CONTENTS

The book „IM NAMEN GOTTES – Die Unterdrückung der Frauen im Iran” (“IN THE NAME OF GOD – the oppression of women in Iran”) sheds light on seven still unknown, deeply distressing individual fates of Iranian women. Each journey of suffering is told in the form of a memoir. Each life story includes a legal examination of the case. In it, decisions of the Islamic-Iranian legal system, which is based on Sharia law, are questioned and discussed. Comparisons to international law are also drawn. Through this factual level, it is made clear that systematic discrimination against girls and women is allowed and does happen under the law.

In doing so, the author uncovers bitter truths and relentlessly tells about a state-imposed half-value of Iranian women compared to men; she reports about girls who are legally married off from the age of nine and shows with further facts the brutal reality of a country that shocks the whole world with the highest number of executions of female population. Girls and women in Iran are arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, raped and executed. Yet the Islamic Republic of Iran is still a member of the UN Convention, but continuously and unpunished commits serious violations of the treaty, as the reports of the United Nations or the publications of various NGOs in the field of human rights prove. An inconceivable testimony of oppression in contempt of women – and the world is watching.

HISTORICAL
BACKGROUND

Since 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini was arrested for her loose-fitting headscarf as well as ill-treated and consequently died three days later on 16 September 2022, protests by Iranian women have been reignited. They are spreading like a revolutionary fire across the world. The headscarf is representative of the Islamic Republic, where women are discriminated against in all areas of life according to Sharia law. Therefore, the women-led revolution in Iran is about much more than the Islamic dress code, namely the overthrow of the Mullah regime, the creation of a new, democratic, secular government and a self-determined life in freedom.
Fates like that of Jina Mahsa Amini are on the agenda in Iran. Sarina Esmailzadeh, Nika Shakrami, Hadis Najafi or Ghazaleh Chalabi are representative, media-effective cases for millions of stories of suffering of Iranian women.