In 1999 I moved to Tehran having grown up abroad, an overeager returnee, in that mid-twenties kind of way, both too confident and too impressionable. By sheer luck and circumstance, I soon found myself under the mentorship of feminist publisher Noushin Ahmadi. Trenchant in her opinions but always soft spoken and incredibly generous, Noushin was the founder of the publishing house Nashr-e Towseh (‘Development Press’) and the quarterly journal Jens-e-dovvom (“The Second Sex”) and went on to spearhead countless political initiatives, big and small, including the One Million Signatures campaign, which demanded a retake of the referendum on the Islamic Republic’s 1979 constitution. The memory of my years as a compagnon de route of Noushin will always stand out.

I was introduced to Noushin by a good friend, the late Mahsa Shekarloo, another foreign graduate and recent returnee. It was with Noushin’s support that Mahsa and I founded Bad Jens, an online English-language platform which reported on the feminist movement in Tehran. Noushin made a persuasive case for building bridges to the outside world, pointing to language barriers which had conspired with difficult geopolitical circumstances (which endure to this day) to isolate Iranian feminism in ways that activists across South Asia or the Arab World did not have to endure.

Noushin, though principled, to the point of being occasionally exhausting, was never dogmatic. There are internationalisms which she actively strived for, and others which she suspected of being part of the problem. Some of you will find this distinction banal. In my case, speaking as a contemporary art professional, I can say that, unfortunately, the importance of this distinction is only slowly dawning on me and most of my colleagues across the field.

In 2005, I translated Noushin’s essay ‘Paved with Good Intentions’ for Bidoun Magazine, where I was a member of the editorial team. (1) In it, Noushin describes how international support for women’s rights movements in Iran often ended up undermining them, no matter how well-intended the support may have been. The gaze of faraway media outlets and NGOs can distort perceptions within the country, dangerously inflating the local activists’ sense of potential while simultaneously pumping up government paranoia. This often leads to activists focussing on short-lived gestures as opposed to grassroots strategising. Noushin points to the example of the reformist student protests in 1999–2000, and the dramatically inflated expectations all around, which were followed by a spectacular wave of government repression. In other words, international exposure can lead to a disconnect between local movements and their immediate context, and to sensational gestures being prioritized over realistic, sustainable change. Big funding and prestigious invitations also create divisions among women by fostering dependency on foreign priorities and transforming activism into professional livelihoods which are vulnerable to fickle global trends.

Heaven knows Noushin did walk her talk. In one telling episode, she doggedly convinced the members of a small network which had just been granted a rather lush European grant to hand it all back, and to fundraise locally instead. Good old Noushin. I can just imagine her. Arguing, grumbling, badgering, teasing, coaxing, urging. A little bit of acid sarcasm here and there. On and on. Relentless.

Today, it seems obvious that Noushin was ahead of the curve. As we stare at the ruins of Palestine, and at the harsh realities of free speech in Euroamerica, it becomes clear that very few of us were ever genuinely interested in the price we pay for our money. If anything, it is now a hallmark of my generation, which came of age in the nineties, to have quietly normalised the existence of murky agendas and hidden interests in our day-to-day dealings with government funding, corporate cash, trustee benevolence. Few of us honed the survival instincts, let alone the organisational skills or the infrastructure that might allow us to imagine alternatives to top-down soft power.

I now hear many colleagues who claim to have always known, always been sceptical, always refused to do this, or to go along with that, etc. Of course, we all had our red lines here and there, but by and large, we took the money and shrugged. Only now do we look towards the selective, patient, bottom-up internationalism which Noushin pushed for (a contemporary voice which reminds me of old conversations back in Tehran is West Bank organizer Fadya Salfiti and her Owneh initiative).

It’s not just the content of ‘Paved with Good Intentions’ that makes me wish I’d made it. It’s also the straightforward set of no-nonsense proposals, born of acting one’s way into thinking, as some activist friends would have it, bereft of the pirouettes I took for intelligent writing over the decades. A clear plan of action based on painfully unflinching analysis. No more, no less.

Perhaps this all sounds sycophantic. Perhaps you’d have had to have been there. Or perhaps you’re another crabby old dog, less confident now, but still impressionable and overeager, not for new tricks so much as the old ones we forgot along the way.