There is a temptation in the U.S. to compare international events to current events domestically, and the recent Iranian protests are no exception. Protests against the oppressive laws that women have endured for over forty years in Iran have happened only months after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, throwing many U.S. states back into 20th-century policies. The comparisons are easy to make, but before we compare, it is important to better understand the context behind Iran and why these protests are unprecedented.
The Iran protests stemmed from the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who was arrested for wearing a hijab improperly and then beaten by the morality police. Amini was taken to a hospital, where the story was broken by journalist Niloofar Hamedi, who posted a picture to Twitter of Amini's father and grandmother crying and embracing in the hospital hallway. Amini died later that day. The international outrage over her death led to the #MahsaAmini becoming popular on Twitter.
The current protests have already been excellently covered by Skidmore News in this article, but it is worth examining previous protests. Previously, there had been student protests in 1999, which stemmed from the closure of the reformist newspaper Salam. Tehran University students held peaceful demonstrations, but on the evening of the protests, their was a violent raid on the dormitory of students by over 400 paramilitaries, in which 300 students were injured and at least one student was killed (BBC News). Unrest spread in Tehran and other cities, with university students violently protesting and meeting similar violent responses from the government and military police. In the aftermath, many student leaders were arrested and more than seventy students were reported to have disappeared.
The last time Iran had major social upheaval was the Green Movement in 2009, also called the Persian Awakening in western media. This movement sprung from the 2009 presidential election, in which the sitting president at the time, conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad declared victory only two hours after voting began, despite widespread claims of voter fraud from the opposition, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, and his supporters. The protests that followed centered around the slogan “give me my vote back” and were the largest protests since the 1979 revolution (according to the Washington Times). This protest resulted in widespread violence and arrests of protestors, including the arrest of the opposition party leader Mousavi, who remains under house arrest to this day.
What makes the #MahsaAmini Protests different is what they are protesting against and the context behind what they are rejecting. While the Green Movement was protesting within the system, arguing for voter reform, the recent protests have rejected the system entirely, demanding an entire change in government rather than reforms. The protests center around the unequal laws that severely limit women’s rights. These laws force women to wear the hijab in public, ban women from dancing in public, and prevent women from working outside their homes without their husbands' permission. Those are only a few of the restrictive policies that affect women in Iran. Beyond these policies, the economic hardship and poor living conditions in Iran have also contributed to the call for governmental change. The New York Times reported that Iranian issues like unemployment, corruption, and high prices are also major forces behind these protests. The protestors include the rural working class and the urban middle class, a mix of protesters never seen before in Iran. Protests have taken place in urban cities and even in holy cities such as Mashhad and Qom, which are traditionally considered the Islamic Republic power bases.
The protestors include primarily a younger generation of women, whose ages are the same as ours, who are utilizing social media to get their message out despite Internet blackouts in Iran (CNN). These protesters are a different generation than the previous protestors, and they have access to social media that allows them to make statements through videos that demonstrate their outrage over the laws against women and get their message out to the wider world. In terms of governmental response, Iran has been widely comdemned by the rest of the international community for its violent response to protesters, as at least 250 have been killed in the protests, according to Reuters.
Whether or not these protests have immediate success, it is imperative that we pay close attention to them as well as understand the context behind them. The U.S. continues to have a negative view of Iran and enforces sanctions against the Iranian government. This negative relationship goes back the 1970s, when Iranian college students took over the U.S. embassy in Tehran and held U.S. citizens hostage. The U.S. has continued to have an adversarial relationship with Iran in the current day, recent sanctions were in response to the Iranian nuclear program and ballistic missile tests (Washington Post). Thes These sanctions hurt the corrupt Iranian government, but in turn they also affect the Iranian people, who are increasingly having economic hardships.
As the United States and the wider world continue to struggle with far-right and fascist policies that threaten women’s rights, it is our responsibility to pay attention to these protests and recognize their importance.
It is difficult to come up with ways to directly help the protestors, but by continuing to cover and spread the messages of the protestors, we can continue to show our support for these protests and demonstrate that the world is watching.
For more information on these protests, I recommend watching this interview with Rana Rahimpour, an Iranian-British journalist with BBC Persia, who was interviewed by comedian Jon Stewart on his podcast, The Problem With Jon Stewart.