According to her, Ms. Afshar had a privileged upbringing in which, surrounded by nannies and servants, she did little on her own. When she went to the prestigious Joan of Arc school for girls in Tehran, she said: “I read ‘Jane Eyre’ and I thought, if you left me on the side of the road, I wouldn’t know which way I have to go.. I better go to this England where they make these tough women.”
She persuaded her parents to send her to St. Martin’s, a boarding school in Solihull, England, outside Birmingham, where she spent three years. She then attended York University, graduating in 1967. She received a PhD in land economics from Cambridge University in 1972.
Ms. Afshar returned to Iran for a number of years, where she worked as a civil servant for the Ministry of Agriculture, a job that often involved traveling to small towns and villages. “I loved talking to the women,” she recalls, “who didn’t even know about the Islamic rights they had: the right to property, payment for housework, everything.”
She also worked as a journalist for Kayhan International, an English-language newspaper, and wrote a gossip column called “Curious,” going to parties while covering the social lives of prominent Iranians.
In 1974, Savak, the shah of Iran’s feared secret police, called her out for her involvement with left-wing intellectual groups, her brother said. The incident scared her enough to return to England. There she was reunited with Maurice Dodson, a math professor at York University whom she had met while still a student. They started dating in 1970 and married in 1974.
Ms. Afshar traveled with her husband to Iran during the Persian New Year in March 1975 and visited the country for the last time in 1977, two years before the Islamic Revolution.