How the Iranian massacre of 1988 shapes the Woman Life Freedom Uprising Today
Everything changed with Evin Prison. It was the night of October 15, 2022. Evin, the notorious Iranian prison, synonymous for much of Iran’s modern history with repression, loss and tyranny, was burning. There were no journalists reporting on what was happening inside, why and how it had been set on fire, who had been injured, whether there were any causalities, whether there was anyone containing the flames. All we could see, thousands of miles away, on the unforgivingly inadequate screen of our phones, were shaky images recorded by residents of the surrounding neighborhoods watching the fire from the windows and the rooftops of their homes.
This is what we could see:
we could see the blaze thrusting into the night sky, flaring, ghastly. We could see plumes of smoke towering ominously over the prison that held thousands of protesters, political prisoners, activists, musicians, artists, writers, journalists, union leaders and human rights lawyers. We could see what looked like grenades being thrown into the prison area from the hills. We could see frenzied movements along the walls, shadows running about. In the dark, the prison looked edgeless and black. Only the sky was lit, a hostile shade of red and purple and orange as if it had been bruised, slashed open.
We could also hear:
we could hear gunshots, intermittent and undaunted, like hunters certain of their prey’s entrapment. We could hear distant shouts. We could hear people whispering words of horror and bewilderment into their phones as they kept recording the blaze. The guns continued to pound. The prison continued to burn.
That night, as Evin went up in flames and Tehran did not sleep, as people drove in their hundreds towards the prison hoping to stop whatever atrocity the regime had planned for the prisoners, as sporadic news came of injured prisoners being taken not to hospitals but to other detention centers, as the roads to Evin were blocked by security forces, as a state sponsored news reporter tiptoed through empty hallways, peeking into silent cells, claiming that all prisoners were “peacefully asleep,” I thought that this time I was going to lose my mind.
“What were they trying to do?” I called my parents, both of them former political prisoners of Evin, now living in California. I was hysterical. “Were they planning to kill everyone inside? Did they want to burn them alive? What were the gun shots? Were they going to launch another purge? Was the massacre about to repeat itself?”
My parents did not have an answer for me, but they knew, as we all did, that my hysteria was not unfounded. For us, Evin was not just a symbol of dictatorship and repression. It was not just a horror house in the stories about Iran’s long history of death and easy brutality. For us, Evin was personal. It was where my mother gave birth and where my father lost a brother. It was where friends lived through torture, where political leaders, who had once inspired millions to revolt, were forced to sign false confessions and later had to bear the shame of it. It was where sisters facing what would turn out to be mock executions were told to write goodbye letters to each other, and those to be truly executed denied a last word with their families. Evin was a place of hunger strikes, of compulsory prayers and floggings. Of betrayal and desperation. Evin was a place of solitary confinement, of broken souls. It was a place of purge, of revolutions gone astray and dying dreams.
In my family, we knew what it meant when the roads to it were closed off. When bleeding prisoners were secretly taken out in the dead of the night. When families were suddenly not allowed visits and denied information on the whereabouts of their loved ones behind bars. We had lived through that once already. Through the carnage behind closed doors. Of corpses carried away at night. Of mass graves. We knew what a fire in Evin could possibly mean. Evin was our place of rupture. It was where everything had fallen apart. And for me, it was where everything had begun. That place of terror and abandonment, now ablaze before the eyes of the world, was where I was born.
“I was sitting on the floor of a van, blindfolded and handcuffed. I’d finally left Evin after a night of contractions and desperate pleading with the prison guards to let me see a doctor. I was alone. The Brother and Sister escorting me to the hospital were sitting in front, chatting, barely paying any attention to me. It was hot in the van. I clung onto what felt like a railing and tried to keep still. My stomach felt like it was going to burst. It kept tightening and contracting, sending waves of excruciating pain throughout my body. I could hardly breathe. All I could think about was to keep you safe inside me. Not here, I kept telling myself. I’m not going to give birth in the back of a van. The baby inside me felt as tense as a knot.”
