stunned the world: hundreds of thousands of women and men marching peacefully, first in support of reformist candidates and later protesting the government’s version of the results. Women played a prominent role at every level in this movement; in fact what unfolded in Iran would not have been possible without them.
At The American Academy in Berlin / Watch
The most taxing contradiction women leaders in Muslim countries face today is the one between the demands of modernity and the requirements of tradition as determined in advance by the modern Islamist world view. At the center of this conflict is the dilemna of Muslim women’s human rights: whether muslim women have rights because they are human beings or whether they have rights because they are Muslim women.
In Der Tagesspiegel
Women in Iran must be free to choose what to think, what to say, what to do, and, of course, how to relate, or not to relate, to God, writes Mahnaz Afkhami. This cannot be had if government and religion are one.
Foreword to Making IT Our Own: Information and Communication Technology Training of Trainers Manual
Modern information technology has the potential to empower women in ways unprecedented in the social and cultural evolution of human history. It is incumbent on us to help prepare women across the world to harness it for changing not only their own lives but also the world for the better. Making IT Our Own: Information & Communication Technology Training of Trainers Manual is an extension of our efforts to empower women to harness ICTs. It is our attempt to shift the ownership of the tools of information technology from the few to the many in a variety of cultures, in the hope that while we are coping with the exigencies…
Women Living Under Muslim Law and Sisterhood Is Global Institute
In Globalizing Women : Transnational Feminist Networks/ Valentine M. Moghadam (ed.)
This chapter examines two Transnational Feminist Networks (TFNs)–Women Living under Muslim Laws (WLUML) and the Sisterhood Is Global Institute (SIGI), as well as a newer TFN that operates in the Muslim world: the Women’s Learning Partnership for Peace, Development, and Rights (WLP). These TFNs call for the advancement, equality, and human rights of women in the Muslim world, and urge governments to implement the UN-sponsored Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women, along with the Beijing Platform for Action. As advocates of democratization, civil society, and women’s rights, they are fierce opponents of fundamentalism, and have taken positions against those versions of cultural relativism and multiculturalism that undermine women’s equality and autonomy in the name of respect for cultural or religious traditions. They also have paid special attention to the violations of women’s human rights in the Islamic Republic of Iran, Algeria, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Nigeria.
Wednesday, April 14, 2010