OPINION:
For most of my life, when people abroad learned I was from Iran, they thought of Persepolis, Persian poetry, pistachios and saffron. Today my country is known for something else: its brave women.
In 2022, Time magazine named the women of Iran its “Heroes of the Year” after images spread worldwide of women in the streets with their hair uncovered, burning headscarves and chanting what came to define one of the most progressive uprisings in the Middle East: “Woman, Life, Freedom.”
Four years ago, the death of 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini in police custody ignited the Woman, Life, Freedom uprising across Iran. Women removed their compulsory headscarves in public, men stood beside them and Iranians across ethnic, religious and social divisions joined the protests. But Iranian women’s resistance did not begin in 2022.
Only weeks after the 1979 revolution, women were already protesting compulsory hijab. The Islamic Republic gradually made women’s bodies one of its central ideological battlegrounds, regulating how women could dress, work, travel, marry, sing and appear in public.
As a university student in Iran, I joined demonstrations against the government and was arrested three times. I spent time in solitary confinement and later in the women’s ward of Evin Prison. There, I met journalists, activists, religious minorities and other women serving long sentences for demanding basic freedoms.
I also witnessed something the government had spent decades trying to prevent: Baha’i, Christian, Muslim, atheist, religious and secular women became one another’s closest allies. The solidarity I saw inside Evin was in many ways a preview of what was to come in 2022.
That is one reason “Woman, Life, Freedom” became so powerful. It connected struggles the Islamic Republic had long tried to keep separate. The government still enforces compulsory hijab laws and prosecutes women who defy them.
Yet something fundamental has changed. Despite the risks, women continue to appear in public without the hijab. The Islamic Republic still governs Iran. But Iranian women have already changed the expectations of a generation and the fabric of public life.
While their larger struggle for freedom is far from over, the question for the democratic world is whether it will recognize that courage while it still matters, rather than simply celebrate it afterward.
MITRA ALIABOUZAR
Research assistant professor, University of Michigan
Plymouth, Michigan
Please read our comment policy before commenting.