Said Madani Ghahfarrokhi, born on Dec. 5, 1960, in Isfahan, sociologist and reference sociological researcher, university professor, journalist, and Melli-Mazhabi affiliated activist. He had his primary and secondary education in Isfahan and started his political activities against the despotism of the previous regime as young as 17. He first, started his higher education in the study area of psychology and then, educational sciences up to his masters, at Tehran Uni. and later received his PhD in criminology from Southern Pacific Uni., in the US. He joined the board of editors of “Iran-eh Farda Magazine” as soon as it was founded. For the first time, and following his composition of an article as a critique of the prolongation of Iran’s war with Iraq after the latter’s defeat and retreat from Khromshahr, published in the magazine stated above, was arrested in 1994 and for 40 days. From that date to the year, 2000, while doing research activities in Welfare Organization, he was still publishing articles in “Iran-eh Farda Magazine.” In 1999, and with the formation of a coalition among Melli-Mazhabi political forces, he took the candidacy for the sixth congress election. On March, 2001, many members of the coalition above were arrested including him. During his detention, for a year he was kept in an unofficial detention house, known as detention house no. 59, in Sepah sq., six months of which in solitary confinement. From 2002 to 2012, he take up his professional career once more at the University of Social Welfare and Rehabilitation Sciences, in welfare research group, and in this period, he supervised various research projects in different areas of social problems in Iran, including poverty and inequality, addiction, prostitution and the like. The same research later provided the ground for his published work. Nevertheless, with such impressive academic and scientific record, he was never given an opportunity to become a faculty member or teaching position and even since 2011, he was barred from entering the Welfare Sciences Uni. In 2009, and with the outbreak of the Green Movement in Iran, He started publishing a series of articles on the nature of new social movements in “Etemad,” a reformist newspaper in Iran. In the same period, Said Madani’s like-minded comrades, Alireza Rajayi, Masoud Pedram, and Hoda Saber [who was later state-murdered in prison] were arrested; and eventually, he himself got arrested on Jan. 2012, and was kept in temporary detention until the end of the following year, at ward 209. After that, at the district court chaired by Judge Pir’Abbassi, he was initially sentenced to six years of imprisonment and a decade long exile, following which, he was transferred to ward 350, at Evin Prison. The sentence in question was then reduced at the Court of Appeals, to five years of imprisonment and two years of exile. While he was in detention at ward 209, his wife, Mansoureh Towfighi, gave an interview on media and disclosed the harsh conditions and persecutions of this researcher and revealed that he had been under pressure by his persecutor to take position against other political figures and the Green Movement. He spent the rest of his sentence from Feb. 2014 to 2016, in Rajayi’Shahr Prison. After that, he was transferred under guard to Bandarabbass to serve his exile period. In 2018. And with the exhaustion of his sentence, he returned to Tehran. Through all those years of imprisonment and exile, he continued with his research and published them in a series of volumes. He was arrested once again, in 2022, and got transferred to Evin Prison. At a court, chaired by Judge Mazloum, he was charged with “propaganda against the regime,” “collusion and conspiracy against the regime,” and “forming and administrating an illegal group” and sentenced to eight years of imprisonment for the charge of “forming and administrating an illegal group” and one further year of imprisonment for “propaganda against the regime.”
Being a highly capable, relentless, and vigilant researcher in the area of non-violent social movements, Said Madani wrote a booklet called “A Hundred Years and a Hundred Days” in the course of ”Woman, Life, Freedom” mass protests in Iran in 2022-202 and their underlying grounds, where he looked into the nature of these protests and their formation as revolt, revolution, movement and non-movement, considered their significant characteristic to be its ties with Iranian women’s non-movement formed against mandatory hijab many years earlier. Referring to Asef Bayat, [the Iranian-American scholar and sociopolitical theorist of such key concepts as Non-Movements, Life as Politics, and Gradual Progression”], Madani introduces a non-movement as “the collective acts of millions of activists, pursued individually, and performed in squares, passageways, at courts or in gatherings.” In fact, non-movements are “resultant of the homogenous conducts of a large number of ordinary people whose dispersed yet homogenous actions bring about massive social changes. Iranian women have long demonstrated their protest against the life-style enforced by violating mandatory hijab rules, and in 2022-2023 protests, the latent potentiality in “women’s non-movement” made a spillover into the protests. In his view, eventually, regarding the continuation of the protests, they show an in-between state to both revolt and movement, and for this very reason, he suggests the term uprising, holding the belief that since “Mahsa Amini Uprising” had lasted for a hundred days, this could indicate its potential for developing into a full-fledged movement.
Before these developments, too, Said Madani had conducted vastly scaled research on problems and hardships directed toward women, including violence against women and children. In his book, The Sociology of Prostitution, and in taking the social disadvantages of prostitutes, far away from the standard approach of adopting the standpoint of power and its possessors, he sets for himself taking the standpoint of a researcher who stands by the oppressed. In this work, he delves into such questions as gender and economic inequality, poverty, hunger, unemployment, illiteracy, lack of awareness, substance abuse, and domestic insecurity among the prostitutes.
