Iran protests a display of women’s power

IRAN is a resistant nation that has held off the West and the US and survived economic sanctions; within the region, it remains the greatest threat to Israel and a challenger to the influence of Saudi Arabia. There are no political alternatives that survive within the borders of the country ruled by clerics since the Islamic revolution of 1979.

There is now resistance within the resistant country by a section of Iranian women, spectacularly throwing off their chadors (long loose veils) and head scarves or hijab. It is an incredible display of woman power. It excites the world and damages the legitimacy of any regime when young women are killed by the morality police and students in universities, and even schoolgirls, according to some reports, start an uprising. Throwing off their veils is an emblematic gesture of defiance.

There are no official figures of the death toll in the protests that began after the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini on September 16. Iran’s state TV says over 40 protesters have died, but independent estimates say the figure is much higher. Tehran’s Attorney General has said that 400 persons, arrested during the ‘riots’ in the capital, have been released after they promised to never repeat their acts. International news agency AP says local officials reported 1,500 arrests across the country.

What must disturb the regime are social media narratives of very young Iranian women landing up dead, the latest being 17-year-old Nika Shahkarami, who went missing for a week before her body was found on a street in Tehran. All of this is stirring up emotions. So much so that on October 4, Iran President Ebrahim Raisi appealed for national unity even as he acknowledged “weaknesses and shortcomings” in the Islamic Republic; he hastened to add that the unrest was being stoked by Iran’s enemies.

US Secretary of State Antony Blinken had on September 23 announced on Twitter that “we took action today to advance Internet freedom and the free flow of information for the Iranian people, issuing a general licence to provide them greater access to digital communication to counter the Iranian Government’s censorship.” There are proxy battles being fought and the official Iranian view is that women and groups outside the country are fanning the protests with the help of some ‘misguided’ young people of Iran and hostile foreign powers.

The official Islamic Republic News Agency, IRNA, quotes Iranian Foreign Minister Hossein Amir-Abdollahian as saying that during the internal unrest in the US that led to the occupation of the Capitol Hill in 2021, the Internet was shut down in that country.

The veil is a complex issue in Iran, where women are part of the workforce and among the 15 to 24 age group, 98 per cent are literate. The Islamic Republic does not bar women from education and the workforce where they are present in huge numbers. There are separate schools for girls and the regime claims to have encouraged education in rural Iran. During a 2017 visit to Iran, I had met Masoumeh Ebtekar, then one of the four Vice-Presidents of Iran, who had been partly educated in the US. She argued that the revolution actually helped girls enter schools, as in the countryside families became more comfortable sending them outside the home as long as religious norms could be maintained.

Earlier, in the Shah’s time, she argued, one section of Iran’s society was wildly westernised and completely apart from the consciousness of an average Iranian (Ebtekar was the main spokesperson for a group of students who took over the US Embassy for 444 days, starting November 4, 1979).

Since then, there has been no serious internal challenge to the regime as all dissent has been crushed, even as Iran has been a player in conflicts from Iraq to Syria and Lebanon and it remains the greatest adversary of Israel. Besides the Vatican, it is the only significant state in the world where a religious head is also the head of state (there is a difference with Islamic states ruled by dynasties).

The system within is being represented by the Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, since 1989; he is also the commander of the armed forces and security services, and he chooses half the members of the unelected Guardian Council. It’s an Islamic theocracy that also has elections to the office of President and Parliament, but candidates only contest after being cleared by the Guardian Council. The Presidents have ranged from moderates to conservatives. Within the range of less to more conservative, the clerics in charge do need to do serious reflection on enhancing the scope of women’s rights.

In 2017, I visited the city of Qom, the centre of Shia scholarship in the world, and met a member of the Assembly of Experts, a body of religious scholars, who will be tasked with choosing the next Supreme Leader after Ali Khamenei, who is 83. He saw Iran as a force against the injustice of “imperial powers” and believed it was the only stable country in the region because it blocked out the US. But today, the cracks are showing. How do you fight injustice in say Iraq and Syria or even Palestine, even as you take away the choice of dress from half of your population? Yet, the regime is unlikely to be overthrown internally and even an external intervention has been outside the scope of possibility, more so in the changing global balance.

The real issue in Iran is that when you give women education and employment, they would be empowered enough to get enraged at being pushed around over whether the head scarf has slipped to a level where the morality police, in itself an abomination, can start hauling them up for questioning. The best that can come out of the current resistance is some acceptance from the men in charge that it’s immoral for them to take all decisions over what women can wear or not wear. Meanwhile, the women of the country have shown courage, brilliance and resilience, and in doing so become emblems across the world.