CNN / By Christiane Amanpour / Part 2; Part 3
Women’s rights have advanced in many Muslim countries, but women still suffer from more inequality than anywhere else. Joining Christiane Amanpour are three women who’ve made it their mission to promote gender equality: the president and CEO of the Women’s Learning Partnership, Mahnaz Afkhami, she’s a former minister for women’s affairs in Iran; Asma Khader, who is secretary general of the Jordanian National Commission for Women and a former culture minister; and Lina Abou Habib, executive director of a Lebanese organization that tries to empower women.
New School for Social Research / By Mahnaz Afkhami
Mahnaz Afkhami delivers the opening remarks during a one-day conference in cooperation with the Social Research Journal, entitled “2020 Vision: Mobilizing for Women’s Rights and Eliminating Violence Against Women.” The conference keynote speakers were Shirin Ebadi, Thoraya Obaid, Mary Robinson, and Melanne Verveer.
BBC Persian Hardtalk / By Enayat Fani Afkhami looks back on the complex issues of advancing women’s rights in Iran: from her time working as Minister for Women’s Affairs under the Shah, and using economic development goals as a ways of promoting women’s development, to the progresses made and lost in family law, to the [...]
VOA News / By Judith Latham / Listen
One way the One Million Signatures Campaign has overcome those barriers is by reaching out to women through “one-on-one” contact. Afkhami said women in the campaign, who go into private homes as well as to places where women gather, try to get other women to sign on to the petition for change. “But if they don’t, they leave the information with them because the aim is to get one million activists, not so much one million signatures,” she said.
PRI’s The World / By Marco Werman / Listen
Iran’s authorities recently confiscated Shirin Ebadi’s Nobel Peace prize medal. Activists say the move against the Iranian human rights lawyer exemplifies Tehran’s hostility toward women. Mahnaz Afkhami was the Minister for Women’s Affairs in Iran before the 1979 revolution. She now lives in Bethesda, Maryland. Afkhami wrote the foreword to a new book called Iranian Women’s One Million Signatures Campaign for Equality. Anchor Marco Werman talks with Afkhami about the women’s movement in Iran and the ‘One Million Signatures’ campaign.
Washington TV / By Amir Irani-Tehrani
On November 6, Ms. Afkhami was featured on Mehdi Falahati’s Persian-language program “Rou dar Rou” (Face-to-Face), produced by Voice of America. During the interview she discussed her professional journey, as well as the role of women in Iran’s democracy movement and their use of ICTs to take their message to the international community.
NPR / By Liane Hansen / Listen
Host Liane Hansen interviews Mahnaz Afkhami, a former Minister of State for Women’s Affairs in Iran, about Farrokhroo Parsay. Parsay was the minister of education from 1968 to 1977 and was executed after the revolution for corruption. Parsay was one of Iran’s most important advocates for women’s rights.
BBC World Service / By Nikki Jecks / Listen
The Iranian president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has announced he intends to appoint Iran’s first women cabinet ministers since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Mahnaz Afkhami was one of the last two women to take part in an Iranian government before the revolution.
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.
Monday, March 8, 2010