 Hello everyone. It's really wonderful to see so many people at this very special event tonight at SOAS and I just want to introduce myself because it's the first time I introduce an event in my new capacity as director of the SOAS Middle East Institute. I only joined SOAS a few months ago and this is the first event we host under the new iteration of the SOAS Middle East Institute. So welcome everyone and thank you very much for being here today. And I just want to say thanks to Roya Arab for being the engine behind this event without her. This event would not really have happened and I'm really grateful to her and to Aki and to everyone who is here today. The event today is both a celebration and a commemoration. It is about the woman life freedom movement in Iran and of course the event is happening against the backdrop of so much tension and sadness in the Middle East but at the same time it is an event meant to remind us that regardless of how much darkness there is in this region the struggle for rights, the struggle for freedom never stops. And of course the event is meant to mark the first awful anniversary of the killing of Amini in Iran which of course sparked this movement but at the same time we also with a broken heart but also celebrate the Nobel Peace Prize for Nagesh Mohammadi who has not and is not stopping her struggle for freedom and rights even behind bars. And so again it's bittersweet the event today but I think it's important not to let this issue die not to let it be overcome by attention going to other things, not that the other things are not important but what we're saying is this issue matters, it will continue to matter no matter how regimes try to suppress freedoms people will still do what they can to continue the struggle. And the arts and culture are very important mediums for expression, for keeping issues alive for engagement, for us all to come together and commemorate and celebrate. And we thought what better way to do that than not just have a discussion featuring really wonderful speakers and for the speakers who can't be here in person we have some recorded statements from them but we're also lucky to have Roya who is a multi-talented not just engine behind events and a chair of the forthcoming discussion but she's also an artist and I'm really delighted that today is going to be my first time also seeing her perform live for all of us to celebrate women's voices also through music. So without further ado, thank you so much Roya the stage is yours. I don't do music when I come to Zoas I feel a bit shy almost because it's normally academia so bear with me this is a song I wrote about five years ago and I adapted it slightly for the woman life freedom movement and if you want to sing the last I am woman I am life freedom with me I'd be very delighted. From zero if we may. Thank you. Oh Now I've got to put my academic hat on and get rid of the emotions doesn't often happen at Zoas Okay let's go. So as our wonderful speakers and guests come up we have Malou for Halasah and we have the lovely Majid Nasi today we're going to do a slightly different format where we're going to engage in discussion with our speakers. So first introduced Malou is a wonderful journalist she's an amazing editor she's a compiler of up to five books on the Middle East so she's really quite remarkable the work she's done and this book which you can buy later as you can see I've been reading through it properly and revising it I can tell you that it's made up a really brilliant series of writings from the personal perspective to the theoretical perspective so it covers a lot of different ground in one book but the key here is about expression and want of freedom and I must tell you some of my favourites were the anonymous letters from Iran I found those amazing and very telling so this is our lovely Malou and we also have the wonderful Majid Nasi who is just he's an amazing documentary filmmaker who's worked on a series of especially war-ridden areas he's worked on and if you go on to the BBC eye player you will find inside the Iranian uprising a very brilliant piece of work now both these books the book and this wonderful documentary film that I'm speaking of by the way, Valli Mahluji sends his deepest apologies he was going to be here to talk about the LGBTQ plus part and consequences with this but we will have a presentation from him and any of the speakers who are not here we can give you their email addresses if you've got any particular questions you'd like to ask so we're going to start all this off with asking both of you a very similar question about the selection process and the challenges because you actually found a series of writers to write for you and Majid actually sat and looked through hundreds of hours of news broadcasts and online as you know online presence is one of the most important ways of accessing information so can you please tell us a little about the selection process how did you select your people I've done two books previously on Iran the first with it was an anthology with Maziar Bihari and that came out Transiteran, Young Iran and its inspirations in 2009 before that I worked with Iran on a monograph about her husband Kavegolistan the very well known documentary photographer so there are people in Tehran who know my work and I was told of many different writers that I approached and some of them did not know me and because they did not know me at first they said we're willing to write for this anthology but we're also afraid to use our names because we might be targeted by the regime but as my friends or people that I've worked with or people that I've published in Tehran before vouch for me some of the writers that I approached said no you can use my name now our book opens a woman life freedom opens with an anonymous letter and closes with an anonymous letter by the same writer who really did want to keep their anonymity and as an editor especially because of the politics of for artists and writers and filmmakers in Iran people