Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here by Karima Bennoune

Author:Karima Bennoune
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2013-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

ASIEH’S EYES

Asieh Amini makes the sign of the noose around her neck.

This is a dramatic contrast to her kind, round face. She wears a green vest and long earrings and looks like a professor of literature. Possessed by a case she worked on involving a young woman hung for “crimes against chastity,” she cannot stop talking about it. The noose is tied to her, too, now.

After seventeen years as a journalist with a big newspaper, Asieh became editor-in-chief of a feminist website called Zanan-e Iran (Women in Iran), in 2003. Having come from a liberal family, she had lived with relative freedom. Her life changed forever when she read a newspaper article about a young woman named Atefah Sahaaleh, who had been executed in public in the Iranian city of Neka in 2004. The paper claimed Atefah was twenty-one. Through her own connections, Asieh elicited information suggesting Atefah was much younger than that. The journalist found herself compelled to know the girl’s real age, to discover why she had been executed. “Why? Why? Why?” To get some answers, the journalist picked up and went to the girl’s desolate hometown north of Tehran. There, she met Asieh’s entire family and saw her ID card, which proved she had been only sixteen at the time she was hanged.

Amini had reported on many social topics before, but never on such executions. The girl’s death transfixed her. She began focusing on women’s rights, investigating executions and trying to understand the legal system. Before that, she had known almost nothing about human rights. “No, I was a poet, I was a journalist, I was in my dream, my good situation. I had to understand the other life that my neighbors had, that other women had.” So the woman from the liberal family with the good life jumped off the high board into dangerous waters. She started writing about what had happened to Atefah Sahaaleh.

“I wrote about her every night. I cried until morning. How did this happen?” Establishing the precise details of Atefah’s case remains difficult; stories diverge and the Iranian government has made it virtually impossible to verify the facts. But Asieh discovered the girl’s father was a penniless heroin addict. Her mother died in a car crash when she was a child. A lonely, rebellious, and unsupervised kid, she was abused at every turn. At the age of thirteen, Atefah seems to have been raped repeatedly by a man in her family who then gave her to his friends. She was jailed, lashed. Then, it seems, she may have been sexually abused by members of the morality police. In court, she reportedly removed her headscarf, to the horror of the man who would seal her fate, Judge Haji Rezai.

On August 15, 2004, Atefah Sahaaleh was executed for “crimes against chastity.” Judge Rezai, who allegedly was also involved in Khomeini’s 1983 campaign of mass executions, hanged this victim himself, hoisting Atefah, who had never harmed anyone, onto a crane in front of a crowd in her own neighborhood.

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