The Women’s Movement in Iran One Year after the Death of Mahsa Amini

Iran continues to surprise the world. In 1979, Western observers—and many Iranians—were astonished to see a people rise up, in the words of one wag, to demand less freedom and fewer material things. Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his Islamist followers obligingly gave them both, Kian Tajbakhsh writes for Public Seminar.

Almost 45 years later, I stand astonished again. If someone had told me 18 months ago that Iranian women would be walking more or less freely in the streets of Iranian cities without hair coverings or hijab, I simply wouldn’t have believed them. 

And if someone had told me 18 months ago that the Iranian government would be a belligerent in a European ground war for the first time in Iran’s history—supplying weapons to Russia, entering into a close strategic cooperation with the Russian military, and bolstering its own military capabilities in the process, I would have thought they were joking.

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