[WSMDiscuss] Reflecting the crucible of Iran

[Brian]

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/azadeh-moaveni/diary <https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/azadeh-moaveni/diary>
> Two Weeks in Tehran
> 
> Azadeh Moaveni  · LRB issue dated 3 November 2022
> 
> Five weeks​ into the protests that erupted across Iran in response to the killing of Mahsa Amini, the floundering Iranian authorities thought it would be a good idea to put up a massive poster in central Tehran depicting dozens of eminent Iranian women as supporters of the mandatory wearing of the hijab. Photographs of academics, writers, directors, artists, actors and athletes were shown in a collage with the slogan ‘Women of Our Land’ which was plastered on the billboard the regime reserves for its most urgent public messaging, a massive structure towering over Valiasr Square. The display included such unlikely figures as the novelist Simin Daneshvar, who wore the hijab only after the revolution made it compulsory, depicted patriarchal oppression in her fiction, and is on record saying that she wished ‘the world was run by women’.
> 
> Within hours, several women demanded their images be removed. The existence of a photograph showing them with a headscarf did not mean they were pious or even that they respected the government; it simply meant they had observed the law. Parvaneh Kazemi, who has climbed Everest, posted on Instagram that she was angry ‘the name and image of us women are used only for abuse.’ The actor Fatemeh Motamed-Arya uploaded a furious video. She appeared bareheaded, and said that she was the mother of Mahsa Amini and Sarina Esmailzadeh, a teenager killed in the protests: ‘I am a mother of all the children who were killed in this land, not a woman in the land of murders.’ The son of another actor who was included in the collage pointed out that his mother had barely been tolerated by the clerical authorities when she was alive. A screenwriter noted on Instagram that one woman on the poster, the photojournalist Nooshin Jafari, was serving a prison sentence for ‘insulting state sanctities’. Overnight, the billboard vanished. It reflected, as the reformist journalist Abbas Abdi observed on Twitter, the ruling system’s ‘contradictory and blocked sensibility’, its wish to co-opt such women and its wish to impose morality policing at the same time.
> 
> More than two hundred people have been killed since the protests began in mid-September and the clerical authorities show no sign of relenting. Despite this, the demonstrators have reason to celebrate. On the streets and in daily life, they have defeated the state’s mandatory hijab policy, which is often described as the key pillar of clerical rule, but more tangibly is used as an instrument of policing whose function is control and distraction from the state of the country. Last month, I watched girls in central Tehran walking around with their hair showing, impressed by their ease and fearlessness. Some even sat on the marble steps of a mosque sipping melon juice and chatting, scarves down. Last week, an Iranian climber competed in an international competition with her hair uncovered. A crowd of ecstatic supporters gathered to meet her at the airport on her return to Tehran.
> 
> The authorities’ imperious response to public anger was a serious miscalculation, sustaining the protests and leading them to grow more radical. Morality policing lies in ruins. No one knows what senior politicians are hearing from their wives, sisters and daughters, but never have the Islamic Republic’s political elite and its most dogmatic constituencies looked so divided at a time of crisis.
> 
> In Tehran, the nightly confrontations have spread into the squares and boulevards of northern areas, a sign that a less economically-battered class is now also participating. In girls’ schools, the courage to scrawl a slogan on the blackboard is spreading to younger groups. Headteachers have been told to release girls one by one after school, in order to discourage gatherings and make it easier to spot any gestures of protest, and to remove the austere pictures of the revolution’s founders from classrooms, so that the girls can’t tear them down and stomp on them while their friends film them on their phones and upload the videos. As dissent winds its way through different age groups and neighbourhoods, the movement has remained remarkably steady: it hasn’t become destructive or violent, lost public sympathy or its radical feminist spirit. Previous protests in Iran have swiftly descended into destructive rioting, been viciously crushed or have petered out, driven by too narrow a grievance.
