Will the hijab protests finally bring change to Iran?
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
In September 2022, a wave of protests spread across Iran in reaction to the death of a young Kurdish woman named Mahsa Jina Amini at the hands of Iran’s morality police. Over the next few months, these protests gained steam, drawing out diverse constituencies from more than 100 cities and universities across the Islamic Republic in what would become known as the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protests.
Mahsa’s death inspired Kurds, Iran’s Balochi ethnic minority, students, school girls, labourers, celebrities, artists, teachers — and particularly women — to take to the streets and rally against the mandatory wearing of the hijab, injustice and continued political repression, among other things.
The Iranian political establishment’s response to this widespread challenge was — as it has always been — a graduated and violent crackdown against protesters and society at large, while also blaming western powers for inciting unrest.
Communication blackouts and heightened surveillance followed. Thousands were arrested, detained and tortured, many were maimed and attacked, more than 550 people were killed, young school girls were hospitalised from exposure to toxic gas attacks, eight people have been executed and many more sentenced to long prison terms. A UN fact-finding mission recently concluded that the crimes uncovered indeed amount to “crimes against humanity.”
The Grammy award-winning Iranian singer Shervin Hajipour, whose song “Baraye” (“For”) became the anthem of the 2022-23 protests, is among those who were recently sentenced to three years in jail. Hajipour’s lyrics were drawn from the aspirational tweets of ordinary Iranians wanting basics — “for dancing in the streets . . . for this polluted air . . . for imprisoned intellectual elites and for freedom” — and went viral. His story is emblematic of the heroic sacrifice of countless Iranians who have had their lives and livelihoods devastated by the hand of a brutal regime.
With authoritarianism on the rise around the world, the protests drew significant international attention, renewing hopes that the Iranian state would give way to demands from women and broader society for social and political change. The bigger unspoken aspiration is that such moderation will lead to an ideological softening of the Islamic Republic and a shift in its advancing nuclear programme, its anti-American posture and support for proxy groups across the Middle East that would have significant impact.
Two new books pay tribute to the 2022-23 protest movement: What Iranians Want by historian Arash Azizi, and the multi-authored Woman, Life, Freedom, a collection of stories in graphic novel style edited by Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi, author of the acclaimed autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis (2000), provides a vivid visualisation of the protests and subsequent government crackdown. Azizi, meanwhile, uses a wider lens to show that Iranians have long been protesting in favour of reform. Both books claim that political or revolutionary change in Iran is inevitable, although impossible to predict.
What Iranians Want takes a historical approach, shedding light on the layers of the country’s diverse protest movement which, since the 1979 Iranian revolution, has been rooted in formal activism, organised campaigns, boycotts and ordinary daily resistance. Moving beyond the traditional approach of reviewing the past rounds of protests — the 1999 student movement, the 2009 Green Movement, and economic protests in 2017 and 2019 — Azizi’s thematic focus provides the reader with an accessible and comprehensive overlay of popular activism led by everyday heroes who languish in Iran’s jails or fill its cemeteries.
Each chapter takes on a protest theme — ranging across peace, women’s rights, labour issues, the environment, freedom of religion and expression, and Afghan refugees — to weave together the history of these movements, the public aspirations behind them and the repressive government response.
“Ideologues don’t make revolutions. Ordinary people do,” writes Azizi, a US-based historian. Iran’s recent protest movements, he argues, are part of a new revolution in the making — one he is hopeful about, but which requires an understanding of history and co-operative action to build upon past sacrifices.
Each theme is given personal expression through the names and stories of the heroes and martyrs of 45 years of protest and beyond. Some are well known, such as the 2023 Nobel peace prize winner Narges Mohammadi and Iranian lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, both jailed for their longtime civic activism. Others include Niloufar Bayani and Sepideh Kashani, arrested for environmental activism in 2018, as well as Sahar Khodayari, who set herself on fire to protest against the banning of women from sports stadiums, and the labour leader Ali Nejati. Azizi also devotes space to Nika Shahkarami and Sarina Esmailzadeh, both of whom were killed by security forces in 2022.
In contrast, Satrapi’s collection provides a mix of perspectives regarding Iranian resistance and government crackdowns. Through bold visualisation of protests and political repression, Satrapi (who lives in Paris) and her co-collaborators Farid Vahidi, Abbas Milani and Jean-Pierre Perrin aim to inspire audiences both inside and outside Iran and to reinforce solidarity with those in the country. While only bootleg copies will make it to Iran, theirs is a vivid and painful testimony of the deep popular frustration percolating across Iran and the underlying hope that accompanies it.
