Women pallbearers carried Dr. Shahla Farjad, a human and women’s rights activist who was imprisoned under the regimes of both the Shah and the Islamic Republic, to her final resting place in Tehran on July 9, 2013, a final act of defiance in a country where men traditionally perform death rites.
From Tehran to Toronto, Kabul to Berlin, Afghan refugees, widows, orphans, grieving mothers of political prisoners, scholars and intellectuals came out of the woodwork to tell previously untold stories about Farjad, a tiny, self-effacing woman.