Shahla Sherkat,
winner of 2005
Courage in Journalism Awards and
Lifetime Achievement Award
Shahla Sherkat is the editorial director of Zanan (Women)
in Tehran. Sherkat founded the monthly magazine in 1991, after she was dismissed
from her position as editorial director at the government-owned weekly magazine
Zan-e Rouz (Today’s Woman). She was pushed off the staff, she says,
because she protested the magazine’s coverage of women’s issues, which only
appealed to conservative, religious women who fit an image set forth by the
Iranian government.
Sherkat founded Zanan because she felt mainstream
journalism was ignoring serious coverage of women’s rights in Iran. It was the
first independent journal to focus on women’s issues after the 1979 Iranian
Revolution.
Sherkat has worked as a journalist for 26 years. Before becoming
editorial director of Zan-e Rouz, she worked in the publishing department
for the production company Kanoon-e Parvaresh Fekri from 1980 - 1982. Before
that, from 1979 - 1980, she was the assistant editor of Rah-e Zeynab
(Zeynab’s Path), a weekly government-owned women’s magazine.
Sherkat publishes Zanan in a very restrictive and
difficult climate. Beginning with the election of Mohammad Khatami as president
in 1997, some media outlets began to cover corruption and malfeasance. Still,
conservatives tightly control Iran’s judiciary and legislatures. They frequently
use their power to close pro-reform publications. According to the Committee to
Protect Journalists, Iranian courts have closed more than 100 publications, most
of them pro-reform, since 2000.
According to Zanan editor Roza Eftekhari, a 2005 Nieman
Fellow, feminism in Iran has carried a negative stigma and, as a result, many
publications stay away from covering topics that may be considered “feminist.”
“Zanan remains the one journal in Iran to speak with
great courage on issues of feminism and women’s rights,” said Haleh Esfandiari,
director of the Middle East Program for the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars
in Washington, DC.
Zanan consistently covers women’s issues in a way that
Iranian society considers taboo, including articles on divorce laws,
prostitution, HIV/AIDS, domestic abuse and maternal custody issues. In 1998, an
issue of Zanan featured an investigative report on the increasing number of
HIV/AIDS victims in Iran and a critique of government inaction on the disease.
Another story, published in 2003, covered the controversial topic of
prostitution in Iran. And a story published in 2004 touched upon gender
discrimination within Iranian universities.
Zanan also faces continuing financial difficulties
because Sherkat is the magazine’s sole owner and, as such, is chiefly
responsible for finding funding for the magazine. (Most revenue comes from
advertisements for women’s cosmetics and other products.)
Zanan’s offices were attacked by fundamentalist gangs
during the early and mid-1990s. During this time, Zanan’s office was in the same
building as a reformist magazine, Kian. Sherkat says that the gangs were
prompted to attack the magazines because they felt the magazines were creating a
movement against the government. The gangs broke the publication’s windows,
desks and furniture. Sherkat caught the gangs in the office after they had
damaged the place and argued with them for six hours before they left. She tried
to bring charges against the attackers after the incident, but police refused to
intervene. To protect the magazine today, there are no signs or other indicators
that identify Zanan’s headquarters from the outside streets.
Authorities have also cracked down on Sherkat and her writers
with threats of imprisonment. As editorial director, Sherkat is liable for the
content of the magazine. She is frequently summoned to Iran’s Press Court to
defend specific articles, including an article by 2003 Nobel Peace Prize winner
Shirin Ebadi and a controversial series of articles about Islamic law and women
that were written by women’s rights lawyer Mehrangiz Kar and Islamic cleric
Mohsen Saidzadeh. Charges brought against Sherkat for publishing these pieces
were eventually dropped.
In 1987, Sherkat was summoned to court when she published a
story about a girl at a Caspian beach who was beaten and arrested by police for
not completely covering her hair. She was later exonerated.
In January 2001, Sherkat was fined and sentenced to prison for
four months by Tehran’s Revolutionary Court on charges of anti-Islamic
activities after she attended a conference held at the Heinrich Boll Institute
in Berlin entitled “The Future of Reform in Iran.” During the conference
discussions on the future of political change in the country took place. Members
of the Iranian judiciary got word of the conference and considered it “harmful
to national security” because they viewed it as a plot to overthrow the Iranian
Islamic regime. At the conference Sherkat said that Islamic dress code should be
encouraged instead of mandatory. She appealed and was not required to serve the
prison sentence, but was forced to pay a fine equivalent to two-month’s salary.
Sherkat holds a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Tehran
University and a certificate in journalism from Keyhan Institute, also in
Tehran. Since 2002, she has been working towards her master’s degree in women’s
studies from Allameh Tabatabai University in Tehran. Sherkat was born on March
30, 1956 in Isfahan, Iran.
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publisher - Coordinates: Tehran, Iran
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