This was the summer of 1983 in Tehran. The woman in the back of the van was my mother. The child in her belly, turning and twisting with the uneven streets, was me. At the time of her arrest, my mother was a bright-eyed 27-year-old secular leftist dissident. When she was detained along with my father for their “anti-revolutionary” activism, she was pregnant with me and had a 2-year-old boy, my brother, whom she was forced to leave at the care of her parents. Soon after my birth, my mother and I were driven back to Evin Prison. My mother was bleeding heavily because of her birth-induced extensive tear. The Sister – the prison guards insisted on being called Sister and Brother – who had escorted her to the hospital would not heed the doctor’s request to keep my mother overnight, refusing the treatment and antibiotics the doctor recommended. “We have everything we need over there,” my mother kept hearing her say. Weak and blindfolded, my mother could not carry her child herself. It was Sister who held me in her arms as the journey back to prison through the traffic of Tehran was made.
“When we finally got back to Evin, it was sometime in the afternoon. All my cellmates were expecting us and rushed forward as Sister opened the door. They were wearing their best clothes like it was the Nowrouz new year. The floor had been swept and washed. Even the walls shined. There was a bouquet of early autumn leaves in an aluminum jar in a corner and a lemon yellow headscarf hanging over the small, barred window. Everyone clapped and whooped and sang songs as we entered the cell. Sister kept shouting at them to quiet down, but they kept singing and ululating and embracing us, passing you around to each other. It was strange to see this, because usually none of them could stand the sight of the other. Every woman in that cell was from a different political background and blamed the others for what had happened to the revolution. But on that day, they seemed to have set aside their animosity and come together for us. This made me forget everything too, my fear, my pain, my torn insides, my newborn enfolded in a prison blanket. I was suddenly happy to be with them.”
The women in this cell, who celebrated my arrival with such jubilation and tenderness, were amongst tens of thousands of dissidents jailed for their continued opposition against the newly established Islamic Republic. Most of these women had participated in the 1979 revolution and fought to put an end to the dictatorial reign of the Western-backed Shah, who had ruled the country for 37 years.
However, nothing turned out as they had imagined. After the revolution, many of these political movements were quickly sidelined by the followers of the authoritarian religious ruler, Ruhollah Khomeini. In 1983, the year of my birth, chaos and terror reined. Tehran, like many cities and towns all over the country, was a hotbed of political persecution, abductions, assassinations, mass arrests, and a ruthless campaign of Islamization imposing Sharia law on the public.
In the four years since the revolution, under what came to be called a Cultural Revolution, universities were shut down then violently purged of “Western and Eastern influences”, newspapers were closed, women were forced to cover their hair, students were arrested for “communist activity”, regions of Kurdistan, Torkemen Sahra and Khuszestan rebelling against the regime were ruthlessly attacked, their town and cities destroyed, and the first wave of extra-judicial executions of thousands of political opponents were carried out.
When my parents were arrested and taken to Evin Prison, Khomeini’s regime was launching its final attack to eradicate all political and cultural opposition to it and establish the Islamic Republic as the sole power in the country. This onslaught, which first started in the form of mass incarcerations of political activists, would in 1988 culminate in the greatest bloodshed in Iran’s post-revolutionary history. A bloodshed that at the time of their arrest, my parents did not even dare to imagine.
“I was taken into a room where three people were waiting: a mullah and two other men in black suits. This was my second trial. I’d already been given a four-year-sentence during my first time in a revolutionary court and wasn’t sure why I had to go through another trial. ‘Do you pray?’ the mullah asked.
‘Do you believe in heaven and hell?’
‘Do you believe Mohammad to be the last of the prophets?’
‘Will you publicly recant historical materialism?’
‘Will you denounce your former beliefs before a camera?’
‘When you were young, did your father pray, fast and read the Quran?’
The last question, we later found out, was a trick question for the secular leftist activists. If you answered, ‘no’, it meant that as a child of someone who did not practice Islam you were not accountable for being a non-believer and so could escape hanging. If you answered, ‘yes’, then it meant your father was a believer and you of your own free will had become an enemy of Islam. This would immediately condemn you to death. But many answering the question did not know about this and fatally answered, ‘yes’.”
This is my father’s account of a trial he underwent months before the massacre of 1988 took place. These early trials, however, reveal the fact that the mass executions of political prisoners had long been planned by the regime, and the authorities were only waiting for the right moment to carry them out. The opportunity soon manifested itself in the form of a ceasefire. The eight-year-war with Iraq, which had caused more than half a million casualties, was nearing an end. Rancorous and humiliated with a war that had failed to produce the glorious divine outcomes the regime had professed, Khomeini’s government turned its sword of wrath on its own population. It decided that it was time to test the loyalty of its opponents and eliminate all those deemed “steadfast to their position in their war against God.” It did not matter that those to be executed had already been tried and were serving the prison terms the regime’s own revolutionary courts had given to them, that none of them had a death sentence hanging over their heads, that they were all supposed to be freed. In July 1988, Khomeini issued a fatwa, a religious order, to execute all those judged “unrepentant.” A Death Committee was established, and the doors of Evin and other prisons were closed off.
