Kamal Ghorui
Protests were at inflection point… then US-Israel attacked
With negotiations to end the Iran war in limbo, there is much speculation about the status of the Iranian regime. Are there cracks or is the regime holding? More important, what do ordinary Iranians want? Battered by the conflict, is there now a rupture between Iranians and ayatollahs?Or has the regime solidified further?
Answers to these questions are complex. But in What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom, author Arash Azizi, suggests that Iranian civil society may have already crossed a threshold. For, it would be a mistake to view the nationwide anti-regime movement, which was sparked by the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in the hands of Iran’s morality police, as an isolated event. Neither was it just about the hijab, which Mahsa was accused of improperly wearing. It was a coming together of multiple forces, building up for four decades, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
The hijab issue has been a point of contention since 1979. Back then, Ayatollah Khomeini had made clear his views on the Islamic dress code for women. The diktat was met with stiff opposition, especially in Iran’s urban centres. Many secular and Left-leaning Iranian activists, who had also opposed the Shah, made their displeasure clear about Khomeini’s obscurantist views. But, despite these protests, the anti-hijab movement was largely viewed as a side issue.
For example, Homa Nateq, a French-educated Leftist historian at University of Tehran, infamously said that wearing the hijab was the price for getting rid of imperialism. Years later, she would rue her words, from exile in UK, saying that she was wrong, and that “someone who tells you what to wear will soon also tell you what to think.”
But Iranian women, throughout the decades, resisted the hijab in their quiet way. Mahsa’s death became an inflection point, says the author, because it drew in people from all walks of Iranian life. Iran has had a significant history of trade unionism, despite the regime’s efforts to crush this – union leaders were jailed, beaten up, even killed. But as protests around Mahsa’s death gripped Iran, Isfahan steelworkers, and other labour unions joined in.
Their long-running demands (increased basic incomes, guaranteed jobs, end to crony privatisation) may have seemed apolitical. But they extended their support to the Women, Life, Freedom movement as part of a national awakening. Likewise, Iranian film industry and writers’ associations, long bearing the brunt of Iran’s censorship laws (actresses’ earlobes were taped for ‘modesty’, a film was censored because it showed the rear end of buffaloes), were quick to join protests in 2022-23. This time, they were saying enough is enough.
From Iran’s remote Sistan-Balochistan province – its poorest – to the Kurdistan regions, from pensioners to conservationists, who were deploring the precarious status of the Persian cheetah due to rampant environmental destruction in the name of development, all Iranians came together for the Women, Life, Freedom movement, per the author. This is what the regime had long feared – divide and rule had been its policy. The Pandora’s Box of Iranian unity had been opened, and it would keep unsettling the regime, until it changed.
Which begs the question: Has the US-Israel war against Iran strengthened the anti-regime movement or helped the regime? Given the regime’s multiple, and growing, domestic problems, perhaps this conflict is exactly what the ayatollahs wanted, and had prepared for.
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