The modern history of Iran is the history of its resistance movements, each of which has women at the centre
On 16 September 2022, a journalist broke the news from Kasra Hospital in Tehran that a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman named Jina Mahsa Amini had died as a result of injuries she had sustained while in police custody. Amini had been apprehended by Iran’s Guidance Patrol for a loosely fitted headscarf that showed what the state’s authorities deemed to be too much of her hair.
Amini’s death sparked a revolutionary uprising across and outside Iran at a scale seldom seen before. The very next day, her family and the women in attendance at her funeral in their hometown of Saqez in Kurdistan Province, removed their headscarves in protest chanting “Jin, Jian, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom in Farsi) and “Marg Bar Dictator” (Death to the Dictator) as they marched down to the governor’s building. The protests soon spread to university campuses in Tehran.
The next few days we witnessed protests in big cities and metropolitan areas of the country as well as in smaller rural regions, led by young women and girls in their early and late teens as well as by marginalised ethnic and religious minorities, university students, struggling workers and the unemployed.
'Jin, Jian, Azadi'
The emphasis is on 'Jin, Jian, Azadi' (Kurdish for Woman, Life, Freedom) —a call for ending the tyranny of compulsory second-class citizenship imposed on women in Iran, a call to end the policing of women’s bodies, and a call for universal political freedoms, the freedom to decide one’s dress, one’s way of life, one’s fate, and one’s government. It’s a struggle for autonomy, equality, and democracy.
Women have always played, and continue to play, an incredibly significant role in Iranian politics. We can trace modern feminist movements in Iran back to the time of the constitutional revolution at the turn of the 20th century. Unfortunately, it is between 1905-1911, during this revolution, that we see the beginnings of today’s gender apartheid system start to take hold. Prior to this development, the clergy was not involved in Iranian politics. They had had a broad base of support across the population but they weren’t a fixture within the political apparatus. It was during this period that a few concessions were offered in the clergy’s favor.
The most important of these was the enshrining of a national religion which meant that the clergy and the ‘Ithna Ashari’ branch of Shia jurisprudence would gain control over the country’s family laws. Iranian women were active in, yet sidelined from, the very constitutional movement that they had helped to bring about, with women remaining the subjects of their fathers and husbands until they won suffrage in 1963.
It was also as early as 1907 that Iranian feminists undertook the difficult grassroots work of opening dedicated schools for young women and girls, and they saw quite a bit of success in their efforts, especially in the capital of Tehran. But they had to deal with obstacles and challenges from the male-dominated political apparatus. The monarch Reza Shah Pahlavi (1925–44), pursued an aggressive modernisation campaign that, by 1936, included the disastrous decision to politicise women’s bodies by outlawing the veil (or rossari). This conflicted with feminists’ efforts to educate young women and girls, especially those belonging to more traditional and religious families. Many of them pulled their daughters out of the same schools that the women had fought so hard to bring to fruition. This disastrous law also served as a crucial political precedent in that it politicised women’s bodies, with subsequent governments aiming to write their competing visions for modernity on and through women’s bodies.
After the ‘Revolution’
The 1979 revolution greatly impacted gender rights and women’s liberties in Iran. First, it’s important to note that women were agents of the revolution, not its passive recipients. Women were very much at the forefront of the opposition to the tyranny of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran. They were in favor of a democratic revolution that would realise full citizenship for women together with substantive and equal rights. To understand women’s opposition to the monarchy, it is crucial to note that the Shah’s dictatorship had descended into an outright police state armed with a deadly secret police— the SAVAK. The Shah’s rule had, in decades prior to 1979, effectively sidelined and silenced all independent voices within his own cabinet and administration, including prominent women’s voices. Worse yet, beginning in 1963, the Shah pursued an aggressive series of reforms often referred to as the ‘White Revolution,’ which was essentially grafted onto the lives of a disenfranchised population.
The real tragedy is that these included a number of important gender reforms that the women’s movement had long been fighting for. Things such as progressive changes to the family laws, the right to vote, maternity leave, daycare provisions, legal, safe abortions and so on. But because these reforms were prematurely imposed onto a disenfranchised populace who had no political powers and were also fully divorced from feminists’ grassroots consciousness-raising efforts, the move backfired. By 1979, these reforms came to be associated with the Shah’s oppressive, brutal, and imperialist rule. So much so that it gave Ayatollah Khomeini, who returned from exile in 1979, the very ideological ammunition he needed to weave together his particularly misogynistic brand of theocratic populism.
This brings us to the third and final regime of the 20th century, that of the theocratic regime. It was born out of the popular revolution of 1979 but which was consolidated in favor of the clerics by way of a post-revolutionary coup. At this juncture, Khomeini, who had done nothing of substance to lay the groundwork for the revolution, stepped in at an opportune time, and masterfully weaved together a populist rhetoric against the Shah.
Khomeini’s rhetoric was that Iranian society had been subjected to imperialist domination, not in an economic or militaristic fashion, but in a cultural manner. Specifically, here we get the image of the ‘Westoxified’ woman, the women of my mother’s generation wearing so-called western garb, who in his twisted worldview, were symptomatic of a “societal disorder.” And so, in Khomeini’s view, any popular anti-imperialist revolution, such as what we witnessed in 1979, had to put the Iranian woman in her ‘place’. And this is a very rigid place determined by the vision of a handful of clerics. This is why the constitution that Khomeini devised spelled out the different roles of women in the preamble. There are no such roles defined for men in the 1979 constitution.
My sense is that the reality for many of these different constituencies across Iran—an intersectional contingent of women, workers, students, and ethnic minorities—the killing of Amini embodied the kind of oppression and violence they had experienced at the hands of the current regime. Each of these constituencies sees a bit of themselves in Amini’s tragedy. Suffice to say that it rightly hit home for a broad swathe of the populace, whether they identified as women or as Kurds in Iranian society.
There is no doubt that the uprising has the Iranian government worried. From my last count, at least 160 cities and towns across all 31 of Iran’s provinces have seen crowds of defiant protesters take to the streets. Despite harsh internet shutdowns, mobile app censorship and bandwidth throttling, we’ve seen hundreds of videos emerge of unarmed protesters staring down militarised riot police while burning headscarves and calling for an end to the Islamic Republic.
(As told to Rakhi Bose)
(This appeared in the print as "Resistance Street")
Sara Hassani is an Iranian-Canadian professor, currently teaching Women’s and gender studies at Providence College, USA