> 
> The movement’s leaderlessness is at once a great strength and its greatest vulnerability. With the internet shut off and no figurehead to speak on the protesters’ behalf, anyone can tell their story. And as international celebrities like Carla Bruni trim their split ends in solidarity, and Barack and Michelle Obama, Melinda Gates, Balenciaga, Meghan Markle, Oprah Winfrey and Jill Biden take notice, powerful currents with an interest in destabilising Iran are also getting involved, seeking to define what Iranians want, what they will be satisfied with, and who their enemies should be.
> 
> A segment of Iranians in the diaspora, most of whom haven’t been to Iran in years or decades, think the Islamic Republic should be brought down by any means, including support from Saudi Arabia and Israel. Many people in Iran, disenfranchised and without any hope for a better life, also feel the system is irredeemable. The ferocious chants targeted at the supreme leader and clerical rule in general make this clear.
> 
> But do they want change propelled from the outside? External interference does not announce itself as such. It comes through discreet funding, often difficult to trace, for lobbyists, disinformation-spreading media, and strategic communication platforms which seem to be authentic citizen collectives and upload content documenting state brutality. One platform that emerged last year, 1500 Tasvir, publishes a huge volume of content on the protests. It has recently started imposing conditions on access, branding groups or individuals whose politics it disapproves of as tainted, and forbidding them, at least rhetorically, from using its data. In the last week or so it has used its feed to attack women journalists it considers collaborators with the regime and enemies of the Iranian people’s revolution.
> 
> These patterns are familiar from the Syrian civil war, where the scope for disinformation and manipulation was vast, and what started as a peaceful citizens’ uprising devolved into a proxy conflict between external forces that had a stake in the state’s collapse. The ‘Syria-isation’ of Iran is something officials now warn of frequently, as they paint the protests as a threat to the country’s territorial integrity, in the hope that those at home who admire the demonstrations’ spirit will be frightened by the threat of blood-letting, chaos and national destruction. As in Syria, much of the content shown on such platforms is genuine. But the strategic communicators are moving swiftly, and media verification of both the content itself and the sources that collate and promote it is haphazard and inadequate.
> 
> All of this is unsettling new territory for the Islamic Republic, whose leaders seem perplexed by an outcome they brought about themselves. At the start of October, the speaker of parliament, Mohammed-Baqer Qalibaf, acknowledged that there were, for the first time, protests taking place against the regime which were not ‘reform-seeking’. He didn’t address the root causes, but instead made what sounded like a plea: ‘I ask all who have any reason to protest not to allow their protest to turn into destabilising and toppling.’
> 
> The day before I left Tehran, two weeks into the protests, I stopped for coffee in the west of the city, not far from the mosque where Cherie Blair’s sister received spiritual guidance before her conversion to Shiism and across the street from a mosque with a pilates studio and gym in the basement. The café is part of a chain, Lamiz, whose coffee shops are dotted throughout the city. They have blue velvet armchairs, cortados, apple galettes and a reputation for being the money-laundering venture of a regime heavyweight. Two young women stood outside the door, defiantly bareheaded but wearing facemasks, holding up a poster that said: ‘Boycott Lamiz for two weeks, and Starbucks will take its place.’ The message was playful and unambiguous: protest hard enough, and a new Iran might be within reach. Nearly everyone I spoke to in Tehran who joined the protests said they wanted an end to the Islamic Republic. ‘Those who are still sitting at home are stuck on the question of the alternative, of who will come next,’ one protester told me. ‘But it’s a mistake to think we should wait to figure out the alternative, because we’ll just be sitting at home for ever. Nobody knows who should come next.’ What isn’t yet clear, though, is whether those sympathetic people sitting at home will ever be persuaded to come out.