Both my parents had been fortunate to have been released before the massacre began. But in the summer of 1988, as the UN-backed ceasefire with Iraq went into effect, the Death Committee launched its slaughter of prisoners. Evin and other prisons were shut to families, and no one was allowed to visit. As desperate families refused to leave the prison grounds, hoping against hope to get news of what was happening inside, and as the eyes of the world turned to the ceasefire after eight years of a bloody futile war, a carnage took place. In just a few months, thousands of prisoners were summarily hanged, their bodies dumped into mass graves. Families were banned from holding funerals, from putting up the photos of the victims in their homes or speaking of what had occurred publicly in any way.
“We were camping in front of Evin. We kept hearing these terrifying rumors of executions happening inside and were told that this was why all the visits with the prisoners had been canceled. Father would not give up. He would go bang on that door every day asking to see his two sons. He wouldn’t move from there. But no one would tell us anything. We only found out in October what had happened. They wouldn’t even give us back their bodies or tell us where they had buried them. All the families were just like us: no answers, no bodies, not even a death certificate. They wanted to eliminate everything. Even their memory, like they never existed.”
The woman telling this story would not like to be named. She lost both her husband and a brother in the mass executions. The bodies were buried so superficially and hurriedly that later, chasing every trace in an anguished attempt to find them, the woman’s family was able to identify some of the mass graves as a hand, a shoe, tuft of hair began to protrude from underneath the earth. The woman, however, never found her husband’s nor her brother’s bodies.
One of these sites where the bodies were buried is the Khavaran Cemetery, an unmarked land in southeast of Tehran. Later called, La’nat Abad, “The Place of the Damned,” Khavaran has ever since become a symbolic place of commemoration, where families gather every year, honoring the memory of the victims and laying flowers where they believe their loved ones once rested. The cemetery of Khavaran is also where lies the memory of my uncle, Mohsen, my father’s younger brother who was executed during the massacre. The last time my father saw his brother, Mohsen had gone through such extreme torture that he was barely able to stand. My father remembers how the family found out about his death:
“They called us and said, ‘come and get his things.’ The man didn’t introduce himself, only said where he was calling from. But I knew before he said anything. We’d already heard the news of executions. I was just hoping we would never get the call. They gave me a paper and told me to sign, then I was handed a bag. Once I got home, we opened it, but the things inside were not Mohsen’s. None of it. They were someone else’s. They had given us the wrong bag, the wrong dead man’s belongings.”
***
We do not always choose the stories we want to tell. More times than not, the stories are the ones that choose us, appearing before us without fanfare, without warning, waiting to be told. My mother has never forgiven the guard who held me in her arms before she had a chance to do so. My father has never forgiven those who took his brother away, who took his friends away.
My grandmother has never forgiven a regime that killed her son and did not even give her a body to mourn. All this fury and sorrow lived in me for a long time before I finally had the courage to tell them. But they eventually came forth and refused to disappear. For, no matter how colossal the debacle, the stories will never die.
The 1988 mass executions were undoubtedly the culmination of a trajectory of violence that had been building up in the country for a long time. A trajectory that had begun long before the revolution with the tortures and executions of political opponents of the Shah, resumed into the early years after the revolution with the elimination of those associated with the monarchy, to soon include the extermination of the same revolutionaries who had participated in the downfall of the old regime. The violence persisted throughout these years, picking up momentum, to finally reach a climax in the summer of 1988 and the mass killings of political prisoners.
Considered for years as the Islamic Republic’s darkest best kept secret, the mass executions marked a turning point in Iran’s post-revolutionary history not only due to its sheer scale and savagery, but because it provided the Islamic regime with the most terrifying and illuminating of all realizations: that they could get away with so much, unscathed. They realized that they could break their own laws, disregard their own courts, kill as many as necessary for their survival and expansion, and no one would say a word. This realization laid the blueprint of the regime’s vision and mechanism of power for decades to come.
