Homa Hoodfar, Professor Emerita at Montreal’s Concordia University, has followed through with the book launch she was working on when she was arrested and later jailed in her native Iran last spring.
“It was not an easy time, but I tried to look at it as accidental fieldwork”
She was imprisoned on June 6, 2016 and spent 112 days in Tehran’s notorious Evin Prison. This was where another Iranian-Canadian woman, photojournalist Zahr Kazemi, was raped, tortured and killed in 2003.
In an interview yesterday, with CBC Radio host Sue Smith, Homa Hoodfar said, of those four month in prison, “it was not an easy time, but I tried to look at it as accidental fieldwork’, she said. “As an anthropologist, we are supposed to immerse ourselves in the area that we are doing our research.”
Her latest work, “Women’s Sport as Politics in Muslim Contexts” was released today at an event at Concordia.
Hoodfar explained the plan originally was to launch the book in London in April 2016 and in Montreal in May 2016, just prior to the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.
“We thought it was timely, but my friends were not about to launch a book without me. They were more focused on trying to get me out of jail,” Hoodfar said.
She said the idea for the book began in 1981, during a return visit to Iran after the revolution,
Hoodfar was struck at the time, by how many women were talking about sports and exercise, and taking care of their bodies.
“In just a few weeks I was there I had more discussions about women and sport than I had the previous thirty years of my life, so I knew that something important is happening”
“Sport is important, and becoming more important in our time”
While completing her PhD at the time, she paid attention to what was developing around the subject of women and sports.
“Initially the religious leaders had said women’s sport is against Islam, then women did the research, proved that it wasn’t, and then they said O.K. it’s not against Islam but it has to be done in a segregated area, they shouldn’t mix with men, then women demanded O.K. then we need facilities, and so the conversation has continued over thirty years.”
She said it was in 2007, while attending a conference on similar issues she realised that women in Malaysia, Indonesia, Turkey and Egypt had experienced the same challenges.
With funding from Concordia University, Hoodfar and several international colleagues organised a one-day symposium on Muslim Women and Sport.
“Sport is important, and becoming more important in our time,” said Hoodfar. She said that in some totalitarian societies women are often prohibited from conversing in the public sphere.
But sport, is accessible to all, and has the power to unite women from all parts of society.
This book, in which Hoodfar and other scholars document the creativity and bravery of women in athletic arenas follows this evolution .
Last year Hoodfar was accused by the Iranian authorities of collaborating with a hostile government against national security and of spreading propaganda against the state.
Charges that were never presented to her lawyer. In the Iranian press, however, the prosecutor was quoted, saying Hoodfar was “dabbling in feminism.”
Today’s book launch, following the international effort to get Hoodfar released from Evin and returned to her home in Canada, assures this latest work will be received as much more than “dabbling” in feminism.
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