Since erupting on September 16, Iran’s latest wave of street protests has
begun to pose a serious security and political challenge to the Islamic
Republic, placing regime leaders in a uniquely puzzling situation.
Interestingly, Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has not commented on the turmoil,
which was ignited by the torture and death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, at
the hands of the regime’s morality police (Gasht-e Ershad, or Guidance Patrol),
reportedly for disrespecting regulations on wearing a hijab. Yet he and his
circle are no doubt concerned about the movement’s novel aspects.
اضافة اعلان
Anti-regime protests are nothing new in the Islamic
Republic. The largest one was sparked by massive fraud in the 2009 presidential
election, bringing millions of people to the street until authorities cracked
down on the movement’s leaders, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karrubi (Mousavi
is under house arrest to this day).
The most recent round of widespread protests took
place in 2019, after the government’s sudden decision to raise gasoline prices.
At the time, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and police forces killed
more than 1,500 people, a shocking record even by the regime’s brutal
standards.
The current uprising is distinguished by several
notable features:
Unlike previous protests, the movement’s chief
source of discontent is neither economic nor an isolated political decision.
The protesters’ main slogan so far is “Women, life, freedom”, indicating a more
generalized and profound opposition to the Islamic Republic’s entire
totalitarian system.
The regime’s comprehensive effort to “Islamize”
Iranian society and engineer all aspects of citizens’ lives has steadily
deprived people of freedoms in the private and public sphere. Women have been
subjected to the worst of these human rights violations, with their very bodies
becoming Iran’s most crucial political battleground. Hence, human dignity and
freedom lie at the heart of the movement’s current demands, centering on
recognition of women as the primary victims of the regime’s patriarchal
tradition and authoritarian Islamist ideology.
This foundation could make the movement a
particularly powerful humanistic, egalitarian, liberal, and secular force in
Iran, with tremendous potential for spurring fundamental change.
The movement is not tied to the clergy at all. This
is not to say it is an anti-religious movement — in fact, protesters have
deliberately avoided the use of any religious symbols or rhetoric. Yet, it is
also conspicuously cleric-free. In the past, all influential political
movements in Iran, from the early twentieth century Constitutional Revolution
to the 1979 Islamic Revolution, have included high-level participation by
clerics. Even the 2009 Green Movement had a cleric, Karrubi, as one of its two
main leaders.
The absence of clergy in today’s movement is not
accidental. Many protesters see all Shiite clerics — not just key regime
supporters, but also silent critics and neutral authorities — as the foundation
of the regime’s legitimacy, facilitating its initial emergence and justifying
its principles, policies, and decisions ever since. Clerics, who represent
Sharia, see in the demand for equal rights for women an ultimate existential
threat to Sharia and their status as its guardians.
Even clerics who might oppose the regime on other
grounds would not be able to publicly shout “Women, life, freedom”. The
movement may therefore represent a watershed moment in the Shiite clergy’s
gradual divorce from the leading forces in Iranian society.
The emphasis on the veil is no coincidence. As a
totalitarian regime, the Islamic Republic has been hostile toward women since
its inception, and mandating that they wear the hijab is a highly visible part
of its efforts to control and marginalize them. Enforcement of the veil rule
has only increased under President Ebrahim Raisi’s government. Yet prior to the
current demonstrations, leading critics of the regime were reluctant to
prioritize refusal of the “compulsory veil” as a political demand, often
ignoring female activists’ justified pressure to include the unique forms of
oppression suffered by half of society.
… human dignity and freedom lie at the heart of the movement’s current demands, centering on recognition of women as the primary victims of the regime’s patriarchal tradition and authoritarian Islamist ideology.
In her 2011 book The Hijab and Intellectuals,
prominent activist Noushin Ahmadi Khorasani showed how even the most secular
and liberal political critics and dissidents have consistently avoided
recognizing the regime’s systematic oppression of women’s freedom and dignity,
focusing on the compulsory veil as a fundamental rather than secondary problem.
Today’s movement has revealed a drastic change in the way many Iranians look at
their plight and its potential solutions, with more citizens apparently seeing
women’s rights as the best starting point for their democratic struggle against
Islamist obscurantism.
The protests indicate that existing political
opposition groups and figures — whether reformists inside the country or
dissidents abroad — are irrelevant. One of the most astonishing aspects of the
current movement is that it is overwhelmingly composed of young Iranians under
age 25 who identify themselves as more than just opponents of Islamist ideology
— they are also avowedly alien to the mindset of the older generation,
including anti-regime politicians. This shows that real forces of change can
emerge and self-organize without intervention by conventional dissident groups
or personalities. It also raises the question of who is directing the movement,
and whether it will be able to establish an organic leadership before becoming
exhausted or crumbling under violent suppression.
In sum, the movement’s nature, organization style,
leadership, and core ideals are sharply different from all previous political
protests in the Islamic Republic. This courageous experiment could spur more
significant developments in Iran over the coming days and weeks, though little
is known about its ability to weather serious challenges in the long run.
Policy recommendations.
In general, foreign government statements supporting
and sympathizing with Iran’s anti-regime protesters are less helpful than
similar gestures from non-governmental entities, including communication and
digital companies (e.g., Google, Amazon, Apple), human rights institutions,
famous civil resistance figures, foreign democratic movements, and individual
academics, literary figures, and artists. Even so, US and European officials
can still play an exceptional role in helping the movement or, at least,
avoiding harmful actions.
For example, now is not the time to implement
financial arrangements that decrease pressure on the regime — including
sanctions relief stemming from the ongoing nuclear talks. Any action that can
be perceived as Western indifference toward the Iranian people’s longtime
suffering should be consciously avoided. Their democratic, secular, and liberal
aspirations are perhaps the best force for advancing peace and security in the
Middle East, since they will be the ones responsible for establishing a
government committed to those principles should the current regime fall.
Mehdi Khalaji is the Libitzky Family Fellow at The
Washington Institute. This article was first published in the September 28
issue of PolicyWatch.
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