AHMADINEJAD’ S NEW ENEMY: WOMEN
Ebadi: Nobelist faces threats for backing women’s rights.
www.payvand.com
Posted: 4:36 am
September 6, 2008
The New York Post
IN one of his last sermons before his death, Ayatollah Ruhollah
Khomeini warned of “three threats” to his vision of Islam: the US, the
Jews and women.
Two decades later, Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad thinks he has
the United States and the Jews in hand – and is moving on the third
“enemy.”
Women were the first to demonstrate against Khomeini’s regime with a
mass rally in Tehran on March 8, 1979 – less than a month after the
mullahs had seized power. Over the next decade, the authorities
imprisoned hundreds of thousands of women for varying lengths of time,
and executed thousands.
But women continued to fight a regime that deemed them subhuman. Their
resistance prevented the mullahs from abrogating pre-revolutionary
laws limiting gender discrimination. Thus, women succeeded in keeping
their right to vote and win public office.
They also retained a veto, granted by the shah, on their husbands’
Islamic right to take up to four permanent wives and countless
temporary concubines.
Last June, Ahmadinejad sought to remove that veto, launching a
campaign with quotations from the Prophet and the 12 Imams of Shiite
Islam to prove that men who took many wives would have a fast track to
paradise.
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