> 
> Nassim is a clerical worker in her early twenties with a serious health condition. The medication she needs to take every day cannot be imported because of US sanctions, and she spends two or three days each month searching pharmacies around the city to find what she needs, often at exorbitant prices. Nassim is pious but supports the protests. She believes women should be allowed to dress freely, and that a relaxation of dress codes will also stop some women trying to subjugate other women. In her town – like many of Iran’s rural areas, it is more conservative than Tehran – she’s often scolded in public by tiresome old women for showing too much hair, even though she covers her hair by choice. Mandatory hijab, in her view, encourages the controlling tendencies not just of the state, but of parents and relatives at home, and strangers on the street.
> 
> For Nassim, a liberalisation of Iran’s social order that reduced religious hypocrisy and helped establish a stable, sound economy would be a satisfactory outcome. Her life wouldn’t be vastly different if the Islamic Republic became secular overnight, but it would be if the state could deliver basic economic welfare. She would be able to get her medication reliably, and have the money to pay for it. Her favourite sister wouldn’t be trying to emigrate to Europe in search of work. For now at least, women like Nassim, critical of the state but not ready to confront it, far outnumber the protesters.
> 
> The sense of hopelessness is most acute in Iran’s border regions. The largest ethnic and religious minorities, the Baluch, Kurds and Arabs, live in provinces ringing the periphery, and have historically intimate ties, of culture, religion or language, with their compatriots outside Iran’s borders. These regions also face specific challenges – drought and water shortages in the south-west, drug trafficking and insecurity in the south-east – that aggravate the deteriorating conditions all Iranians face. Poverty is worse in these areas, unemployment is worse. All have a long history predating the Islamic Republic of state neglect and of separatist movements.
> 
> Mahsa Amini was an Iranian of Kurdish origin – her Kurdish name was Jina, which means ‘life’ – and the protests at her killing began in her home region. The movement’s slogan is ‘woman, life, freedom’. Jina wasn’t arrested for being Kurdish: you can’t tell whether an Iranian woman is Jewish, Armenian, Azeri, Lor, Baluch or Arab by her appearance. But any unrest in Iran’s minority regions tends to be swiftly politicised by the state as a matter of national security. This is in part because Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear deal gave an implicit green light to a regional campaign to destabilise Iran which has led to the funnelling of cash and weapons to armed militant networks in border areas and the inflammation of separatist sentiment. The sustained and angry protests in Kurdish areas over Mahsa/Jina’s death prompted the authorities to launch missile strikes across the border into Iraqi Kurdistan, claiming that a separatist group was exploiting the protests to wreak havoc.
> 
> The protests in Iran today are not expressly about the economy, but they are propelled by despair about the future. Many of the things Iranians want for their futures – a promising job for a skilled graduate, an academic career for a bright researcher, marriage, children, foreign travel, study abroad – are undeniably bound up in material realities. Iran’s frozen ties with the West and its increasing obsession with security are entwined with its economic isolation and decline.
> 
> Mass protest is often provoked by a specific humiliation, but the underlying oppression explains why unrest races through society. Things have deteriorated for Iranians in recent years, particularly for Iranian woman and girls, and this has shaped their response. The economy of the Islamic Republic, a country rich in oil and natural gas reserves with a highly educated population and a tourism potential to rival Thailand or India, has chronically underperformed since 1979, when its GDP was much greater than that of Turkey and South Korea. Mismanagement and corruption have been endemic in Iran for decades, but the biggest shocks to the economy in recent years have been a result of US sanctions.
> 
> In 2012 and 2018, the United States imposed severe sanctions first on the central bank, through which Iran sold its oil, and later on the energy, shipping and financial sectors, penalising firms in other countries that did business with it. Household incomes plummeted, the rial lost half its value, and the cost of living soared. Women and girls have been disproportionately affected. Their unemployment rate is higher than men’s, even though they make up less of the labour force. Young women who were living independently have been driven back to live with often controlling families. Rising costs and falling incomes have pushed survivors of domestic violence back into abusive situations. Two years ago, when I tried to discover the impact these conditions were having on female activism, the women I spoke to told me they scarcely had time or energy left for organising around political demands. By the time they had worked several jobs, cared for their children or their sick and elderly parents, they had nothing left for politics.