Over its forty-year rule, the Islamic regime has succeeded in building and mastering a disturbingly efficient apparatus of oppression, organized and sustained by a powerful network of security forces, secret police, intelligence services, Morality Police, Basij militia and Revolutionary Guards. The utility and mechanism of this apparatus have transformed throughout the years, be it in the form of political assassinations, chain murders of writers and intellectuals, armed attacks on universities, tortures, imprisonments and exiles, but it has always been there and has fostered the regime’s core instrument in maintaining power until today.
“On the night of the fire in Evin, we kept hearing gunshots. The tear gas and smoke coming from underneath the door caused a stir. We pushed the locked gate to get out. The gates were never locked before, but somehow for the past three days the guards had started locking them. When we finally got through the gates, we found the prison personnel waiting for us along with more military forces. Instead of helping us, they started shooting and savagely beating us and shoving us toward the gym area. There were probably around 2000 of us in the gym that night. They even took our slippers away while the floor was hot from the burning fire. We could barely breathe. We didn’t know what was going on with the fire, but not once did we ever hear fire truck sirens.”
This is the account given by the political prisoners, Yashar and Kaveh Darolshafa, two brothers held in Evin and transferred injured to another detention center on the night of the fire on October 15, 2022. One a PhD student and the other a musician, the brothers have been in and out of prison for years on charges of “propaganda and conspiracy against the regime.” Their mother, Touran Kabiri, who was able to meet with her sons ten days after the fire, recorded a video about this meeting to let the world know of what had happened in Evin on that fateful night.
Her account and those of other families that began slowly making their way into social media stood in stark contrast with the scenarios given by the regime and the state TV. Contradictory and at times mindboggling, these official scenarios ranged from a fire having started by accident in the sewing workshop of the prison, to a fire starting due to fights between inmates, to the surreal account of prisoners having stepped on minefields around the prison while trying to escape. The state TV put the death toll at 8 and the injured at around 60 prisoners. Neither names of the dead nor the injured have ever been made public.
Yet, for however the regime has tried to present the fire in Evin as an accident and build a whole narrative around it, such claim has never been believed. This is not only because the Islamic regime has long lost its credibility amongst Iranians but more so, because the specter of a massacre which happened 30 years ago has continued to haunt our collective memory, making us vigil of all and any act of violence perpetrated by the regime, especially when these acts occur in times of unrest and turmoil, and especially when they occur in prisons.
The fire in Evin caused such anguish amongst Iranians, because when it happened, the country had been rocked for weeks with mass protests over the death of the young Kurdish woman, Mahsa Zhina Amini, who was beaten to death by Morality Police for wearing her hijab loosely. Soon what began as demonstrations against mandatory hijab laws turned into a fierce anti-dictatorship, anti-patriarchy, and anti-Fascist revolt the scale and likes of which the country, with all of its uprisings over the decades, has never seen.
However, the greater a revolt, the more forcefully the regime’s machine of repression goes into action. The wilder the panic, the more viciously it retaliates. The more it is cornered, the more ferociously it clings on for survival. In the year that has passed since the protests first erupted in September 2022, over 20,000 protestors have been jailed, over 500 gunned down, 70 of them children. Seven protestors have been executed, charged with crimes of “waging war against God” and “corruption on Earth.” Hundreds face the death penalty charged with similar crimes.
Every day, we hear of more deaths, more arrests, more torture, more restrictive and punitive measures against women refusing to wear the mandatory hijab. We hear of young women blinded by rubber bullets during protests, of young men hanged in small towns in the more marginalized regions of the country, of kidnappings and abductions, of prisoners on hunger strike, of suicides of young protesters just days after being released from prison, of rape as a form of torture, of students and professors expelled from universities for protesting, of families of victims and prisoners being targeted, harassed and even arrested for speaking up, and of authorities refusing to return the bodies of dead protesters to their families to bury.
“I am the mother of Mahmoud Ahmadi. Give my son’s body back to me. My Mahmoud was only 21 years old. All I have of him are his military service clothes. All I have of him to bury. Give my son’s body back to me.”
These are the words of the mother of Mahmoud Ahmadi, a young man from the province of Khuzestan, who was gunned down by security forces during protests. She made this video begging the regime for her son’s body, so that she could at least bury him.
“My name is Mashallah Karami. I am the father of Mohammad Mehdi Karami. My son has been sentenced to death. I am a worker, a street peddler. My son is a karate champion. He has won many medals. He was fourth in Iran’s national karate team. I beg the judiciary chief and authorities, please do not execute my son.”
