Since mid-September, people across all age groups, ethnicities, classes and genders in Iran have been protesting resolutely and in solidarity for their rights. The trigger was the violent death of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini, who was arrested by Iran's morality police because she was not wearing her hijab "properly." Journalist Gilda Sahebi explains why feminist world history is being made in Iran right now and why the protesters' push for freedom and equality is nothing Western.
In her book "My Iran," Shirin Ebadi recounts the morning she opened the daily newspaper Enghelab-e Eslami - translated: Islamic Revolution, not a particularly creative name. From the newspaper, the future Nobel Peace Prize winner learned that her life and that of all women in Iran would change in one fell swoop. The newspaper contained a draft of the Islamic penal code, a new set of laws that would implement the supposedly Islamic moral concepts of the new rulers. In her book, she writes, "The horrific laws I was to spend the rest of my life fighting against stared back at me from the paper."
She enumerates what these laws entailed: A woman's life was to be worth only half of a man's. If a woman died in a car accident, her family would receive only half the financial compensation as a man's family. From now on, it also took two women to outweigh a man's testimony in court. Women in Iran, according to the body of laws, also needed their husband's permission to get a divorce. And much more. "In short, the laws turned the clock back 1400 years to the early days of the spread of Islam," Shirin Ebadi writes in her book.
Like Shirin Ebadi, millions of Iranian women woke up from one day to the next in a dystopian world. For example, Ebadi describes how, if a day earlier she was in an equal marriage with her husband, she now became a "legal chattel" while her husband could remain a "person." The forced veiling, which is so often the topic of discussion in today's protests in Iran, was and is only the outward embodiment of the humiliation and disenfranchisement of all women in Iran.
The story of Shirin Ebadi explains the anger that has been seen on the streets of Iran since mid-September. It explains the passion with which women are taking the hijab off their heads, tucking it away, swinging it in the air, throwing it into the fire. It explains the courage that makes people, women, men, LGBTIQ people, protest, knowing that it can cost them their freedom and their lives. Because: they know that something has been taken away from them. Something that is rightfully theirs. The systematic oppression of women, which ultimately affects and restricts the freedom of all people, is not something God-given or even "normal" for the people of Iran - but it is the result of decisions made by a squad of fundamentalist clerics.
The urge for freedom is nothing Western
What is happening in Iran is feminist world history. And it is happening regardless of what the course of this history is. Because what the women in Iran are proving in the fall of 2022 is that the inner urge of women for freedom, for sexual self-determination, and their claim to fundamental women's rights is not something that comes from the "West." After centuries of colonization of the region of the so-called Middle East, the image of societies that are backward is still being painted in Europe and North America. This message does not reach us expressis verbis (unless it comes from the far right). Instead, it is packaged in images that reach us via the daily news and adorn the covers of news magazines. On which one always sees the chaotic, packed bazaars, never the modern offices. On which you see women in submissive or unassuming poses, but never gripping, determined. This message is wrapped up in political debates, for example, when former Foreign Minister Heiko Maas, in a speech in the Bundestag on the withdrawal of the Bundeswehr in June 2021, explains what Germany has "achieved" in Afghanistan. Afghan civil society had become "more self-confident" and "aware" of its rights "during this time. Human rights are enshrined in the constitution, he said, and women lead "much freer lives." Here it is again, the implicit message: We, the West, bring freedom, human rights, women's rights to those in the Middle East. We are teaching them something.
Now the people, especially the women, in Iran are showing it: we don't need you to understand what human rights are. They not only understand it, they are putting their lives on the line to finally regain it. The web is flooded with images of schoolgirls engaged in civil resistance. One picture shows young schoolgirls from behind, their hijabs removed, their long dark hair falling down their backs as they hold hands. On the school blackboard they have written, "For my sister, your sister, our sister." Sisterhood at its best, shown by girls born in a state that forbade them to do just that from an early age. And yet they have grown up knowing from generations of women before them that the only way for women to be free is through solidarity with and among each other.
We are all called Mahsa Amini
Such is the story of a schoolgirl on ARD's Weltspiegel. In her school class, she takes off her obligatory hijab, and the teacher threatens to kick her out of school for it. When he asks her name, she says: Mahsa Amini. And then all the other students stand up and say: We are also called Mahsa Amini.
This solidarity, and this is new, runs through all age groups, through all ethnicities, through all classes - and even through all genders: woman, life, freedom, the "most feminine and civilized slogan that unites women and men from Tehran to Kurdistan," as women's rights activist Mansoureh Shojaee put it to Handelsblatt. It is as if 43 years of violent patriarchy have not only failed to eradicate this almost primordial knowledge of the strength of solidarity, of sisterhood - but have allowed it to grow in these women and girls. The death of Jina Mahsa Amini has unleashed this power in many people.
Throughout the region, people are watching, transfixed, what is happening in Iran. Unlike us in the West, they are not surprised that Iranians are fighting for women's rights, for human rights. Rather, they are surprised that it is having an effect, that the regime is shaking, and above all that people are not stopping fighting - no matter how brutally the protests are put down. They see regime forces shooting indiscriminately at people and even into homes in the streets. They see young girls who remove the hijab being arrested, tortured, raped and killed.
But they also see that the families of these young people are not silent, but are calling on everyone else to continue. Like the mother of Nika Shakarami, a 15-year-old teenager who was brutally killed and presumably tortured and raped beforehand. Her mother held up a picture of Nika to the camera on October 2, Nika's birthday and a few days after her death, and congratulated her on her birthday and she was proud that her daughter had become a "martyr" for freedom.
From Kabul to Tehran: "Women, Life, Freedom."
People in the region are seeing that Iranians* are not going to be bludgeoned, despite the almost unimaginable violence the regime is inflicting on its own people. The protest movement in Iran is already showing the power of fighting for rights that the leaders of these countries, whether in Afghanistan or Iran, dismiss with contempt. In late September, Afghan women gathered outside the Iranian Embassy in Kabul, holding up protest signs and chanting, "Women, Life, Freedom" and "From Kabul to Iran, say no to dictatorship!" France 24 quotes one of the women as saying, "We must put an end to these terrible governments. The people here are also tired of the crimes of the Taliban. We are sure that our people will rise up just like the Iranian people."
Imagine the power that could be unleashed should the Iranian regime actually fall.
It could be the beginning of an upheaval in the history of this region that leads to people throwing off the shackles that colonialism and one dictatorial ruler after another have put on them. How long such an upheaval will take, months, years, decades, no one can predict. One thing is certain: they have the power. The power to return to what all people desire, regardless of origin, regardless of gender, regardless of location: freedom, equality and sisterhood.
Background:
Jina Mahsa Amini was Kurdish Iranian (Jina is her Kurdish given name). On September 13, 2022, she was arrested by the morality police in Tehran for not wearing her headscarf properly. A short time later, she died in a hospital as a result of brutal violence. The violent death of Jina Mahsa Amini sparked nationwide protests against the Iranian regime that continue. Since then, under the slogan "Jin, Jiyan, Azadi" (Kurdish for "Women, Life, Freedom"), people across all age groups, ethnicities, classes and genders have been protesting courageously and resolutely for freedom, self-determination and equal rights.
This article first appeared here: heimatkunde.boell.de