June 17, 2016
The Islamic Republic last week arrested the sixth dual national to be taken into custody in recent months, this time an Iranian-Canadian.
She is 65-year-old Homa Hoodfar, an anthropology and sociology professor at Montreal’s Concordia University who became a widow last year when her American husband passed away due to cancer.
Her family is worried because she suffers from a rare neurological illness, myasthenia gravis, and they say her relatives in Tehran have not been allowed to deliver her medicine to her.
Hoodfar has done a lot of work on feminism and women’s roles in Middle Eastern countries, which might have earned her some attention from hardliners in Iran, except that her work is academic and doesn’t involve protest marches or confrontations with authority.
Hoodfar was locked up just two days before the Islamic Republic renewed its complaint that Canada is doing nothing to fulfill Iran’s request that an accused embezzler, Mohammad-Reza Khavari, be extradited from Canada for trial in Iran.
This has sparked speculation that Hoodfar might have been arrested to be traded for Khavari.
Khavari is accused of being a major figure what is described as Iran’s largest corruption case, the diversion of $2.6 billion from several banks, including Bank Melli, of which Khavari was the
managing director of’one branch. Four others caught up in the massive case were sentenced to death.
Khavari fled Iran in 2011 just as the huge case surfaced. He turned up in Toronto, where it turned out he owned a mansion and had obtained Canadian citizenship six years before. Khavari has not been seen in Canada since he fled. And the Canadian government has been totally mum about the case, prompting speculation that Khavari might have done some espionage on behalf of Canada.
Two days after Hoodfar was dumped in jail, Justice Minister Mostafa Pur-Mohammadi complained bitterly that Canada “has not rendered any cooperation” on the long-pending extradition request.
News reports quoted him as saying Canada was obligated under international law to return Khavari to Iran for trial. But international law says no such thing. Extradition is regulated by bi-lateral treaties.
Hoodfar traveled to Iran in February for an extended visit with her family, her niece Amanda Ghahremani told The Canadian Press.
Ghahremani said her aunt, who was born in Iran but has been living in Montreal for 30 years, was initially arrested in March, shortly before she was to return home, but was released on bail.
Ghahremani said the authorities kept her passport, documents, computer and other personal belongings, and summoned her for several more rounds of interrogations, some lasting nine hours
a day.
Hoodfar was once again summoned for interrogation on Monday, June 6, but was not released at day’s end.
Ghahremani said her aunt is not being allowed to see her lawyer or contact family. “We are unclear as to what the charges are,” said Ghahremani. “She is not an activist and she has never been political. She has never engaged in anything that could even be remotely be construed as any form of sedition or political activity in any way.”
“She has worked on improving the condition of women across the Middle East in the Muslim context,” Ghahremani said. “And she’s done it through a purely academic lens.”
“Perhaps her work on feminism and on woman’s issues may be an issue here, but I find it would be a misunderstanding or misinterpretation of her work,” Ghahremani said.
Hoodfar’s plight carries echoes of the case of Zahra Kazemi, an Iranian-Canadian freelance photographer who was arrested taking photos of the outside of Evin Prison in 2003, and died some days later from beatings during interrogation. Relations between Iran and Canada quickly went from poor to terrible and have never recovered.
One other Iranian with Canadian ties has been in prison in Iran since October 2008. Saeed Malekpour is not a dual citizen, however. He had applied for citizenship and was awaiting action on his application when he flew to Tehran to visit his dying father and was arrested. He was convicted of having a role in running a pornographic website.
Malekpour was a software designer who designed a system for posting photos on the Internet. A pornographic website that bought his software left his name as the designer on its website, prompting Iran to think he had a role in the website,
Hoodfar holds a BA in economics from the University of Tehran, an MA in development studies from the University of Manchester in England and a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Kent in England.
Hoodfar’s research has looked at educated women who use international digital media campaigns to stop the stoning of women, and at poorer women who redefine their limited volunteer health-care roles to advocate for improved local standards in community health.
She got an early start as a researcher when a relative asked her to recruit women for literacy classes when she was 15 or 16 years old. Hoodfar recalled that her middle class family had recently moved into a newly built housing estate that backed onto a shantytown. The exposure to such different circumstances proved to be a defining moment in her life. As she walked around the shantytown, Hoodfar found herself asking questions about the great differences in wealth among people living in such close proximity.
Hoodfar published two papers in 2010 focusing on women’s social activism in Iran since the 1979 revolution. She argued that far from hampering women’s activism, the advent of a Shiite religious state, though unintended, offered ordinary women opportunities to push for change in a way that didn’t exist under the Pahlavi regime.
“The mullahs were the first regime to include ordinary women as their political constituency,” Hoodfar said, “Women are legally still considered second-class citizens, but now view themselves as political agents deserving of rights. Before it was only educated, middle class women who viewed themselves as citizens with rights.”
While it is still too dangerous for women in Iran to collectively organize activities that might be defined as feminist elsewhere in the world, Hoodfar said”they have become adept at using the language and opportunities offered by the Shiite regime to promote women’s discussions and challenge the regime.
Hoodfar gave the example of a religious ritual whereby the simple act of putting a flag in front of the house turns a private home into a public discussion space – one that is open to women only. She remembers going to listen to some of the discussions at such gatherings and being very surprised by what she heard.
“For five or six hours, women come together to talk about religious or family issues. They said, ‘Whether male or female, black or white, tall or short, you’re all equal in front of God. It’s how you behave that is important.’ It was very interesting for me. I realized that these religious meetings were not making women docile at all. In fact, they were undermining the legitimacy of the regime by changing the way that women understood their rights.”
Hoodfar is critical of the Western tendency to focus on the veil and see it as a deep-seated sign of Muslim women’s oppression.