One Tuesday in September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, arrived in Tehran to celebrate her birthday and go shopping – to enjoy herself a bit before the start of the university term. “Mahsa had not come to Tehran to be a hero,” the historian Arash Azizi writes, or, indeed, to become a hashtag tweeted millions of times. But soon after she exited the metro, the 21-year-old was detained by the Iranian police’s moral security division for an alleged infraction of the rules around female dress: her head covering had been deemed insufficiently modest. Witnesses reported seeing police beat her; by Friday, she was dead. The result was an outcry and a record-setting series of protests. “Her murder touched a nerve precisely because so many Iranian women knew it could have been them,” Azizi notes. Although, he adds, “Amini would not have wanted any of this”.
What she did want, by all accounts – and what so many Iranian women and men want, was only to live. It’s a sentiment underscored by the widely adopted slogan “Women, Life, Freedom”, and its key demand of “a normal life”. This is no small ask in a country where posting a photo of your ponytail on Instagram can result in arrest (as it did for one prominent actor, Katayoun Riahi), where job prospects are limited and inflation is stuck above 30%, where conservationists working to rehabilitate the Asiatic cheetah can be accused of spying for the CIA (as Kavous Seyed-Emami and others were), or where footage of the rear ends of water buffaloes emerging from water can be deemed “potentially arousing” and therefore unsuitable for mass broadcast (just one of the “ridiculous” but real examples Azizi recounts).
