The recent wave of protests seems to have been triggered by this one incident with Mahsa Amini. But there is a larger context and history to them. Could you tell us a little about that?

The killing of Mahsa Amini, following her arrest by the morality police, was the tipping point or maybe the spark that led to the recent wave of protests. But this is not the only time we’ve seen women being at the forefront of such protests [in Iran].

This new wave to me is the [latest] iteration of a historical push against top-down measures that are quite gendered and want to treat women as second-class citizens. 

Just to back up a little bit, when we’re talking about gender, women’s rights and ideology, we know that ideology plays itself out on women’s bodies. Iran was ruled by a monarchy for decades. It had a secular and top-down Westernisation model, and one of the things they did in the 1930s—1936 to be exact—was to ban the headscarf. This was a top-down decision because they wanted a woman’s body to be the secular body, the symbol of modern Iran at the time.

Obviously, this did not sit well with many because these were top-down measures; women had no input. So, following the 1979 revolution, when the opposite ideology came to power—a top-down Islamisation ideology—they kind of did the same thing. They said, “Now we’re an Islamic Republic, we can’t have unveiled women running around in the public sphere.” And they pushed for mandatory veiling. Just a few weeks after the ruling clergy came to power, among them Ayatollah Khomeini, who eventually became the supreme leader, women held a mass protest against the rumours of mandatory veiling. This took place on 8 March 1979.

So, the history really needs to go back. Why were women at the forefront? Because they realised very quickly that they have the most to lose from this. There are documentaries online about this particular protest in 1979, where a French journalist is seen going around talking to women who are saying: ‘This is not why we did a revolution, this is going in the wrong direction. This is not about dictating to our bodies.’

Unfortunately, at that time, men—particularly Marxist groups, leftist groups, and other moderate religious groups—did not support women. They were telling women, ‘Just be patient, let this new republic take shape, and then we’ll attend to your issues.’ And that ended up not happening. Saddam [Hussein] attacked Iran, there was an eight-year-long war, so all of these social justice and civil rights issues were put on the back-burner. [But] women were never passive, they were never victims, they always protested.

Why do you think this particular moment became big?

There are several factors. The fact that we gave the system forty-three years is one. We’ve had at least two to three rounds of moderates coming to power, the most significant one being the Khatami regime. [We had Hassan] Rouhani as well, who didn’t necessarily represent reformists but was certainly a moderate. Rouhani was publicly against the morality police that ended up killing Mahsa. He kept saying, ‘You can’t force culture on people’—it was one of his slogans. And even then the hardliners had no tolerance for what he represented. And the women I studied in my book, they would enter parliament just to be harassed and interrogated on a daily basis until they were forced out of office. And even the men. The people of Iran have experienced this, particularly my generation, the generation that was born after 1979. We were always hopeful to see if small changes could happen from the Islamic justice point of view. But now we see there is a clear dead end. Why? Because there is a section of the elite that is so restrictive.

The other factor is that the Iran of today is much more globalised than what it was twenty years ago. The youth, who are at the forefront of the current protest, are on TikTok, on Instagram. They are seeing how they’re being told to dress, what to watch, what to sing, what music to listen to, [and] they’re also seeing what people in other parts of the world are doing.

Economic restrictions as a result of sanctions is yet another factor. The COVID-19 pandemic affected many countries, and Iran as well, particularly in how the state failed to provide services. The groups we didn’t traditionally see express solidarity are now coming out very publicly to express solidarity; for example, medical groups, doctors. We’re seeing universities, oil refineries, a lot of businesses —groups that were previously on the fence now saying, ‘Enough is enough’. All of this is energised because women are at the forefront. And that’s been one of the successes of this round of protests compared to the one in 1979, where the women were basically alone. They’ve been able to convince men and other ethnic groups—people across ideologies and class—that what they are fighting for is part and parcel of the larger demands for that radical democratic shift.

Why do you think the hijab became the symbol of protest?

It goes back to the issue of a political ideology playing itself out on women’s bodies. It’s really interesting that  the Islamic Republic of Iran basically picked the hijab as its symbol.

It’s also critical to keep in mind that many devout Muslim women MPs were against mandatory veiling. They often pushed for the removal of this rule. According to the parliament’s own research, fifty-five per cent of the population disagreed with mandatory veiling—and this was in 2018. And one of the reasons why they found that the public was disagreeing with this policy was because of the role of the morality police. One MP told me, ‘It looks bad on me as a devout Muslim woman who’s wearing the veil when I see other women being harassed, because it’s questioning my faith, that I’m doing this because I’m forced to, not because I want to.’ It is then important to keep in mind that many religious groups support voluntary veiling but the regime has singled it out as a symbol of their hold over power, women and the status quo.

