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Special Features

Iranian Women You Should Know: Shahnaz Azad

May 28, 2020
IranWire Citizen Journalist
6 min read
Shahnaz Azad, far left, founded and edited a radical women's newspaper at the age of just 20. Picture courtesy of The World of the Qajar Women
Shahnaz Azad, far left, founded and edited a radical women's newspaper at the age of just 20. Picture courtesy of The World of the Qajar Women

Global and Iranian history are both closely intertwined with the lives and destinies of prominent figures. Every one of them has laid a brick on history’s wall, sometimes paying the price with their lives, men and women alike. Women have been especially influential in the last 200 years, writing much of contemporary Iranian history.

In Iran, women have increased public awareness about gender discrimination, raised the profile of and improved women’s rights, fought for literacy among women, and promoted the social status of women by counteracting religious pressures, participating in scientific projects, being involved in politics, influencing music, cinema... And so the list goes on.

This series aims to celebrate these renowned and respected Iranian women. They are women who represent the millions of women that influence their families and societies on a daily basis. Not all of the people profiled in the series are endorsed by IranWire, but their influence and impact cannot be overlooked. These articles are biographical stories that consider the lives of influential women in Iran.

IranWire readers are invited to send in suggestions for how we might expand the series. Contact IranWire via email ([email protected]), on Facebook, or by tweeting us.

 

“Are there not 100 men in Tehran who could dedicate 1,000 tomans each – the money they spend on revelries over a couple of nights – to revive this dead nation, and spend this money on the basic expenses of women’s education?”

When Shahnaz Azad (née Roshdieh) published this sharply-toned article on the necessity of women’s education in autumn 1921, with the above as the opening sentence, she was only 20 years old. This passionate young woman, whose Womens Epistle newspaper surfaced in the final year of the last Iranian century, lit a bonfire under the deadwood of masculinist and anti-woman society.

She went on to serve as editor-in-chief of the fourth Iranian women’s newspaper, targeting the hijab as the most significant cause of Iranian women’s “backwardness” and insisted that women remove it, at a time when no woman was even allowed to leave her house without chador, veil and the permission of her father or husband. Above its logo, her newspaper bore the legend “Women are Men’s First Teachers”. Beneath, it said: “This newspaper is to awaken and redeem the rights of deprived and oppressed Iranian women.”

 

Daughter of a Pioneering Educator

Azad was the eldest daughter of Mirza Hasan Tabrizi, the founder of modern education in Iran. Originally an Azari Turk from Tabriz, he traveled to the Ottoman Empire to continue his education, where he became familiar with modern elementary schools called Roshdiehs, which – contrary to the traditional schools in Iran – taught the alphabet to children aged six to nine years old.

At that time, Dar ol-Fonun in Tehran was the only modern Iranian modern school and was aimed at children who were already literate. Children were taught elementary literacy at the old traditional schools, with the teacher’s cane as the main pillar of their education. These schools were run in a haphazard, non-standardized way and the only alternative was the Christian Missionary schools which the Iranian children rarely attended them.

Mirza Hasan spent a few years researching educational methodology. On returning to Iran, he set up a school with a similar system to the Turkish ones he had encountered in the city of Tabriz. The owners of the traditional schools and reactionary mullahs attacked and damaged the building, forcing Mirza Hasan, now calling himself Roshdieh, to move to Mashhad.

The second school in Mashhad, and the next schools established in Tabriz, were similarly attacked by mullahs and closed down by order of the clergy. Finally, after seven failed attempts to open a school, Roshdieh went to Tehran in 1897 and established the first elementary school in the vicinity of Darvazeh Qazvin.

In contrast to his previous institutions, this one had the good fortune to survive with the support of Ali Amin-ol-Doleh, the then-Iranian prime minister. Roshdieh School, as it came to be known, is considered the first step in the establishment of widespread elementary education in Iran. However, it was only for boys; girls remained deprived of even a tacitly-acknowledged right to education. When Roshdieh’s daughter Shahnaz was born in 1901, he decided to change this approach for himself by educating his daughter.

In the same year that Shahnaz’s father began teaching her, the first rumbles of the Constitutionalist Movement were heard. Shahnaz’s education coincided with the Shah signing the Constitutional Order and other historic events which later encouraged her to join progressive women’s associations at young age.

Shahnaz’s father went further than mere home schooling. He took her and her sister, disguised in boys’ clothing, to school and made them promise not to disclose that they were girls. Their clandestine study behind the boys’ desks at the school where their father was principal lasted for several years, until finally by the efforts of Bibi Khanum Astarabadi and later Tuba Azmudeh, girls’ schools were established and Roshdieh’s daughters took their places there instead.

 

Birth of a Radical New Newspaper

Shahnaz was just 16 years old when she married a famous journalist, Abolqasem Azad Maraghei. Because her husband was an intellectual, the marriage did not hinder her further education or social activities.

Abolqasem had abandoned the seminary school in Najaf as a young man, studying elementary modern sciences in Tehran before traveling to Europe to learn French and English while writing for Habl ol-Matin newspaper. By the time he returned to Iran he was fluent in eight live languages as well as some ancient scripts, and accepted a job in the Ministry of Science, where he came to know Roshdieh’s family and as a result, married Shahnaz despite their nearly 20-year age difference.

The marriage gave Azad the freedom she needed to become more active in political and journalistic spheres. Together with Abolqasem, she founded the Womens Epistle newspaper, a radical and progressive publication that criticized the patriarchal society of that time. Shahnaz, who was only 19 then, wrote the editorials. In the inaugural issue, she wrote: “What is there that hinders us to see with our own eyes, hear with our own ears, and walk on our healthy feet on the highway of progress? Hijab, delusions, and the shackles of fogeyism.

“To be frank, European women work much better than Iranian men. It is surprising that Iranians have still not realized that if women are not educated, the men will not become the kind of men they should be. Is not woman their life-companion? In that case how can he allow his house, his life, his properties, his respect and dignity, to fall into the hands of an illiterate woman?”

 “Women’s education,” Azad concluded, “is more imperative than men’s because men’s knowledge depends on women’s knowledge and not otherwise. In all countries, women number more than the men. If they do not see women’s education as necessary, then half the world will be out of the sphere of humanity and the rest, men, will also be out as a result of their mothers’ ignorance."

 

Read other articles in this series: 

The Women's Clandestine Union, Anonymous Political Agitators

Roshanak Nodust, Headmistress of Saadat School

Mahshid Amirshahi, Writer, Journalist and Satirist

Nahid Pirnazar, Professor of Iranian and Jewish History

Ashraf Bahador-Zadeh, Iran’s Mother Teresa

Razieh Ebrahimzadeh, Wanderer and Communist Firebrand

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