The title of today’s text is a slogan, a slogan that resonated with Iran’s protests following the killing on September 16, 2022 of a young woman of 22 named Zina Mahsa Amini (Mahsa is her official Iranian name, while Zina is Kurdish, unofficial because Kurdish parents have no right to call their children any name they want). There are conditional, unprincipled, false slogans, fossils of the past, and there are others that greatly thicken the spirit and content of the great popular mobilization. Lately I’ve been discerning two such slogans: the American “Black Lives Matter” and the Iranian “Woman, Life, Freedom.” The slogan was first heard at Amini’s funeral in her hometown of Shakez in Iranian Kurdistan, where 100,000 people followed her to her grave and then spread throughout the country. I recall the facts: Zina Mahsa Amini was arrested on September 13 by the morality police in Tehran for inappropriate clothing, that is, because she did not wear a hijab, an Islamic headscarf, as expected, but let her hair down. She was severely beaten, and when she was taken to the hospital, she was already clinically dead. Her murder sparked a massive wave of protests that erupted spontaneously and spread across the country through mobile phones and social media. The regime reacted violently. According to authoritative reports from non-governmental organizations, more than 500 protesters (including 68 minors) were killed and 20,000 arrests were made.

Dictatorships that kill, torture, terrorize, imprison are not easy to overthrow. However, the dictatorship of the mullahs will fall! We simply do not know when and at what cost of shed blood.

The slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” sums up the entire political and social problem of Iranian society. In the oppression of women, the tyranny of the regime (but also the chauvinism of society) is mainly manifested and symbolized. Women’s freedom presupposes and is identified with political freedom, that is, with the overthrow of the dictatorial regime. Therefore, this slogan was accompanied by another: “Down with the dictator.” The shocking images of the courage of young women who stood and screamed without a headscarf in the face of armed men or cutting their hair with scissors will remain indelible in our eyes. They were not alone, there were men with them. These girls and boys, young women and boys came to the demonstrations to express their will to live and enjoy life freely! The youth under the age of 24 in Iran in 2022 is 18 million people (22% of the total population), all of them have an Internet subscription and maintain links with the Iranian diaspora (three million Iranians live outside of Iran). They know well, I mean, what is going on in the world. In addition, as many serious researchers of Iranian society tell us, they grew up in families where paternal arbitrariness and authoritarianism are largely mitigated, especially in large cities where parents have university education. Iranian society, despite the furious reaction of the theocratic regime, is also secularizing. Along with social secularism, intellectual secularism is also developing on the part of Shiite theologians and thinkers, who question Khomeini’s teachings about the velayat-e faqih (that is, the rule of Sharia teachers). This is a current of neo-Mutazilites (the classical Mu’tazilites of the 9th-11th centuries brought logic to the theological discussion and accepted the creation of the Koran), who essentially seek to separate the Islamic faith from theocratic politics. It is important to note that the newer theologians of this trend do not recognize the obligation to wear a headscarf.

As society secularizes, Islamist ideology loses all persuasive power, and the regime is left with nothing but extreme violence and repression. This year’s mobilization, of course, is not the first in recent years against a tyrannical regime. It was preceded by many and massive: the green movement of 2009, after the falsification of the presidential elections in order to keep Ahmadinejad in power, the so-called “egg riot” of 2018 (which began on December 28, 2017 % increase in the price of eggs in one day) and even more in November 2019 with 1,500 dead, caused by a tripling in the price of gasoline. All were brutally suppressed, no one managed to overthrow the dictatorship of the mullahs. Dictatorships that kill, torture, terrorize, imprison are not easy to overthrow. And this recent youth uprising, the “revolution of 1401”, as the Iranians themselves call it (that is, 2023 according to their own dating system), has slowly subsided. But not all of these uprisings were in vain. They have revealed to Iranian society at large that the theocratic dictatorship no longer has a foothold within itself, as oil revenues no longer allow it to buy off the poorest sections of the population. Mullah dictatorship will fall! We simply do not know when and at what cost of shed blood.