Iran’s President Hassan Rouhani encouraged greater female participation in politics and culture at a conference Feb. 8 titled “Women, Moderation and Development.”
Rouhani said that women’s rights in Iran have come a long way since the first days of the 1979 revolution. He recalled that during those days, there were some clerics with “extreme ideologies” who had religious objections to women participating in protests. The clerics had gone as far as asking women to not chant slogans so that their voices would not be heard by unrelated men. Rouhani said that the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, former Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, had rejected these extreme opinions and said that women were encouraged to both protest in the streets and chant slogans.