If you look at India or France by contrast, there are women who are fighting to wear the hijab. What do you make of these seemingly contradictory movements?

These are all top-down policies with very little input from women themselves. They are ideologically driven, and are coming from individuals who want to dictate how women should dress. One thing we need to keep in mind is the role of Islamophobia; some of these policies, particularly in the West, in France, are instigated because of stereotypical Orientalist assumptions.

It would be a mistake to think that the huge protests in Iran are anti-veil. The chant is: ‘Women, Life, Freedom’. We need to focus on the fact that they are literally asking for women’s rights—the right to live, the right to freedom. And not to say they’re ignoring their male counterparts. Their chant is very much about bodily autonomy, gender equality, about being able to choose on their own…and it’s reached a point where there can be no reversal of that. Right now, women are walking around the way they wish, at least in urban centres. They’ve reached a point where they are claiming their autonomy by force, they are daringly risking their lives to dress the way they want. Because it’s reached that point where they are not willing to go back and wear their hijabs just because the regime wants them to.

I’ve read that there is a Kurdish connection to the chant ‘Women, Life, Freedom’.

I did comparative research between Iran and Turkey, and realised that the pro-Kurdish rights movement is really active in Turkey. One of their protest chants is ‘Zan, Zendegy, Azadi’, which means ‘Women, Life, Freedom’. I would always hear it whilst in Turkey, and think: ‘Oh, when will I be able to hear this in Iran as well?’ And that was in 2022.

In all the countries where you have minority ethnic Kurds— in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria—they’ve been repressed. The pro-Kurdish rights movement has been quite feminist, and that’s because their male leaders eventually acknowledged that this feminism needs to happen. So, for me to hear this chant in Iran is a reflection of the intersectional turn that this protest has taken, in the sense that the dominant Persian ethnic group is recognising that the Kurds, the Baluch and other minority groups that have faced repression need to come together and push for change.

Had Mahsa not been Kurdish herself, maybe we would not have seen this. You have a woman from her province come to the city for a vacation, and [what happened to her] could have happened to anyone. And the funeral in the Kurdish region [was] so massive. That’s when they realised that we need to join forces.

You mentioned Islamic feminism. Is there a distinct Iranian feminism?

When I talk about Islamic feminism, I’m talking about those who push for gender equality but from within a religious perspective. They are maybe trained in a religious seminary, women and men, as well as some clergy who identify as Islamic feminists and are pushing for an inherent egalitarian message, very much talking back against these conservative religious ideologies that have dominated the main gender discourse in Iran.

In terms of feminism in Iran, I consider it very much alive, very lively; it’s been around for at least a century. We have documents leading up to the constitutional revolution of 1906, we have secular feminism, we have religious feminism. And when there are openings, they’re able to push—we have women’s journals that one would consider feminist. Maybe they didn’t identify themselves as feminist but when you read the work in Western academia, we would consider them feminist. When there are closures, they are forced underground. But they never go away.

Someone was asking me whether I would consider these high-school students posting pictures of themselves [on social media] as feminist, and my response to that is that I can’t put that tag on them because maybe they don’t identify as that. But to me, the context and situation has made them act in feminist ways.

One observation—and perhaps it’s a trite one—is that many women who wear the burkha are often very stylishly dressed underneath, or in private. How do we understand the role of clothes in negotiating the private and the public?

My generation, which was born very soon after the revolution, grew up with that duality. It was always central; you don’t even think about it. It’s a performative act, where you dress a particular way in the domestic sphere, and once you set foot outside and depending on the context, you dress differently, you even act differently, you speak differently. That duality is extremely prominent. Even in the first grade, I remember my mom telling me, ‘Hey, what we talk about at home you don’t talk about in school.’ When I was six years old, I fully understood that, because it was so much a part of that fabric of how to survive. You recognise that you’re in a group that needs to make these distinctions between how you are in public and how you are in private.

I think that has changed drastically with the new generation.  Those born in the past two decades are tired of this duality. It doesn’t necessarily make sense to them, and they’re increasingly willing to call it out, and not necessarily just go with the status quo. Obviously the Internet and social media has greatly affected this. When I was in my twenties, there was no way I could dream of or imagine having a bonfire of headscarves.