Iranian women say enough

En­e­mies of the au­thor­i­ties

The wildest protests of an en­tire gen­er­a­tion come as a re­sponse to decades of con­trol and re­pres­sion, with women as the main vic­tims. The im­po­si­tion of the hijab since the Is­lamic Rev­o­lu­tion of 1979 is only a small part of a story that is get­ting worse. Iran­ian pres­i­dent Ebrahim Raisi last month an­nounced that the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards would begin using fa­cial recog­ni­tion tech­nol­ogy to pros­e­cute women who did not abide by the rule. These cam­eras, lo­cated in the streets and on the un­der­ground, make it pos­si­ble for the au­thor­i­ties to hunt down of­fend­ers and sen­tence them with up to 10 years in prison. “Every time I leave home, I’m ter­ri­fied,” said one telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions com­pany em­ployee speak­ing to Reuters in Tehran: “These cam­eras are every­where.”

This hu­mil­i­a­tion of women en­com­passes all spheres of life. The regime has warned that those who ap­pear on so­cial media with their hair un­cov­ered may be fined and lose their jobs. Some women have been forced to apol­o­gise on na­tional tele­vi­sion after being jailed by the moral­ity po­lice. Those ar­rested can­not be re­leased until they are col­lected by a legal guardian, who in all cases must be a man from their fam­ily.

“I sup­port these protests and I’m not ex­ag­ger­at­ing when I say every­one I know does,” says Mar­jan, an Iran­ian from Tehran, where she lived a good part of her life. She is now 35 years old and re­sides in the United States, es­cap­ing the iso­la­tion to which Iran­ian au­thor­i­ties con­demn their cit­i­zens. The in­ter­net out­ages that the regime has re­cently im­posed to con­tain the riots be­hind closed doors also make it dif­fi­cult to main­tain con­tact with sources on the ground. “I spent a year and a half in Iran in 2019 and felt there would be a fem­i­nist rev­o­lu­tion soon; the force of the re­pres­sion was enor­mous,” Mar­jan says. This econ­o­mist by pro­fes­sion, who left the coun­try be­cause there were things she could not ac­cept “from a misog­y­nis­tic regime”, ex­plains that young peo­ple are lead­ing the protests: “They are fed up with it, be­cause they know that life in the rest of the world is not like in Iran. They look around and want to live bet­ter,” she says.

The renowned ac­tivist Hoda Katebi uses sim­i­lar terms to ex­press her­self, also from the United States: “As an Iran­ian Amer­i­can who chooses to wear the hijab, I am en­raged by the way the Iran­ian state ex­ploits my iden­tity to main­tain power,” Katebi writes: “This is not about Islam or ap­ply­ing moral­ity, but about im­pos­ing the power of the state.”

The in­crease in re­pres­sion has come at the hands of Ebrahim Raisi, who has held the post of pres­i­dent of the coun­try since June last year, when he won an elec­tion that seemed fab­ri­cated to pave his way to power. The Supreme Leader of the Per­sian na­tion, Ay­a­tol­lah Ali Khamenei, ve­toed all nom­i­na­tions not part of the ul­tra­con­ser­v­a­tive plat­form. The re­jec­tion of renowned fig­ures and ac­cep­tance of can­di­dates of mediocre rep­u­ta­tion seemed to be, in the eyes of many vot­ers, a strat­egy to cat­a­pult Raisi, a cleric with a tra­di­tion­al­ist pro­file close to the Supreme Leader, to power.

Raisi’s tra­jec­tory is stained with blood. The cur­rent Iran­ian pres­i­dent had pre­vi­ously held mul­ti­ple po­si­tions in the ju­di­cial sys­tem. When Khamenei him­self ap­pointed him leader of that power in 2019, the United States launched sanc­tions against Raisi al­leg­ing human rights vi­o­la­tions, in­clud­ing the ex­e­cu­tion of more than 4,500 po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers in 1988.

The thou­sands of men and women cur­rently stand­ing up to the au­thor­i­ties are risk­ing their lives, and they know it. The prece­dents are not good. At the 2019 demon­stra­tions, two in­te­rior min­istry of­fi­cials told the press that the death toll rose to 1,500 peo­ple in less than two weeks. At that time, the pres­i­dent was Has­san Rouhani, whom some con­sider to be of a more mod­er­ate pro­file. Now, with Raisi in power and en­joy­ing Khamenei’s un­con­di­tional sup­port, no one ex­pects the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards to opt for any­thing other than bru­tal vi­o­lence. At the mo­ment, they have cut off in­ter­net ac­cess in the coun­try so that the world does not see them.

The cir­cle closes

“I was in­volved in the rev­o­lu­tion that put this regime in power. I was very ex­cited about kick­ing the shah out,” Sheyda told this mag­a­zine’s Cata­lan sis­ter pub­li­ca­tion, La Re­pub­lica, again from the US. At that time, she was 17 years old. At 21, she turned away from her fam­ily and her coun­try to leave be­hind the rules im­posed by the Is­lamic Re­pub­lic: “I was so tired of it.”

“The op­pres­sion of women is an es­sen­tial issue with this regime, but per­haps this is also its fun­da­men­tal weak­ness,” Sheyda analy­ses. She says most Ira­ni­ans do not sup­port the regime and that ad­vanc­ing women’s rights has now reached so­cial con­sen­sus. “The last two up­ris­ings have been pla­cated with hun­dreds and hun­dreds of dead, im­pris­oned and tor­tured. The pro­test­ers know how it works, but I don’t think they care any­more,” she says poignantly.

How­ever, she also ad­mits that both she and her fel­low cit­i­zens are ter­ri­fied: “We know what this regime is ca­pa­ble of,” she warns. She ex­plains that au­to­crats in that part of the world force the pop­u­la­tion to choose “be­tween a sta­ble dic­ta­tor­ship and ab­solute chaos”, and re­grets that the mi­gra­tory move­ment of thou­sands of refugees be­tween coun­tries in the re­gion means that their re­spec­tive trau­mas serve as a prece­dent: “We have heard too many Syr­i­ans in refugee camps say the rev­o­lu­tion was a mis­take,” she de­clares mourn­fully. She also men­tions the cases of Egypt, Afghanistan and Iraq. “We don’t want to be next,” Sheyda re­marks fear­fully.