By Arash Azizi
Iran's revolutionary struggle for freedom
Subject
Themes
In September 2022, twenty-one-year-old Mahsa Amini was detained by Tehran's morality police for "bad Hijab" and brutally beaten. She died days later. Her funeral in Saqqez drew thousands, and the Kurdish slogan "Women, Life, Freedom" swept across every corner of Iran. Women burned their headscarves, schoolgirls gave the finger to portraits of the Supreme Leader, and protesters declared: "This is a revolution."
In September 2022, twenty-one-year-old Mahsa Amini was detained by Tehran's morality police for "bad Hijab" and brutally beaten. She died days later. Her funeral in Saqqez drew thousands, and the Kurdish slogan "Women, Life, Freedom" swept across every corner of Iran. Women burned their headscarves,…
Published in 2024, this work arrives at a moment when the 2022 Iranian uprising has entered a lull but its consequences remain deeply contested. The timing situates it within a broader wave of global scholarship on protest movements, authoritarian resilience, and the politics of everyday resistance,…
The concept of "Life as Politics," borrowed from sociologist Assef Bayat, captures one of the most significant dynamics running through the Iranian struggle: the way ordinary daily acts become profoundly political in an authoritarian context. When a woman allows her scarf to slip, when a teenager…
The placement of "Women" as the first word in the slogan "Women, Life, Freedom" was not accidental. Iranian women had been at the forefront of every major challenge to the Islamic Republic, and the 2022 uprising finally recognised what decades of activism had built. The compulsory Hijab, often…
The Islamic Republic was founded on a grand promise: to offer an alternative to both Western capitalism and Soviet communism, governed by a philosopher-king in the form of the Guardian Jurist. Over four decades later, the regime has manifestly failed on every count. It promised an economy for the…
One of the most remarkable features of the 2022 uprising was its capacity to unite Iranians across ethnic, religious, class, and national lines that the regime had long exploited to maintain control. Previous protest waves had struggled to bridge these divides. The 2009 Green Movement was centred on…
The Islamic Republic has developed a sophisticated apparatus of repression that extends from brute physical violence to subtle psychological manipulation. Understanding these tools is essential to appreciating both the courage required to resist and the ingenuity with which Iranians have fought…
On 13 September 2022, twenty-one-year-old Mahsa Amini stepped out of a Tehran metro station, a week shy of her birthday. The Guidance Patrol, the dreaded morality police wing tasked with enforcing "proper" Hijab, seized her and threw her into a van. They beat her so badly during the ten-minute…
On 8 March 2023, five prominent activists commemorated International Women's Day inside Tehran's Evin prison. Narges Mohammadi, a fifty-year-old human rights campaigner who had spent most of the past two decades behind bars, spoke with cool authority: "The people's will now demands an end to the…
On 15 November 2022, sixteen thousand Isfahan steelworkers walked off the job. Dressed in blue overalls and white helmets, they marched as the factory chimneys hissed, chanting "Enough promises, our table is empty." Management had offered each worker ten million rials (roughly twenty-five pounds) to…
On 28 February 2023, ten-month-old Pirouz died of kidney failure. He was a Persian cheetah cub, one of the last of a critically endangered subspecies. The entire nation grieved. A footballer called it a "great national catastrophe." From exile, former crown prince Reza Pahlavi tweeted: "For myself…
On 20 November 2022, security forces stormed a rural village an hour from Tehran to arrest Katayoun Riahi, a sixty-year-old actress who had been on the run for months. Her crime: posting a photo of herself without Hijab two days after Mahsa Amini's death, alongside the words "Iranian women are a…
On 30 September 2022, congregants filed out of Friday prayers in Zahedan, capital of Sistan and Balochistan, Iran's poorest province. A group headed toward a nearby police station to demand justice for a fifteen-year-old Baloch girl allegedly raped by a police commander. Pre-positioned snipers…
Iran is home to around five million Afghan refugees, linked by a shared Persian language and centuries of cultural exchange. Yet pervasive racism defines their daily existence. A 2019 poll showed 43% of Tehranis favoured banning Afghans from the city, 44% supported segregation, and only a bare…
In February 2023, elderly pensioners joined nationwide strikes with an unexpected slogan: "Leave Syria alone and think of us!" Iran's military intervention to prop up the Assad regime had cost up to thirty billion dollars and over two thousand soldiers' lives. Meanwhile, inflation devastated…
Sixteen-year-old Sarina Esmayilzadeh was beaten to death by security forces on 23 September 2022, on the streets of Karaj's Mehrshahr neighbourhood. The regime claimed she committed suicide by jumping from a roof. But Sarina had left behind something the state could not suppress: an extraordinary…
By Arash Azizi
Subject
Themes
In September 2022, twenty-one-year-old Mahsa Amini was detained by Tehran's morality police for "bad Hijab" and brutally beaten. She died days later. Her funeral in Saqqez drew thousands, and the Kurdish slogan "Women, Life, Freedom" swept across every corner of Iran. Women burned their headscarves, schoolgirls gave the finger to portraits of the Supreme Leader, and protesters declared: "This is a revolution."