have to be careful so I had no problem with anonymity and I really wanted the book to be a platform for the not only the theory but the voices and the art that's coming out of the woman life movement so to make this platform you had to be flexible and a lot of material came in if the book could have been bigger and I think that that was really when you say about the problem of selection originally the publisher said you could have 18 contributors and I gave them over 50 so it was I tried to open the book even wider and Saki is a Middle Eastern Middle East publishers so they understood exactly what I was doing and in the end they were very supportive of it but also we wanted to have voices one of the main thing and a lot of my anthologies is that I like to have established voices because I feel that the people who are coming up have a different perspective from those who've been writing or working for a long time and so it's really to get that balance but I tried to bring in whoever I could bring in I tried to bring them in well you did a great job of it and Majidjan how did you choose from all these hundreds of hours of footage what you put in it's like it's like a nightmare really to be honest after 16th of September I put myself I go to my room office at home and it became for me like a cell because I cannot move it's the social media full of lots of footage and you cannot do anything and of course you are far as a documentary filmmaker I'm always been inside the happening you know everything happening I was there my camera was there in front line I don't know in this country that country this is the first time I'm not there and I cannot do anything and that was for me is a really nightmare but I said myself I have to do something but what I didn't know what is that then I start to download any footage came out from any social media I can found in that time I can tell you really like a 20 hours a day working sleeping in the same room wake working sleeping then for after a few months I found myself in the middle of the hundreds hours of rushes and then I said okay now is the time to go ahead and make this film but it was been only social media then with the team and the group you know because the film is a little bit there is a team working you know all of this thing then we decide how to tell the story because we have to tell very simple story and what the reason of that film the reason of that film for me it we give the voice to the people inside Iran to the people the foreigners they don't know about Iran because all the Iranian know their story you know and know the story also and we try to make it as simple as possible to give the like a narrative story from the first day until 2003 what happened in Iran that why then we choose three character and lots of interview inside Iran now one thing I did forget is my sleight of thing we actually have a very wonderful presentation from Nader Echamlou who has worked for the UN and perhaps we will play you that film because it will give you some perspective and some wider understanding of the impact and the issues that have arisen on this so if I may be so bold as to Echamlou who will be very honored actually agreed to take part in this but I will need the lovely help of the gentlemen to do ah here is over there my apologies technical stuff is not my fault thank you so much I think you can please put this child in the presentation what has the Iranian opposition learned from the by now 13 month old women life freedom movement and what must we do more in the future greetings to you Pashomot I am Nader Echamlou firmly with the World Bank and now with the Atlantic Council I thank you for the invitation to this very important event and to regret that I am not there in person since I would certainly have benefited greatly from the exchange of views. The tragic death of Mahsanshi no I mean you erupted the most broad based political movement since the 1979 revolution Iranians everywhere set aside initially ideological differences which have for so long fragmented the community and joined hands in a renewed and energized campaign to change the regime or at least radically change its behavior. Citizens artists, influencers and officials from and in diverse countries supported the struggle for women's equality in unprecedented ways among them the Grammy to Shenminghajipur's song or the Nobel Prize in peace to Nagesse Mohamedi in honour of the women live freedom movement I believe that it was the first time in Nobel history to award the prize for a second time to the same cause in the same country in 2003 to Dr. Shireen Abadi and now again to Nagesse Mohamedi I count among the movement's successes its ability to change the image of young Iranians around the world instead of the somber and harsh face that the Islamic Republic has projected since 1979 and the world saw a generation of modern dynamic open freedom loving sophisticated people and it sympathized with that. Another game has been the initial flurry of debates about what values we want to see in a future Iran and let us not forget that the brutality of the regime has also led to the steady erosion of regime supporters or at least the distancing on a revaluation of the early release. But why could such a broad-based movement not yet deliver more tangible results? Beyond the unparalleled brutality of the regime in suppressing any kind of protest I see two problems first, while women's equality is a deserving goal in itself it seems to be still seen as a zero something a belief that what women gain is at the expense of others though this not only does discrimination benefits all and delivers a gender dividend second, not a movement is called women like freedom it may have been pushed further by old ideological struggles about what type of and what shape of Iran's future government should be during the monarchy of republic and in either case which form of monarchy and republic okay let me begin with what I call the gender dividend and allow me to share some trends that Iranians would