ON 16 SEPTEMBER 2022, the Iranian ‘morality’ police arrested a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, Jina Amina, in the city of Tehran for unsatisfactorily covering her hair under the rules of Islamic Sharia law.
CCTV footage taken on the eve of her death shows that Jina was brought to a police station, where she later collapsed, before being taken to hospital. She was pronounced dead three days later.
The Iranian state denied Jina’s family access to her body and refused a post-mortem examination into the cause of her death taken by a non-state forensic doctor.
The incident triggered a protest in Jina’s hometown of Saqqez, where the slogan “Jin, Jian, Azadi [women, life, freedom]” could be heard.
These words have a philosophical backbone and take their rhetoric from the writings of imprisoned Kurdish leader Abdulla Ocalan, who is now serving a life sentence in Turkey. According to Ocalan, freedom is meaningless until women are totally free.
The slogan also fits well with the situation in Iran, where gender apartheid has been the official state policy for over four decades. The words express radical demands for political openness, freedom and human rights that have been denied by the government since 1978.
Protests over Jina’s death quickly spread to other cities in Kurdistan and across Iran, and in less than a week, people from every corner of the country and of different ethnic, religious, languages, gender and political orientations, took to the streets demanding justice for her under the same slogan: Jin, Jian, Azadi.
Previous movements
The state has responded with a heavy hand, using every method of repression to crack down on protesters. According to Human Rights Watch, the Iranian state security forces have so far killed 280 people, including 28 children, and detained thousands.
In the first trial of those detained, which was held on 31 October, the so-called ‘revolutionary court’ charged four people for being “enemies of God”, an overt term that normally carries a death sentence in Iran’s judiciary system.
The nature of the revolt led many Iranians to believe it could be the beginning of the end of four decades of brutality, injustice, deprivation and suppression in the Islamic Republic. For some reason, I believe the same.
If it is not, the uprising could be the foundation for a forthcoming revolution that may eventually overthrow the current regime.
Compared to previous uprisings between 2008 and 2010 (the ‘Green Movement’) and in 2018 (ignited by the rise in the price of petrol and other commodities) – both of which merely called for changes to certain policies – the current movement feels far more assertive and radical.
In its campaign against the regime, the Green Movement showed no significant differences from the Iranian mainstream ideology when it came to women’s rights, human rights, or ethnic and religious rights.
And because of this, it attracted less attention from people who were not affected by the slight differences it demanded. The Kurds, Baluchs, Arabs, human rights activists, and feminists did not join in.
A decade later, demands for a decrease in the price of petrol, energy, and other commodities that fuelled the 2018 and 2019 uprisings likewise failed to reach affluent people, women, ethnic and religious groups.
Consequently, except for the most economically deprived vulnerable people from the periphery of the large cities, that uprising did not draw enough support to challenge the very foundation of the Islamic regime’s political structure.
The Jina Uprising
But there is a significant difference with what is being called the Jina Uprising, particularly within the slogan ‘Jin, Jian Azady’.
It unites an array of social factions and classes. The slogan is trans-ethnic, trans-religious, and transnational, with the potential to accommodate a wide range of social, economic, and political viewpoints and spectrums.
It leaves behind only the theocratic ideology of the state, whose foundations lie in the control of women and discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities.
But the other distinguishing feature of the current uprising is its revolutionary nature.
Over the past 43 years, the Iranian regime has exercised its power and authority in three main arenas: on the streets; in mosques; and in universities.
For the regime, the streets have always been a place for showing its muscle, particularly by demoralising the presence of women. But now, the streets have become a place where authority is challenged by the people – and notably, by Iranian young women.
Another pillar of power, universities, have likewise been lost by the Iranian state to the people of Iran this time.
To prevent a repeat of the collapse of the Shah regime in 1978, in which students played a vital role, the Islamic regime launched a ‘cultural revolution’ in Iranian universities between 1980 and 1983.
Thousands of lecturers, intellectuals, and students were replaced by people loyal to the regime and the entire curriculum was changed. ‘Islamic sociology’ was introduced as a means of aligning the curriculum with political Islam.
But now, the active participation of students in the latest uprising have exposed the flaws of the regime’s 38-year cultural revolution.
Finally, and most importantly, the regime has also been built on a pillar of religion and emboldened through the influence of religious institutions. These institutions combined with the use of coercive force have created a machine of control over Iranian society.
Religion provides a consented form of authority for the state, because the state claims to represent god, while coercive power has been used to supplement total control of society.
But in the digital age, young Iranians no longer accept authority that does not come from the people. And by rejecting the authority of religion, they have practically rejected the authority of the state.
In this situation, the state’s only tool of authority is the use of coercive force. But this has now proven to be entirely ineffective during the last 46 days of protest in Iran.
Demonstrations are approaching their eighth week with no sign of diminishing. Those at the heart of the protests are targeting the very foundation of the Iranian regime and the country’s political establishment.
Shamal Mirza is a PhD graduate from the Department of Sociology at University College Dublin. He was a lecture assistant from 2016 to 2021, and is currently employed by Accenture.
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