<
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/09/iran-headscarf-protest-mahsa-amini/671555/>
"No one can predict how a revolution starts. Nor can anyone know when one
injustice will be what causes a people’s fury to overcome their fear. In 2011,
in Tunisia, a street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, sparked an uprising by setting
himself on fire. In 2022, in Iran, the death in police custody of a 22-year-old
woman, Mahsa Amini, has brought Iranians onto the streets in every corner of
the country.
Amini and her brother had traveled from Saqqez, a city in Iran’s Kurdistan
Province, to visit relatives in the capital, Tehran, when, on September 13, the
so-called morality police arrested her for improperly wearing her hijab, or
headscarf. Three days later, she was declared dead. The authorities claim she
died of cardiac arrest. According to a U.K.-based independent Iranian news
site, the CT scans of her skull showed signs of fractures.
Each time I see the images of her lying in a coma in a hospital bed, I cannot
help thinking that I could have been Mahsa Amini. I was a girl in Iran in 1981,
when a law making the hijab a mandatory dress code for women first came into
force, two years after the Islamic Revolution. And I was a teenager when the
morality police began making the rounds, stopping and arresting people on a
whim, sometimes on no more pretext than a few strands of hair peeking out from
under one’s scarf.
One August day in 1984, thickly wrapped under my Islamic uniform and headscarf
when the temperature was intolerably high and the water fountains in Tehran had
been shut off in observance of Ramadan, I began thinking that I would not mind
dying if those who had made our lives so miserable were to die along with me. I
left Iran later that year, but today I feel what so many Iranian women feel: We
are all Mahsa Amini.
Since her death, thousands have taken to the streets in a show of rage and
solidarity that is rare even for a country that has known many such tumultuous
moments. More than some past uprisings against the regime, this one has been
remarkably broad-based and inclusive. The affluent residents of north Tehran
have come out alongside the poor ones from the city’s south side. The youth are
there—and so are their parents, even their grandparents. The metropolitan
people are out, and so are the small-town folk.
The women of Iran are at the forefront—they who have most consistently resisted
the regime’s tyranny and persisted in rebutting the myth that the hijab is an
Iranian tradition. The sight of all the men at their side is a sign of the
near-universal disdain for the regime’s official misogyny. With the risks these
citizens are taking and the sacrifices they are making, they are proving that
if any tradition needs defending 24 hours a day by armed men who have to beat
people to embrace it, then it deserves to perish."
Also at
https://archive.ph/tYZxy
Via Susan ****
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
