“Woman! Life! Freedom!” The three words imposed themselves as a cry, a promise, at the heart of the Iranian uprising. Since the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old young woman, three days after her arrest by the morality police for a “poorly put on veil”, protests against the mullahs’ regime have continued to swell.
“Woman! Life! Freedom!” They dance, they burn, they chant. In hair in the streets of the Islamic Republic, they defy the patrols of modesty, taking off their hijab as one breaks irons. If, as Hemingway wrote, courage is grace in the face of danger, then Iranian women who rise up against the mullahs’ regime are the very definition of courage.
Alongside them, no less courageous men revolted to the same cry: “Woman! Life! Freedom!” Like all emancipatory struggles, the power of feminism lies in its universal character. At the time of writing these lines, the tribute of these brave men and women is already heavy: several dozen demonstrators have paid the price with their lives, and hundreds have been arrested.
What will happen to this hair revolt? We dare not hope for the immediate overthrow of the regime. The latter is still extremely powerful, and society as a whole is not – far from it – in solidarity with the uprising. But this is the very kinetics of revolutions: they take on repressed hopes and anger until they reach their tipping point.
Two years later ; five years later ; ten years later. Even by restricting the Internet and locking up hundreds of young people, the regime cannot stifle the impulse for vital freedom which is expressed in the streets of some 130 cities of the country, nor the momentum it generates everywhere else. Courage is always superiorly beautiful; that’s what makes it so inspiring, and so contagious. The photos of these revolutionaries à la Delacroix, the dances, the slogans, the films… all of this plants the seeds for the next time.
In some videos that are looping on the networks, women take up (in Persian) the famous song of the Italian partisans Bella ciao. He said: “And if I die […], you must bury me, up there on the mountain, in the shade of a beautiful flower.” He says: “And people passing by will say ‘Oh what a beautiful flower!'”. He says, “It’s the flower of the partisan, who died for freedom.”
