FOR THE PAST THREE MONTHS, revolutionary sentiment has been coursing through the cities and towns of the Persian plateau. The agitation was triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, on 16 September after she was arrested by the morality police in Tehran. From the outset the movement had a feminist character, but it has also united citizens of different classes and ethnicities around a shared desire to see the back of the Islamic Republic. Iran has known numerous protest movements over the past decade and a half, and the nation’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has comfortably suppressed each one with a combination of severity and deft exploitation of divisions within the opposition. This time, however, the resilience and unity shown by the regime’s opponents have consigned the old pattern of episodic unrest to the past. Iran has entered a period of rolling protest in which the Islamic Republic must defend itself against wave upon wave of public anger.
In their retaliation against the protesters, the security forces have killed at least 448 people, including 60 children and 29 women, and made up to 17,000 arrests. Thirty-six protesters have been charged with capital crimes, according to Hadi Ghaemi of the New York-based Center for Human Rights in Iran, including several people accused of killing members of the security forces. Still, the authorities insist that they have erred on the side of restraint. On 9 November the commander of Iran’s ground forces warned that Khamenei only needed to say the word and the opposition “flies” would “without question have no place left in the country”.
Every day there are fresh demonstrations, whether in universities, in the streets or in cemeteries where the victims of police bullets and truncheons are buried. And whenever a protester is killed, you can be sure that in another 40 days, when the Shia mourning period climaxes, there will be a graveside protest and the possibility of more deaths, extending the cycle of savagery and reaction. It was this cycle – of deaths leading to funerals, protests and further deaths – that sapped the Shah’s regime over the course of 1978 and culminated in his flight from Iran in January 1979
This movement without a name, without a leader, is diverse and adaptable. It has harnessed a vast and hitherto under exploited resource – the latent dissatisfaction of women at their second-class status – and turned it into a mighty asset. And it has already scored a success, albeit a reversible one: for the first time since the early days of the revolution, significant numbers of women in cities across the country are going about their business without any form of hijab at all. On 4 December, Iran’s public prosecutor announced that the morality
