In Iran, ‘Ordinary Women’ Lead an Extraordinary Movement

One year has passed since the tragic death of Mahsa (Jina) Amini in police custody, the event that ignited the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. This movement has provided a platform for acknowledging the enduring struggles of ordinary women in Iran, a battle that had been ongoing long before September 16, 2022. By “ordinary women,” I refer to individuals outside the elite and activist spectrum, adapting from sociologist Asef Bayat’s definition of “ordinary people” in his book Revolutionary Life. The struggles of ordinary women in Iran were often ignored or sidelined until last year. While I respect the efforts of all women’s rights activists dedicated to improving women’s rights in Iran, I believe the “Mahsa movement” stands on the shoulders of ordinary women, many of whom may not belong to the middle class or possess feminist knowledge, but who are undeniably fighting for the freedom to lead ordinary lives.

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement has induced cultural transformations within society and families in Iran. Many parents who previously advised their daughters to accept the mandatory hijab as a “minor issue” have now thrown their support behind their daughters’ quest for freedom of choice. The presence of women with uncovered hair has become more widely accepted. Women feel safer going out without the hijab. As one woman told me, “before the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, when I went out without hijab, I felt I was breaking social norms and that I was doing something weird in the eyes of society. But now I feel safe and know if somebody scolds me about the hijab, other people in the streets will come to protect me.’’ These cultural changes in the Iranian society are not limited to the hijab issue. The status of women within families has largely changed, and more women are gaining autonomy.

One of the most intriguing aspects of the Mahsa movement is the newfound overt support from men. Women have historically borne the brunt of struggles against a patriarchal society and state, but the Mahsa movement marks a turning point where men have joined in supporting women’s causes. Whether this support will extend to other women’s issues, such as unequal inheritance and divorce laws, remains to be seen.

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement has also significantly transformed the subjectivity of ordinary women. It has united women with shared experiences and pain, reminding them that they are not alone. While there have always been small support networks among women, this movement has elevated this solidarity to a national (and international) scale. In one instance, I saw a police officer who wanted to confiscate a vendor’s goods in the Tehran subway. Women inside the wagon rushed to save the vendor, pulling her and her goods inside. The collective struggle to reclaim public spaces has emboldened women, many of whom now proclaim, “I have become braver.”

But the Mahsa movement has not been limited to women’s rights alone. The movement initially protested against mandatory hijab but, like an umbrella, it now encompasses a range of other issues in Iran, including the unbearable economic challenges and ethnic and religious discrimination. Protesters have also been calling for the overthrow of the Islamic Republic. Yet, the state’s brutal suppression of these protests underscores the complexity of achieving political goals such as regime change. According to Jack Goldstone, a scholar of social movements, the Mahsa movement continues to lack some of the key factors needed for a full-scale revolution, such as an organised programme and the involvement of older generations.

The conflict between Iranian authorities and Iranian women dates back to the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979, when women’s rights were among the first to be compromised. Women did come to the streets to protest against the enactment of the compulsory hijab law and abrogation of the family protection law in March 1979—but the state prevailed in curtailing women’s rights. Four decades later, despite various policies, ideological education, and unequal laws aimed at curbing their economic, social, and political opportunities, Iranian girls and women are trying to break free from traditional gender roles.

What is undeniable today is the Iranian women’s desire for both “freedom” and an “ordinary life.” These two desires resonate strongly in my conversations with many Iranian women from around the country. Iranian women have made strides in education despite numerous obstacles. They are rising against gender-based oppression and have exhibited remarkable resilience in their quest. However, their economic participation remains disproportionately low, forcing many into the informal economy. Women are also denied the right to run for president, and the majority are disqualified to run for public office.

The Iranian state has persistently attempted to exclude women from various spheres, yet they persist in resisting. They aspire to careers as diverse as football referees, aerospace engineers, mathematicians, musicians, and much more. The evolving lifestyle of ordinary women highlights the failure of the Islamic Republic’s discourse in imposing gender roles. Their fight for the freedom to choose how they dress is just one aspect of the broader rights they seek. According to political scientist Fatemeh Sadeghi, the actions of Iranian women are not rooted in anger. Rather, they represent the transformation of anger into a force for change. Accordingly, political change, in their view, will emerge from social empowerment. These women are, in essence, revolutionaries without a revolution. They do not want to achieve freedom through revolution. They aim to achieve revolution through freedom.

