Revolt of Iranian girls

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

FOUR DAYS ago, on December 11, armed Iranian security forces violently arrested Tehran University student, Mahdieh Suleimani, taking her into custody without charges. She is 22 years old. She is the same age as Mahsa Amini, who died in police custody on September 16, after being arrested by "morality police" for improperly covering her hair.

Following Mahsa’s death, protests exploded across Iran, in many ways led by teenagers, young women and students who have shaken Iranian authorities with their generation’s fearlessness. Women and girls refused to wear their hijabs, burned them in fires and cut their hair.

Angry secondary schoolgirls mobbed officials, hounding them out of their school compound. One principal, Zahra Lori, died from “security pressures” after refusing to hand over the names and footage of students holding a sit-in in their school. She had been summoned many times and dismissed from her position. She defended her students with her life.

Young women have protested at a cost to their bodies and lives. In October, Nika Shakarami, 17, was killed at a street protest where women were burning their hijabs. Amrita Abbasi, just 21 years old, was kidnapped by Iran’s security forces and tortured, and brutally physically and sexually assaulted. She was taken to hospital, but kidnapped again by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps before her parents arrived. She hasn’t been seen since October 18.

Across the country, since September, many young women have also died from blows to the head from security forces during protests. As we do for victims of gender-based violence, it is important to say their names: 16-year-old Sarina Esmailzadeh, 17-year-old Arnika Qaem Maghami, 21-year-old Negin Abdolmaleki, 17-year-old Sadaf Movahhedi, 16-year-old Sarina Saedi, 22-year-old Marzieh Doshman Ziari, 16-year-old Maedeh (Mahak) Hashemi, 15-year-old Asra Panahi, 21-year-old Pegah Ghavasieh and 22-yer-old Maria Ghavasieh, and more.

Fourteen-year-old Parmis Hamnava tore Khomeini’s picture from her textbook and was beaten by state security forces in her class and in front of her classmates. She died from internal bleeding, and she’s not the only one. It is estimated that dozens of children have been killed.

Not only young women have been blinded, beaten, shot at, arrested or killed, but the ages of these young women, some just teenagers, and the numbers of children also detained, demands our solidarity as we reach the end of 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-Based Violence and Human Rights Day on December 10. The two are intertwined here.

These Iranian girls are facing such violence because they are rebelling against patriarchal state power, and a religious social and political order, administered through gendered forms of repression, which is why Mahsa Amini’s death felt so personal and political.

In solidarity with the protests, Iranian university students tore down walls that created gender-segregated dining halls, refused to attend classes and are demanding the unconditional release of all arrested students, cancellation of arrest warrants for the released students, the lifting of recent academic suspensions and the withdrawal of the security forces from campuses.

Although public anger has been brewing in Iran for a long time, and the current resistance is nationwide, this is a generation that has clearly had enough of inequality, terror and injustice. They build on the legacy of an earlier generation of women who took to the streets in 1979 to march against Ayatollah Khomeini’s decree making veiling of women mandatory.

It reminds us that women’s anger at injustice is a flame they hand down to their daughters to tend until they too combust in fire. If not by one generation then by another, we have always had to fight and win feminist battles this way.

This is a complex, historically multifaceted movement supported by women and men of all ages, and women have been resisting restriction and denial of their rights for decades, as do women everywhere.

However, part of the momentous radicalism of the current Iranian feminist revolt for regime change is how much it is powered by the young. Such a blaze is brilliant, terrifying and hopeful to see.

Schoolgirls have been hanging signs that read “woman, life, freedom” in classrooms. These words, “zen, zendegi, azadi” originally emerged from Kurdish women’s movements in Turkey, Syria and Iran. Originally “jin, jiyan, azadi” in Kurdish, they became the rallying cry these last months.

Young women are fighting to end their tears behind bars. As they bloom more powerful from their wounds, as they build another world without fear for students and for their future, as they change rusted minds, may their revolutionary wildfire rise and rise.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 487

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