page_title: Zahra Rahnavard
section_title: Career
hierarchical_section_title: Zahra Rahnavard / Career
caption_attribution_description: Wife of Mr. Musavi Ex-chief of Al-Zahra university Eid of Mab'as Musavi had a meet with families of arrested people More photos: &lt;a href="http://picasaweb.google.com/hsaber/29TirMabAs" rel="nofollow"&gt;picasaweb.google.com/hsaber/29TirMabAs&lt;/a&gt;
context_page_description: Zahra Rahnavard is an Iranian academic, artist and politician. Rahnavard is a university professor, artist, and crusading intellectual who had been under house arrest from February 2011 to May 2018. In 2009, Foreign Policy magazine named her one of the world’s most distinguished thinkers. She is the wife of former Iran Prime Minister Mir Hussein Musavi. In part of her work, she has underlined the need for men to respect the laws of hijab in the same way as women, as well as a general activist for women's rights in the middle east.
context_section_description: Rahnavard was among the early revolutionaries against the Shah. In the last years of the Shah, she was close to Ali Shariati, a dissident Islamist leader.
  Rahnavard served as the Chancellor of Alzahra University in Tehran from  1998 to 2006, and as a Political Adviser to the former Iranian President Mohammad Khatami. Rahnavard was the first Iranian woman appointed as a chancellor of a university since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. She was nominated to this post by former Minister of Science, Research and Technology, Mostafa Moin. After the election of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2005 and the purging of reformist officials from the government, Rahnavard was removed (or resigned) from her position as the Chancellor of Al-zahra University in 2006, replaced by Mahboubeh Mobasheri.
  As the head of the Women’s Social and Cultural Council, established in 1989, as one of seven government committees exploring various social issues, Rahnavard has called for these committees to be more equally represented by women members and has been an outspoken critic of the government’s failure to accord women what, in her opinion, are their legitimate social and civil rights under the Qu’ran.
  She was an active member of her husband Mir-Hossein Mousavi's campaign when Mousavi entered the 2009 presidential election. Now she is a member of The Green Path of Hope and is one of the Leaders of Opposition. Rahnavard is also the author of 15 books.
caption: Zahra Rahnavard in 2009
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