Fighting an oppressive regime while earning PhDs, Iranian students balance two lives

After a young Iranian woman was arrested and died in custody this past September, Parya — a University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student — was devastated.

She missed three classes, instead becoming glued to the news coming out of Iran: the public outrage at 22-year-old Mahsa Amini’s death and the massive protest movement that sprung up in resistance to the oppressive regime.

A school therapist encouraged Parya, an architecture doctoral student, to go to class. So Parya began living parallel lives. She woke up each morning and read stories of the brutal government crackdown on protesters. Then she attended classes and led others as a teaching assistant, trying to remain upbeat for her students.

About a month after Amini’s death, Parya logged into her computer at the start of a class and saw that the notorious Evin prison was on fire. There were reports of explosions, gunfire and deaths of inmates.

Parya was overwhelmed. Many political activists and government dissidents are imprisoned at Evin.

“Guys, I’m sorry if I’m not normal today,” she warned her students. Then she forged ahead with the day’s lesson.

Parya wasn’t alone in feeling the tension between her life at UW-Milwaukee and the upheaval in Iran. Many of her fellow Iranian students were struggling as the school year got underway, said Anita Alkhas, an associate professor of French who serves as the faculty adviser to the Iranian Student Association.

Iranians are one of the largest international student population on campus. Most are pursuing master’s degrees and PhDs.

“They're very positive, young, energetic people, but you could see that just under the surface, they were really having a hard time,” Alkhas said.

Soon, though, Parya and other Iranians on campus decided to turn their anger into action. Though never much involved in politics back home, and busy with coursework for high-level degrees and teaching assistantships, the students felt an obligation to speak out against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and to do what they could to fight for the Iranian people.

They have organized a candlelight vigil and two on-campus rallies, built an informational website and kept news of the protest movement in their friends' social media feeds. They will host a presentation March 8 on International Women's Day to celebrate the achievements of Iranian women.

The students and the protesters in Iran are not calling for specific reforms on modesty laws, elections or other issues, Parya noted. They are calling for an end to the Islamic Republic as a whole.

“Theocracy cannot be reformed," Parya said. “Government should not be ruled by religion."

That conviction, shaped by lives under the restrictive Iranian regime, motivated the students to carve their own paths in the U.S. Now, they want their peers in Iran to experience the same freedoms they have.

The students profiled in this story asked the Paste BN Network to use only their first names and for their faces to be partially obscured in photos, fearing retribution for their families back home — and for themselves, if they were ever to try to return to Iran.

Restrictions in Iran fuel students' opposition to regime

For Nilou, an electrical engineering PhD student, her fight is fueled by her childhood encounters with the theocracy in Iran’s capital city of Tehran.

From age 7, Nilou wore a hijab, or headscarf, in school as mandated by law. She found it suffocating.

But she was shy and wanted to stay out of trouble. She dressed conservatively so she wouldn’t be stopped by the morality police.

Nilou also chafed against the religious teachings in school, since she and her family weren’t practicing Muslims. Teachers commonly warned that if students didn’t follow the strict interpretation of Islamic teachings, they’d be hung from their hair in hell.

“I couldn’t tolerate those times at school,” Nilou said.

For Parya, the architecture student, childhood memories are peppered with instances of the restrictions placed on her, and her resistance to them. The daughter of dentists, she grew up in the south of Iran, where attitudes were more conservative than Tehran.

At 4 years old, her father sang her a popular song with lyrics that said, “You are a beautiful girl. You shouldn’t go out on the streets because you’re in danger of being stolen.”

“I remember saying to my dad, ‘Why don’t you go and make the streets safe?’” Parya said.

She recalls that in her first year of primary school, she earned perfect scores in every subject in school, except in the category of “discipline.” Her manteau, the long, loose-fitting coat worn by Iranian women and girls, was slightly too short.

It lit a spark of resistance in her, she said. She didn’t want fear to dictate her life.