certainly want to see reversed in the future the first is Iran's global economic standard as measured by its share of global GDP the IMF data, Iran's share declined from 1.8% in 1980 to 0.8% today, less than half of what it used to be over the same period two of Iran's comparators here, Turkey and Korea achieved a continuing and stabilized Iranians would certainly want to see an economically more powerful country in the future and with the right policies that is possible a second challenge in citizens welfare and this really depicts average income and wealth since 1950 and how it increased before the revolution and how it dropped sharply and stayed flat since then increasing average income will naturally be among the important expectations in the future high income inequality is another source of this content that redlining this figure shows the share of pre-taxed national income of the top 10% and the blue line is the share of the pre-taxed income of the bottom 50% a huge gap additionally nearly one in every three Iranian has fallen below the national poverty line with recent years creating opportunities for people to move out of poverty and now the main income inequality will be among the persistent expectations in the years and decades to come now what could women's equality do for all of these economic challenges my answer is a lot I refer to a series of outstanding cross-country analysis that the IMF has conducted which have found strong linkages and at times direct robust causations between gender equality and key economic outcomes and here is the list in case you're interested but among the studies are that gender equality has economic gains and boosts growth profitability more equal laws boost women's economic participation which tackles income inequality it impacts firm performance and it has shown to increase industrial and export diversification in the words of Christine Ladak then IMFG women boost the bottom line for home, firm and country and these have direct relevance for the economic progress that Iran faces to demonstrate this point further for Iran a 2017 IMF report estimated that better female economic participation could boost Iran's GDP by 40% imagine that a 40% average increase for every Iranian this is what I call the gender dividend but today women's economic participation in Iran is at 15.5% the lowest in the world and what keeps it below are many legal barriers that limit women's access to opportunity the world times women business and law found that Iran has among the highest legal barriers for women's participation 23 more burdens than men and that these burdens are over and above the discriminatory family laws such as the right to divorce or child custody that women activists have been fighting for decades hence the strong empirical evidence from cross-country analysis suggests that gender equality benefits everyone not just women and therefore essential to development and prosperity the World Economic Forum's gender gap report ranks in on 143 out of 146 countries so nearly at the bottom we face a mountain of discrimination that must be dismantled not just for the sake of women but for the sake of all Iranians what is at stake goes beyond the job it is for the future of Iran now to my second point what is happening in the opposition initially all groups rushed to profess to women's rights but in recent months ideologically dividing lines have reappeared such as should be Iran be a republic or a monarchy and which type under each as a result of all few selfishness if women life freedoms comes up it is a window blessing most of them it is left out here I share two such sessions by either side that is rather main women who are active in the opposition are either absent on the trans lines or have chosen to fight on the ideological side I have witnessed fierce exchanges among women from opposite camps who would otherwise agree on the topic of women's rights hence if women life freedom may have lost its pervert women they are part of the blame themselves putting ideology ahead of women's rights is precisely the mistake Iranian women made in 1979 such as fighting imperialism was more important than their own rights we know how it ended it must not be repeated regardless of the nature of a future government women across all political stripes must be united to dismantle the system of gender apartheid that was amazing that was amazing it was quite shocking the statistics were shocking earlier you went during the 1979 revolution the hijab was taken as a way of standing out against imperialism because in the Reza Shah's time around the time of Ataturk when they were trying to secularise the region they actually tried to force the hijab this idea of the hijab had this going backwards and forth and in this particular clip she actually has some very powerful women saying we'll wear the hijab if it means that the westerners realise we're not proud of the imperial powers to be so this hijab has had this up and down problem for a very long time and it's a really key issue because they literally even very modern women agreed to wear the hijab based on the fact that we'll see now my apologies it's a basically the point being that you see very powerful women who got from the left wing from democratic parties saying we will wear the hijab if that means that we make a point to the west that we are not going to be part of the imperial process so my apologies for that but there is a lot of on net which in women form the hijab you will find the women people who you wouldn't expect to speak about but they did because if this hijab is what's really interesting in Iran is there's people who want to keep their hijab so this woman life freedom will just this woman whole woman life freedom thing goes beyond the hijab this has become a symbolic fight in a struggle which actually brings me to this question of economics because clearly economy is one of the major driving forces behind this we not only have a very corrupt government we have a very wealthy nation and at the same