Thirty years ago when the reign of political Islam officially started in Iran and while the whole world saw what they were told was an ‘Islamic revolution’ on the screens of their televisions, I and many people of my generation, feeling suffocated and oppressed by numerous rules and regulations, started to rebel against the new powers who were crushing our revolution. In the process we began to question not only Islam but God too. By then I had already spent half my age learning how to read the Quran and how to practise Islam properly. I was brought up with God in every moment of my life.

One of my earliest memories is of my father’s deep melodic voice, reciting the Quran very early in the morning. He would sit on his prayer mat, his big red Quran carefully opened on a low stool in front of him and recite loudly in a rhythmic manner for half an hour before doing his prayers and going about his daily duties. I would listen for a while and then drift back to sleep.

Had it carried on like that, it would have remained a happy childhood memory in my mind. However, when I was five or six years old I was considered old enough to start learning my prayers and my Quran. I would be shaken awake by my mother and forced out of the comfort of my warm bed to get washed and get ready for my prayers. Getting ready was not simply about washing your face and kneeling down to tell your god how wonderful and compassionate he was and how you worshipped him. Allah, as it turned out, was a very fussy god, and you had to do more than just wash your face to be acceptable in his presence and praise him. The process would start with washing your butt with clear water for several minutes to make sure it was absolutely clean. This was easier said than done, considering at that time we still lived in a village and at five o’clock on a cold winter morning having to get up and go to an outdoor toilet carrying a jug of cold water to wash and scrub your butt over and over again was not a joke. Having cleaned and raised our butts, we had to wash our feet and our hands up to elbow and our face, not once but three times, making sure the water went inside each nostril and finally the top of the head had to be touched in a ceremonial movement for the wash to be completed. Only then were we allowed to go in shivering and trembling to stand on our prayer mats and repeat some Arabic words which I came to know later were praises of God and his greatness and graciousness.

When we prayed together all the males, including my younger brother and cousin, would stand in the front row and the women folk would stand a few feet behind them. We had to be covered from head to toe. The god was very strict on that. No woman was allowed to show her hair or any part of her body (apart from her face and hands) when standing in front of him and absolutely no make up. Father taught me a small verse every morning and asked me to recite the previous day’s verses. He would then briefly give me a lesson on the pillars and teachings of Islam and make me revise the most important prayers. By the age of nine I had read a great deal of Quran, had learned a long list of rules and was familiar with the history of Islam, the famous battles, the big migration, the conflict and split between the prophet’s disciples after his death and the way Islam eventually took over a vast area in the region. There was no attempt to cover the brutality of what had been done throughout history in the name of religion. Islam, it was stated repeatedly, was a religion of kindness and compassion, but killing its enemies, which were many and varied, was perfectly justifiable, even encouraged.

I must be thankful to the 1979 revolution in Iran that changed people’s views of life and raised questions about many well established traditions including religion, and in the process helped them to shake off the shackles of religion. As the Islamic republic fastened its claws around the country and treated all resistance with extreme brutality, the dos and don’ts at school became more frequent and regulations got stricter everyday. Chanting slogans and singing, which we had greatly enjoyed during the few months of freedom, became forbidden and wearing the veil and midday group prayers became compulsory. Many of the teachers were fired and new, mainly religious, devoted teachers called sisters of Zainab were recruited to teach us and control us and break our resistance. The religious lessons and Quran lessons were increased substantially. They used every opportunity to preach how real Muslim girls should behave. Running around the grounds, for example, and screaming and laughing loudly were strictly forbidden.

Monthly periods were a good reason for being excused from praying or even attending a Quran lesson, because bleeding women are not considered clean enough to appear in front of god or to touch the holy book or observe fasting, one of the main reasons that no woman is ever allowed to become a mullah or a religious leader. “Who will lead the prayers when the woman mullah is having her period?” has been a winning argument used by Islamic leaders whenever a confused feminist who naively thought there could be compatibility between Islam and women’s rights tried to follow her European sisters and seek equality by making women religious leaders.

Nearly thirty years on, whenever I read news of a protest in some university front or see the films and photos of young girls and boys gathering in the street to show their resistance, I can see and recognise our young selves and that rebellious spirit in many of those young girls and boys who, despite being born and growing up under the Islamic republic’s rule, have never submitted to it. The Islamic government has managed to stay in power thanks to thousands of executions, horrible torture chambers and brutal laws suppressing and crushing opposition. They have stayed in power fighting for their existence on a daily basis and in every corner of the street, every school yard and university front. They have made rules and spent tonnes of money and employed thousands of Special Forces and moral squads to impose those rules on people, only to face more revolt and unrest. They have failed to impose their laws and regulations fully on people; they have also failed to keep their God alive among an increasing number of Iranians. The fear of god and his horrific hell that kept many of us clinging to the faith long after our intellectual minds had declined it, was shattered as we came to realise that the infamous hell Allah promised to doom us to if we did not follow his orders surely could not be worse than the hell his current representatives have created in our country and if we can fight them despite their brutality, then there is no reason to fear god and his uncertain punishments. Finally we were free of him.

Along the way some of us became Marxists, enriched our new beliefs by reading Marx’s dialectic materialism and other intellectual views on religion and god, and joined a political movement to fight religion and political Islam on an international scale, which seems to be a necessity more than ever.

My comrades and I in Worker Communist Party of Iran who were forced out of Iran due to our political activities, found ourselves in the forefront of another battlefield against political Islam and other reactionary forces. This time we have to fight against veiling young girls and women, not in Tehran or Isfahan, but in London and Berlin, we have to fight honour killings not in Afghanistan and Iraq, but in Sweden and Germany and Holland, we have to save women and men from stoning not only in Iran and Afghanistan but also Nigeria and Sudan, we have to campaign against faith schools in most European countries and we have to struggle to keep the freedom of expression alive not only in Afghanistan and Iran but also in Denmark and America. As much as political Islam and other regressive forces are crossing the borders and forming attack lines all around the world we have found ourselves in need of joining forces with other international secularist and progressive forces to fight for human dignity, for freedom, for equality and for a better world.

And we are proud to be the most active and most progressive political force in Iran leading a growing and sophisticated movement against god and its earthly representatives. This movement is reflected in the voice of thousands of students who gathered last year in front of one of Tehran’s biggest universities and chanted “we don’t want an Islamic government, we don’t want it, we don’t want it”.

Sohaila Sharifi is a member of the central committee of the Worker Communist Party of Iran, editor of No Hejab, and member of Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain