Unrest in Iran: Home

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Dozens of cities have been embroiled in protests that were prompted by a young woman’s death in custody but that have escalated amid anger over religious rules and a rock-bottom economy.

(New York Times Article)

Mahsa Amini, also known as Jina, died in police custody, igniting the protests & unrest in Iran.

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In Iran, Iranian women's struggle for rights parity, representation, and freedom of choice is at a tipping point. Protests are erupting across major cities like Tehran and through smaller cities and towns in the Kurdish areas.

The catalyst for these protests and eruptions was the arrest of Mahsa Amini, a 22 year-old Kurdish woman who did not have all of her hair covered. Iranian morality police, colloquially called the "hijab patrol", arrested her and sent her to a reeducation camp, when on September 16th she died in custody with the suspicion of beating by the camp police.

In Iran's history, the current protests do not have a parallel. The scale of the protests, the gender, ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity of the protestors, and the lack of geographic restriction makes this wave of protests markedly different.

Mahsa Amini's death has ignited protests across Iran. A common sight in these protests are women shirking their head coverings called hijab, which are mandated by Iran's conservative religious government. Protests on this scale have not been seen in Iran since 2009, when the Green Movement protests occurred after a commonly-believed rigged election.

Currently, many women are also cutting their hair and burning hijab in defiance of societal norms and the will of the ruling government. While such actions are in direct opposition to the government, and possibly more directly to the morality police, it is also a repudiation of the status quo, as well as a demand for broader socioeconomic and political reform.

The protests initially started in the city of Saqez, located in Kurdistan. The chanted slogan - "Women, Life, Freedom" - spreads along with protests across the province, soon after most of Iran, and now across the world. There are international protests around the world chanting the slogan and protesting for women's rights to body autonomy.

The renewed push in women's body autonomy sprouts from a complicated history of social action from Muslim women in Iran. The culture and societal norms surrounding the hijab is effused with aspects of patriarchy, conservatism, and tradition; however, it is also an avenue for women to enact social change, societal reform, and commentary on existing institutions.

Iran has a history of citizen protests. Historically, most of the protests were over constitutional revolution. Many protest slogans were alongside Socialist or Communist proclivities, such as the slogan "Bread, Work, Freedom", which was the main idea around Iran's 1979 governmental protests and inspired by the Russian revolutionary movement earlier in the century.

The current slogan for these protests is "Zan, Zendegi, Azadi" - "Women, Life, Freedom". While protests in the past were about constitutional qualms, this protest is about body autonomy of women. This slogan - Women, Life, Freedom - has gone viral and is being chanted across the world.

In 1978, leftist and Islamist factions in Iran protested governmental rule in a series of revolts and protests. Known as the Iranian Revolution, or the Islamic Revolution, it culminated in the overthrowing of the Pahlavi governmental dynasty, under Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, and installed an Islamist republic under Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

In 1998, the leader of the Kurdish emancipatory movement Abdullah Öcalan said in a speech women are the fist captives of history and until women are liberated any revolutionary movement will be doomed to fail. The movement Öcalan headed was the first to use the phrase "Women, Life, Freedom". The Kurdish people, who are part of one of the most economically impoverished sectors of Iran, have been at the center of many grassroots, neighborhood-by-neighborhood revolutionary and protest movements.

In 2009, the Green Movement protests - also known as the Green Wave of Iran, Persian Spring, or the Persian Awakening (similar to the Arab Spring) - demanded Mahmoud Ahmadinejad be removed from presidential office after the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election, which was viewed to be corrupt. A common refrain was "Give me back my vote!" That wave of protests were initiated by the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan, whose shooting by a Basij paramilitary soldier was digitally filmed and disseminated on the Internet. She became the rallying point and image of the Green Movement and the hashtag #neda trended on Twitter. This was one of the early situations of international news and media outlets covering an event such as the killing of Neda Agha-Soltan before state or local news did.

Issues around body autonomy of women have swirled around Iran and the Muslim World for decades. The aspects of colonialism, Western perspectives and lenses, racism, colonial and cultural (particularly Western) biases, and patriarchal barriers serve to color and define Muslim women's - Iranian women in particular - relationship to the veil, or hijab.