This the father of Momammad Mehdi Karami, a 22-year-old Kurdish man sentenced to death. His father made this video asking the authorities to refrain from executing his son, asking them to let his son live. Mohammad Mehdi Karami along with another protestor Mohammad Hosseini were both executed on January 7,2023. The mother of Mahmoud Ahmadi was never given her son’s body back and was forced to bury his clothes instead. The executions, torture and incarcerations continue to this day.
What stands out in all of these tales of deaths and atrocities, from the execution of my 27- year old uncle, Mohsen, sentenced to death by the Death Committee in 1988 to that of the 22- year-old Mohammad Mehdi Karami and all the others executed, gunned down and sentenced to death in 2022 and 2023, is not merely the disheartening linearity of history, which is evident for all to see, but the shocking lack of mystery in the way a dictatorship works. We continue to be appalled by the ferocity, the ease with which they kill, maim and oppress. Every time, we hope something changes in their attitude, their awareness, their values, but it doesn’t. A dictatorship is inherently immune to crisis of conscience. Its only way of survival is through violence and repression. It is the only way to exist, the only way to keep going; and the Islamic regime is no exception to this rule.
And yet, not everything has remained the same. Now, when it comes to the majority of the Iranian people and their perception of and attitude toward this historic, institutionalized violence, a dramatic shift seems to have taken place. When the 1988 massacre happened, most Iranians did not hesitate to believe the regime’s narrative of “war against the enemies of state and revolution,” and accepted the perpetrated violence as inevitable means toward stability and security. Few, other than the families of the victims, protested the mass executions. Many ignored it. And for years, dissidents who had survived prison and massacre, were forced to live in a hostile society that continued to consider them enemies, who got what they deserved.
In the three decades following the massacre, however, Iranians have come to learn, through many brutal and deadly lessons, that turning a blind eye towards any form of oppression not only does not guarantee one’s peace and safety but brings that oppression ever closer to one’s doorstep. They have come to learn that one single act of violence brings about more acts of violence. That one single campaign of persecution only gives rise to more widespread campaigns of persecution. That in an authoritarian society, no one is immune, no one is safe, no one is free, and it is only a matter of time before the guns and batons come for their next victim.
This long traumatic experience, which has over the decades taken tens of thousands to prisons, exile and torture rooms, has resulted in many Iranians looking back with hindsight, recognizing the lies and false narratives the regime has fed them over the years. As a consequence, the 1988 massacre, along with many other national tragedies which have shaken the country over the decades, have begun to work their way out of oblivion and disregard and into the nation’s collective consciousness. The Iranian society has gradually become aware of the unwitting support its silence has provided in maintaining this cycle of institutionalized violence and concluded that the first step to break this cycle is not by turning a blind but by actively exposing, denouncing and opposing it.
“I see a young boy sitting by the exit door of the interrogation ward of Evin. It’s snowing and all he has on is a thin gray shirt. He is blindfolded and shaking. They’ve tied him to a chair and are interrogating him. The boy cries out, ‘I swear to God I haven’t beaten anyone.’ They want him to make a confession. I scream, ‘Don’t confess to anything! Listen to me! Don’t confess to anything!’
The woman agent, who is escorting me, covers my mouth with her hand and drags me away.
‘You’ll pay for this cruelty one day!’ I try to shout. I can only imagine that all these death sentences being given to protestors have all come from these interrogations, these torture rooms. The entire hallways are filled with young boys and girls and the roars of torturers. ‘You’re not alone!’ I shout. ‘The downfall of oppressors is near.’ They drag me away.”
This is an excerpt of a letter written in Evin Prison in January 2023, denouncing the torture that protesters were undergoing inside Islamic regime’s prisons at the time. The writer is a 29-year-old journalist and workers’ rights activist, Sepideh Qoliyan. She is currently serving yet another jail term, this time not because of reporting on workers’ strikes but for having spoken up about the torture and abuse she and her fellow inmates have suffered at the hands of interrogators and prison guards. Audacious and persistent, Sepideh has never lost an opportunity to expose the atrocities of the regime. It is important to her that people know of the violence and corruption the regime is built upon, the blatant lies and propaganda it disgorges to save its own skin, the disgrace and annihilation it feeds itself with.