time as you saw the wealth is very badly distributed and I actually saw in your film Marjad it was really interesting one of the teachers one of the teachers cussing the student saying what are you talking about do you think that taking off the hijab will fix the problem of your economy so economy became a key factor in this so I'd like you to speak a little about that both of you what you found with your research to do with the problem with the economy and how that is feeding into the movement is the hijab as we know is the like a symbol of this movement but there is lots of behind this hijab is day by day grew up lots of history as economic as we know for many years we have a very young generation in Iran you know they are all looking for work they are all looking for better life but day by day because of the sorry for my English not good because of the the government always they make a wrong decision wrong thing you know is like a dictatorial government they have the ideology they really don't don't care about the like these huge young people and they are they don't have the work don't have anything that why the one of the reason of the not this movement few years before that also a start other movement that is a start because of the petrol is the price came out three years before that I think and the government in few days they killed something like 1500 just lots of lots of people until know lots of people we don't know their name and that is more happening like a poor city and poor country because poor city and small country and as in Tehran too you know but is that what we say is when it arrive to the woman life freedom is the woman life like a last thing because it's like lots of economic, political lots of thing behind this this movement now we see and in your essays and your contributions what did you find in the essays themselves people were not talking about a lack of opportunity but I was very interested when I was working with there is a group online and we had a collective called Iranian women of graphic design and we went to their open access drive they I found them very interesting because they told me that they run an open access drive that artists inside Iran artists from around the world upload their images that they have made in support of the woman life freedom movement and that protesters come out and take them on demonstrations but the reason why this group came together initially was because there had been a book published of a hundred years of Iranian graphic design and in a hundred years they only showed five women five women graphic designers and this group formed because they wanted to show the work of women graphic designers but as the women life freedom movement started and took off they were in conversation with graphic designers around the world and they decided that they didn't want their open access drive to only show the work of Iranian graphic women designers they wanted queer designers they wanted male designers they wanted trans designers they wanted international designers and I think that was the first inkling that I really understood that the hijab was yes it's a piece of cloth and of course it means that women do not women are invisible in a way that their opportunities have been curtailed because they are women but definitely in the 1979 revolution this is from my own research in the Islamic revolution there were secular women who wore the Chador because they wanted to support the revolution against they wanted to overthrow the Shah the imperialists they wanted to overthrow the Shah but this and women were very active during the 1979 revolution but what women did not realize was that a few weeks after Khomeini came to power in the Islamic and the Islamic Republic was formed that their laws the family laws their rights under certain family laws under the Shah were rescinded and in our book we have the photographs of the mass women's marches against compulsory veiling and this takes place around and Vali has talked about it and it takes place March 8th 1979 that was international women's day there were a series of marches because the women had been told that they were going to have to wear the hijab and you can see in the photographs by Hangebe Gholistan their iconic black and white photographs that we reproduced in the book you can see the women are very angry because they fought so hard for the revolution and they had been told by Khomeini that they would not lose their rights and it's almost like I think that the revolution the Republic was formed sometime during February 1979 and by the 8th of March women were losing their rights so it's this it's very interesting how women's women's bodies women's rights became a canvas on which ideologically ideological changes were made I will say here that in Iran the men are also restricted somewhat in what they can wear so a man can't walk around in shorts and a sleeveless top either so to be fair this hijab is for both of us in one way or another one thing I wanted to talk about is the regional powers because one of the things that struck me in two of the first of all in the first essay turns around and says something that really scares me but is really flaming true it says the Islamic Republic after more than four decades of practice has not necessarily perfected but rather learned the art of allowing for seismic activity sometimes tectonic in scale in order to preempt something far larger of magnitude they know how to stay in power basically and that same author then goes on to say basically she doesn't see the regime being changed and that's the reality could you tell us a little bit more about that that is the anonymous author that opens and closes the book and even though this author feels that at this time they don't see she doesn't see regime change she does believe that something seismic has occurred and that before woman life freedom people didn't really think that there could be a change in the regime and now during the the protests and at this time now people think that there