By the time she was attending college at the prestigious University of Tehran, Parya and her friends often flouted dress code laws, with shorter manteaus and hijabs that showed their hair. They’d text each other every morning where the police were parked outside the public transit station.

“Every day your commute becomes a challenge,” she said.

Once, she was stopped by the morality police in the mall. An officer reprimanded her: “How do you think it’s OK to show your body like this in public?” She avoided arrest. Most of her friends have been stopped too.

“This is normal life for us. It is traumatizing, but you get used to this everyday fight,” Parya said.

'I don't have a future here,' students realize

The oppressive regime wore on Nilou and Parya. Eventually, they both saw leaving their home country as their only chance for a real future.

By age 13, Nilou decided she’d emigrate from Iran. She knew higher education would be her way out.

When things got difficult, she often reassured herself that one day she’d be living freely somewhere else.

Nilou’s mother, who is disabled from polio, encouraged her to go to the U.S. — even though it meant she might not see her daughter for many years, and that her mobility would be even more limited without Nilou there to help.

“I just want you to be happy,” Nilou’s mother told her. “I want you to go to a free world and I want you to make your future.”

Parya dreams of becoming a mayor or a city planner. But she didn’t want to become part of the corruption she said is rampant in Iran, and she wasn’t willing to dress as conservatively as other female government workers.

“This was the key point that drove me,” Parya said. “I don’t have any future here. Maybe I have a future somewhere (else).”

Her determination to leave intensified two years ago as she was applying for her PhD program at UWM. The government had shut down internet access across the country to tamp down a wave of protests, and she couldn’t get online to submit her application.

“I felt like, this is a dictatorship that doesn’t give you any human rights, any means of just leaving the country,” Parya said.

Even after a year and a half in the U.S., the restrictions of Iran are rooted in her subconscious. Sometimes, her mind second-guesses whether it’s really OK to leave her dorm only in a shirt and pants.

Nilou, who has been at UWM for eight years, felt similar pangs of panic throughout her first year here when she’d walk around campus without a hijab.

But both women never considered covering their hair in the U.S.

“When you have to do something, and you might get killed for not doing it, there’s no way that you repeat that action in a free country,” Parya said.

After months of protests, students find hope in 'small victories'

There has been a sense that this protest movement is different from previous ones, said Alkhas, the students’ adviser, because of the massive scale of protests and the widespread sentiment among Iranian people that the theocratic regime must end.

For the Iranian diaspora, “the kind of risks that people were taking across the board in Iran was really galvanizing in a new way,” Alkhas said. “You really felt a stronger duty to do what you could.”

In online videos, young women defiantly remove their headscarves upon their release from jail. Teenage girls walk right up to lines of security forces to protest.

It has inspired a cautious hope that an end really is near, Alkhas said.

That young generation is on Nilou’s mind. She doesn’t want them to live like she did, terrified she’d get in trouble and never standing up for herself.

“Now that I know what freedom looks like,” she said, “I want this for the people of my own country, for the women of my own country.”

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In recent weeks, protests in Iran have calmed down some. But there’s a sense that it’s only a lull, Alkhas said, and each new action from the regime re-energizes the movement.

The students in Milwaukee balance frustration that more has not changed, and feeling like the world has left Iran behind, with moments of optimism.

Recently, an Iranian singer won a Grammy for his song “Baraye,” a popular protest anthem. And the United Nations expelled Iran from a commission on women’s rights.

“We are dealing with burnout with small victories,” Parya said. “I never lose hope.”

The students don’t know if they’ll be able to return to their families in Iran anytime soon. They’ve heard that security officers check people’s phones at the airport and search their social media accounts for any sign of anti-government sentiments.

So why speak out against the regime and organize protests? Why talk to a newspaper reporter?

“If I'm afraid, that’s what they want,” Parya said. “Like every other decision, I don’t want fear to dictate my life.”