Pivotal moment as many Iranians unite in outrage over death in custody

Friday, 23 September 2022

Protesters chant slogans during a protest over the death of Mahsa Amini in the Iranian capital, Tehran, this week.

Donna Miles is an Iranian-Kiwi writer based in Christchurch

OPINION: It is hard to write about what is happening in Iran at the moment without being consumed by seething anger over the regime’s treatment of women.

In fact, it is the eruption of collective anger that has caused the current wave of protests all over Iran.

What triggered this eruption was the death in custody of 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by the morality police for not fully covering her hair.

For 43 years, Iranian women have suffered from the backward patriarchal ideologies of a regime which measures the strength of its autocratic power by how much hair women are showing in public.

A woman burns a hijab during a protest against the death of Mahsa Amini, outside Iran’s general consulate in Istanbul on Wednesday.

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Donna Miles: “Young men and women are literally putting their bodies on the line, knowing full well that they are facing a regime that has killed thousands of protesters in the past.”

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The introduction of compulsory hijab, shortly after the 1979 revolution, was the first step in the suppression of women in Iran. But its introduction didn’t pass without protest. On International Women's Day, March 8, 1979, more than 100,000 women took to the streets to participate in anti-compulsory hijab protests that lasted for six days.

I was too young to be allowed to participate, but my older female cousin, and her university friends, all attended the protests, with the slogan: 'We didn’t have a revolution to go backwards'. But this is exactly what the revolution did. It turned the clock back on women’s rights and acted regressively on the advantages women had gained in previous decades.

In today’s Iran, women cannot travel abroad without the permission of a father or husband, are denied custody of their children if they remarry, can only inherit an eighth of their husband’s estate, cannot divorce, except under special circumstances, and are faced with one of the world's worst gender pay gaps. There is little doubt that the Islamic Republic, with its laws cemented in the male interpretation of Sharia jurisprudence, has rendered women second-class citizens in Iran.

Despite frequent setbacks and brutal state repression, women have continued to struggle for their legal and social rights. But so far, no Iranian government, no matter how moderate, has been prepared to change the compulsory hijab laws, despite many Islamic scholars’ assertion that forcible veiling has no basis in Islam. Clerics in Iran fear that easing restrictions on women will open the floodgates to more civil freedoms, and ultimately, the unravelling of their power.

Many of the men and women currently protesting in Iran are too young to have experienced the country pre-revolution. In the Iran I grew up in, women dressed freely and enjoyed many civil rights. So imagine our shock when veiling in public became compulsory.

Many of us still carry the trauma of the early years of the revolution when lawlessness and chaos unleashed terror on women. I witnessed a shocking incident when a random man walked up to a young woman and slapped her hard across the face because she was wearing lipstick. He did this while yelling insults at her, calling her a whore and a disgrace to the memory of the martyrs of the revolution. No-one in the busy street dared to intervene, fearing the wrath of a violent revolutionary mob drunk on power. We all stood there stunned, silent and ashamed of our own impotence, while the young woman sobbed uncontrollably.

The events of the past few days have proved to me that the sense of impotence we felt then is well and truly disappearing. People have had enough and have woken up to their own power to hold the regime to account for its brutality and state violence. The extreme courage women are showing by removing their hijabs in public and, in some cases, setting them on fire, is truly astonishing and one that will be told in history books. Young men and women are literally putting their bodies on the line, knowing full well that they are facing a regime that has killed thousands of protesters in the past.

It is hard to tell if the current protests will lead to any meaningful change in Iran, but all agree that rarely have Iranians been so united in their sense of disgust and outrage, than over the needless death of young Mahsa Amini.

It is particularly encouraging to see Kurdish women at the forefront of the protests. It was in the Kurdistan region of Iran that the first meaningful resistance over her death began, and also where the current popular slogan “woman, life and liberty” originated.

Just as the suppression of women was the first act towards creating a dictatorship in Iran, the liberation of women has to be the first step towards achieving true democracy there. I see hope in this movement, but fear that any foreign intervention, including increased sanctions and threat of war, will do what they have done in the past, which is to undermine civil society and empower the country’s most authoritarian forces. What Iranians need from us most is our solidarity and a chance to have their voices heard.