Her brother led Iran to 3 World Cups. Yet she — and 41 million other women — couldn't see him play

For years, Maryam Shojaei could only when woolgather of watching her famous comrade recreate association football inside Tehran’s Azadi Stadium as he led the Iranian national team to repeated victories.

As one of the country’s roughly 41 million women, she was banned from entering the stadium during soccer matches — an unwritten law by hard-lining clerics since shortly after the Islamic Revolution in 1979, which saw the country move from a secular society to one governed by Sharia law. 

Even so, soccer remained “a lifeline," she said, recalling the moment in 1997 when, at 21, she saw the social power of the sport as Iran qualified for the World Cup and there was a public celebration for her first time in memory. 

But that power still eluded her, her sister and her mother, none of whom could cheer on soccer superstar Masoud Shojaei on home turf in the early 2000s or watch him build up a team that he would bring to three World Cups.

Shojaei herself wouldn’t see her brother play in person for Iran's national team until 2015, during an Asian Cup game in Australia.

That day, she said she saw for the second time how to capitalize on the power of soccer, how to use the attention she received as Masoud’s sister to remove the ban on women attending Azadi Stadium, especially with his help. 

What the World Cup means to this Iranian activist

"I thought that, ‘Oh my God, this is, that's a great potential here.’ And I didn't want to waste that,” she told The Sunday Magazine’s Piya Chattopadhyay in a recent interview about her book.

“I thought maybe me and my brother can use this potential to do something meaningful, especially because he's been a real feminist, he's a true feminist." 

Shojaei documented her campaign in Azadi Means Freedom: Fighting for Gender Equity Through the World’s Most Popular Game, which was released in April. Azadi, the name of the Tehran stadium, literally means freedom in Farsi.

In 2015, she caught international attention, holding up a #NoBanForWomen banner at the Asian Cup in Australia, promising her brother she would relinquish it if a police officer requested. No one did. But her picture circulated the world.

“I did it on behalf of all Iranian women inside Iran who couldn't do that,” she said.

At that moment, she said she felt proud to see her brother play on the world stage. But she said she would later feel prouder of the way in which he tried to facilitate meetings between her and the other players, the way he funded her campaign and how he publicly supported it. 

It would take five years of activism, 200,000 signatures, and women enduring continued arrests by morality police outside the Tehran stadium before the ban would be partially overturned in October 2019, following a demand letter from FIFA to the Iranian Football Federation. (Only a fraction of the stadium’s 78,000 seats would be held for female fans.)

FIFA threatened to oust Iran from competitions for violating its constitution, which includes anti-discrimination language that it said the stadium ban violated.

Shojaei also notes pressure came following the suicide of a 29-year-old woman; the woman set herself on fire in September 2019 after learning she might go to prison for trying to sneak into a stadium to watch a game dressed as a man.

Iran's soccer federation asks for guarantees for World Cup participation

Other Islamic countries allowed stadiums to host female soccer fans for years, Shojaei said, so the ban was not about religion but control. 

"It was because it became a civil and women's rights demand. And the authority didn't want to give up on that."

Right now, the author and activist is in Canada, and she said it’s been challenging to be away from family in Iran amid the uncertainty raised by the war between the U.S. And Iran. Internet and media blackouts in the Middle Eastern country have made it even harder to get information.

“I felt better when I was inside, because you know what you're dealing with,” she said. “But when you are out … and your country and your loved ones become headline news, it's very scary.”

The war has also trickled down to soccer, with Washington refusing to host the national Iranian team for the FIFA World Cup in the U.S. In two weeks.

Instead, the team will stay in Mexico and travel to the U.S. For game days.

Senior writer

Interview with Maryam Shojaei produced by Andrea Hoang

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