Kameel Ahmady is a British-Iranian scholar working in the field of social anthropology, with a particular focus on gender, children, ethnic minorities, and child labour. Kameel Ahmady, born in 1972 in Naghadeh, West Azerbaijan Province, is an Iranian-British researcher and social anthropologist known for his research and activities in the fields of social anthropology and harmful traditional practices. He is the coordinator and developer of more than 11 research study books and 20 scientific articles in Persian, English, Turkish, and Kurdish on subjects such as child marriage, temporary marriage, White marriage, female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C), Male circumcision, child labour and children's scavenging, LGBTQ+ issues and identity and ethnicity.
Ahmady holds a HND and bachelor's degree in printing and publishing from the London University of Communication and a master's degree in social anthropology and visual ethnography from the University of Kent in the United Kingdom.[15] He has also completed specialised training and courses on politics in the Middle East, research methods, and empowerment at other universities in England. In 2017, IKWRO presented its annual award to Ahmady for his collection of research in the fields of gender and children at the London university of Law. Ahmady also won the World Peace Foundation's Literature and Humanities Award in 2018 at the Global P.E.A.C.E. ceremony hosted by George Washington University for his collection of works on social issues.
During his career as a researcher, Kameel has conducted several comprehensive and group-based research projects in the field in various parts of south-west Asia, including Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Turkey.
In mid-August 2019, media inside and outside Iran reported that Kameel Ahmady had been arrested by the security forces of the Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) of the Islamic Republic of Iran. A year later, in December 2020, he was sentenced to nine years and three months in prison and fined 600,000 euros on charges of collaborating with a hostile government, trying to divide Iran through scientific research, seeking cultural changes through research, collaborating with and implementing anti-government projects, conducting subversive research work related to social issues and minorities, promoting and supporting homosexuality in the form of scientific research, and several other charges while released on bail of 500 million tomans in December 2020, Ahmady escaped through the western borders of Iranian Kurdistan and went to Britain.
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Kameel Ahmady was born in 1972 (1351 in Iranian calendar) in the ethnically mixed town of Naghadeh in West Azarbaijan province, Iran. He grew up in a middle-class, Kurdish-speaking family.
During the Iranian Revolution, when Ahmady was a boy, Kurdish groups had joined the struggle to end the rule of the Shah. They wanted greater autonomy for Iran's Kurdish minority. However, after the Revolution, the new Islamic regime rejected that demand. A conflict erupted between government forces and Kurdish Peshmerga fighters, which lasted for years and left thousands dead.
In an interview on the BBC's Witness History, Ahmady stated that, as demands for autonomy grew, his town became the scene of bitter ethnic fighting, which led his family to flee and become refugee in various villages, never returning to his home town.
Due to the political changes in Iran between 1979 and 1985, Ahmady received his primary education in various schools in Naghadeh, Gerd Ashvan village, and in town of Piranshahr and in three educational systems – the Imperial Government (the Shah), the Democratic Party of Iranian Kurdistan (KDPI), and the Government of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Later, he completed his secondary education in Moqbli, Marufi, and Mohammad Rauf schools in Piranshahr and Naghadeh towns. Finally, during the internal conflicts and Iran – Iraq war also due to his unwillingness to study in the education system at that time, after being repeatedly failed and rejected, he dropped out of school and continued his education by home-schooling himself.
In his interview with the BBC, Ahmady stated that he was arrested and tortured in his teens due to his political activities. During the internal political tensions and the military conflicts between the Iranian Government and Kurdish political parties and after the war between Iran and Iraq, he decided to migrate from Iran to Britain to continue his studies. During that time, he lived and studied in England.
After immigrating to England, Ahmady was able to obtain his undergraduate degrees, Higher National Diploma (HND) and BA in printing and publishing and environmental economics London University of Communication, a constituent college of the University of the Arts AW (UAL) in 2002. In 2005, he obtained his master's degree (MA) in social anthropology and visual ethnography from the University of Kent in Canterbury. He went on to complete specialised courses related to Middle Eastern politics and research methods at other universities in London.
After university, Ahmady began his fieldwork-orientated and anthropological studies, and research in different regions of Asia, the Middle East, Africa. Most of his research in recent years, which is carried out in teams and fieldwork based, has been done in connection with the Middle East, Kurdish studies, Iranian culture and social issues. He has published and coordinated research studies on a variety of topics, such as a travel guide to Kurdistan of Turkey, the self-immolation of women in Iraq, child marriage and child labour in Iran, the situation of LGBTQ+ peoples in Iran, investigations of so-called White marriage (cohabitation), temporary marriage, ethnicity and identity (5 major ethnic groups in Iran) and research into male circumcision (MGM) also comprehensive studies on female genital mutilation/cutting (FGM/C) in Iranian Kurdistan and the south of Iran. He has published several field-research team work books and articles in English, Persian (Farsi), and Kurdish.
