“Under the skin of the cities in Iran, there [was] something boiling… It was like a burst of suppressed desire and anger of the younger people,” says Elahe Amani, a former student activist at Tehran University and current chair of the Women’s Intercultural Network.
It’s been almost two years since the murder of 22-year-old Zhina “Mahsa” Amini made international headlines and sparked an uprising in Iran. All the while, the Kurdish words for “Woman, Life, Freedom” are still being chanted.
Amini was arrested by the regime’s morality police in Tehran on Sept. 13, 2022, for allegedly wearing her hijab too loosely. This was just weeks after government officials proclaimed that they would begin using facial recognition strategies on public transport to identify violators of draconian dress code and hijab mandates. Amini and her brother were told she would be held for an “educational and orientation class,” but according to Tehran’s Police Information Center she was brought to a hospital in a coma the same day as her arrest. She died Sept. 16 in custody. Images of Amini in her hospital bed showed her unconscious with tubes in her mouth and nose, and extensive bruising around her eyes.
Her death triggered the longest uprising in Iran since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Months of women’s solidarity demonstrations took place in more than 159 cities worldwide. “Under the skin of the cities in Iran, there [was] something boiling… It was like a burst of suppressed desire and anger of the younger people,” says Elahe Amani, a former student activist at Tehran University and current chair of the Women’s Intercultural Network.
Women across Iran took to the streets, burning hijabs, cutting their hair and chanting the slogans “Mullahs must get lost” and “Death to the dictator,” calling for the fall of the fundamentalist regime of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. This uprising against authoritarianism caught fire not only in the public sphere but also domestically, against the patriarchy in the home.
“This generation… really has been deprived of living,” Amani says. “The majority of younger people born and raised in Iran are deprived of their freedom, their life, of being able to fall in love, to kiss someone in public, to get married, to open a door for their future.”
Brutally violent government suppression followed the protests, with more than 600 executions in 2023 alone and the poisoning of thousands of schoolgirls, allegedly orchestrated by the Iranian regime. “I think [the poisonings were] the fear tactic of the Islamic Republic because this was one of the historical times high school and middle school students participated in the Woman, Life, Freedom movement,” Amani says. “My own family and friends were expressing that they were afraid to let their child go to middle school.”
This story originally appeared in the Spring 2024 issue of Ms. magazine. Join the Ms. community today and you’ll get the Spring issue delivered straight to your mailbox.
Nonetheless, activists continue to resist President Ebrahim Raisi’s even stricter hijab mandates and government crackdowns by not obeying the dress code and by gathering in persistent small clusters of anti-regime demonstrations. In 2023, jailed Iranian feminist and human rights activist Narges Mohammadi won the Nobel Peace Prize for fighting women’s oppression. Iran’s Revolutionary Court announced in January that it was extending Mohammadi’s prison sentence by 15 months.
“The government didn’t hear the voice of young people,” Amani says. “In Iran, there are a record number of executions, a record number of honor killings. We will see more resistance, and the people will come to stir it when the time is right. Things may seem quiet now, but we should expect another uprising.”
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