“They needed everything to suppress these girls who were so fearless” | A supporter spotlight with Dr. Nayereh Tohidi

As part of our anniversary celebration, we are launching a Supporter Spotlight series to highlight the individuals who make up the strength of the Scholars at Risk Network. 

Nayereh Tohidi was pursuing her PhD in the United States when Ayatollah Khomeini assumed power and declared secular Iranian intellectuals like her enemies of the state. Unable even to renew her passport, she became a scholar-in-exile. Ever since, she has been a passionate advocate for free thought and human rights. Now an internationally renowned scholar on gender, Islam, and feminism, Tohidi has campaigned alongside Scholars at Risk for threatened and imprisoned scholars around the world. In this spotlight, she shares her thoughts on the courage of Iranian female students and how knowledge can liberate us, both from repressive systems and from our own narrow ideas of the truth.

SAR: Thank you again for speaking with us today. I appreciate your taking the time to share your perspective. 

TOHIDI: Thank you. I also appreciate your attention to scholars who are trying to help other scholars. SAR’s mission is very important. You are doing something that I, for one, value very much. So it was an honor to receive your invitation, because it made me happy to realize that people appreciate what we do; even the small things that I have done have been noted. And I hope that they can inspire others to become engaged in defending academic freedom. 

SAR: You have contributed to Scholars at Risk in a range of different ways. Why have you chosen to support SAR’s mission?

TOHIDI: I was looking for a network or institution like SAR because I knew so many people who were desperate to leave Iran, scholars especially, because of being persecuted and harassed. Basically, these are very decent, very respected people, most of them well known, and their only “sin,” according to the government, is that they don’t think the way the government thinks. And they write and do research that enlightens people about the real situation in Iran. 

The current example I’m worried about is Dr. Saeed Madani, who is a prominent sociologist. [Recently], he was released after spending four years in jail for no reason. He was supposed to be in jail longer, but there were lots of campaigns on his behalf. Dr. Madani has done a lot of field research and sociological investigation into why Iran has become such a movement-oriented society, why people are so frustrated and angry. And in an ordinary situation, in a democratic context, the government should actually say, “Thank you. Thank you for giving us a warning, for telling us that the society may implode.” But since Dr. Madani was popular, and many people were reading his writings, the government got scared. They don’t want to allow anyone who has the competencies, the courage, the advocacy for changing society, changing the system, to be heard. 

In a theocracy, everything is controlled. The government thinks it’s their mission to keep people the way they are supposed to be, in order to take them to heaven. Before coming to power, Ayatollah Khomeini knew that he could not be against the students if he wanted to win public opinion. So, he said, “Yes, universities are the center of revolution, the students are wonderful, and professors are doing such a good job.” But just a couple years later, the first year or second year of taking power, he started saying that universities are more dangerous than cluster bombs. 

SAR: In writing about the Iranian government’s antagonism toward universities, you’ve noted that it is women students who have suffered most. Your 2025 article, Will the Women’s Movement in Iran Grow into a National Liberation Movement?, co-authored with Manijeh Daneshpour, states that the experience of women is often “the sharpest lens” through which to view Iranians’ collective frustration with authoritarian rule. Why do you think the struggle of women – and in particular women university students – is such a potent example of the tension between the people and the regime?

 TOHIDI: Let me start with a general statement that the two social groups in Iran that have become primary agents of change are women and the youth. During the Woman Life Freedom uprising, we saw how widely even school girls were involved in the movement. They started poisoning the school girls, remember? They needed everything to suppress these girls who were so fearless.

So why are women so important here? Because they were the most oppressed part of the society, the most controlled. Their body, their style of life, what they wore became subject for repression, for putting them in jail. Imagine that you are going to school and suddenly they come after you, and they put you in the van and take you to the jail just because you haven’t covered everything properly. But women have been able to change the cover. Women have been able, little by little, to put away the all-encompassing black chador, which is the superior hijab, according to the government. Gradually, they changed the color of the chador; they turned the chador, gradually, little by little, into a scarf. Then the scarf became smaller and smaller. So women have exerted agency and resistance in different ways, by, you know, two steps forward, one step backward, like a mouse and cat game with the regime. Women learned how to sabotage this ideology and this pattern of repression gradually by just daily resistance. That’s why I think when you can see the change among women, and this degree of self-confidence in using non-violent civil disobedience very cleverly and effectively, you understand why women have become the symbol of Iran’s liberation.