In August 2019, on his return to Iran from a UN conference in Addis Ababa on human rights, and while he was researching ethnicity and identity among five major cohorts of Iran, Ahmady was arrested by security forces in Tehran. He believes he was taken by the Revolutionary Guards partly due to his research work, but also because Iran was looking for British assets to seize in reprisal after the British Marines helped seize an Iranian ship, Grace 1, off the shores of Gibraltar on 4 July 2019.
The ship was suspected of breaching EU sanctions by taking oil to Syria. The infamous judge Abolqasem Salavati of the Islamic Revolutionary Court formally charged Ahmady with trying to secure socio-cultural changes in the Islamic Republic by allegedly conducting subversive research related to social issues, such as lobbying to raise the age of child marriage, promoting homosexuality, trying to divide Iran through scientific research, sending false reports to the human-rights rapporteur of the UN, and several other charges. He was sentenced to nine years and three months in prison and fined 600,000 euros.
He was interrogated and kept in solitary confinement for more than one hundred days by the IRGC in the infamous Ward A section of Evin Prison in Tehran. Although under supervision, Ahmady was then temporarily released from prison on bail. When his appeal was quashed and his sentence confirmed by the Supreme Court, he managed to leave Iran, escaping through the mountains, and return to England.
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Given his background in anthropology and ethnography, Kameel Ahmady has made numerous trips to various parts of the world such as north Africa, Europe, south-west Asia, and the Middle East to conduct research and carry out participant observation. Since Ahmady was born and raised in the Kurdish regions of the western provinces of Iran, and because of the culture and religion of his region, he and his teams conducted some of his earlier anthropological and ethnographic research in those regions.
As is common in social science research, most of Ahmady's work are connected with one another and most of his research topics were determined by the available field data.
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The field research for this book, which was also Ahmady's university project, began in May 2006 in West Azerbaijan province in north-western Iran – the southern part of this province (also referred to as Kurdistan also Mukriyan), in the town of Mahabad. The work was undertaken in cooperation with the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults (Kanoon Fakri o Parverashi Kodek o Nojavan). Photographic, textual and interview data were collected during a three-month period working with children and young adults as well as members of staff at the centre, parents, and local leaders.
The initial aim of this research was to examine the factors that shape a sense of belonging and place among young people in Mahabad, a town on the north-western periphery of Iran. Ahmady wanted to look at their consumption of local, national, and transnational forms of media and how these influenced their views of events and their local environment, and the ways they choose to narrate these. He used reflexive visual methods, asking them to take their own photographic pieces dealing with themes they saw as relevant to local current events and their places within these. The works they produced were then placed in a week-long public exhibition in Mahabad, where further data were gathered from a guest book of reactions to the event and observation notes taken at the time.
The work produced by the participants shows the multiple and sometimes competing forces at work in the lives of young people in Iran, where idealised images about The West serve to challenge or reinforce their own senses of place. Conventions of media and popular culture story telling – that is, the discourses used to describe current affairs and social conditions on satellite television from Asia and Europe, in films, in print media such as newspapers, and in vernacular trends – shaped not only the choice of themes that were prioritised by the young people, but also the ways in which they viewed those themes and their relevance to their lives. Particularly with respect to issues of gender, there appears to be a strong desire for more public debate, but an ambivalence about the role of hybrid influences as positive or negative. Additionally, local forms of identity based on Kurdish resistance to a dominant nationalism are sometimes discernible, as is the overarching context of recent global events drawing Iran into direct political confrontations with Western powers.
This research was published in English, Farsi and Kurdish 2020 by Avaye Buf and Mehri Publication in Farsi and English and by scholar press in different languages under the title Conformity and Resistance in Mahabad – Media Consumption, Conformity and Resistance: A Visual Ethnography of Youth in Iranian Kurdistan.
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One of the most diverse pieces of research that Ahmazdy and his team conducted is on the subject of travel to the east and south-east of Turkey, also known as Turkish Kurdistan. This research was carried out from 2005 to 2008, taking an ethnographic view of the 15 mostly Kurdish provinces of Turkey. He published the results of this research in Istanbul in the book Another Look at East and Southeast Turkey (2009) in English, Turkish, and Kurdish (Kurmanji).
This book seems at first to be a travel guide in nature, but it goes beyond a conventional travel guide by attempting to move readers away from stereotypical view of the region and show that the area need not only be known for military conflict and war, but also for its long and glorious history.