> 
> Acknowledging the way these hardships have diminished women’s ability to agitate for their rights doesn’t absolve the state of responsibility. Iran used to have one of the most capable women’s rights movements in the region. It grew alongside but independent of the reformists who came into government in the early 2000s: they were dismissive of women’s concerns and saw no reason to expend political capital on them. Female activists organised a campaign to get a million signatures in support of a statement arguing that gender inequality was structurally intertwined with the way the clerical state ruled in defiance of the public good. They travelled across the country, and spoke to women on their doorsteps, presenting feminism as a way for them to understand how culture and law discriminated against them in many spheres, from child custody to inheritance, from workplace protections to divorce.
> 
> The feminist movement wasn’t calling for the downfall of the regime or the end of theocracy, but its collection of signatures was shut down by the authorities. Over the years its leaders were imprisoned, interrogated and cast into exile. Those who remained went underground or focused on less controversial issues such as sexual harassment on public transport. The feminist movement of the early 2000s recognised women’s disenfranchisement as one of the most destabilising realities of the Islamic Republic. But the movement was dismantled and suppressed. Many of the protesters on the streets today are the daughters of those activists. The demonstrations unfolding across Iran may not have a leader, but they do have a provenance.
> 
> A month and a half into the protests, the Islamic Republic’s most senior figures are in disarray. Setting the official tone on 3 October, the supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, mentioned Mahsa Amini’s death as though it were a sad but distant event. ‘In the accident that happened, a young woman passed away,’ he told a gathering of army cadets, ‘which also pained us.’ But the riots, he insisted, were the design of Iran’s enemies, the United States and Israel. A few days later, President Raisi, visiting a women’s university, recited a poem that likened the protesters to flies. Students heckled him and told him to ‘get lost.’ The head of the judiciary declared himself ready for dialogue with any groups or individuals who had ‘questions, criticism, uncertainties or protests’, but three days later ordered judges to hand down stiff sentences to those arrested.
> 
> Looming over all these responses is the possibility that the supreme leader might not have much longer to live. Khamenei is 83 and rumoured to be unwell. Ali Larijani, a former speaker of parliament and a member of a prominent clerical family, gave a lengthy magazine interview recently in which he said that dress codes were out of touch with Iranian society and it wasn’t the state’s place, either religiously or politically, to regulate social behaviour. He wasn’t only contradicting Khamenei’s depiction of the protests but offering up an alternative mode of governance. It was a bit of a campaign speech, although it was so long and theologically ponderous, laced with references to the fall of Andalusia and tolerant ayatollahs, that it was easy to miss the implication that the supreme leader was becoming a bit Salafist in his outlook, too wrapped up in a reactionary Islam of laws and security.
> 
> To an extent, the Islamic Republic has boxed itself in. It has purged the reformists who once served as a useful distraction at such moments, allowing the highest authorities to claim the system was pushing back against over rapid change. In exchange for being admitted into politics, the reformists refrained from making the most telling criticisms: that Iran’s democratic theocracy was unworkable, that a system could not simultaneously be accountable to God and the people. Now that there are no reformists in politics any more, the Islamic Republic has no useful opposition and is finally on its own, aware of being in a moment of acute existential crisis, but unable to take any steps to save itself.
> 
> As a former mayor of Tehran recently pointed out on state television, the government can’t have it both ways: it can’t claim millions of young women as loyal citizens when they turn out for the funeral of a Revolutionary Guard commander, as they did for Qasem Soleimani in 2020, but disown them as deviants and law-breakers when they show up on the streets now.
