This is a guest post by Alma Fazeli, a PhD candidate whom I have the pleasure of supervising. In the post Alma reflects on the events taking place in her homeland of Iran at the moment. The thoughts, words and sentiments are Alma’s, and I am very happy to be providing a vehicle for her to express them.
For Woman, Life, Freedom
1 Mahsa Amini is now a name known to the world. She was a 22-year-old young Iranian girl from Kurdistan province who had come to Tehran to visit her relatives. Her younger brother was with her when she was arrested for her ‘inappropriate outfit,’ which seemingly did not comply enough with the imposed dress code, the Islamic hijab law. ‘We are not from this city; please don’t take her,’ his brother begged the so-called Morality Police officers. Nobody listens to their cries. She is arrested, beaten in the head several times, goes into a coma, and dies. A photo of her on her death bed in ICU goes viral.
2 I am on the phone, talking to my mother and my only sister in Tehran the night she dies. The internet of Iran is not cut off yet and I can still see their faces on WhatsApp. My sister cries and I cannot calm her. I listen. She has been arrested two times for the same reason that took Mahsa’s young life. ‘It could be me,’ she says, ‘it is so humiliating, and now they might even kill you.’ We all know that. It could be any woman who steps out of the house. They are everywhere, in front of shopping centres, in crowded squares, or ambushed at the metro stations waiting for their prey. It is a cat-and-mouse game, a deadly one, that I myself have played a hundred times.
3 Persian Twitter is shocked, outraged, in deep agony: ‘Mahsa was not the first and is not going to be the last.’ Everything fades but one fact: ‘They’ can kill you anywhere, any time; you never know. Thousands of people died of COVID when there was a vaccine because ‘they’ ‘forbade’ the American and the British-made vaccines. ‘You are not even safe in the sky’ when you are on a plane leaving your country and your loved ones for the sake of finding your dignity as a human being somewhere else in this world. I am talking about the intentional downing of the passenger flight PS752 in January 2020. Most of the passengers were Iranian Canadians, young couples, among them PhD students in Canadian universities who had come back home for their own weddings. Among the dead were little children with shining eyes. Yes, it could be me.
Voices start to be raised. The dead start to be summoned from their graves one by one: all those shot to death on the streets in November 2019; all those beaten to death or executed in 2009; all the bloggers and journalists tortured to death; all those university students who lost their lives in the July 1999 protests; all those mothers and fathers who died mourning their children whose lives were claimed by the newly established Islamic regime from the early days of the 1979 Revolution. A horrifying slideshow of crimes committed “In the Name of God” was replayed.
4 Witnessing injustice, you may shed a tear in sorrow or write a poem out of your agonising helplessness. You may curse the criminal and wait for the Final Judgement. But there is a threshold even to this feeling of helplessness. At a certain moment, you may also decide to sharpen the sword that you do not have, gather all your courage, and shout your anger in the streets in the face of the oppressors’ naked violence. Poems become senseless. No more patience for Judgement Day. Enough is enough. Chanting ‘death or freedom,’ you choose to welcome batons and bullets rather than letting your humanity be taken away from you. You love life, but you love freedom more. That is the very moment of your becoming fully human. You have never felt more alive. You leave a line on Twitter that may be your last words; an incomplete sentence: ‘For Mahsa, for taking back our country.’ You are going beyond yourself and you are taking the world with you.
This is a war happening on two fronts: in the streets and on Twitter. In my timeline, tweets are pouring in, all starting with ‘For’: ‘For never having equal rights’; ‘For all the stolen dreams’; ‘For unstoppable tears’; ‘For this forcibly going to paradise’; ‘For all the anti-depressants’; ‘For all the times I was told “No, because you’re a girl…”’; ‘For all those who wanted to build their homeland but you made them leave their homes’; ‘For my father who was in solitary confinement for thirteen months’; ‘For all the friends I lost to migration’; ‘For Afghan kids’; ‘For all those in prisons’; ‘For all the Syrians that were killed by the Islamic Republic’; ‘For the Bahai’is who were denied the right to education’; ‘For censorship’; ‘For the last kisses at the airports’; ‘For all the natural rights that we never had’; ‘For a normal life that we never had’; ‘For banning women from singing’; ‘For students’; ‘For Neda’; for names, names, names of the dead. The list is endless and continues to mount as I am writing. This is not poetry. This is the ugly truth, an utterly disturbing truth. A new genre is born. ‘For freedom’: a collective cause to define freedom through accumulated rage. A collection of subordinate clauses that act as one elliptic main clause. ‘For woman, life, freedom.’
5 As I surf this ocean of pain and dreams, I keep an eye on the voices coming from the opposite camp; what ‘they’ think of these events. ‘They’ are the Basij militia, the IRGC, the army, the police, the notorious intelligence agents, and some branches of the IRGC with weird names. By ‘they,’ I mean all these armed forces, their cyber army, and their sympathisers around the world. There also exists a small group of religious people who side with the Islamic Republic because they believe society must be ruled according to God’s orders. They believe in an Islamic government but are not content with systematic corruption and some policies and methods. They are disturbed by Mahsa’s death, but a secular state seems to them more disturbing. There is a line dividing ‘us’ and ‘them’ drawn by blood. There is nothing in between. Not any more, sadly. Over twenty years of struggle for reforms came to its end following the bloodshed of November 2019.