SAR: I’m interested in what you’re saying about women becoming a symbol both of courage and also of the possibility of change. You’ve participated in some of SAR’s advocacy work, which is always an optimistic exercise. It requires a belief that your voice can be heard even in the most oppressive contexts. What gives you that hope?

TOHIDI: If you lose hope, you can’t be an activist, you can’t be an agent of change. You have no motivation to do that, because you are hopeless. 

Also, I have seen changes. I have seen a lot of successes in Iran. Look, women are more educated now in Iran than men. Even the percentage of acceptance into universities is higher among girls than boys. In practice, however, there are twice as many unemployed people among women than men, because of the discrimination and lack of equal opportunities for women, but they engage in all sorts of jobs within the informal sector of the economy. For example, there are new restaurants, small shops that are run by women. They have become very creative. They have even become Uber drivers. They don’t limit themselves to patriarchally defined female jobs. They are architects, they are surgeons. They have achieved a lot by resistance, by creativity, by their intelligence and courage and commitment. I myself owe my liberation to the University of Tehran. When I say liberation I mean that I could free myself from traditionally patriarchal customs such as an arranged marriage, so the enlightening and empowering values of education for me have been understood on a very personal level as well as a sociological observation.

Universities, especially more active campuses like University of Tehran, have played a critical role in liberating women, in consciousness raising, in the development of feminist movements, feminist literature, feminist discourse. So, why should I be hopeless when I see that it works? People sometimes get discouraged by failures and give up. But I’m also a sociologist. As a sociologist, I know societies have changed. Everything changes. That’s why I keep saying to my students: don’t ever think that these rights you have are going to stay there if you don’t take care of them. If you don’t protect them, there’s always a danger of going back by the force of retrogressive people and oppressive and discriminatory ideas. 

SAR: You’re talking, on the one hand, about hope, because you’ve seen that things can change, and then on the other hand, about not taking things for granted, because you’ve seen how things can be lost. How do you talk to your students about academic freedom? Why can we not do without it or take it for granted?

TOHIDI: Because most of the ideas for change and creative ideas for betterment of human life are thanks to the research that is happening in universities. Universities are supposed to be the centers of discovery, centers of creativity, centers of knowledge, and knowledge is power. But these centers can work only in freedom. They cannot work when they are controlled in their ideas, when their actions are controlled by governments that are not always on the side of creativity. Universities should be respected and should remain free and equipped with enough budget and enough support and be immune from attacks. If an ideology is wrong, if an idea is wrong, it’s going to be proven wrong by people, by other scholars. We don’t need the police force or the government to get rid of wrong ideas. Also, freedom of thought and academic freedom are so interrelated with other freedoms. When you lose that freedom, you can easily lose freedom in other areas of life. 

SAR: Scholars at Risk is currently celebrating our 25th anniversary, the theme of which is Truth Matters. When you hear the phrase “truth matters,” what does it mean to you? 

TOHIDI: I think about how the internet, and especially social media, have become a double-edged sword. On the one hand, they help us to democratize knowledge, to make it easier to communicate, and stay informed but one of the things that has been jeopardized by social media is the truth. All sorts of lies, all sorts of fake things appear in social media and confuse people, mislead them, and so populists and charlatans can take power by abusing this new technology. 

Truth can also be the first victim of wars. The first thing that happens during war times is that we don’t know who is telling the truth, or which news is accurate, because propaganda  becomes so pervasive. So another thing it brings to mind is false ideologies, ideologies that become rigid and blind your rational thinking, making you become very narrow in your perspective and limited in what you see. I tell my students that truth is not held by one certain group or one certain ideology or one certain person. Don’t worship any individual, worship the actions, praise the good actions, because individuals can make mistakes.

These are all things I learned in university by good professors. I got emotional before because I was thinking of those years and how I got liberated by learning I had certain rights, as men and women did in democratic societies; that is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Teachers are so important. Teachers are agents of change. 

 

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