> 
> Television is the only outlet to the outside world now that the internet is down. There isn’t a Persian-language news sphere so much as a grand theatre for the geopolitical contest between the Islamic Republic and its opponents in the region and the West. As well as the state broadcaster there are channels loyal to the absentee royal family, and one run by the terrorist cult Mujaheddin e Khalq, whose presenters speak in the stentorian tones of the 1970s and transmit messages from their long-dead leader. Iran International, set up in London with Saudi money, broadcasts a steady stream of breathless ‘no-context revolution’ videos and occasional disinformation, and explores scenarios for a post-Islamic Republic future. One of the presenters from the channel recently addressed the subcommittee on human rights at the European Parliament. The investment in this media infrastructure by opponents of the Islamic Republic has proven especially useful at moments of crisis, giving platforms to terrorist groups and advancing the narrative that Iran is riven by sectarian divisions and on the brink of fragmentation. The result is that the lines between spirited reporting, disinformation and propaganda are often blurred.
> 
> These media outlets had a remarkable effect on my relatives when they were holed up at home during the pandemic. They came out on the other side not simply derisive of the Islamic Republic, as they’d been before, but programmed with demonstrably false lines of information and an impassioned new and formulaic way of speaking about key enemies (usually diaspora journalists or organisations).
> 
> Propaganda works. Last week, the commander of the Revolutionary Guards paused before starting a military drill in north-west Iran to speak to the Saudis directly: ‘Watch your behaviour and control these media; otherwise you will pay the price.’ Iran’s own conduct has helped produce the security problem it now faces: by putting a generation of journalists out of work through censorship and intimidation, it has created a talented and eager pool of labour for its opponents’ networks.
> 
> I asked one young activist what he thought of these channels and the dissidents who appear on them, some of whom claim to be leading events on the ground, even as the protesters celebrate their leaderlessness.
> 
> ‘Of course they urge people to come out,’ he said, ‘promising the day after collapse will be better, a utopia, although we know the day after is when everything is broken, and when the problems start. They know how to seduce people with trickery and showmanship. But there’s also no doubt that the country is being destroyed, and that reform is dead.’
> 
> ~ 21 October, 2022
> 
Azadeh Moaveni is the author of Guest House of Young Widows. She teaches at NYU.

**************

https://thebaffler.com/latest/without-them-arian <https://thebaffler.com/latest/without-them-arian>
Without Them 
In Iran, a revolution of the mind has already taken place

by Amir Ahmadi Arian, The Baffler, October 25, 2022
> “This time there is no way back,” Hamid said. “People have imagined life without them.”
> 
> He had to yell these words into his phone to record the WhatsApp voice message he sent me, or else the background din would have drowned him out. He was standing on a street in Tehran, in the thick of a protest on an early autumn afternoon. Around him, people were chanting in one moment and stampeding the next while cars roared and honked, paintballs hissed, and police sirens shrieked. He was forced to run for safety before he could finish speaking, so his last words were interrupted by panting. Despite the danger, his voice was loaded with excitement.
> 
> Hamid and I have been friends for nearly twenty years. We regularly met to talk politics while I was in Iran and stayed in touch after I left. The last time I heard him speak so excitedly was in June 2009, during the early days of the Green Movement, which rose in protest of the result of the presidential elections.
> 
> I listened to his message in my home in a small town in upstate New York. It’s hard to get agitated up here. And yet, hearing Hamid speak sent such a wave of thrill through my body, I could no longer remain seated. It especially mattered that this message came from someone of my generation. We are the revolution generation, born around 1979. We grew up during the dark years of the Iran-Iraq war in total isolation from the world. We were barely adults when we experienced our first anti-government action during the student uprising of 1999. We failed. We took to the streets in 2009, 2017–2018, and 2019–2020. We failed again and again. In between those peaks of activity, we organized and mobilized, wrote and sang, fought with whatever means available, and every time we lost, we fell harder to the ground. During the pandemic, we were exhausted. We had become cynical, middle-aged people, many of us scattered around the world, our youths squandered, our hopes dashed, our yearning for change thwarted at every turn. 
