Draft:Nasrin Bassiri

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Nasrin Bassiri (born 1945 in Tehran) is an Iranian-German political scientist, journalist, She opposed the Shah while living in West Berlin, returned briefly to Iran after the 1979 revolution, then fled again in the early 1980s and resettled in West Berlin, where she became a leading figure in Iranian exile civil society. She co-founded refugee-aid organizations, ran a Persian-language radio program, and worked for decades as a journalist and author. In Germany she is perhaps best known for her 1991 book rebutting Betty Mahmoody's bestseller Not Without My Daughter.

Biography

Early life and education

Bassiri was born in Tehran in 1945. She studied political science at the University of Graz in Austria, where she earned a doctorate. From 1974 to 1979 she was a lecturer at the Berlin School of Economics (Fachhochschule für Wirtschaft Berlin).

Return to Iran and exile

During the late 1970s, while based in Berlin, Bassiri was politically active against the government of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi; she has recalled joining the occupation of the Iranian embassy in East Berlin amid the protests that preceded the revolution. When the Pahlavi dynasty fell in 1979, she was among the Iranians abroad who hurried home, reaching Tehran only days after Ayatollah Khomeini's own return from Paris.

Her hopes for the new order were quickly disappointed as clerical authorities consolidated power. During roughly four and a half years in Iran she taught at the University of Tehran, co-founded the National Union of Women, and spent about two years living in hiding. After the university was closed under the regime's "Cultural Revolution", she fled on foot across the border into Turkey with the help of a local guide. She arrived in West Berlin as an asylum seeker in December 1983.

Activism and career in Berlin

Back in Berlin, Bassiri resumed her political activism, now directed against the government in Tehran, and assisted the waves of Iranian refugees arriving in the city. Because she spoke German well and knew her way around, she was frequently sought out to accompany newcomers to government offices and medical appointments, and she wrote a guide of addresses and advice for Iranian refugees. She joined the Berlin Refugee Council and helped establish institutions serving Iranian exiles, and in 1986 she co-founded the Association of Iranian Refugees (Verein Iranischer Flüchtlinge). From 1992 she ran what was described as the only district office for the counselling of immigrant women in Berlin, based in Schöneberg.

Bassiri later worked as a women's affairs officer, first in a Berlin district administration and then, after resigning in protest over what she described as obstruction of her work, as the equal-opportunities officer (Frauenbeauftragte) at the Weißensee Academy of Art, a post she held until retiring in 2019. She also lectured at several Berlin universities.

From 1994 to 2008 she designed and directed the Persian-language program on Radio Multikulti, a service of Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg (RBB) for Iranians in Berlin. She has continued to work as a freelance journalist and author, writing for German and Persian-language media, and is a member of the association Transparency for Iran, which publishes the German-language online magazine Iran Journal.

Not Without My Daughter criticism

In 1991 Bassiri published Nicht ohne die Schleier des Vorurteils ("Not Without the Veils of Prejudice"), a critical response to Betty Mahmoody's bestselling memoir Not Without My Daughter. The book was part of a wider response by exiled Iranians who, though often opponents of the Iranian government themselves, objected to what they saw as a distorted portrayal of Iranian people and culture. Literary scholar Christine Garbe cited Bassiri's work as a leading example of that critique, and a review in taz singled out her writing as carrying particular moral authority, noting that she analyzed the position of women in Iran with nuance rather than blanket hostility.

Commentary on the 2022 protests

Bassiri has been a frequent commentator in German media on Iranian affairs, including outlets such as taz, Deutschlandfunk, and Die Welt. Discussing the protests that followed the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022, she argued that the "Woman, Life, Freedom" movement differed from earlier uprisings she had witnessed, in part because many Iranian men openly supported women protesters, and she described the exile opposition as more united than ever before.

Selected works

• Nicht ohne die Schleier des Vorurteils (1991

• "Barabari im Iran und im Exil," in Claudia Koppert (ed.), Glück, Alltag und Desaster: über die Zusammenarbeit von Frauen (Orlanda-Frauenverlag, Berlin, 1993), pp. 183–198.