In this fluent translation by Una Dimitrijevic, illustrations contributed by 17 artists add colour to vignettes that describe events around Mahsa Amini’s death and the protests that followed. Like Azizi, they too highlight the role of everyday heroes as protesters and prisoners. Moreover, they visualise how the “Woman, Life, Freedom” slogan was inspired by Kurdish activism, which views the dignity and inclusion of women as essential to broader freedom. Although the 1979 revolution brought a reversal of women’s rights in Iran, women in the country remain highly educated and despite exclusionary government policy they are active across society.
Their work brings together stories on patriarchal norms and the nature of the regime’s tyranny, ranging from censorship to authoritarian control to violence and torture in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison — where the British-Iranian dual national Nazanin Zaghari Ratcliffe was held among many others. They also show how the system goes about dividing the opposition and creating a culture of fear through surveillance, humiliation and intimidation.
Mana and Touka Neyestani’s spine-chilling drawings of Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, point to his clear role in systematising repression. The Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps feature as his praetorian guard. Another chapter is peppered with limited highlights of Iranian history, graphics on the celebration of the Iranian new year — and features an odd composition of famous Iranians around the world.
These stories don’t always flow from one to the other. But together they shed light on the diverse, dynamic nature of Iranian resistance, social contradictions around faith and ultimately a collective yearning for a better Iran. The final chapter, titled “And then?”, aims to build on this yearning by visualising the authors’ meandering conversation of what Iran’s future will bring. They conclude, like Azizi, that political change, if not revolution, is inevitable.
One aspect that is underserved in Satrapi’s book is the role of the almost 5mn-strong diaspora, roughly seven per cent of the total number of Iranians, which played an important part in the recent protests. It would have merited a focus on its own — especially since the final conversation alludes to the diaspora and ponders the issue of future leadership.
In a unique attempt to build broader solidarity, international protests were organised around the world, from Toronto to Sydney and Berlin — taking the Iranian leadership by surprise. World leaders condemned Iran’s government crackdown and imposed sanctions on its political elite.
Self-appointed opposition figures in exile attempted a shortlived show of unity, even proclaiming a democratic charter of principles — only to eschew these values and revert to alarming patterns of competition and attacks. The diaspora, owing to its ideological, demographic and geographical divisions, is certainly not yet ready to support protesters in a meaningful way, nor has it managed to present a democratic vision for the future.
This limited diaspora unity, along with fierce and consistent state crackdowns, suggests a darker picture to come. Despite a clear crisis of legitimacy, the Iranian political establishment continues to rely on coercive repression to protect the system, ultimately remaining stubborn to change. Rather than be seen to support a popular call to liberalise the Islamic dress code, Iran’s parliament has doubled down with a hijab and chastity bill that aims to penalise anyone who challenges it.
It’s no surprise that Iran’s parliamentary and Assembly of Expert elections in March received the lowest turnout in the history of the Islamic Republic: 41 per cent. Yet the system remains preoccupied with surviving the impact of swingeing economic sanctions and supporting its axis of resistance groups across the Middle East. The inevitable clerical successor to Ali Khamenei, who has been in power for over three decades, will certainly be the key turning point on the horizon for Iran and its people.
Both books tell us that Iranian protests are part of a bigger wave of political change that will come to the Islamic Republic — if not a transformation. When this transpires, the impact on Iranian society and across the Middle East, where the regime has been a destabilising force, will be significant.
What is uncertain is whether that change will bring a democratic Iran or a new version of an autocratic Iran. While Azizi suggests that the “Iranian quest for normality and democracy” seen in the 2022-23 uprising bucks an ascendant authoritarian global trend, he and Satrapi are unclear about how Iranians will move forward. Drawing from Iran’s dynamic protest-driven history, one can certainly be sure that in absence of political, economic or social reform, more unrest is on the cards.
To translate such action into a more effective reality, however, Iranians must reflect not only on the sacrifice of past heroes and martyrs, but also on how to thread together their diverse strands of activism into a collective platform for action. “As always with revolutions, this true battle starts tomorrow,” concludes Azizi. In reality, the collaboration must begin today.
Woman Life Freedom Edited by Marjane Satrapi, translated by Una Dimitrijevic Seven Stories Press £30/$35.95, 270 pages
What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom by Arash Azizi Oneworld £20, 256 pages
Sanam Vakil is the director of Chatham House’s Middle East and North Africa Programme
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