> 
> Before 2009, I never considered leaving Iran. I had a decent career, a regular column in a newspaper many read, an editorial job at a major publishing house, and half a dozen authored and translated books under my belt. Writing was my calling, and I would never sacrifice it for the comforts of a Western life. Then 2009 happened. A massive movement got violently crushed. The publishing house I worked for was shut down. The newspaper I wrote for was shut down. I got interrogated, and many of my friends were arrested. I had no choice but to leave. Over the following decade, I lived in three continents before settling down in the United States.
> 
> It felt as if Iran spat me out like a little bone its teeth caught while chewing meat. Insulted and hurt, I decided to live as if I had never lived there. I switched my writing language to English, befriended and dated non-Iranians, and took jobs that had nothing to do with Iran. Sometimes for weeks, save for brief conversations with my parents, I spoke to no one in Persian. When I finally had a chance to relaunch my career, I published a novel and a few op-eds in English that would block my way back to Iran, as if intentionally suppressing my bouts of homesickness, the occasional urge to return. After a few years, I grew confident that the umbilical cord was cut. I had built a life elsewhere, and I could live the rest of my life without fretting over Iran. Then the unexpected happened.
> 
> By now, the story is well-known: on September 13, goons working for the hijab patrol (it is often rendered as “morality police,” which is a terrible literal translation of the euphemism the Iranian government has concocted for this abomination) arrested a young woman named Zhina-Mahsa Amini, whose outfit they deemed improper, and took her to police station. When she resisted the officers, they banged her head against the wall and broke her skull. She died three days later.
> 
> The air has been throbbing with revolutionary fire, and we, the exiled, can feel its warmth from afar.
> The officers who killed her have not been named. I doubt that they were much concerned about what they had done. Harassing young women over exposed hair is the job of these people, and beating up those who resist it is an occupational hazard. The police have gotten away with worse. But this act of brutality was the straw that broke the camel’s back. People took to the streets all over the country.
> 
> The previous uprisings I mentioned were criticized for lacking universality: they were either limited to big cities or to rural areas, their demands either predominantly economic or exclusively civil. Over time, the geographic range of the protests expanded. In every round, it included a new set of towns, sometimes a new province, but never the entire country. This time is different. High schoolers are going on strike, professors lock arms to form a corridor so their students can escape the militia, old ladies shield young girls against the police. People in the south chant in solidarity with northerners, and the Turks come out to support the Kurds. This is the first truly universal uprising in Iran in more than four decades. The air has been throbbing with revolutionary fire, and we, the exiled, can feel its warmth from afar. This has revived the spirit of pessimists like me.
> 
> “People have imagined life without them,” Hamid said. I never really have. The uprisings I experienced firsthand were reformist. We demanded alternatives from within the system in order to better certain conditions. This time, the revolution has already taken place in the mind. The public imagination has soared to a new plateau. The idea of Iran without the Islamic Republic has graduated from an aspiration to a real possibility. Thanks largely to this shift in belief, the balance of fear has tipped. We have seen countless videos of protesters attacking the police, young people corralling the guards and disarming them, armed police running from unarmed teenagers—sights unimaginable only a decade ago. People are no longer afraid, and no one remains enslaved to masters they cease to fear.
> 
> The country seems to be experiencing a moment of clarity. The opportunists and whataboutists have lost their appeal. The political scene has been polished into a mirror, making it impossible to avoid facing yourself. Thanks to this mirror, for the first time since I left, I am thinking hard about why I am no longer in Iran. My lazy chicken bone theory no longer cuts it. Over the last several weeks, while I kept my eyes fastened to my phone lest I miss a piece of breaking news, my brain was busy rethinking my relationship with home.
> 
> I have come to two conclusions: I left Iran because I was ashamed, and because I was humiliated.