In their camp, that of the ‘religious system’ as they call it, I find nothing but arrogance and self-righteousness. The iron fist of God coming out of the sleeves of ‘true believers’ to smash whatever is not ‘them,’ whatever is ‘us.’ They are armed to the teeth, holding a gun in one hand, and the Holy Book in the other. ‘Of course, this looks like a war now and this can be boasting,’ I say to myself, ‘but they have always had this attitude; like they are masters and we, their slaves.’ No apologies. No listening. No sign of empathy. This is hubris. ‘Are they conscious of their Pharaoh-like attitude?’
6 What is happening in Iran is a complex multi-aspect phenomenon. Whether we are witnessing a revolution or not, some believe we are, and some prefer to remain more careful. However, what is quite clear is the accumulation of discontent and the growing gulf between the state and the nation. There exist economic, political, and social crises: the regime’s systematic corruption, its closed circle of power, and systemic discrimination are all reaching their climax, if it has not already been reached. All these critical factors make any reflection on the current uprising extremely complicated.
I am not going to write about the history of Islam in Iran or that of women and the veil. Numerous brilliant reflections are already there. What has long seemed to me an important question to ask is the feeling of self-righteousness which arises from religion and justifies power and violence at all costs. Having humble beginnings, Islam now is a political institution and a power structure that draws its legitimacy from the sacred words of God, echoing the same old “God, King, Homeland” or “Dieu, la Patrie, le Roi.” What is alarming though, is the hubris that both the state and the practising faithful have long undermined.
7 In Islamic scripture and tradition, hubris is not an unknown concept. I find the Arabic term (which is also used in Persian) Tafar’un [تفرعن] to be close to hubris. The term is derived from the Pharaohs, tyrants of ancient Egypt. Pharaoh’s story in the Quran depicts a personality trait that we now call narcissism and arrogance. So, by hubris in this text, I have this Quranic meaning in mind, rather than its Greek equivalent, to limit myself to the Muslim context. The message of the story of Pharaoh and Moses is too clear to be misunderstood: hubris ends in your downfall.
Sealed in a halo of holiness and purity, the Islamic Republic and its leaders refused to be accountable before the people. Tying the state’s identity to the sacred prevented it from correcting its mistakes. Sacred arrogance spread fast among the believers and made them commit unforgettable and unforgivable crimes. Killing in the name of God became easier each day, creating an illusion of undefeatable power. The Islamic state gave its leaders the status of saints and blocked critical questioning. Leaders among the clergy considered themselves the source of the absolute truth, having the divine right to rule as master and sovereign. The people became their subjects, expected to obey sacred laws. Defying the supreme leader became synonymous with apostasy. Power turned an ordinary human being into a leviathan who has the final word in matters of its subjects’ life and death.
8 The struggle between the sovereign and his subjects seems to have reached the point of no return. Over forty years of suppression has burst into a flaming rage. The regime’s obscenely high level of corruption, its insolent unaccountability, and its agents’ hubris add fuel to the fire. All religious moral values promoted incessantly from the official platforms seem utterly insulting to the collective conscience. I might look naïve, but many young people who are now on the streets have been traumatised over the years by believers’ toxic piety. Their subjectivity and agency have been denied in almost every aspect of their personal and social life. They have been humiliated and dehumanised. To make it possible to beat a young girl to death because of her not-Islamic-enough outfit, one must dehumanise the other human being first. The lived experience of men and women like me is dehumanisation in God’s name.
Now the stakes are high for both parties of this war, of which this current uprising is only the latest battle. The regime refused to listen to people and continues to do so – look at how many people, including students, journalists, lawyers, and singers have been arrested in the past two weeks. The Islamic Republic not only deteriorated into hubris but also managed to degenerate Islam in the name of Islam. Some people are happy; some people are not. But this is the final ring of caution for believers, religious scholars, and theologians. If they do not act now and miss this historic chance to rethink certain Islamic laws and adapt them to contemporary modes of life, they will be rejected and isolated. They are already culpable for making a ‘mediocre bureaucrat’ and a blood-thirsty monster out of a God who could be the transcendental source of all good. They are culpable for not raising their voice against injustices, suppressions, and patriarchal laws and practices. They have benefited from this patriarchal narrative of religion and they are culpable for reinforcing it. Islam has not lost to imperialism or the Western values; it has lost to its own rigidity and hubris.
9 All said, Mahsa’s tragic death cannot in any way be reduced to the Morality Police. A woman’s veil is the first and the last barricade of the Islamic Republic. It defines the Islamic-ness of the state; it is its emblem. If the regime loses this battle to women and this feminist movement, it will lose the war. The regime’s sympathisers resist any reformation and threaten people with their guns with utter hubris, as they have done for four decades. People, particularly what is known as Generation Z, are not in the streets to negotiate for what they believe is their natural right. They believe this natural right is incompatible with Islamic law, especially laws concerning women. All those sentences starting with “For” outline their demands. They want to be regarded and treated as humans. They are tired of being slaves of the tyrant. They are challenging a regime that claims to be God on earth. The Islamic discourse that brought Islam to power in 1979 is melting into the air. If women, among other things, succeed in taking back autonomy over their bodies – no forced veiling and no forced unveiling – all Muslim nations will have to face a serious challenge. Regardless of future circumstances, this is a moment of fate for both Islam and women.
