(https://www.equaltimes.

org/)

After one month of protests, Iranian

women are still leading the charge to
freedom

NEWS

By Marga Zambrana
17 October 2022

Solidarity demonstrations are being held in major cities around the world, from Sydney to Los Angeles.
“Die, die dictator!”, “Woman, life and freedom!” chant hundreds of women and men at a rally in the
Turkish port of Kadiköy on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus in early October.
(Marga Zambrana)

Cutting one’s hair is a mourning ritual for the death of a loved one, a tradition already
recorded a thousand years ago in the epic poem Shahnameh (Book of Kings), written by
Persian poet Ferdowsi. This tradition is still widely observed in Iranian Kurdistan, and in recent
weeks it has become a form of protest used by Iranian women to express their pain and their
anger at the abuses they suffer.
“Woman, life and freedom!” shouted Swedish-Iraqi MEP Abir al Sahlani after cutting her hair in
front of the cameras on 4 October. It is a gesture that has been emulated on social media by
dozens of celebrities such as Penélope Cruz and Juliette Binoche. Meanwhile, Angelina Jolie
has expressed her respect and admiration for the Iranian women leading the protests calling
for an end to the compulsory hijab and the Islamic regime.

The current protests were sparked by the death, in mid-September, of a 22-year-old Kurdish
woman Mahsa Amini, after she was beaten by the Basij, or morality police, for exposing part of
her hair under her headscarf. At least 201 people, including several minors
(https://iranhr.net/en/articles/5515/), have since been killed in the violent crackdown on the
protests.

Solidarity demonstrations are being held in major cities around the world, from Sydney to Los
Angeles, especially those where a large part of a diaspora of more than four million people (out
of a population of 86 million) has fled the repression of the Tehran regime over the last four
decades.

According to Iranian migration data, around 140,000 Iranians are living in exile in neighbouring
Turkey. Protests are regularly held in front of Iranian diplomatic missions or in central parts of
Istanbul, Ankara and Izmir.

“Die, die dictator!”, “Woman, life and freedom!” chant hundreds of women and men at a rally in
the port of Kadiköy on the Asian shore of the Bosphorus in early October. The women burn
their black hijabs and throw them into the evening sky. They carry white flowers, pictures of
Mahsa Amini and banners calling for an end to the regime of the ayatollahs. Some chop off
their hair and hold it up in their fists. The crowd shouts, cheers and sings the protest anthem,
Baraye. (https://lyricstranslate.com/en/baraye.html-3)

Many of the protesters are Iranian, but there are also Kurdish and Turkish feminists and left-
wing activists. Turkish riot police outnumber the protesters, although the Turkish government
has not commented on the protests. (https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2022/10/iran-
protests-put-turkish-government-tight-spot)

“My friends in Iran are demonstrating. I trust everything is going to go well there, the revolution
is going to go well. They are going to change the regime in Iran and move towards a
democracy,” Khatereh, a protester who left Iran a year ago, tells Equal Times.

Yes, she is aware that her friends may die in the protests: “That’s
the price of freedom, and it’s a price we’re willing to pay.”

Other teenagers have already died, such as Nika Shakarami, Nima Shafighdoust and Sarina
Esmailzadeh (https://www.al-monitor.com/originals/2022/10/teen-deaths-mark-new-episode-
irans-crackdown-protests) who – along with Amini – are becoming symbols of a generation
that has grown up with social media networks such as TikTok, Twitter and Telegram, has
access to the international press and aspires to what it calls “a normal life”,
(https://www.equaltimes.org/what-iranians-seek-in-war-scarred#.Y00gGHbMI2x) without
restrictions. They are just young girls, but they are bold enough to film themselves in videos
jumping on pictures of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini (1902-1989) and his current successor,
ailing 83-year-old Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, both supreme religious leaders.
Equality for women and beyond
The mobilisations in Iran are leaderless. “This is both good and bad. Bad because it makes
organising more complicated, and good because the regime can’t stop the movement by
decapitating its leaders,” as was the case in 2009, says Kaveh Nematipour, a 42-year-old
Green Movement activist who has been living in Istanbul for ten years. “The mobilisations are
spontaneous. People go out in the evenings and if they see a small group, they join in and start
chanting. People have had enough. Everyone wants a change: the Kurds, the poor, the liberals,”
she tells Equal Times.

“I am a girl from Iran (https://www.equaltimes.org/women-on-the-iranian-

frontier#.Y00gVXbMI2w) who wants a liberal, secular and democratic government so that I can
live a normal life in our country,” explains another protester of around 20, in Istanbul, who
chooses not to give her name for security reasons. She adds: “We are protesting against the
harassment we suffer as women in the streets, in schools, in universities, in the family. We are
forced to wear a hijab when we go out, and if you don’t follow Islamic law, you can be punished
or imprisoned.”

