Lecture 1
Bayat: Is Iran on the Verge of Another Revolution?
The death of Mahsa Amini in 2022, while in police custody for wearing an “improper” hijab,
has triggered the most severe political upheaval ever faced by the Islamist regime in Iran.
The Twitter hashtag #MahsaAmini broke the world record of 284 million tweets, and
the UN Human Rights Commission voted to investigate the regime’s repression.
How do we make sense of this extraordinary political happening?
This is neither a “feminist revolution”, nor simply the revolt of Generation Z.
This is a movement to reclaim life.
As the primary objects of this colonization, women have become the major
protagonists of the liberation movement.
Since its establishment in 1979 Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s, the Islamic Republic has
been a battlefield between hardline Islamists who wished to enforce theocracy in the form
of clerical rule (velayat-e faqih), and those who believed in popular will and emphasized the
republican tenets of the constitution.
This ideological battle has produced decades of political and cultural strife within
state institutions and in the streets in daily life.
The hardline Islamists in the nonelected institutions of the velayat-e faqih want to
enforce their “divine values” in political, social, and cultural domains.
The 1997 election of the moderate Mohammad Khatami, following social and
cultural openness, was seen as a hopeful sign.
But the hardliners saw the reform project as an existential threat to clerical rule, and
sabotaged Khatami’s government.
The Green Movement—protesting the fraud against the reformist candidate Mir
Hossein Mousavi in the 2009 presidential election—was the popular response to such
a counter reform onslaught.
o The Green revolt and the subsequent uprisings in 2017 and 2019 against
authoritarian rule challenged the Islamist regime but failed to alter it.
Against such critical challenges, one would expect the Islamist regime to reinvent itself
through a series of reforms to restore hegemony.
, But instead, the hardliners tightened their grip on political power in a bid to ensure
their hold over power after the supreme leader expires.
Thus, once they took over the presidency in 2021 through rigged elections, the
hardliners moved to subjugate people once again.
Women did not rise up suddenly.
It was the culmination of years of struggles against a systemic misogyny that the
post revolution regime established.
When that regime abolished the liberal Family Protection Laws of 1967, women
overnight lost all their rights and took to the streets to protest.
But when the regime extended its repression, women resorted to the “art of
presence”— the ability to assert collective will in spite of all odds, by utilizing what
exists.
o Simply, women refused to exit public life through such ordinary things as
pursuing higher education, working outside the home, etc.
o The hardship of sweating under a long dress did not deter many women from
jogging, cycling, or playing basketball.
By 2010, one in three women between the ages of 20 and 35 had their own household.
Many of them undertook what came to be known as “white marriage”- moving in
with their partners without formally marrying.
These mundane desires were deemed to redefine the status of women under the
Islamic Republic.
While many women wore the hijab voluntarily, for others it represented a coercive
moralizing that had to be subverted.
Over the years, headscarves gradually inched back further and further until finally
they fell to the shoulders.
With the initial jail penalty between ten days and two months, showing inches of hair
had ignited decades of daily street battles between defiant women and morality
enforcers.
In 2013, some 3.6 million women were stopped and humiliated in the streets and
issued formal citations.
, But despite such treatment, women eventually demanded an end to the mandatory
hijab.
Thus, over the years, women established new norms in private and public life and
taught them to their children.
The hardliners now want to halt that forward march.
This is the story of women’s “non-movement”—the collective actions of non-collective
actors who pursue not a politics of protest but of redress, through direct actions.
Its aim is not a deliberate defiance of authorities but to establish alternative norms
and life-making practices.
It is a process of incremental claim-making that ultimately challenges the patriarchal-
political authority.
And now, that very “non-movement,” impelled by the murder of one of its own, has
given rise to a political upheaval in which woman and her dignity has become a
rallying point.
Reclaiming Life
Today, the uprising has grown to include wider concerns and constituencies—young people,
students and teachers, middle-class workers, and those religious and ethnic minorities (Kurds,
Arabs, Azeris, and Baluchis) who feel like second-class citizens and identify with “Woman,
Life, Freedom.”
The thousands of tweets describing why people are protesting point to the longing for
a humble normal life denied to them by a regime of clerical and military patriarchs.
The movement’s language is secular, devoid of religion. Its peculiarity lies in its
feminist facet.
But the feminism of the movement is not antagonistic to men.
Rather, it embraces the humiliated and suffering men.
The feminism of the movement is antisystem; it challenges the systemic control of
everyday life and the women at its core.
It is this antisystemic feminism that promises to liberate not only women but also the
oppressed men.
, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” then, signifies a paradigm shift in Iranian subjectivity—
recognition that the liberation of women may also bring the liberation of all other
oppressed people.
This makes “Woman, Life, Freedom” an extraordinary movement.
Movement or Moment
Extraordinary yes, but is this a movement or a passing moment?
The Green revolt of 2009 was a prodemocracy drive for an accountable government.
o It was a movement of the urban middle class and other discontented citizens.
o In the protests of 2017, Iranian workers, students, middleclass poor, and
women took to the streets for ten days before the government’s crackdown
halted the rebellion.
o Some observers at the time considered the events a prelude to revolution. They
were not.
o The protests were mostly concerned with sectoral claims—delayed wages for
workers, lost savings for creditors, and jobs for the young.
o As such, theirs was not a collective action of a united movement but
connective actions of parallel concerns.
The current uprising has gone further in message, size, and make-up.
o This uprising has created a collective claim—one that has united diverse
social groups to not only feel and share it, but also to act on it.
o With the emergence of a super-collective in which differences of class,
gender, ethnicity, and religion disappear in favour of a greater good, the
uprising has assumed a revolutionary character.
o For the first time, a nationwide protest movement has called for a regime
change and structural socioeconomic transformation.
Does all this mean that Iran is on the verge of another revolution?
Right now, Iran is far from a “revolutionary situation” - a condition of “dual
power,” where an organized revolutionary force backed by millions would come to
confront a crumbling government and divided security forces.
What we are witnessing today is the rise of a revolutionary movement.