As it is evidently recognizable, his political pedigree roots back to such prominent nationalists like Muhammad Mosadegh, Ezatollah Sahabi, and Hoda Saber and once can relate his unremitting companionship to the Green Movement, and his ideation and mappings for this movement to this particular line of politics that he pursues. In line with his intellectual and research background in the area of social movements, he has also published the book, Social Movements and Hope, which was deemed unpublishable in Iran and thus got published by Baran Publication, an Iranian publisher based in Sweden. The principal idea of this volume, was first formed while he was in prison in the year 2013. It contains of six chapters and 360 pages, and according to Ali Reza Rajayi, a political figure mentioned earlier, it “studies various, and sometimes even contradictory, dimensions of the formation and decline of movements and their leadership organization and perspectives at the core of the profound dialectics between hope and despair.” In it, Madani tries to define the relation between new social movements and late capitalisms, in addition to the old movements. While accounting for the differences and transformations of the movements, he draws on the theories of Antonio Negri, the Italian leftist philosopher, who believes that the transformations of the models of resistance, are inclined toward outcomes ever more democratic, transparent, and sustainable. In this view, “the traditional concept of revolt, which is a reading of Paris Commune and October Revolution, is changed and the role of the internet and cyberspace, as unprecedented phenomena, is of great significance now.” To make a case for this paradigm shift in revolution and gradual transformation of the radicalism hinging upon it, he refers to the Green Movement, along with the student, environmentalist, nuclear disarmament, and queer movements, all born in the 1980’s and beyond.
Elsewhere, he gives a detailed account that the Iranian society, hence the 90’s, has entered a movement-based phase, and thus can be called a movement society. He points out that since 2009 onward, there are very telling evidence available, indicating the liveliness of the Iranian society; a society that expresses its discontent in various forms and at a national, regional, or individual level. The mass protests of the workers, retirees, teachers, and other social groups, is affirmative to this claim. In addition, he adds that during periods of inactivity and indifference in the society, “meeting personal interests, individualism, and disregard for collective interests is strengthened; in a way, the result of this inactivity is the liberalization of social relations.” He holds that a part of the intellectuals, in line with the ruling political system, are in pursuit of rationalizing this inactivity and resonating it; a group that promotes individualism and egocentrism and not the individuality itself, founded on a hedonistic philosophy.
Kalameh [a reformist news agency website based abroad], some hours after the reaffirmation of the 9 year long imprisonment sentence of Said Madani by the Court of Appeal, division 36, released a by-then unpublished recording of him, recorded back at the 12th anniversary of the house-imprisonment of the leaders of the Green Movement; in there, he emphasizes that the formation of social networks in the course of and all around the Green Movement, and consequent to that, the declaration of its bill, indicates the identification of this movement, its determination and perpetuation of this identity. Thus, since identity is not susceptible to neither imprisonment, confinement, nor suppression, the state put its leaders into house imprisonment in order to force them into retreat. In it, he recognizes Mir Hussein Mousavi’s on Nov. 2019 as a sign of his resisting endurance with his previous positions. Moreover, following Mir Hussein Mousavi’s latest statement published on Feb. 2, 2023, and in the apex of the current mass protests in Iran, in the course of “Woman, Life, Freedom” Movement, along with six other political prisoners of note and presently in prison, he, too, declared his advocacy for this statement from Evin Prison. In that statement, Mousavi had demanded the composition of a new constitution, implementation of a referendum, and formation of a constituent assembly, for a peaceful transition of Iran to a thoroughly democratic structure. In a political statement, these political prisoners made an endorsement of the solutions plotted out by Mousavi. The three stages emphasized in the latter statement are: “holding a free and transparent referendum about the necessity of changes to or the replacement of the present constitution by a newly composed one, and in case of this subject being voted yes to in the referendum, the formation of a synthetic congress of the actual representatives of the nation, and via a fair and free election, and another referendum for the constitution ratified by this congress as with the aim of the establishment of a rule-governed system.” However, on media, there was a report published on Feb. 25, 2023, saying that in reaction to their joint statement mentioned above, Said Madani, Hussein Razzagh, Muhammad Reza Jalayi’Pour, and Mostafa Tajzadeh were put under pressure at Evin Prison and their personal belongings also put to a thorough search. What, in any case, deserves more attention in his ideas as an exemplar sociologist, and after the protests in question, is his full-fronted and exact analysis of these unmatched protests in Iran. He refrained from reducing these protests, out of simplicity and excitement, to a mere generational view, and instead tried to see “Woman, Life, Freedom Movement” in a broader horizon and intertwined with other movements. However, the works published him are “Mozaherrat Salmiyeh,” [meaning, “these protests are peaceful,” said by a local protesting woman in Khuzestan, in its economic uprising], “Civil Society and Corona,” “The Sociology of Prostitution,” “The Status of Human Development in Iran,” “Social Movements and Democratization,” “The Necessity of Struggle against Poverty and Inequality in Iran,” “A Study on the Social Damages of Prostitution,” “Violence against Children in Iran,” “Communitarianism and Communitarian Programs,” “Addiction in Iran,” “Pathology of Children’s Rights in Iran,” “Psychology and Social Transformations,” “Child-Molestation in Iran,” and “A Hundred Years and a Hundred Days.”
