We don’t hear much anymore in Australia about what is happening on the ground in Iran, but the Woman Life Freedom movement is very much alive.
Some calls this movement an uprising where others say these are protests. Some see revolution, while the Islamic Republic regime rails about a plot fomented by its enemies.
Thinking about this movement as a revolutionary process helps us to understand why it might look like it has disappeared. It is a process which has ebbs and flows. At the moment, we are in the ebb, but flows are bound to come back.
We often link a revolution to an event that sparked it, but when we are doing this, this is retrospectively. Think about Bastille Day for the French revolution. It is marked as the symbol of the revolution, but the storming of the Bastille was just one in a series of events at the time. It was neither the most radical nor the larger. It has become symbolic of the revolution though.
Iranians similarly have rallied around one event, the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in September last year while in police custody. The majority of Iranians now want significant political and cultural changes, but the Islamic regime and the political apparatus are strong. They do not show signs of being divided, nor are they in doubt about their legitimacy. For this reason, the revolutionary process will take time. Some events will trigger small shifts, until a major change happens.
It is important to be hopeful about this revolutionary process. It is a journey.
Even more so because the Woman Life Freedom movement is about regaining a sense of hope, of life, of love, of joy, of lightness. Lightness not in a superficial fashion, but as a cure from the old sad heavy ways of the Islamic regime. As a rejection of the killing of joy and of the constant grief.
When the Islamic Republic established itself in 1979, its ideology soon came to become one that associated modesty, a highly desirable Islamic virtue for women, to invisibility. One of the first things you need to learn as a woman in Iran is that it is not proper to walk around, smiling, looking happy, nor to look at people too directly. The best way to walk in the streets is to walk fast, looking at the pavement, and to avoid eye contact (and physical contact for that matter). This does not stop girls and women from smiling and laughing in the street of course, but when they do so, they stand out.
The current movement reclaims the right to laugh in the streets, to stop being invisible, and to be hopeful. It reclaims the right for small daily interactions without having sin entering the exchange. This is why the veil, which is seen by the Islamic regime as a way to avoid sinful interactions and to protect women’s modesty, is an important symbol. For most Iranian women, it is an imposition on their bodies that they are not willing to compromise on anymore. Women are now increasingly going out in the streets not just with a loose veil, but without veil at all, which was unthinkable before September last year and it is a victory that the movement of the past few months has achieved.
This desire for joy doubles down when people meet in the streets to express it. A revolution brings energy that did not seem to exist before it started. It sends ordinary daily fear to the background and brings about the joy of being together and powerful. For the people who are gathering in the streets and squares, there is a triumph of fearlessness. There is an exhilaration of being there together that makes the fear of repression disappear, at least for a moment.
Revolutions are messy and bloody, let us not forget. This movement in Iran has already claimed many lives, many have been tortured, and this will continue as long as the regime holds its position. However, it is important to understand the feelings that spark revolutions and to be attuned to the emotions of the people who gather on the street. We more obviously see the anger, the violence, the frustration. These are emotions that translate well visually.
What also strikes me when looking at images of Iranians in the streets these days is the joy of being out together and of fighting for this sense of lightness. The joy of women feeling the wind in their hair.
So even if you do not hear about Iran in the media, it does not mean that nothing happens on the ground. Let us have hope in the journey.
