The real meaning of Iran’s protest movement
WHITE TORTURE
Interviews with Iranian women prisoners
NARGES MOHAMMADI
Translated by Amir Rezanezhad 288pp. Oneworld. Paperback, £11.99.
IN THE STREETS OF TEHRAN
Women. Life. Freedom.
NILA
Translated by Poupeh Missaghi 112pp. Ithaka. £12.99.
WHAT IRANIANS WANT
Women, life, freedom
ARASH AZIZI
256pp. Oneworld. £20.
THE IRANIAN REVOLUTIONARY GUARD CORPS
Defining Iran’s military doctrine
ALMA KESHAVARZ
232pp. Bloomsbury Academic. Paperback, £21.99.
THE WOMEN, LIFE, FREEDOM protest movement in Iran in 2023 attracted the attention of many Iranian pundits, academics and politicians in the West. That furore had subsided in recent months, mostly because it seemed, by early 2024, that the demise of the Islamic Republic was neither imminent nor likely. But the sudden turn of events, with the Israeli attack on the Iranian consulate in Damascus on April 1, followed by last weekend’s barrage of missiles in retaliation by Iran, has brought those same pundits back to centre stage. What many will probably miss is how intense the internal debate remained before the recent events – a debate now set to ramp up further.
In a recent interview with Didar News, an independent Tehran-based news website, Mohammad Fazeli, a former assistant professor at Shahid Beheshti University, was asked about the origins of the Women, Life, Freedom protests. They were a consequence of “modernization”, he argued, and of Iranian women’s building awareness of (what ought to be) their rights. At the same time, he said, a different, compounded discontent has been growing, driven by the sanctions regime of the Barack Obama administration and by Donald Trump’s withdrawal in 2018 from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action ( JCPOA), the point at which all hope of successful nuclear negotiations evaporated.
Fazeli defines modernization (towse’eh) as the art of problem-solving – in which, he claims, the Iranian government has shown little interest. It has failed to combat air pollution, to regulate water consumption, to promote economic growth, to rationalize foreign relations, to resolve a housing crisis and so on. Rising discontent has been met with further clampdowns that focus for the most part on women. Over the past four years the Iranian parliament has introduced more extensive hijab restrictions, and various sectors of government have recommended a more muscular response to perceived contraventions of the moral order.
But all this is derivative, Fazeli says. The muting of feminist dissent stems from the suppression in toto of dialogue and political participation, both of which require defined spaces and institutions. Forty-five years i
