Iranian Women’s One Million Signatures

“Noushin Khorasani is an Iranian activist and one of the founders of the One Million Signatures campaign to get signatures for a petition to revise all sorts of laws – particularly the family law – to make them gender-equal…Her book is a splendid set of articles, almost a case study, of how to build a social movement in the 21st century in order to effect legal change…this book is about how to achieve results through a broad social movement. And it’s especially compelling because the million signatures campaign is very much a grassroots movement. Volunteers fan out over the countryside, in urban areas they go across class divisions. All kinds of people come on board. As Khorasani emphasised, simply by circulating a petition there’s a lot of spreading the word about the basic ideas and demands, and it’s also about engaging with the folks who are signing and finding out from them what they think, what they want. And so it’s a constant putting together of people’s demands and questions. It’s very organic – not top down in the usual sense, even though, of course, there are steering committees, organisers, etc. So that’s pretty exciting and inspiring.” Read more...

The best books on Islam and Feminism

Margot Badran, Historian