Iran’s women on freedom: ‘This cause won’t die’

The girls had already taken off their headscarves, in defiance of Iranian law. Then, in breaks between classes last week at their high school in Sanandaj, western Iran, they added their voices to nationwide protests, chanting demands for greater freedoms and an end to Iran’s theocratic rule.

As the students finished school and filed out – chanting again for the death of Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and for “Women, Life, Freedom” – two police vans were waiting.

Policemen pushed six girls into the vehicles, and drove them away.

They were freed the same night, after their parents were forced to sign pledges that their daughters would not protest again, or risk “consequences” such as expulsion.

“But they’ve been chanting the same slogans ever since,” says a geography teacher at the school in the ethnic Kurdish city, which has become an epicenter both of protests and of the crackdown that rights groups say has taken more than 200 lives in four weeks. “I don’t think anyone will be able to stop this generation.”

After the incident, one of the detained girls “sounded incredibly determined about the future” despite being maltreated by the police, says the teacher, adding that the girl told her “we are just at the beginning of the path.”

Neither the teacher, speaking by telephone from Iran, nor her student could be named, for fear of reprisals.   

The defiant reactions provide insight into the reason why the month-long women-led protests persist, morphing into one of the broadest challenges to the Iranian religious leadership in recent years.

Students and other protesters “want regime change because they believe dialogue with this [ruling] system has failed more than once and has already burned older generations,” says the geography teacher, in her late 30s. “And wow, aren’t they right?”

Women’s rights ... and more

Schools and universities have become focal points of the protests, which broke out after the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested and beaten by the so-called “morality police” for allegedly showing too much hair.

Raids on educational establishments, and arrests by police and staunchly ideological basij militia, have intensified.

WANA/Reuters

A police motorcycle burns during a protest in Tehran, Iran, Sept. 19, 2022, over the death of Mahsa Amini reportedly at the hands of "morality police."

Yet the protests have expanded well beyond the issue of women’s rights, into a more far-reaching contest, also fueled by economic grievances, between the aging religious leaders who rule the Islamic Republic and legions of citizens tired of their strict and intrusive rules, brutally enforced by militia.

The protests “are a plea and cry for a type of personal autonomy that many of the young generation have come to see as normal ... being able to walk in the street without being either harassed, or being arrested,” said Kian Tajbakhsh, an Iranian American political scientist at Columbia University in New York, who has twice been detained in Iran for lengthy periods.

Video footage shot in Iran shows continued defiance, violent clashes, and security forces shooting live ammunition to disperse crowds – actions that protesting Iranians contacted for this article say have only hardened their resolve.

“Basijis and riot police must be punished right on the street, because they have proven that they have no mercy on us, the defenseless. We should teach them a lesson,” says Minoo, a humanities student at Azad University in Tehran who asked not to give her family name.

The violence has prompted her, with her boyfriend and a few classmates, to begin making Molotov cocktails – three of which she says they threw into groups of police in recent days.

“We are there to bring down the regime, it’s now or never. After Mahsa our lives are no longer like they were, we are not the same people we were a month ago,” says Minoo.

Her name a symbol

The protests began with the death of Ms. Amini, who witnesses say was severely beaten after her arrest for allowing too much hair to peep out from her headscarf. Such enforcement has been stepped up since hard-line President Ebrahim Raisi took office in August 2021. Authorities deny any abuse, but prevented the family from seeing the body before burial.

Painted in blue across her simple concrete gravestone in her home village of Saqqez are words that use Mahsa’s Kurdish name: “Dear Zhina – you haven’t died, your name will turn into a symbol.”

Iran’s mandatory hijab laws make Iran “utterly exceptional,” matched only by the Taliban’s Afghanistan, said Dr. Tajbakhsh, the analyst, speaking during a webinar on Tuesday. Today, in a sophisticated nation such as Iran, the laws are “such an anachronism that it has almost become like an embarrassment,” he added.

“This is a [young] generation that has grown up only within the confines of the ideological parameters of the Islamic Republic of Iran,” he said. “So the idea that this generation is turning its back on the values that it grew up in – that it was indoctrinated in, so to speak – must rattle the leadership of the regime.”

The result has been a strident debate about hijab, which has long been a pillar of the Islamic Republic. When a former reformist mayor suggested on state-run television in the first days of protest that 70% to 80% of Iranian women rejected mandatory hijab, the editor of a hard-line newspaper acknowledged that strict enforcement would require jailing or fining 20 million women.

Another hard-line pundit in the same debate, Sadeq Koushki, said “public opinion doesn’t count,” because wearing hijab “is the law of God.”

“Inspiring all of us”

The violence used by police as they round up protesters appears to have had little effect on the unrest, other than to radicalize some of the demonstrators.

“We are not backing off,” says a student at the prestigious Sharif University of Technology, who calls himself Yasser. “Many students here at Sharif are ready to take this battle to the end, even if they have to get armed at some point. This is a war that must have a winner. We are at the final stage.”

Such determination is recognizable back in Sanandaj, where teachers never expected police to show up on their school doorstep.

“I am from that older generation,” says the geography teacher, “and look at me – a bullied woman who hasn’t been able to stand up for her rights. But [the girls] are inspiring all of us now. The Islamic Republic has invited them into this war and victory is for our girls.”

How can she have such high expectations, when Iranian authorities have a successful track record of violently suppressing all previous protests?

“A ruling system that adopts such cowardly measures like attacking and arresting teenage schoolgirls is definitely counting its days,” she says.

“We do know they are brutal,” the teacher says of the police, “but I couldn’t imagine they would go to that length in spreading fear.

“Has it worked? My experience with these robust, fearless young ladies says ‘no.’ It might be years before the girls will get what they want, I know, but what matters is that this cause won’t die.”

An Iranian researcher contributed reporting for this story.