Photo: Rouzbeh Fouladi

Iranian Women are Colliding with the Iranian State

On the day that Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s President, was giving a speech at the United Nations headquarters in New York about the double standards with which human rights are pursued around the world, a tear gas canister flew past me and hit a car that was parked a few metres away. I was among the protesters running down Palestine Street in the centre of Tehran, and the tear gas was being fired directly at us by anti-riot police. We were doing nothing more than shouting slogans, but any of us could have been severely injured or killed—this was not an isolated incident. According to human rights groups, more than 90 people have been killed in the ongoing protests across Iran. The protests were ignited by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while she was in the custody of the morality police. The authorities have responded to these protests with a brutal crackdown—beating, shooting, arresting—and an internet blackout that has blocked access to platforms such as WhatsApp and Instagram.

Twenty years ago, it would have been hard to imagine that dozens of cities in Iran would erupt in protests against imposed religious rules. The death of Zahara Bani Yaghuob, an Iranian medical doctor arrested by authorities in Hamedan in 2007, did not lead to widespread protests at the time. But the Iranian state is reaping what they have unintentionally sown. Despite rolling back some women’s rights, such as the Family Protection Law introduced under Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and imposing an Islamic dress code, after the revolution, a so-called Islamic educational system helped more women in rural and lower social classes to receive an education. While women in upper and middle social classes benefited from progressive laws prior to the revolution, traditional families, typically from disadvantaged backgrounds, felt more comfortable sending their daughters to school under Islamic laws. Today, women account for 60 percent of university students in Iran. It is no coincidence that Generation Z, now on the frontlines of the recent protests, are the children of Iran’s 1980s baby boomers. Generation Z’s parents were the first cohort to see a dramatic shift in the numbers of women receiving higher education in Iran.

A few hours before the tear gas canister nearly struck me on Palestine Street, I was passing security forces on Revolution Avenue when a man in plain clothes and a helmet came up to me and said, “Our cameras will capture your face. If I see you again in this area, you’ll get arrested.” “For what crime?” I asked. “No offence required,” he replied, “I have the power, and I’ll use it against you.”

The man’s boast is the key to understanding the recent protests in Iran. After Sepideh Rashnoo was harassed on a bus by a fellow citizen over her “improper” hijab in July, the dangerous power that had been delegated to pro-regime citizens became clearer. Iranians watched Rashnoo, a writer and artist, make a humiliating forced “confession” on national TV. In contrast to Rashnoo’s humiliation, the woman who harassed her over her hijab enjoyed a kind of authority bestowed upon her by the government.

Along with the morality police, the citizens who have been granted this authority stepped up their policing of the hijab rules since Raisi’s election, which was marred by record low turnout. The death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody has revealed the conflict between the Iranian government and citizens who do not want to comply with rules they believe infringe on their civil rights. There is significant disillusionment and profound doubt about the prospects of reforming a system that has shown zero interest in compromise. If the Green Movement’s slogans were full of verses from Qur’an and other Islamic references, the slogans heard in the recent protests contain no Islamic references and no requests for narrow reforms.

Despite the economic stagnation, systematic corruption, and mismanagement in recent years, economic grievances do not feature in the slogans either. The protests have coalesced around dissatisfaction about how the Iranian state relates to society. The protests that erupted after Mahsa Amini’s death emerged mainly from marginalised groups: Kurds who are an ethnic minority, the middle class which as encountered so much hostility from the government, women who are not even recognised or protected in the system if not wearing a hijab, and the working class who have witnessed widespread governmental corruption in the recent years.

While living under the strict rules of an increasingly authoritarian state, the future for these oppressed groups is grim—they see a dead end. Accordingly, for the Iranian authorities, the unification of these various social groups, which has happened for the first time since the 1979 revolution, poses a new challenge.

In recent years, Iran’s middle class has been shrinking because of international sanctions and economic decline. Still, they have had some spaces, such as social media and satellite television, to engage with progressive ideas on human rights. Long before the recent protests forced Iran’s national television to address the issue of compulsory hijab on their programmes, subjects such as the hijab, personal freedom, and gender politics have been debated on social media and foreign-based television channels before large audiences. In this way, two different worlds have coexisted and one is now crashing into the other.

