Witnessing stolen youth

What did the people who, risking their lives, demonstrated in the streets of Iran want to regain? Of 'stolen youth, of unlived lives, of repressed joys' answered the Iranian-American sociologist and writer Asef Bayat, in an interview published a month after the start of the 'Woman, Life, Freedom' movement. A movement born spontaneously after the umpteenth arrest of a woman who made "improper use of the veil": Mahsa Jîna Amini, an Iranian student of Kurdish origin imprisoned on 13 September 2022 and killed three days later.

With 'their heads full of fury and enthusiasm', for more than two years now, the women - even though they know that the police will shoot their eyes out, that they will arrest them, that in prison they will rape them, torture them, that finally, as a condition for returning their bodies, they will ask their relatives to pay the price for the bullets with which the state authority has killed them - have been taking to the streets of Tehran. Thus the title of the book one of them wrote, under the pseudonym Nila, publishing it abroad to protect herself and evade censorship.

All we know of her is that she was born after 1979, like many of the people who fill the demonstrations, of the girls who take off their veils, who burn them in the square, who, running, make their turbans fly from the heads of the mullahs. "It is impossible to go back. We are afraid but, nevertheless, we take to the streets. We run on the mountains of our terrors like our mystics on the dark waters of the ocean of calamities and catastrophes'. Certain that 'if we did not take to the streets, the next day it would be our turn to be arrested, killed, deported or executed'.

There are many who have gone before them: 'women condemned, without the defence of a lawyer, for defending the rights of women and children. Mothers who end up in prison for demanding justice for the murder of their children'. Women who set themselves on fire 'to affirm that we do not have the right to dispose of our bodies'. In addition to the 'women and men, and there are many of them, who wrote about these murders of women in their newspaper columns and who, before the newspapers went to press, were thrown into prison'. Groups of 'invisible women', who appeared sporadically in the world's media 'only to disappear soon after' and who have been taking a stand for 44 years, in a discontinuous but progressive resistance that 'transformed their struggle into such a powerful civil disobedience that the world was eventually forced to take notice. We are no longer the stereotype of an unfortunate country. We embody contestation'.

Walking through the streets of Tehran, and recounting this experience, Nila questions a generation born of parents 'made of many layers, like the trunk of a tree, each consisting of a different kind of terror'. About a country 'in which no father is defeated by his son', as in the legend of Rostam, the protagonist of the Book of Kings: a saga and a chronicle at the same time, which traces in a dynastic scheme the entire history of Persian civilisation written around the year 1000. It tells of a parent who, rather than seeing himself as a loser, becomes an infanticide. A country in which 'the patriarchy we fight is intimately linked to the religion imposed by the regime', but which 'is a phenomenon that has such extensive roots in the world that it links our battle and those of women and other minorities beyond our borders'. But he also describes a country that, after the Muslim invasion and conquest 1400 years ago, clung to Persian, not leaving it for Arabic, as other peoples did, and to the splendour of a vanished empire. A country 'that is the only one to draw its identity not from the clash of two nations, but from the confrontation of a nation and a religion'. Inhabited by a people 'who have always been animated by aspirations for justice' who, at times, in taxis, in shops, or at the doctor's, weep silently, in a 'delicacy in sorrow' that is 'comforting, because someone else understands the reason for those tears', and which 'is a form of communion'.