might be a change but they don't know when it will come and I think that has to do with what we were hearing about that the actual opposition is that they're fighting and that's the one thing that I have noticed among working not among my contributors for the book because they've been incredible but in political gatherings Iranian political gatherings there is a lot of animosity and a lot of people feel very much that they fight their corner and I really have to go back to what Maziar Bahari was talking about Maziar runs Iran wire and Maziar said that what's important now is that Iranians start talking among themselves with each other instead of blaming everybody everyone has to sit down and talk because this is a problem whilst the Islamic Republic has consolidated this position fully and very firmly stayed in power the actual opposition groups outside Iran have absolutely minimal unity and that became really clear anything to say about that? I'm only saying about the government not change this is really last night one of the my mom of one of my friend she's just come from Iran and I asked her okay what is now you know is as a she said look we win the war now I say but the government still the same thing she said yeah the government is still the same thing but we are one step further that mean we didn't lose this battle but it's not always when you want to win the battle that mean the government is change or anything else happen it will happen little by little maybe I wanted to share that because it's very powerful she believe that there is now change you know they killed lots of people but it's like a one step further and as she said the people start to speak start to think and start to think about the future and the relation with this and also on everything I think the people in the west and everyone has to realize that Iran now has the most incredible surveillance going on inside their cities on their streets I mean in the introduction for the book a friend of mine had just returned from one of the smaller cities and he related to me a conversation around the dinner table when the whole family was together and his brother was talking about the cabbies that take a woman who's unveiled who ferries an unveiled woman to a place they get a call on their mobile phone a warning from the government the government can see who they are through their license the license plate on their car and they have their numbers they call them up and they warn them that this is your first warning they get a fine the third warning maybe they're taken to court and their car is confiscated I heard a statistic that 100,000 cars have been confiscated so I mean we're talking about a country that has high surveillance CNN reported that they're using AI in facial recognition and also in the book graffiti I always find a very important way of judging or gauging a place what's going on with graffiti artists and when the protests were high and women were being killed during these protests and men were being arrested and some of them have been executed a socialist youth group went out and documented the graffiti on the streets they went out on the streets and they had to go in night and they had to take care because the people who do the graffiti if they're picked up they can be killed the people who document the graffiti they can be arrested bad things can happen to them so we're asking a country or we're expecting regime change in a country where the people the heavy hand of surveillance in a way that we don't understand yet here is there because just China is famous for its surveillance methods and I wouldn't be surprised if half of this stuff came from China and it is remarkable that a few months into the woman life freedom China stood shook hands with Iran and said we're trading with them we buddies, next minute they go Iran has lithium, next minute they go we're going to open up the biggest factory then we have Saudi Arabia whose Iran's long term nemesis actually shake hands about the fact that this woman life freedom is about political freedom it's about civil rights it's about human rights none of our neighbors want that the Islamic neighbors we've got none of us want the women with that hijab and it's for Russia and China the last thing they want is civil liberties and human rights because this is something also came up in your book from that anonymous one I love at the end she says to actually look at this in the prism of Iran is wrong you have to look at what is going on around Iran because that is feeding into Iran's abuse of power but also that even though you have this heavy surveillance going on inside the country you also have these tech activists inside the country and outside the country and one of the writers that we have in one of the contributors her name is Ashley Bellinger and she's an investigative reporter for Ars Technica which is the technical the tech magazine that covers the latest trends and it's owned by Khande Nast and her article about Iran is one that Jasmine Green who is Iranian who's at Google Alfa Jigsaw she tweeted about it's important that we watch the tech activists and what they're doing and what they're calling for to help Iran but what about the problem we've got in Iran that we cannot solve our problems alone and the people who might be able to help us are doing the exact contrary so how do we place Iran within the political gains and machinations that are going on in the region in the wider world this is would you agree I mean is this yeah no no I think that is right we are in the middle of the lots of different political thing but the it's hard to I think how to can say it you know it's we have a different country around us but I don't want to say it's like the Iranian culture with other country they have you know but as we know the Islamic culture in Iran is like a traditional but is not like not like a it's a traditional thing so sometimes without the religion you can have some of the traditional life ways but in the country around us I want to shift to