Another Look at East and Southeast Turkey includes ethnographic and anthropological information and first-hand, specialised information about celebrations, customs, Nowroz, myths, religious rituals, language, clothing, food, music, and architecture. This book introduces readers to the hidden places of Kurdistan of Turkey.
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One of Ahmady's first pieces of research after his return to Iran after university was an investigation of female genital mutilation/cutting in Iran. This fieldwork team research was conducted discontinuously between 2004 and 2014 in the rural areas and villages of four provinces: West Azarbaijan, Kurdistan, Kermanshah, and Hormozgan. The results indicated that FGM/C has been common among the Shafi'i branch of the Sunni religion in those provinces for a long time and it is still being done there in a scattered manner. From his subsequent research and field visits, Ahmady found that the phenomenon of FGM/C had been decreasing in these provinces. It was found the most important reasons for the existence and continuation of FGM/C in these areas were traditional and religious justifications of the practice, a lack of awareness, a lack of education and low levels of literacy, poverty, and beliefs about chastity, health beliefs, and beauty.
The final results of this research were compiled in a book titled In the Name of Tradition: A Comprehensive Research Study on Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) in Iran, published in 2015 by UnCUT/Voices Press. The book (2022) was republished in English, Farsi and Kurdish in Denmark by Avaye Buf and LAP Lambert Academic Publishing also contains an updated appendix on FGM/C entitled The Changing Paradigms: Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting Country report on FGM/C in Iran, With an introduction to Male Circumcision / Male Genital Mutilation (MGM/C) in Iran.
Ahmady, while conducting this research, documented interviews and information obtained from the fieldwork, which later led to the creation of a documentary film entitled In the Name of Tradition (2015). The documentary, which is considered to be the first documentary film about FGM/C in Iran, has been shown in several short film festivals, including the London Film Festival, and on the BBC.
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One of the most important issues that Kameel Ahmady has researched is early child marriage. this research eventually become a scientific appendix to the bill to increase the age of marriage submitted by representatives of the MP women's reformist faction of parliament, which was voted for by the majority of parliament, but soon rejected by the judicial committee. Ahmady stated that, while researching FGM/C, he and his team realised just how common child marriage was in Iran and the connection between these two harmful practices.
The research shows that the seven provinces of Khorasan Razavi, East Azerbaijan, Khuzestan, Sistan and Baluchistan, West Azerbaijan, Hormozgan, and Isfahan have the highest numbers of child marriages, and nearly 17% of all marriages in Iran are child marriages. From his field findings, Ahmady concluded that the most important factors in the continuation of child marriage in Iran are poverty, low levels of education and literacy, the lack of legal protection, social pressures in a male-driven society, and traditional and religious beliefs. The age of marriage in Iran is 15 years for boys and 13 years for girls (but it is possible to reduce this to nine years with the court's and guardian's permissions). This research, entitled An Echo of Silence: A Comprehensive Research Study On Early Child Marriage (ECM) In Iran, was published in 2016 by Shirazeh Publication in Iran and by Nova Polishing in the USA also in English, Farsi and Kurdish by and LAP Lambert Academic Publishing and Avaye buf in 2023
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In 2016, Ahmady and his team started a piece of research entitled A House on Water: A Comprehensive Study Research on Temporary Marriage in Iran, during which various aspects of the phenomenon of temporary marriage were investigated. In Ahmady's previous research, a close relationship between temporary marriage and child marriage was established, leading Ahmady and his colleagues to study the phenomenon of temporary marriage in the three metropolises of Tehran, Mashhad, and Isfahan in 2016. The team used a method called grounded theory, took qualitative and quantitative approaches, and applied the contextualisation method.The findings of this research indicated that pleasure-seeking and child marriage are two central issues related to temporary marriage, which has consequences such as stigma, especially for women, and the formation of negative mindsets in men towards permanent marriage. In the book A House on Water (2022), Ahmady states that Iran's laws are silent on temporary marriage, paving the road for early marriage, having extensive social and psychological consequences, especially for young children, and indirectly fuelling the increase in child marriage in Iran. This book was published in Iran in 2017 by Shirazeh Publishing House and reprinted in English, Farsi and Kurdish in 2022 by Avaye Buf also in 2023 by LAP Lambert Academic Publishing. Electronic and audio versions are available to the public on the Internet.
