Is Iran on the Verge of Another Revolution?

How should we make sense of this "Women, Life, Liberty" Iran, this completely novel political uprising which came into being with the death of the Kurdish Mahsa Zhina Amini in September 2022 while in police custody, following her arrest for wearing an "improper" hijab? Neither a "feminist revolution" per se, nor just the revolt of the new generation-nor about compulsory hijab. It is a movement of life restitution, of emancipation towards a free and dignified life from an internal colonization. As the first objects of such colonization, women have become protagonists of a movement that may take the Islamic Republic through a revolutionary course.

Her death, while in police custody on 16 September 2022, for wearing an "improper" hijab, became the spark for the most serious and longest-running political crisis that this Islamist regime has seen so far in Iran. Immediately, waves of protests, largely led by women, poured two million onto the streets of 160 cities and small towns, inspiring extraordinary international support.1 The Twitter hashtag #MahsaAmini broke the world record of 284 million tweets, and on November 24, the UN Human Rights Commission voted to investigate the regime's deadly repression that has claimed five-hundred lives and put thousands of people under arrest and eleven hundred on trial. Repression by the regime, exhaustion by the opposition-these will surely slow down protests, but it will not bring the uprising to an end. For political life in Iran has taken a new, uncharted, and irreversible course.

How to interpret this extraordinary political phenomenon? Neither a "feminist revolution" in itself, nor just a Generation Z revolt, and even less a protest against compulsory hijab-this is the movement of reclaiming life. A struggle for the free and dignified existence, against its internal colonization; and the women, becoming the main object of that colonization, turn out to be the main protagonists of the movement of liberation.

For two decades after the 1990s, elections kept most Iranians hopeful that a reformist route could gradually democratize the system. The 1997 election to the presidency of the moderate Mohammad Khatami heralded a notable social and cultural openness, and many treated this as a hopeful omen. But the hardliners saw the reform project as an existential threat to clerical rule, and they fought back fiercely. They sabotaged Khatami’s government, suppressed the student movement, shut down the critical press, and detained activists. After 2005, they went on banning reformist parties, meddling in the polls, and barring rival candidates from participating in the elections. The Green Movement—protesting the fraud against the reformist candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi in the 2009 presidential election—was the popular response to such a counterreform onslaught.

The Green revolt and successive uprisings of 2017 and 2019 across the nation against socio-economic ills and authoritarian rule fundamentally shook the Islamist regime, though not changing it. The uprising, in fact, did not bring a revolution but an "imagined revolution," an insecurity factor compounded by the revolutionary uprisings against the allied regimes in Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq that Iran helped quell.2 One would believe that against such critical challenges, the Islamist regime has to reinvent itself through a series of reforms so as to restore hegemony. Instead, the vetting process allowed the hardliners to solidify their grip on political power to ensure their full control once the Supreme Leader died. Thus, after taking the presidency in 2021 and the parliament in 2022 in elections whose rivals were arbitrarily vetoed, the hard-liners moved to subjugate a defiant people once again. Besides the imposition of the "morality police" in the streets and institutions to enforce the "proper hijab," there were other measures, but that one triggered a nation-wide uprising in which women came to be placed at the very center.

Women did not suddenly rise to spearhead the revolt which followed the killing of Mahsa Amini. Rather, it was a few years of quiet struggles against systemic misogyny the post-revolution regime installed. That regime then abolished the relatively liberal Family Protection Laws of 1967, where women overnight lost the right to initiate divorce, to assume child custody, to become judges, and to travel abroad without permission from the male guardian. Polygamy came back, imposition of sex segregation was carried out, and all women had to wear the hijab in public. Social control and discriminatory quotas in schools and workplaces have driven many women into the role of housewife, early retirement, or working in the informal sector and family business.