> 
> “Without Khomeini’s name,” the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei once famously said, “the [Islamic] Revolution is not known anywhere in the world.” This assertion can be inverted and applied to the revolution aimed at ending his rule: without women, this revolution would not be known anywhere in the world. The current uprising is taking place for women and by women. They stand on burned trash bins, their faces covered, their fists brandished at the sky. They dance around fire and throw their headscarves into the flames. They stand face-to-face with armed and armored guards twice their size and stare them down. They cut their hair at the funerals of their loved ones. They have set an earthquake in motion that threatens the foundation of the fundamentalist patriarchy whose survival is predicated on keeping them subdued and apart. 
> 
> It is not my place to hold forth on what a women’s revolution means to them. Iranian women have already done that and will continue to do so. I want to write a few words on what this revolution means to me, a middle-aged man participating in it from afar.
> 
> Reason never drives people to the street en masse. Outrage does. You risk beating and arrest, even death, only when anger heats up your head, sets your belly on fire, draws cold sweat from your pores. And usually beneath the outrage lies deeper emotions, longstanding feelings that gnaw away at the soul, like humiliation, terror, or disgust. In my case, the strongest underlying emotion is shame.
> 
> I feel ashamed of the way I lived in Iran. My two sisters had to wear gray smocks and miqna from the age of six onwards while I could freely walk around. I knew that the law entitled them to only half of the inheritance I would receive if our parents passed away, god forbid, and that, until six years ago, they would have received only half the settlement I would get if we had been in a car accident together. I was aware that if I divorced a woman, the law would almost certainly give me custody of our child. Throughout my life, the compulsory hijab, and the unrelenting brutality the state visits upon women’s bodies, has been the law of the land. I lived through all that blithely, without really doing much to fight this gross injustice. For a while, I even took sides with people who considered the compulsory hijab a side issue and found their demands for its abolition a distraction from more pressing matters, which, depending on the fashion, ranged from Global South solidarity to the neoliberal economy.
> 
> The women’s revolution is an opportunity for me, for all men. If women can liberate themselves, I will be liberated along with them, unburdened of this lifelong shame. They are giving me, and many other Iranian men, a chance to transform our shame to outrage and eventually unshame ourselves. This is why men are also out in the streets in unprecedented numbers, getting shot and beaten to death, chasing the guards and kicking their asses, cheering their sisters as they dance with bare heads or cut their hair. As the saying goes, none of us is free until all of us are free, and I have never so acutely felt this to be true.
> 
> July 8, 1999. My phone rang at 6 a.m. A guy I barely knew told me that my friends in Building 18 of the students’ dorm complex at the University of Tehran had been beaten up and taken to the hospital. He explained that at midnight, the Basij militia had broken into the dorm, dragged the sleeping students off their beds, and beaten them to within an inch of their lives. It made no sense. The previous afternoon, I had participated in a rally at the dorm to protest the closing of the Salam newspaper. Nothing seemed out of ordinary. I threw some clothes on and ran to Amirabad Avenue.
> 
> Inside the dorm, the doors had been kicked down and axed open. The floor was covered with glass shards and torn paper. Computer screens were thrown against the walls. There were blood smears on the walls, and on beds and clothes and books and food. Outside, students milled about in their pajamas, dazed and terrified. Some strapped broken hands with a piece of rag tied around their necks. Some patched bleeding wounds with torn T-shirts.
> 
> We stayed in the streets for a week. I inhaled my first tear gas, received my first baton strike, my first kick in the ass and punch in the guts by the police. I was nineteen.
> 
> After the protests petered out, Khamenei took the podium at the University of Tehran, the site of the violence, to draw a distinct line through Iranian society. “You are an Insider (khodi),” he said. “If your heart beats for Islam, for the [1979] Revolution, for Imam [Khomeini], and you are truly on the side the people. You are an Outsider(ghayr-e khodi) if you listen to foreigners, if your heart beats for them, if you long for America to return.”
