Home » The young woman who died of a misplaced hair makes Iranian youth explode – Pierre Haski

The young woman who died of a misplaced hair makes Iranian youth explode – Pierre Haski

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The young woman who died of a misplaced hair makes Iranian youth explode – Pierre Haski

September 20, 2022 9:14 am

Mahsa Amini was a 22-year-old Iranian girl. Last week, while she was visiting Tehran with her family, a police patrol stopped her because an extra strand of hair was visible under her veil. Three days later she Mahsa was dead. And the anger of young Iranians exploded.

For forty years now, after the Islamic revolution of 1979, the mullahs in power have been deciding how women should dress, what they can show and what they should hide. In these forty years there have been ups and downs, between moments of tolerance and moments of inquisitive conservatism.

Generation after generation, Iranian women have tried to break free of these chains. The new generation exerts a particularly strong pressure, with the help of social networks on which it challenges the moral order.

Students in the square
Ebrahim Raisi, the current ultra-conservative president of the country who would like to take the place of the elderly supreme leader, has decided to rage by tightening up the laws that the so-called “moral police” is in charge of enforcing. Mahsa Amini was the victim.

On September 17, the girl’s funeral, in her hometown of Iranian Kurdistan, resulted in clashes with the police, with one dead and dozens injured. The protests and repression then spread to the rest of the country. On September 19, in Tehran, students from three universities took to the streets.

Numerous videos shot in the capital show the crowd of demonstrators, men and women, and the intervention of the guardians of the revolution, armed with fire hydrants.

Mahsa Amini’s death was the detonator of an omnipresent cultural, social and political frustration. Just as the suicide of a greengrocer had sparked the Tunisian revolution of 2011, the death in unclear conditions of the young Iranian due to a lock of hair has opened Pandora’s box.

On social networks, girls cut their hair in front of the cameras as a sign of solidarity with Mahsa. Some even burn their hair. It is a symbolic protest in a chained country.

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Iran has a long history of bloody repressed protests, from the 2009 “green revolution” against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s rigged elections to the 2019 protest movement, with hundreds of victims.

As the past teaches us, we must not underestimate the regime’s willingness to do whatever it takes to retain power. The international climate, with the nuclear negotiations now at an impasse and the rapprochement between Tehran and Putin’s Russia, does not give hope for a tolerant approach.

We have rarely seen such a wide gap between religious elders leading the state and young people who ask only to live liberally. In Iran, as in Afghanistan after the return of the Taliban, women are the first victims of theocratic power. They resist as they can and for this they deserve all our respect and admiration.

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(Translation by Andrea Sparacino)

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