Late one evening more than 10 years ago in Tehran, the Middle East correspondent of the Swedish Radio Cecilia Udden and myself, in those days Middle East correspondent of Svenska Dagbladet, met Azam Taleghani, a dissident politician and a Muslim feminist. For decades she fought tirelessly to change the Islamic Republic of Iran from within. She lost most of her battles.
She claimed the right for women, not least herself, to run for the presidency. This was refused every time she tried. But she never gave up, claiming that a provision in the Iranian constitution allowed for women to stand as presidential candidates. Azam Taleghani argued that the word “rajul” in the Constitution, which translates as man in its Arabic original, should be interpreted differently in Farsi; as a person with a certain standing, a political personality. She was convinced that she fulfilled all the requirements to assume the office as the head of state of the Islamic Republic. But every time her demands were refused by the Guardian Council, which is vetting political candidates.
Maybe she had inherited her fighting spirit and unwavering self-confidence from her father, the famous ayatollah Mahmoud Taleghani, whom she spoke highly about during our interview. Her father, a Muslim reformer and the founder of the Freedom Movement of Iran, died in the revolutionary year 1979 under mysterious circumstances. Two of Azam Taleghani’s brothers claimed that their father had been murdered. If my memory is not misguiding me, Azam Taleghani shared these suspicions.
The interview was not published in Svenska Dagbladet – which is why I can’t recall everything she said. A foreign correspondent, or any journalist, has to accept that the newsroom at home doesn't always agree about what is newsworthy for the reader. Maybe Cecilia Uddén had a soundbite from this interview in the Swedish Radio. Anyhow, I am sure that Taleghani said things that had been worth publishing.
In 2009, she protested against the violent crackdown on Iran’s reformist Green Movement. Before that she had objected the house arrest of Grand Ayatollah Ali Montazeri, once the designated successor to Khomeini. Montazeri was punished and confined to his home in Qom after he had denounced the mass executions in Iranian prisons in the 1980s – horrible events which have sometimes been called “Iran’s Srebrenica”. As The New York Times recalls in its obituary over Azam Taleghani, she also held a one-woman-protest outside Evin prison in north Tehran in 2003, decrying the death in custody of the Iranian-Canadian photojournalist, Zahra Kazemi.
Azam Taleghani held her last speech about a month before her death. Her fighting spirit and courage was still unabated. Acccording to The New York Times, she said: “From the beginning of the revolution we were told that those in power shouldn’t be criticized, but if we had been allowed to criticize, we wouldn’t have so much embezzlement, theft and betrayal.”