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One controversial piece of Ahmady's research is about the status of White marriage, or cohabitation, in Iran. This research was conducted in the three big cities of Tehran, Isfahan, and Mashhad in 2017 and at the same time as field research conducted about temporary marriage. Using a grounded theory method, the study concluded that environmental factors (economic conditions, social structures, and legal and official frameworks), intervening factors (family conditions, the weakening of supervision, and immigration), and contextual factors (relationship experiences and individual worldviews) are the main factors in White marriage in Iran. The central phenomenon is the emergence of value and normative changes in people's lifestyles and their leadership actions, and multiplicity and instability of relationships. The disintegration of gender stereotypes, freedom of choice, a reluctance to formally marry, social exclusion, a lack of support, and fear of prosecution were identified as the most important consequences of White marriage in Iran. The study was published in a book entitled House With Open Door: A Comprehensive Research Study on White Marriage (Cohabitation) in Iran. The book was first published in Farsi and English by Mehri Publication in London. In 2022 it was republished by Avaye Buf in English, Farsi and Kurdish languages, and its electronic and audio versions were made available on the internet.
The Situation of the LGBTQ+ Community in Iran
One of Ahmady's most controversial studies was entitled Forbidden City: A comprehensive study on lesbian, gay, bisexuals (LGB) in Iran. It was conducted in the three metropolises of Tehran, Isfahan, and Mashhad with the aim of understanding people's general feelings and beliefs about the LGBTQ+ community in Iran through a critical analysis of the LGBTQ+ community members’ own perspectives. It attempted to investigate the challenges they face as a result of living in a religious, class-orientated, traditional and patriarchal society that rejects same-sex preference as an identity. In the book Forbidden Tale: A comprehensive study on lesbian, gays, bisexuals (LGB) in Iran (2020), Ahmady detailed his research findings. It was published in English and Farsi by Mehri Publication, London and in 2021 the audio version of the book was published by Avaye Buf. It is noteworthy that one of the charges for which Ahmady was sentenced to nine years in prison in 2020 was related to this research – he was convicted of promoting and supporting homosexuality in the form of scientific research.
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Ahmady was the coordinator and compiler of the book Traces of Exploitation in Childhood: A Comprehensive Research on Forms, Causes and Consequences of Child Labour in Iran (2021) and the supervisor of a separate study called Childhood Yawn: A Study on Recognising, Preventing and Controlling the Phenomenon of Child Scavenging (Waste Picking) in Tehran. Both were the result of fieldwork by Ahmady and his team on the phenomenon of child labour in Tehran, the capital of Iran.
In the book Traces of Exploitation in Childhood, which was published (by Avaye Buf) on 12 June 2021, the World Day Against Child Labour, 23 forms of child labour are introduced to the reader. The book discusses what perpetuates child labour and the dangers that it poses for children. Using direct quotes from child labourers, it tries to establish a connection between the reader and the sufferings and difficulties of working children. The fourth chapter of the book presents solutions to reduce harm based on the knowledge gained from the fieldwork, and the views of experts and the target community.
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In the latter years of his stay in Iran, Ahmady researched waste-picking, or scavenging, children in Iran. There was a lack of comprehensive and purposeful studies on the common practice of waste-picking, an ignorance of the problem, and a substantial risk to children, which led Ahmady to conduct the research. The detailed study aimed to recognise the phenomenon of garbage collection, investigate the factors increasing the practice in children, and recommend ways to reduce the harms of this work.
This study was published under the title Childhood Yawn: A Study on Recognising, Preventing and Controlling the Phenomenon of Child Scavenging (Waste Picking) in Tehran (2019) under Ahmady's supervision and with the cooperation and financial support of the Association for the Protection of Children and Youth Rights. It revealed both the obvious and obscured issues related to child labourers in different parts of Tehran.
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The final research project that Ahmady was involved in before he escaped Iran was group fieldwork investigating the topic of identity and ethnicity in Iran. It was postponed because of Ahmady's arrest and conviction in 2020 and continued after his release from prison on bail. This research attempted to perform a detailed and multi-faceted assessment of the situation of five major ethnic groups – the Azeris, Kurds, Baloch, Arabs and Persians – in 13 provinces of Iran. This research points to the diversity of identity/ethnicity in contemporary Iran, which, accompanied by globalisation processes, has created a type of inter-ethnic conflict that tends to seek identity and justice to eliminate discrimination and inequalities and achieve social developmentCiting field interviews, Ahmady and his colleagues state that Iranian social identity groups are dissatisfied with the dominance of elements of Persian identity over their own. They do not consider the reduced state of Iranian historical identity to be fair and in line with the development of a collective identity. The majority of the statistical population of this research, which is sampled from prominent ethnic groups in Iran, objects to centre-periphery policy-making, the denial of education in mother tongues, the ignoring of citizens’ rights, and ethnic and religious discrimination. They believe that if the ruling government in Iran's actions aren't serious and peace-orientated, Iran will be pushed towards social and political collapse.
The research is published by Mehri Publication in a 2021 and Avaye Buf in 2022 entitled From Border to Border.