A Canadian professor who was recently freed after four months in Iran’s Evin prison says she believes her jailing was ordered by religious hardliners who wanted a foreign scapegoat to blame for their election loss.
Homa Hoodfar told CTV Montreal that the conservatives “had lost very badly in the (parliamentary) election, so rather than accept that they had lost the popular support they were trying to blame that on foreign intervention.”
“I just happened to be there,” she added.
According to Hoodfar, the conservatives still control the courts, police and media, which had reported that her June 6 arrest was a result of her efforts to “foment a feminist soft revolution.”
Hoodfar, who had researched women’s roles in the Islamic world as a professor for Concordia University, said she travelled to her homeland in order to escape Montreal’s harsh winter, to get her mind off the recent loss of her husband and to be with her sister for Iranian holidays in March.
She had also decided to do some research on Iran’s parliament.
“I thought, maybe I can get a feel while I’m there,” she said. “But my only research plan was to go to the parliamentary library to look at letters and documents that were left from the first decades of the parliament.”
Hoodfar said she also spent time scrutinizing political posters and having discussions about the election “on the metro, on the buses, the green grocer shops.”
In March, she answered the door and five or six Revolutionary Guards came in to search her apartment. They took her computer, passport, credit card and several garbage bags full of books, she said.
When Hoodfar went to a police station the next day for an interrogation, she said she wasn’t panicked, believing she could prove to them that she was only doing academic research.
Hoodfar said the authorities asked her repeatedly about her participating in a research and support network of Muslim women academics and political activists from various countries that she worked with in the 1980s.
They raised her bail to the point where she couldn’t afford to buy her freedom and on June 6 she was imprisoned.
The cell was only about one metre by two metres, had no natural light and the artificial lights were on all of the time, Hoodfar said.
“After a week, I started to say, well, I’m here, I’m an anthropologist … I’d go down for interrogation and meet other women, so I started to consider it field work.”
Hoodfar had no pen or paper, so she would write things with a toothbrush on the cell wall and try her best to memorize them. Eventually the guards returned her reading glasses and gave her newspapers.
Hoodfar said that while her interrogators tried to make her cry by telling her she would die in prison and by referencing her dead husband, there was no physical abuse.
She said she believes the lack of physical abuse was due to the international outcry after Canadian Zahra Kazemi, who was raped and tortured to death in the same prison in 2003.
“A couple times her name was mentioned in my interrogations,” she said. “They were very aware of the impact Zahra Kazemi’s case had on their reputation.”
Hoodfar said diplomacy led to her release on bail, pending trial. She had to agree that she wouldn’t “do politics” or support certain women.
Her proposed sentence was seven years, which she believed was a result of how many books she had confessed in writing to having possessed.
“Thank God I didn’t write 10 books,” she said.