that the country around us is usually the Islamic for them is like not only traditional in the way of the Shiveyeh Zendigeh sorry it is being bought about by the style of life so this is the way they live so let's say Afghanistan Saudi Arabia or Qatar and this is not as good or bad it's not about what is a different for example I want to only shift a little bit before that when the movement started in Iran woman life freedom we had a huge attack from the outside Iran about the they are the Islamic phobia they want to take the hijab because they want to against Islam lots of friends outside when I speak with them they say no we cannot speak about this this is Islamic phobia and it takes a long time to people understand this is not about Islam the revolution in Iran when you take the hijab you are anti Islam that's the weirdest thing I think is that you're right Islam in Iran is cultural and family and there are families that have young women who have taken off the hijab and their grandmothers and mothers wear the hijab there was another conversation that was related to me by someone who's just come we know artists and artists have daughters and one artist was talking about how every time her daughter leaves the house she's very worried because her daughter not only refuses to wear the hijab that yes they understand that but the young will no longer even wear a scarf around their neck so if they're stopped by the authorities they can flip the scarf up and say it fell down no they're not going back but they're still very devoted to culturally their Persian and their Islamic their family is culturally Persian and Islamic and I find that these discussions that have been taking place in mainly what I've been seeing American Muslim circles that somehow this women in Iran are not Islamic this idea that you're either religious with the hijab or you're religious you're irreligious without the hijab it's very binary it's a very stiff idea of how people and women how people behave and I think that's really a problem in the book we have a very interesting interview with Pamela Kawimi who's a well-known art historian and she talks about the problems in America how people have been looking at the hijab as the measure of how religious are you and I think it you know this binary stuff is a problem I must say that this from my own personal experience when I was in Zanzibar at the time when woman life freedom happened there are 95% Muslim there and I have a very good friend Abraham and he was absolutely gutted that I was talking about the Islamic Republic and one thing I found and this is what I've traveled in different Islamic countries they actually look up to Iran and a Lebanese chap also again in Zanzibar said why don't you have running water don't you have electricity and I went are you kidding me we have enough money for all of that so we have this really big problem where unfortunately the Islamic Republic seems to be held up as an example of a successful nation they're only successful because they're so rich they're not successful because anyone's managing it well as a matter of fact they're scraping 95% of the wealth off and only 5% is reaching the people but there is this perception that Iran in Egypt I've heard it in Lebanon I've heard it people look up and go oh look the Islamic Republic that is still successful that is still there and it's almost at any cost and this actually brings me to this woman life freedom the whole context of that was Kurdish women I mean amongst the Kurds I know that this whole Iran woman life freedom was a bit ethnicised but it had nothing to do with her being a Kurdish woman she could have been Azari she could have been Baluchi Iranian she just got really unlucky but this whole idea of like it's just really it does sort of get confusing now I've lost my track of thought you know I wanted to no no please what's really interesting is that when I was reading books in you know I guess over 10 years or a decade ago Iranians didn't talk about the diversity of their country I hear so much about Iranians talk about that there are Afghan Afghan Iranians Arab Iranians lures Baluchistan it's and you also see it I'm getting really excited I really like Iranian hip-hop I don't know if you've been listening to Iranian hip-hop Iranian and you know of course Tumaj Salihi but also you know Justina and also there's a video out on YouTube where you have rappers from all over Iran rapping in their dialects some of them even dress up in their in their region's dress and I mean when I saw that video I like I I'm so diversity it's so interesting I learned through the photographs of Tumaj Mosavi of African Iranians who were brought by the Arab slave traders who live in Baluchistan and Sistan they live in we've got a longer history than that when the Achaemenis built the first the Suez canals they actually had Egyptians building and they site them so we actually have a very ancient black presence when the Portuguese arrived is when actually they're the ones who bought wholesale sale slavery the Arab traders we didn't have such a thing as slavery we had surfed them so it's a slightly different discussion there but this what I was going to say about woman life freedom so as something to this you know you said Mahsa Jeena I mean she was from the minority of the Kurdish people she's a very young girl and you know when they arrest her her brother said they come to Tehran the capital of Iran to visit the capital for the first time in their life and they arrest her and the brother said to the police we are here a visitor we are a stranger here we are from the Kurdish people and then that happened to her and you cannot believe for the first time also come from the Arab minority then we can speak about the minority in Iran you know you cannot believe the Iranian people everyone saw Mahsa she's like a guest in that city and she could be one and she's innocent she's not political she's not anything else you know but what is happen two thing happen I think this movement in the start go very