> 
> I listened to that speech on the radio, overwhelmed by humiliation. My nineteen-year-old self failed to comprehend why I had been beaten for absolutely no reason, only to hear the highest authority in the land justifying it by calling me an “outsider.” This humiliation over time transformed into a ticking bomb. The events of 2009 detonated it. I could no longer stay in Iran.
> 
> Over the years, Khamenei has offered different versions of this dichotomy, increasingly replacing “outsider” with “enemy” (dushman). This is not just dictatorial saber-rattling. In his worldview, “outsiders” are the enemy within, a fifth column of citizens who have to be put in their place, contained, and if necessary, exterminated. This category has expanded over time, and as we learned during the 2019 uprising—which the government crushed by shutting down the internet for a week, arresting thousands, and killing fifteen hundred people—it now includes the majority of Iranians.
> 
> Following this prescription, the Islamic regime runs the country not so much as a typical dictatorship or a totalitarian state as it does a colonial power. It has channeled all the wealth, privileges, and benefits to a very small “insider” elite, letting the “outsider” majority languish in poverty and brutally silencing them whenever they voice their despair. The uprisings in 2017 and 2019 were carried out by the disenfranchised, impoverished majority trying to make a dent in an armed-to-teeth system bloated by years of pillage and corruption, one that has metastasized into a military aristocracy. 
> 
> “You have come to my country to fight me,” a woman yells at a guard. It is September 2022. They are standing on a sidewalk in the city of Bojnourd. Both are Iranian, but the woman doesn’t seem to feel that way. She says that the Iraqi army, which waged war against Iran for eight years in the 1980s, had more dignity than this guard.
> 
> They are claiming Iran as their own and treating their government as a gang of invaders, an occupying force.
> In the protests I experienced firsthand, we demanded inclusion. We called on the Supreme Leader and the government to listen to us, to see us, to acknowledge us as the people of this land and to stop regarding us as outsiders. Under the influence of the reformists, with optimism that in retrospect seems shockingly naïve, many of us genuinely believed that dialogue and compromise would work. I shudder to think how hard Khamenei and his cronies must have laughed at us all those years.
> 
> This time around, no one is interested in expanding the circle of the insiders, or even in removing it. They want to break the pen that drew the circle. People have stopped asking their government for recognition or rights. They are claiming Iran as their own and treating their government as a gang of invaders, an occupying force. This movement is ultimately a fight against the humiliator-in-chief, the Supreme Leader who has demonized and vilified the majority of Iranians for forty-one years. No wonder these protests were ignited by one of the most oppressed ethnic groups (Kurds) and spearheaded by the most humiliated social group (women). Reducing the cause of the uprising to economic pressure caused by the sanctions is naïve at best and complicit at worst. People have joined forces to wrest back their dignity.
> 
> How can you tell if a society is in a revolutionary state? I wonder if you ever can. Everyone who remembers the 1979 revolution will tell you that up to the very last day, most people were living their lives as if nothing was happening. Iran today is not different. Intense, bloody clashes between protestors and the police are interspersed with days of calm. Everyday life goes on at the same time as massive protests. If you go out on the street, you can collect evidence for both an imminent revolution and total peace.  
> 
> I am too old to fall for blind optimism. The road ahead is long and already soaked in blood. The government in Iran has entrenched itself through crisis after crisis for forty-plus years; it has excelled in the craft of oppression and control. The prospect of “life without them” can tempt one to wax lyrical about vast mountains in the distance, oblivious to the roughness of the road that winds its way towards them. But the public imagination has undergone a revolution. I have no doubts about that. People have concluded that symbiosis with this regime is no longer tenable. Minds have already migrated, and bodies will eventually follow them.
> 
> ____________________
> 
Amir Ahmadi Arian is the author of Then The Fish Swallowed Him (Harper 2020). He teaches literature and creative writing at City College, New York.
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