Are we witnessing another revolution in Iran? It is hard to ascertain. Iran’s state ideology still has sincere supporters, not just at home but also across the region. Some analysts have pointed to the limited number of protesters to suggest the protests are a “virtual revolution” that exists only on social media. Still, a revolutionary turn does not necessarily depend on the number of active protesters; it arises from a dead-end situation. Following Ayatollah Khamenei’s speech in which he called the protests “riots” and blamed a foreign plot for the unrest, the obstruction has never been clearer.

Nevertheless, there is a movement in Iran. Motivated by their anger following Mahsa Amini’s death, a growing number of women who have found the courage to go out with their hair uncovered in public. For a political system that places enormous emphasis on women’s appearance, this is a profound form of protest. Iranian women, supported by the many men who have now joined them, are challenging the discrimination they have experienced for decades. They have already achieved a great victory by making their voice heard around the world.

Photo: EPA-EFE

Iranian Newspaper Editors Decry Trump's 'Immoral' Sanctions

In a remarkable joint editorial published Monday, the editors of four of Iran’s leading newspapers—Iran, Hamshahri, Etelaat, and Sazandegi—have invoked the United States Declaration of Independence to decry the reimposition of sanctions as a violation of the “unalienable rights” of the Iranian people to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

Published in both Persian and English, the editorial casts President Trump’s decision to leave the Iran nuclear deal and to reimpose sanctions as inconsistent with both the spirit of the US constitution and the letter of international law. Drawing extensively on the values of international liberalism and citing an intellectual legacy from “Thomas Jefferson to Francis Fukuyama,” the editorial serves as an example of the increasingly vocal position taken by Iranian editors and journalists when it comes to holding both the Iranian government and foreign governments to task for restrictions on freedom.

Most strikingly, the self-proclaimed “freethinking” and “freestanding” journalists question the claims of the Iranian and US governments alike. “The US government claims that its sanctions are targeted on Iranian governance, not on Iranian people, while Iranian government believes that the sanction would come to no harm,” note the editors. They forcefully disagree, arguing that “contrary to what governments claim, the US tyrannical sanctions have brought about destructive repercussions for the lives of millions of Iranian citizens who legitimately enjoy the right of life under optimal conditions.”

The criticism of the Iranian government’s line of sanctions is especially notable given that two of the four newspapers, Iran and Hamshahri, are affiliated with the presidency and the municipality of Tehran, respectively. Moreover, while Sazandegi is a reformist paper, Etelaat is known to have a conservative outlook, suggesting that the editorial position crosses political lines.

The editors explain that the “access to medicine, drugs and medical equipments” offers “obvious proof” that it is “children, women and men” who are “actually targeted by blind sanctions.” The recession caused by sanctions will see “many job opportunities lost” in industry and agriculture, effects that will “subsequently provoke escalation of poverty among the households, and these households are just those who constitute Iranian people.”

Citing the principles of the International Human Rights Charter, the recent ruling of the International Court of Justice, and the UN Charter’s provisions for the role of the Security Council in the “authorization of any coercive measure, including sanctions,” the editors detail how Trump’s reimposition of sanctions violates international law. This appeal to multilateral institutions and international legal norms, which are under attack by illiberal political movements around the world, is remarkable.

Looking to American leadership at large, the editors question the Trump administration’s might-makes-right approach to international affairs, asking “Is economic power and authority, by its very nature, sufficiently eligible to foreclose the authenticity of collective rationality, removing it from the processes of decision and policy-making in the international arena?” They also ask whether the “eccentric development” of Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal heralds an attempt to undermine the United Nations, “the highest institution in the world that works based on collective rationality and democratic values.”

The editorial ends with an exhortation to “free-thinking peers all around the globe” to “speak out in defense of the truth” lest the achievements of liberal thinkers including “Thomas Jefferson, John Dewey and Walter Lippmann to Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, John Stuart Mill, Friedrich Hayek and Karl Popper and to Isaiah Berlin, Hannah Arendt, Francis Fukuyama” be lost.

High-minded in both principles and style, the editorial is nonetheless an important expression of the kind of righteous indignation felt among many Iranians. For now, the imposition of sanctions is taking place without a clear justification—Iran continues to uphold its commitments under the JCPOA. As such, while there is anger over the Rouhani administration’s somewhat facile reassurances regarding the impact of sanctions, there is greater anger felt towards the Trump administration, which has appeared to cast aside the long-standing liberal principles of American leadership, simply to enact suffering on the Iranian people.

Photo Credit: Depositphotos