It’s important to celebrate courage wherever we find it.
Since Sept. 16, we’ve witnessed amazing courage in dozens of Iranian cities, as thousands have protested the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman who died in Tehran in the custody of the so-called morality police.
Her offense? She was allegedly in violation of the hijab rule, a mandate imposed shortly after the Islamic revolution of 1979. Iranian women are forbidden to appear in public without a long, loose robe and a head covering.
Women in violation of this rule may be accosted on the streets, lectured, fined or arrested. Mahsa Amini was reportedly beaten by the police. Photos on social media show her unconscious in a hospital bed, with bruises around her eyes and bleeding from an ear.
Thousands marched in protests largely driven by women. It’s impressive to see videos of Iranian women and girls tearing off their much-hated hijabs and throwing them into fires.
The danger these women face cannot be overstated. Iranian officials have responded with brutality. Many protesters have been arrested. They likely face torture and imprisonment. More than 130 have been killed, and some sources say that the figure is likely much higher.
The anger — and the courage — of these Iranian women reflects deep discontent. Many are just tired of being forced to wear a scarf over their hair when they go out in public. Many Iranian women despise the hijab because it symbolizes their supposed inferior status and the “right” of men to tell women how to look and behave.
But these protests represent something larger, as well: an intense craving for modernity and the freedoms of the West that permeates much of Iranian society. This longing for freedom is eloquently described in the books of Iran experts Sandra Mackey and Elaine Sciolino. In “The Shia Revival,” Vali Nasr notes that in 2006 Persian was the third most common language on the internet, and that young Iranians maintained over 80,000 blogs. The writings of Immanuel Kant, Gabriel Garcia Marquez and other Westerners sell well in Iran.
A primary narrative of Middle Eastern tension is Iran (Shia) versus Saudi Arabia (Sunni). To the extent that we have any business taking sides, we’ve chosen poorly.
Iran has a democratic tradition that dates to 1905, when a revolution diminished monarchical power and established a parliament. Most Americans are unaware of the systematic subversion of democracy in Iran by the U.S. and Britain throughout the 20th century, including a CIA-driven coup in 1953 that kept an autocratic shah in power until his tyranny made the 1979 Islamic Revolution almost inevitable.
But every Iranian is aware of this history. Nevertheless, many of them still long for the modernity and moderation of the West.
In the meantime, we’ve courted Saudi Arabia, a brutal, oppressive monarchy that, last week, betrayed us by conniving with Russia to cut OPEC production and keep oil prices high.
One of the great blunders of the Trump administration was the abrogation of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a 2015 agreement between Iran and the U.S. that limited Iran’s nuclear development in exchange for sanctions relief.
The deal was working. Even Trump’s Defense secretary, Jim Mattis, said that the JCPOA’s verification procedures were “robust,” and he did not dispute the findings of the International Atomic Energy Agency, which confirmed Iran’s compliance.
The JCPOA bolstered the standing of Iran’s moderate President Hassan Rouhani; Trump’s rejection of the deal in 2018 helped Iranian hard-liners elect the rigid, reactionary Ebrahim Raisi. In short, Trump gave the hard-line mullahs what they need most — a treacherous, deal-breaking external enemy.
A new iteration of the JCPOA should be a top priority of the Biden administration, even if it requires easing our sanctions to achieve it. The goal isn’t to appease the hard-liners. It’s to strengthen the moderates — there are more of them than we think — and to prevent Iran’s development of a nuclear weapon.
If Iranian women and girls have the courage to protest the tyranny of the mullahs, we should have the courage to say that we made a mistake.
