The Iranian journalist on Mahsa Amini’s death: “Today’s protests are the continuation of a long trial: today’s girls are completely fearless”
The Iranian-American journalist Azadeh Moaveni he was in Tehran visiting his family when protests broke out following the death of Mahsa Aminiat a time when there are hardly any reporters to tell them live for Western newspapers. Moaveni (Cutuli Award 2019) was struck by the courage of the young women who snatch the images of the founder of the Islamic Republic Ruhollah Khomeini, who they cut their locks or shave their heads as in “a ritual sacrifice in a culture whose poetry for centuries celebrated hair as a metaphor of ancient beauty and chains of love”. He wrote about it
New York Times
and talks about it with the
Courier.
Her testimony is also significant because the journalist documented the rebellion of the previous generation of Iranians in the 2005 essay.
Lipstick jihad
(The lipstick jihad).
What happens today “is the continuation of a long process,” says Moaveni from New York, where he teaches. “Each generation builds on the achievements of the previous one. In
Lipstick jihad
I told how the young women began to contest the power that the state had arrogated to itself, on an arbitrary basis, to decide whether a woman’s appearance is Islamic or not. In the 2000s, my generation resisted wearing bright colors, tight-fitting or unbuttoned overcoats, putting on make-up, interpreting the rules on modesty in their own way and pushing the boundaries of what in fact became normal to wear ». Girls like sixteen Nika Shakarami and Sarina Esmaeilzadehkilled in the protests, they go further, they are “completely fearless, let’s see their videos” in which they sing and dance without a veil. But «there are also girls who in the family they have to wear the chador and then in their room they shoot movies of dancing and share them on social networks with the people they trust. It now happens outside the most progressive social groups and therefore even more religious families mostly do not accept that a young woman can suffer violence because of her own appearance ”.
After 2009, Moaveni never returned to Iran until two or three years ago and was amazed to see how things had changed. “In so many public places the women wore no hijab. The police of morality has never disappeared, but in the last 2-3 years its presence has diminished ». Strengthening the rules on hijab it took place under President Ebrahim Raisi: “And it is a sign of how far the system is now from the people, which has become more restricted and homogeneous,” observes the journalist. “Raisi perhaps thought he was responding to the expectations of his supporters, but I don’t think religious Iranians want this either.” Yesterday the president he had his picture taken surrounded by students from the Al-Zahra University of Tehranafter a speech in which he compared the “rioters” to “flies”. But even in this university he was greeted with protests: “Murderer.”
What also contributes to the anger is that an arrest like Mahsa’s would not have happened in the restaurants of northern Tehran where the children of the ruling elite spend their free timeor, with different freedoms. “And this becomes a vulnerability of the Islamic Republic, which promised social justice against the corruption of the Shah. As everyone’s living standards plummet, on Instagram the young people of the new elite show off their wealth, pose in bikinis, live like oligarchs. And this infuriates people. ” Moaveni however stresses that “not everyone in these protests wants the same thing. There is a fever in the West that suggests that it is time for this regime to fall. I think we will move towards the normalization of the end of compulsory hijab. They might still try to enforce it somehow, for example if you take off your hijab in your car, register your license plate and fine you and, after four times, you have to take a re-education course, but they prefer to avoid direct confrontation; maybe they will continue to impose it to go to places like banks, but in women’s lives it is the end of the mandatory hijab pillar, it will never be the same again, the police fear of morality is gone: now they are murderers . For the rest, however, I see contradictory feelings. On the one hand, the slogans of “Death to the dictator”; on the other hand, many do not want a violent overthrow: the hope is of a transition towards what the majority wants. But how?”
October 8, 2022 (change October 9, 2022 | 02:42)
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