She Misplaced Her Profession, Household and Freedom. She’s Nonetheless Combating to Change Iran.

When Narges Mohammadi was just a bit woman, her mom instructed her to by no means grow to be political. The worth of preventing the system in a rustic like Iran can be too excessive.

That warning has proved prescient.

Ms. Mohammadi, 51, Iran’s most distinguished human rights and ladies’s rights activist, is now serving a 10-year jail sentence in Tehran’s infamous Evin jail for “spreading anti-state propaganda.”

Her present imprisonment is hardly her first encounter with Iran’s harsh strategy to dissent.

Over the previous 30 years, Iran’s authorities has penalized her again and again for her activism and her writing, depriving her of most of what she holds pricey — her profession as an engineer, her well being, time along with her mother and father, husband and kids, and her liberty.

The final time Ms. Mohammadi heard the voices of her 16-year-old twins, Ali and Kiana, was over a yr in the past. The final time she held her son and daughter in her arms was eight years in the past. Her husband, Taghi Rahmani, 63, additionally a author and distinguished activist who was jailed for 14 years in Iran, lives in exile in France with the twins.

The struggling and loss she has endured haven’t dimmed her willpower to maintain pushing for change.

A small window in her cell within the girls’s ward of Evin opens to a view of the mountains surrounding the jail in north Tehran. Spring introduced extra rain this yr, and the rolling hills had been lined with wildflowers.

“I sit in entrance of the window on daily basis, stare on the greenery and dream of a free Iran,” Ms. Mohammadi stated in a uncommon and unauthorized phone interview from inside Evin in April. “The extra they punish me, the extra they take away from me, the extra decided I grow to be to combat till we obtain democracy and freedom and nothing much less.”

The New York Occasions additionally interviewed Ms. Mohammadi over the phone in April 2022, when she was granted a short medical furlough from jail. In March and April of this yr, The Occasions interviewed her by submitting questions in writing and in a surreptitious telephone name from inside jail organized by way of intermediaries.

Final month, the jail authorities revoked Ms. Mohammadi’s phone and visitation rights due to statements she had issued from jail condemning Iran’s human rights violations, which had been posted on her Instagram web page, her household stated.

PEN America awarded Ms. Mohammadi the Barbey Freedom to Write Award at its annual gala in New York final month. The United Nations named her one of many three recipients of its World Press Freedom Prize this yr.

“Narges Mohammadi has been an indomitable voice towards Iranian authorities repression even whereas being amongst its most persecuted targets,” stated Kenneth Roth, the manager director of Human Rights Watch from 1993 to 2022. “She has been unyielding regardless of repeated imprisonment, persevering with her reporting on authorities abuse even from her jail cell. Her persistence and noteworthy braveness are a supply of inspiration worldwide.”

Ms. Mohammadi grew up within the central metropolis of Zanjan in a middle-class household. Her father was a prepare dinner and a farmer. Her mom’s household was political, and after the Islamic revolution in 1979 toppled the monarchy, an activist uncle and two cousins had been arrested.

Two childhood recollections, she stated, set her on the trail to activism: Her mom stuffing a purple plastic purchasing basket with fruit each week for jail visits along with her brother, and her mom sitting on the ground close to the tv display screen to listen to the names of prisoners executed every day.

One afternoon, the newscaster introduced her nephew’s title. Her mom’s piercing wails and the best way her physique crumpled in grief on the carpet left an enduring mark on the 9-year-old woman and have become a driving power for her lifelong opposition to executions.

When Ms. Mohammadi entered faculty within the metropolis of Qazvin to review nuclear physics, she appeared to hitch girls’s scholar teams, however none existed. So she based them, first a girls’s mountain climbing group after which one about civic engagement.

In faculty, she met her husband, a widely known determine in Iran’s mental circles, when she attended an underground class he taught on civil society. When he proposed, her mother and father instructed her a political marriage was destined for doom. Mr. Rahmani spent their first wedding ceremony anniversary in solitary confinement.

The couple lived in Tehran, the place Ms. Mohammadi created, expanded and strengthened civil society organizations that had been engaged on girls’s rights, minority rights and defending prisoners on loss of life row.

She additionally wrote columns about girls’s rights for newspapers and — to earn a dependable revenue — labored as an engineer for a constructing inspection agency. The federal government compelled the agency to fireplace her in 2008.

The judiciary has convicted Ms. Mohammadi 5 instances, arrested her 13 instances and sentenced her to a complete of 31 years in jail and 154 lashes. Three extra judicial circumstances had been opened towards her this yr that might lead to extra convictions, her husband stated.

Their household of 4 has not been collectively as a unit, when one father or mother wasn’t in jail or exiled, because the twins had been toddlers. Ms. Mohammadi and Mr. Rahmani each stated their son usually says he’s pleased with his mom’s work, however their daughter has questioned her mother and father’ choice to have kids when their activism remained a precedence at any value.

Holidays and birthdays are when the youngsters grieve her absence extra intensely, her husband stated.

“This separation has been compelled on us. It’s very troublesome. As a husband and father, I need Narges residing with us. And as her companion in activism, I’m obliged to help and encourage her work and elevate her voice,” stated Mr. Rahmani in an interview in New York when he got here to obtain the PEN award on her behalf.

Since September of final yr, the couple’s activism has taken on extra urgency. An rebellion erupted throughout Iran, led by girls and women, demanding an finish to the Islamic Republic. It was set off by the loss of life of a younger girl, Mahsa Amini, within the custody of the morality police for allegations of violating Iran’s hijab guidelines.

Even from detention, Ms. Mohammadi was encouraging civil disobedience, condemning the federal government’s violent crackdown on protesters, together with executions, and demanding world leaders take note of Iranians’ wrestle for freedom.

Her decades-long efforts have helped elevate a grassroots consciousness in Iran of those points. For Iran to rework right into a democracy, she says, change should come from throughout the nation by way of the event of a strong civil society.

“Like many activists contained in the jail, I’m consumed by discovering a solution to help the motion,” she stated within the written a part of the interview. “We the individuals of Iran are transitioning out of the Islamic Republic’s theocracy. Transition received’t be leaping from one level to the subsequent. Will probably be a protracted and laborious course of however the proof suggests it would positively occur.”

Ms. Mohammadi has all the time handled jail as a platform for activism and a petri dish for scholarly analysis. Throughout the rebellion, she organized three protests and sit-ins and delivered speeches within the jail yard. The ladies sang, chanted and painted the partitions with slogans, promptly erased by the guards.

For so long as she has been jailed, she has led weekly workshops for ladies inmates, instructing them about civil rights.

Ms. Mohammadi’s analysis from jail, primarily based on interviewing inmates, resulted in a e book concerning the emotional impression of solitary confinement and jail circumstances in Iran. In December she launched a report on the systematic sexual assault and bodily abuse of girls prisoners.

Her pals and colleagues say Ms. Mohammadi’s most exceptional trait is her refusal to be a sufferer. A skilled singer in Persian classical music, she organizes gatherings within the ward the place she sings, performs rhythmic tombak on a pot and dances with the opposite girls. In March at Nowruz, the Persian new yr, she led a gaggle singing a Persian rendition of the Italian protest track, “Bella Ciao.”

“When jail drags on for a few years, you must give your life which means inside confinement and hold love alive,” Ms. Mohammadi stated. “I’ve to maintain my eyes on the horizon and the long run despite the fact that the jail partitions are tall and close to and blocking my view.”