<\/p>\n
By Kelly J Shannon<\/p>\n
Woman. Life. Freedom. Those are the words being chanted by the thousands of anti-government protesters taking to the streets across Iran in response to the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini. <\/p>\n
The young woman died while in the custody of the Gasht-e Ershad, the country\u2019s \u201cmorality police\u201d, who detained Amini for violating Iran\u2019s hijab law, which mandates veiling for women and modest Islamic dress. <\/p>\n
Despite the government\u2019s insistence that Amini died of a pre-existing heart condition, Iranians widely believe that the morality police beat her to death.<\/p>\n
While Amini\u2019s death was the spark that ignited the protests, the roots of unrest stretch back decades. <\/p>\n
At its heart, the uprising is about the Islamic Republic\u2019s four decades of patriarchal oppression and violence against women, as well as the determined resistance of Iranian women to the oppression.<\/p>\n
While Mohammad Reza Pahlavi\u2019s government, which ruled Iran from 1941 to 1979, was repressive, women in Iran made significant gains during his rule. <\/p>\n
They had access to higher education, careers, the right to vote and hold office (admittedly a dubious right in an undemocratic country), equal pay laws, health care and reproductive rights, and a cabinet-level position dedicated to women\u2019s issues \u2013 only the second such position in the world. Women could choose how they dressed. <\/p>\n
Because of women\u2019s activism, Iran\u2019s 1967 Family Protection Law, and a subsequent 1975 amendment, was one of the most liberal such laws in the Islamic world. It mandated more equitable marriage, divorce and inheritance rights for women and largely eliminated polygamy.<\/p>\n
Although many women participated in the uprising that toppled the shah\u2019s regime, controlling and subordinating women was at the top of the new Islamic Republic\u2019s agenda from the moment of its inception in 1979. <\/p>\n
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fundamentalist Shiite cleric who was the symbolic leader of the revolution, saw women\u2019s equality as incompatible with the strict Islamic society he sought to create.<\/p>\n
On March 6, 1979, just weeks after the shah fled the country and two days before International Women\u2019s Day, Khomeini declared that he wished to overturn the Family Protection Law and that all women must wear the chador, Iran\u2019s traditional form of Islamic veil that covers a woman\u2019s hair and body. <\/p>\n
In response, tens of thousands of Iranian women marched in protest across the country for three days. Because Khomeini shared political power with pro-democracy liberals like Prime Minister Mehdi Bazargan, the protests caused him to temporarily back down and rescind the declarations.<\/p>\n
But in 1980, after Khomeini consolidated power, he once again ordered compulsory veiling and fired all female judges. Female protesters again took to the streets, but they could not stop Khomeini\u2019s agenda. The Islamic Republic enshrined compulsory veiling into law in 1983, along with other restrictions on women\u2019s rights.<\/p>\n
The 1980s brought harsh repression for Iranian women, and there was little organised resistance during those years. The Islamic Republic surveilled its people and meted out brutal punishment for anyone who did not conform to its strict codes of behaviour. <\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s morality police, an earlier iteration of today\u2019s Gasht-e Ershad, stopped and arrested women (and sometimes men) on the street for \u201cimproper\u201d dress, and raided people\u2019s homes to root out illegal alcohol, Western contraband and \u201cun-Islamic\u201d behaviours. <\/p>\n
The government forced women out of certain jobs, segregated universities by sex and banned female students from majoring in certain subjects such as veterinary science and geology. It repealed the shah\u2019s family law, thus depriving women of most rights in marriage, divorce and child custody. <\/p>\n
It lowered the minimum age of marriage for girls, first to 13 and then to nine (it raised the age to 13 again in 2002), and encouraged polygamy. Women also lacked freedom of movement and required a male guardian\u2019s permission to leave the country.<\/p>\n
Iranians who opposed the Khomeini government and had the resources fled the country, forming a global diaspora that included Iranian feminists who fought for women\u2019s rights while in exile.<\/p>\n
Even worse, the Islamic Republic systematically used violence against women. In 1980, as Khomeini consolidated power, the government began executing large numbers of its citizens for dubious crimes. <\/p>\n