powerful up first the innocent of the Mahsa that is the first thing really because everyone found that could happen to my girl you know the second thing is the the like arrangement of the woman in Tehran in that few days when she was being in the hospital and then the Kurdish the Kurdish helped that is like make this movement in the start is like very organized because that's what I think maybe I'm wrong I think you're right because they was being for many years fighting the government you know they are like they had a party we don't have a party in Iran when you say party as a party like here you know is all is like a but they really have opposition party you know and they start to like organize everything because the first days everyone don't know what happened also the opposition started to like organize Iran inside Iran but they are very very fast make it like organize and then start and also who documented a lot of what was going on was Harana which is a Kurdish human rights organization that publishes online a lot of the news that you could read in Iran wire and also it back to Harana's website the reports that they made about the first I think not the first 100 days but maybe the first 200 days of the protests and that a Kurdish human rights stroke activist journalist group they were the ones that were the the source you see what I was going to say is the woman life freedom was actually a term that came out from the Kurdish fighters because whilst you have the Kurdish are just as bad no offense with being patriarchal in their society they are actually quite tough on their women however Kurdish women are one of the only women from south and west Asia who are absolutely incorporated into the army and this was woman life freedom was actually something they sung to make a point of to the men about their society and then when ISIS came this took on a whole other meaning so for me this you see this patriarchal Islamic social society they are they feel very jeopardized by this whole woman life freedom which is why for me I feel a bit sad because I don't think we're going to get too far no offense but you think we are so tell me about one thing in the book is about how the world is a woman life freedom movement is a revolution made by art because I think that's a really key point with this movement it was interesting that the protests were going on and the artists were also galvanized and you had all the moving image on social media and then you had the artists putting in images so that they could be disseminated and they talked about the Arab Spring 2011 the revolution in Tahir Square was the twitter revolution because it was through twitter but really this revolution and people do call it a revolution woman life freedom they don't really think of it as a movement they call it a revolution they see it it really had traction on social media but instagram was very important I'll confess I'm a lugite you know come on new technology I have trouble with it I just like I think within the last because I'm the literary editor of the Marques review I tweet now about my writers in what we're doing at the Marques review but very Bradley the experimental sound artist she came to my house she said if you're going to do this book you've got to get on instagram you can't do the book and not be on instagram and so she got me on instagram and I noticed that if I needed to talk to an artist if I needed if I had a question for the socialist graffiti collective in Tehran and their name is Kibon Tribune I wrote them through instagram and they answered me within a half hour that's how I was able to negotiate my way with the artist I will say with the arts we are not just talking about visual arts because music clearly plays a massive part in this whole thing and what did you find? I found it is she said is the art movement I say this is the social medias movement you know I found it is really without social media it's nothing this is the really social media movement that's why you know so it kind of shows when we talk about technology we worry about surveillance that there is an alternative way to hit back it's not all doom and gloom people find a way they find a way through the cracks and then we were talking about how this is different various societies that are hit by this whole thing we didn't have here today because he had covid so I would like to just share with you some of the things that are their findings there is an axis of resistance which is operating in Iran Iraq and Lebanon and they perpetuate and organize violent anti-LGBTQ plus hate campaigns and mob attacks you also have in Iraq the communications and media commission has declared homosexuals as sexual deviants we have a really big problem that we need legislation for LGBTQ rights and then this issue of like public awareness unfortunately it's not just outside it's inside Iran we need to change the attitudes of Iranians, Iraqis Middle Easterners about LGBTQ issues inside and outside Iran so this is the one thing that struck me this fight is not just within the country we have to change the way Iranians outside think because I know many people who are in the closet from the region because even though they live here they can't fully come out so I'm really sad that we couldn't have Vali here to talk more about that can I quote him? Yes Vali said that he felt that woman life freedom there's a real queer current to the revolution and that he felt that it was a feminizing it wasn't just a feminist revolution it was a feminizing revolution that had space for everybody else to come in so it's not just about women it is about so many different sectors of society and unfortunately issues can't all be addressed and it is outside the country as well because you mentioned how backlash against what goes on in Iran ends up mirroring outside it's a very weird uneasy dialogue and debate and argument that seems to be constantly going on now what I'm going to do in the last 10 minutes is open up for any of you if you have any questions from our