Skip to footer
Equality
The Monitor's View

The liberation of Iran’s women athletes

In contrast to women leading mass protests for rights, female sports teams provide a model for freedom and equality.

|
Reuters
A woman walks in a street in Tehran, Iran, April 9, 2023.
  • By the Monitor's Editorial Board

Women in Iran were a bit stunned last month when, for the first time, national television allowed a live broadcast of an Iranian women’s sports team playing in an international tournament. Inside Iran, women are rarely, if ever, allowed into stadiums to watch men play. Almost as stunning was that the televised sport – ice hockey – did not exist for women until a few years ago in an arid country where powerful clerics have long discouraged women from participating in athletics.

“The perfection of a woman lies in motherhood,” declared one Muslim cleric in 2014.

Iran’s female hockey team, created only in 2020, came in a close second during a matchup of Asian teams in Thailand in April and May. “Our achievement can help all of Iran’s women to know that there is nothing that can stop them,” the team’s captain, Azam Sanaei, told Al Jazeera.

Excelling in a sport has long been a way for suppressed people to claim freedom and equality for themselves. For women in Iran, who have been at the forefront of major protests in Iran over recent decades – especially in 2022 to oppose mandatory head covering – sports have become an alternative and affirming route to social liberation. 

“Like a mighty river blocked by giant boulders, the movement [for women’s emancipation in Iran] continuously finds a new path, sometimes in entirely unanticipated ways,” wrote Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, two scholars at the University of California, Santa Barbara, in a recent Dissent magazine article.

Sports for Iranian women largely ended in 1979 when the Islamic Republic was founded. In recent years, the gradual revival of women's sports has been supported by regime reformers who see the advantage of stoking national pride when Iranian athletes win international games. In 2018, when Hassan Rouhani was president and seen as a moderate leader, he wondered aloud why women’s sports should not be broadcast on television. “Why we cannot show the events, especially when they compete bravely with world-famous teams and win great victories?” he asked in a question probably directed at the dominant clerical leadership.

The women who have pursued excellence in ice hockey – helping bring public interest in watching the team on live TV – have answered his question.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.
editor@csmonitor.com
Subscribe
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

QR Code to The liberation of Iran’s women athletes
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2023/0605/The-liberation-of-Iran-s-women-athletes
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe