Iran, hair in the wind and hijab in the air: support for women’s protests arrives from the squares around the world

ROME – Zan, Zendagi, Azadi: woman, life, freedom! But also “Death to the dictator!” and “Let’s stick together!”. The videos arriving from Iran and circulating online at these hours show streets full of citizens of the Islamic Republic waving flags with words of freedom. The women dance in colorful jackets, their hair in the wind and hijabs in the air in protest. There are thousands and thousands, in their early twenties, and have been demonstrating against the regime for fifteen days after the “moral police” brutally beaten a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian girl, Mahsa Amini, guilty of not wearing the hijab. The girl went into a coma and died almost immediately. Today the long wave of protest reaches over one hundred cities around the world, from Europe to Latin America, to celebrate the international day of solidarity with Iranian protests.

The denunciation of Amnesty International. The organization denounces that the police forces of the Islamic Republic have used batons, tear gas and fire hydrants to disperse the demonstrators during these days. They used sexual violence against women in the square, grabbing them by the breasts or by the hair. Police intentionally fired into the crowd, killing over eighty people, including several children, and wounding hundreds more. But Amnesty he believes that the number of deaths and injuries is higher than what has been documented so far. Yesterday the security forces shot and killed several demonstrators in Zahedan, in the south of the country. Local sources claim that at least ten people were killed, almost all belonging to the Sunni Muslim minority. According to rumors published by the information site Iranwire, a platform directed by the journalist Maziar Bahari, to give the green light for the “heavy hand” was the Supreme Guide Ali Khamenei, who would have ordered the repression even in the Kurdish majority provinces, on the borders with Iraq.

Women’s protest. It is women who lead the street demonstrations against the strict application of the hijab law. I am not against the veil, but against the obligatory nature of the veil. Many have publicly burned their headgear, as happened in Sari in the north of the country. Others cut their hair as a sign of solidarity and spread the images through social media. Like Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe, the Anglo-Iranian humanitarian worker and former political prisoner, who in a video that appeared on the BBC shows herself with scissors in hand, cutting her locks “for my mother, for my daughter, for the women of my country, for freedom “. Ratcliffe, a London resident, was arrested in Tehran on a visit to her family and was detained for six years in Evin prison on charges of spying.

An Iranian feminist movement? Kian Tajbakhsh, Senior Advisor of the Columbia University Global Center, asks. The street demonstrations these days, for the scholar, are an epochal turning point in the history of the country because women are openly fighting against the patriarchal management not only of their bodies but also of public spaces. The girls who take to the streets in these hours – writes Tajbakhsh – not only ask for the abolition of the compulsory hijab, but ask to live under a different system of government. But these demonstrations did not arise on September 16 following the murder of Mahsa Amini, because Iranian women have been challenging the authorities, and their apparatuses such as the moral police, for at least forty years, leaving several centimeters of hair uncovered.

An exasperated economic crisis. Last week, a spokesman for the regime said that if Islamic hijab law were to be strictly enforced, more than 20 million women across the country would have to be fined and arrested. The law should be softened – declared the exponent of the regime – but not eliminated because it is God’s law and therefore it is right. The protests of these days do nothing but aggravate a social situation that in the country is already exasperated due to the economic crisis also caused by Western sanctions, corruption and the policies of the current government of Ebrahim Raisi. The president took office in 2021 following elections conditioned by Islamic vetoes that prevented moderates from participating.

The moral police. In an investigation published on Iranwire, it was reported that following the murder of Mahsa Amini, many women who had offered to join the patrols of the moral police, withdrew. Patrols generally consist of two male officers, a woman and a volunteer from some religious organization. But they have been drastically reduced in numbers across the country since protests erupted over the young woman’s murder, still denied by authorities today and blamed for a heart attack. According to the Iranian government, the street demonstrations are an attempt by the United States to destabilize Iran. An anonymous high-level source cited by Iranwire points out that concern is spreading among the ranks of the apparatus: members of the paramilitary Basij militia, which is in fact a parallel police controlled by the Revolutionary Guards, could desert control of the squares if wave of youth protest were to grow again. In the military, many are wondering whether it is worth defending a corrupt government from top to bottom. But many senior officials will remain loyal to the regime, more out of fear of retaliation than out of personal convictions.