With negotiations to end the Iran war in limbo, there is much speculation about the status of the Iranian regime. Are there cracks or is the regime holding? More important, what do ordinary Iranians want? Battered by the conflict, is there now a rupture between Iranians and ayatollahs?Or has the regime solidified further?
Answers to these questions are complex. But in What Iranians Want: Women, Life, Freedom, author Arash Azizi, suggests that Iranian civil society may have already crossed a threshold. For, it would be a mistake to view the nationwide anti-regime movement, which was sparked by the 2022 death of Mahsa Amini in the hands of Iran’s morality police, as an isolated event. Neither was it just about the hijab, which Mahsa was accused of improperly wearing. It was a coming together of multiple forces, building up for four decades, since the 1979 Islamic Revolution.
