by Megan Clement

On September 16 2022, Jina Amini died at the hands of the so-called morality police in Tehran for allegedly violating mandatory hijab laws. Amini, a member of Iran’s oppressed Kurdish minority, was visiting her brother in the capital when police officers pulled her off the street, pushed her into a van and beat her. She was transferred to the notorious Vozara detention centre for “reeducation”, where she was tortured. Amini died of her injuries in hospital under police guard at the age of just 22.

Amini’s death kicked off a feminist revolution in Iran, as women, girls, men and boys protested the brutality of the regime under a slogan that came from the Kurdish women’s movement: “Woman, Life, Freedom”. Girls danced in the street. Women cut off their hair and burned their hijabs. The protests united generations of Iranians like never before to demand an end to decades of brutal oppression under which women have suffered most.

The subsequent crackdown on the movement was brutal. More than 500 protesters have been killed, and hundreds more beaten, tortured and imprisoned, constituting crimes against humanity according to the United Nations. But activists say the genie cannot be stuffed back into the bottle – the protests have already changed society, and Iran’s women and girls will rise again.

In We Are Not Afraid: the Courage of Iranian Women (available in French and German), journalists Natalie Amiri and Düzen Tekkal have collected the testimonies of 16 Iranian writers, thinkers and activists both inside and out of the country, as they reflect on the significance of the Women, Life, Freedom movement and its future. I spoke to one of those women, Shila Behjat, a journalist based in Berlin, about what we have learned two years on from Amini’s death and the political upheaval that followed.

Megan Clement: It has been two years since Jina Amini died in the custody of Iran’s morality police. What has changed for women in Iran since then?

Shila Behjat: We see in pictures that there are many more women who don’t wear a hijab in the streets any more. Now, is this due to the fact that they are more courageous, or is there more of a letting go [on the part of the regime]? I would
doubt the latter, because the regime is just as unpredictable as it has always been. In fact, when it comes to the hijab, the laws have been enforced more and they’ve created more legislation. So it’s more the courage of these women to go out without a hijab, to show themselves and to resist in this way. And for the first time in the history of this republic, even before, there is a recognition that Iran is actually a multi-ethnic and multi-religious country. This will not go away. Just by virtue of the fact that a Kurdish slogan is being used, just by the fact every time [protesters] raise their voices, they cite the Kurds, the Baluchi, the Baháʼís, and call out these minorities. This has changed dramatically.

What the recent elections showed is that there’s a real, deepened, wish for democracy and free elections in Iran, and that’s why people did not even show up to vote. This is something new, because in the past, people were part of the Green Revolution, which was about reform: they still believed in a candidate that could be more moderate and reform the Islamic Republic. This belief has gone. There’s no more belief in reform. There’s only the demand that this regime has to fall.

Megan Clement: What is the status of the Woman, Life, Freedom protest movement today?

Shila Behjat: We don’t see the level of protest that we saw at the end of 2022 and beginning of 2023. It’s life-threatening to go on the street and protest, to even show your middle finger to a photograph of one of the ayatollahs. The regime was really under pressure, and that’s why their response was as violent as it was. And it keeps on being violent because this is the only way they can keep their power. But when you talk to people inside Iran, what everybody says is that something like that could happen again in the blink of an eye; that protests on that scale will show up again.

I’ve spoken to many people who study dictatorships and autocracies, and they say [the situation] is very unsatisfying in this moment, but the level of violence the regime displays means that more and more people will not approve of the regime, because they see violence on a constant basis, and people are more inclined to choose non-violence. The more they see young people getting beaten up, tortured and put in prison for nothing, like for singing in the street, the more people will not believe in this regime any more and will not support it.

Megan Clement: Iran has a new ‘reformist’ president, Masoud Pezeshkian. Is there any chance he can effect the change needed to end institutionalised discrimination against women and girls?

Shila Behjat: We have to remember that the description “reformer” was given to him by the regime itself. So he was the reformer candidate against a very hardcore candidate. And he’s not a reformer at all. He can’t be, because all candidates have to go through the highest Islamic Council anyway, so there will never be anyone who will change the laws that uphold the Islamic regime, and one of these things is the [mandatory] hijab. The oppression of women is part of this regime, and it’s one of the symbols they have to carry forward. So there is no chance at all.

Megan Clement: You come from the Bahá’í community, which you describe in your essay as the most discriminated-against minority in Iran. What is the situation for Bahá’í women today?

Shila Behjat: Women and girls in Iran who are part of the Bahá’í community face intersectional discrimination, so they face all the discrimination that Bahá’ís are facing – which ranges from having no civil rights at all, not having the right to study, not having the right to work in certain fields and being the target of very malicious propaganda – and then obviously the women have all the issues that women are facing [in Iran], which is that all signs of femininity cannot be on display in society. The Bahá’í women in Iran respond to this in a way I find fascinating. The idea is to not take on the qualities of the aggressor. I asked one of them and she said that, from the Bahá’í perspective, there is no fighting back, no violence, no aggression, but at the same time not being passive. She referred to it as having a sense of “productive resilience”, which means that they are active in their local communities.

When we see pictures of them, when they enter prison for whatever sentence they’re getting, you see it. They carry themselves with so much dignity. They go to a prison like Evin Prison, which is over-full with women prisoners, and I sometimes think, “what is this regime thinking, putting them all together in one spot?” Narges Mohammadi, Sepideh Qolian, these incredible women’s rights activists and human rights activists are all in one place. Obviously, they keep on going. Obviously they carry on their work. And these prison walls don’t mean anything to them.

Megan Clement: What is the best way for people outside the country to help the women and girls of Iran in their ongoing struggle for freedom?

Shila Behjat: Share their voices and their stories. Being forgotten is the worst thing, and that’s what the regime wants. So sharing the stories is one very important thing, but we also need people to work on their own governments and their own parliamentarians to put pressure on this regime and to recognise that it destabilises the whole region. So if you don’t do it for women, please just do it for peace in this region. No one listened to the women, no one supported these women, and I think that should enrage us all, because these women showed the world that there can be peaceful protests, that there is an idea for a free, democratic Iran. Sometimes I believe it’s because it was women, and because their word doesn’t mean as much on this world stage as we want it to. We are clapping for them, we call them courageous, but we don’t really support them. There was a Nobel Peace Prize [for Narges Mohammadi], and a Sakharov Prize [for Jina Amini]. But how did it help them?

Megan Clement: What gives you hope to keep going?

Shila Behjat: The women. Because sometimes I’m tired or don’t feel like doing anything, and I lose hope. And then I think about them, and I know that not only do they not lose hope, but they have an idea of a better future, and they work towards it. The least I can do in my safe-and-sound Berlin is share what they are trying to do, because it’s incredible how they created a philosophy around women that became a revolution for democracy.

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