This included women who refused to veil or resisted the regime in other ways. The government accused them of prostitution or \u201cwaging war on God\u201d. Female political prisoners were denied due process and were often tortured or sexually assaulted. Many of them died by stoning \u2013 a particularly brutal form of execution not historically practised in Iran.<\/p>\n
Iranian women began fighting back in earnest in the 1990s. In what became known as the \u201cPink Revolution\u201d, women, especially in urban areas, collectively began pushing the boundaries of the hijab law by wearing make-up, colourful headscarves and long coats instead of chadors, and intentionally allowing their hair to peek out from under their scarves. <\/p>\n
Given the large number of women who resisted Islamic dress, the morality police could not arrest everyone.<\/p>\n
Emboldened by their success, Iranian women began organising in other ways. In 2006, they held a peaceful protest calling for the repeal of discriminatory laws against women. <\/p>\n
Out of the protest, Iranian feminists formed the grass-roots One Million Signatures for the Repeal of Discriminatory Laws campaign, also known as Change for Equality. This activism occurred despite harassment from authorities during the presidency of hard-liner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who cracked down on violations of the veiling law, and during whose presidency the current iteration of the morality police was created.<\/p>\n
The activists behind Change for Equality played a key role in the mass 2009 protests after the suspicious re-election of Ahmadinejad. Women rose up in force, and images of young, stylish women protesting in make-up, sunglasses and blue jeans with headscarves perched far back on their heads dominated international news. <\/p>\n
The uprising ultimately ended with a violent crackdown by the government, which included security forces shooting and killing a young woman, Neda Agha Soltan, whose death was captured on a cellphone camera.<\/p>\n
Over the past decade, women\u2019s organised resistance to veiling has grown. Young women filmed or photographed themselves removing their headscarves in public. <\/p>\n
They posted videos online of women being harassed in public by morality police or other citizens for wearing \u201cimproper\u201d hijab, as a way to shame the harassers. <\/p>\n
They used social media to decry compulsory veiling and created the civil disobedience campaign, My Stealthy Freedom, where women posted photos of themselves bareheaded on social media. The government responded with arrests and long prison sentences.<\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s president, Ebrahim Raisi, is an extremist who has cracked down on dissent since taking office in 2021, with a special focus on veiling in response to women\u2019s organized resistance to the practise. <\/p>\n
His government has been using facial recognition technology to arrest and punish young women appearing in the anti-hijab videos posted to social media. Earlier this year, a young woman was detained and beaten for appearing in one of the videos and was forced to appear on TV to apologise for her behaviour.<\/p>\n
Amini\u2019s detention and death demonstrate the government\u2019s sense that it can act with impunity in its oppression of women. The outpouring of anger across Iran, therefore, probably came as a surprise to Iran\u2019s leaders.<\/p>\n
Iran is resorting to its standard repressive tactics to quell the uprisings \u2013 restricting access to the internet and cellular service, and even opening fire on protesters. At least 30 people have died in the protests.<\/p>\n
But angry women aren\u2019t backing down. They\u2019re publicly burning their headscarves and cutting off their hair. Unlike in 1979, large numbers of men are protesting alongside them, and the protests are growing as the government responds violently.<\/p>\n
Unlike recent protests about lack of drinking water or economic troubles, the protest is about a central tenet of the Islamic Republic\u2019s identity \u2013 its subordination of women. As a result, the protesters are openly calling for the end of the Islamic Republic and its theocratic rule. <\/p>\n
Iran\u2019s government claims that the protests are the work of the country\u2019s enemies, but, in fact, they are the result of smouldering discontent that dates back 40 years and poses a powerful threat to the regime.<\/p>\n
Iran might manage to crush the protest movement as it has done to others, but if that happens, it will only add to Iranians\u2019 pent-up fury. <\/p>\n
Or perhaps the killing of Mahsa Amini might prove to be the turning point in Iranian women\u2019s long struggle for freedom. We might just be witnessing the beginning of a revolution. Woman. Life. Freedom.<\/p>\n
Kelly J Shannon is an associate professor of history at Florida Atlantic University and author of \u201cUS Foreign Policy and Muslim Women\u2019s Human Rights\u201d and is writing a book on US relations with Iran from 1905 to 1953.<\/em><\/p>\n