The young woman describes some of the constraints on Iranian women’s lives
(https://www.mei.edu/publications/women-iran-political-representation-without-rights): they
cannot sing or dance in public, participate in many types of sports, or travel without their
husbands’ permission. There is gender segregation in education.

Sharia law prohibits women from initiating a divorce or having custody of their children; they
are considered to be worth half a man when it comes to legal testimony, inheritance and death
benefits, and the legal age for girls to marry is 13, or nine with the father’s permission. Men can
have up to four permanent wives, and an unlimited number of temporary wives. Husbands can
rape their wives or daughters – and bosses their female employees – with virtual impunity. The
law does not prohibit honour crimes or genital mutilation. Women are barred from certain
professions. And, up until 2019, women were not allowed to attend football matches. It took the
death of a young woman, who set herself on fire, (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-
east-62678408) for the authorities to relent, under international pressure.

This draconian framework (set by the law, and sometimes in

spite of it) clashes with a reality in which there are more women
university graduates than men. The employment rate among
women is, nonetheless, only 14 per cent, one of the lowest in the
world (https://iranwire.com/en/features/69146/).

The economic situation has worsened with the pandemic. And restrictions on women have
been tightened since Ebrahim Raisi, linked to a 1988 prison massacre in Iran
(https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2018/10/blood-soaked-secrets/) in which 5,000
people were killed, became president in 2021.

The young woman protesting in Istanbul lists a number of other grievances: “The daughters
and granddaughters of our politicians, who live in the US or the UK, are free. They pose half
naked on social media. (https://www.instagram.com/therichkidsoftehran/) Yet we are not free,
we have no rights, we have no opportunities, and we are getting poorer by the day”.
Some observers are already talking of Iran’s first women-led revolution. But, as Azadeh
Pourzand, human rights advocacy officer at Impact Iran, points out, Iranian women have been
involved in all the uprisings over the last century.

“Women have always been among the vanguard during most protests in contemporary Iran,
be it at the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, the Green Movement (2009), or the nationwide
protests of December 2017, January 2018 and November 2019,” Pourzand, who is also executive
director of the Siamak Pourzand Foundation for freedom of expression, set up in honour of her
father, a journalist and prisoner of conscience who committed suicide in 2011 while under
house arrest, tells Equal Times.

The women’s rights movement “is also one of the oldest and strongest grassroots movements,
going back a hundred years, despite the Islamic Republic’s violent repression over the past
four decades”, she adds. The history of this movement
(https://go.owu.edu/~aamahdi/Iranian%20Women%20Movement%20A%20Century%20Long%20Struggle.p
goes back even further than the Constitutional Revolution (1905-11), when women began to
demand access to education.

Following the 1921 coup d’état led by Reza Shah Pahlavi (monarch from 1925-41), a number of
radical secular reforms were introduced, including the emancipation of women and the
removal of clerical privileges. In a bid to modernise the country, Pahlavi ordered his soldiers to
strip women of their veils, even at gunpoint, and men of their turbans. Religious students who
protested were gunned down in the streets. Despite the dynasty’s heavy-handedness and
corruption, its liberal reforms paved the way for the Family Protection Act (1966), and women
won the right to vote in 1965. Imposed secularism, however, fuelled a radical religious and anti-
Western backlash, and when Khomeini took power women’s rights were abolished and the
hijab was made mandatory and remains so to this day.

Pourzand points to what distinguishes the current revolution

from previous ones. “It has two key features: the central role of
women’s rights and the overlap with the fundamental demands
and grievances of the rest of the nation.”

“Although the protests were sparked by the death of Mahsa Amini, and opposition to the
mandatory hijab and the morality police, the demands have now grown into calls for a change
of regime,” she continues.

Another key element is “...the critical role of Generation Z, without whose courage and
incredible sense of grassroots mobilisation we would not be where we are today in terms of the
progress made in the struggle. These protests are a monumental event in the Iran of today and
I believe they mark a before and after in the country,” says Pourzand.

The average age of the protesters is just over 18. “This young generation has said, ‘We’re
screwed’, and they’re taking the lead because they don’t see a future. One salary per
household is not enough and they can’t leave the country, like we did, or lead a normal life.
They have nothing to lose and have said: Enough of this,’” says Kaveh Nematipour. “In 2009, we
were soft compared to them. In my day, we could go to a European university but, now, you
have to be rich to do that. It costs €8,000 for a European visa.”

The young people’s desire for freedom is resonating with an impoverished population, unable
to make a living, rampant inflation of 80 per cent and corrosive corruption that cannot be
hidden from view on social media.
Analysts and protesters agree that the violence is not likely to cease in the coming months and
more reprisals and killings are expected, as the regime has made it clear that the hijab is non-
negotiable. If the veil falls, the ayatollahs fall.

This article has been translated from Spanish by Louise Durkin

Suggested reading

The slow but unstoppable social transformation of Iran and Saudi Arabia
(the-slow-but-unstoppable-social)

“Iranian workers are not only deprived of their wages but of their basic
rights”
(iranian-workers-are-not-only)