this week, including an Iranian-born woman who won great respect in Iran before immigrating to Canada and starting all over again.
The award, which includes a cash prize of $225,000, went to Haideh Moghissi, now a professor at York University in Ontario where she is globally recognized for her analyses of gender issues in the Islamic world. Before that she was an acclaimed archivist in Iran.
The Trudeau awards are often likened to America’s MacArthur Fellows program in that both are nicknamed “genius grants” because they single out highly creative academics and try to help them do more creative work by making them more independent financially.
The Trudeau Foundation was established in 2001 as a living memorial to the late prime minister. It was funded with a $125 million endowment voted unanimously by the House of Commons.
For Moghissi, the award recognized work she has done in what she calls “my second life.”
Her first was in Iran where she headed the old manuscripts department at the National Archives. Iranian women were making progress toward legal rights and equality at the time. That life evaporated with the Islamic revolution of 1979, which Moghissi had supported. In the ensuing years, she helped found the Iranian National Union of Women to fight back, but under pressure she and her family bribed their way out of the country in 1984, settling in Canada.
Now, she focuses on de-mystifying issues of the status of women in Muslim-majority countries, Western reflections of those societies, and issues of fundamentalism—subjects she thinks are of great interest to Canada, with its diverse and growing Muslim population.
“The supporters of Islamic legal practices are no longer only the uneducated, the downtrodden. Many are educated professionals. So if my work reaches to them, and to women in particular, I am happy,” she told The Globe and Mail of Toronto.
Moghissi’s published books have been translated into several langauges and her Trudeau grant will bring international scholars to a conference next year to try to “make sense” of the Arab Spring.