Sepideh Qoliyan is not alone in her resistance. This young woman, with her round black eyes and long hair that she used to love to dye blue, is amongst generations of Iranian activists, campaigners and dissidents who have fought, denounced, gone to prison, been tortured, spoken up again, been detained, and have nevertheless indefatigably continued their struggle against despotism, repression and terror. Their resistance has been significant not only because it has carried forward a fight that began long before these women and men were born, but also because it has strived to break the silence, to raise our awareness, and to muster our awakening not only as regards the systemic violence that has dominated our nation for decades, but also as regards the civic values and rights for which we must as a society strive.
Thus, the Iranians taking to the streets today demanding freedom, justice and equality are there not only because they have had enough of the corruption and abuse of a dictatorship, but because women and men like Sepideh Qoliyan and the Darolshafa brothers have fought to uphold and preserve these very civic rights and values, for which they are rising now. Sepideh continues in her letter:
“But not even the thick walls of Evin are able to hold back the cry of ‘Woman Life Freedom’ that reaches us from the four corners of Iran. Although the forced confessions and their broadcasts continue, this time the voice that breaks the silence is not from the interrogation rooms but from the streets of Marivan, Izeh, Rasht, Sistan-Baluchistan and all the other cities of Iran. This is the call of revolution. The true call of “Zhin Zhian Azadi.”
The Woman Life Freedom movement, which emerged from the death of Mahsa Zhina Amini and has ever since swept across the entire country, is the result of all these years of struggle and sacrifice that the nation along with its activists and dissidents have gone through, standing up against oppression, tyranny and violence. This movement is not the beginning of a revolution but the continuation of it. Led by women, minorities and the youth, it is one of the most inclusive and progressive movements the country has ever experienced, the chants of “Woman Life Freedom” targeting the very core of a corrupt, authoritarian, religious patriarchy.
Young, rebellious, and iconoclast, the new generation of protestors is one that has seen all the previous struggles against the same dictatorship throughout these years, all their failures and shortcomings, their accomplishments and efforts, and has learned to draw its own conclusions. They have come to learn that their fight is not only over guns and gunned men but a fight over narrative, and they have to do everything in their power to take the narrative back into their own hands.
“Down with the Dictator!”
“Down with the Islamic Republic of executions!”
“You can kill a revolutionary but not a revolution!”
“You’re the pervert, you’re the filthy! I’m a free woman!”
“Free political prisoners!”
“There are a thousand people standing behind every person you kill!”
“We swear to the blood of our comrades / We are standing to the end!”
“Freedom is something to be planted / And we have the seeds!”
These are some of the slogans, which have been chanted on the streets and buses and trains and inside bazars and in town squares and written on walls all over the country in the past year. The same slogans that were chanted outside Evin as thousands rushed to the prison on the night of the fire on October 15, 2022, both to show their support to the prisoners and their families, and also to make it clear to the regime that they’re there and this time they won’t go anywhere. The same chants that reverberated outside another horror house, the Rajayi-Shahr Prison, on the night the news of the imminent execution of two more protestors was made public, when once again hundreds of supporters amassing in front of the prison, risking their lives, confronting security forces, refusing to abandon the families of the prisoners sentenced to death. The same slogans chanted during funerals of gunned down protesters, which were no longer held in fear and silence as thirty years ago, but with hundreds of supporters coming to show their solidarity with the families of the fallen.
All of these spontaneous instances of courage and resistance, and many more similar to them, demonstrate that now thirty years after the 1988 massacre, when thousands were killed in general silence and indifference, our society has taken a different turn. No longer are families of protesters and political prisoners abandoned to their grief and solitude as my family and so many like mine were thirty years ago but are now supported and braced. No longer are dissidents seen as enemies of the state but now as heroes to be lauded. No longer are artists and writers and musicians seen as troublemakers putting the nation’s security in jeopardy, but as truth tellers who will not remain silent. A shift of perception, of conscience, and a determination to be a far better, more just and more human society than what the regime has envisioned for us has now taken root.
The Islamic regime has struggled for over four decades to transform Iran into a fanatical, bigoted, chauvinistic society. By manipulating people’s religious sensibilities, aggressively promoting the patriarchal beliefs deeply embedded in the society, exploiting the nation’s weariness of the historical foreign interventions, which have for centuries pushed back progressive movements not only in Iran but throughout the region, by suppressing minorities and instilling fear into people’s hearts and minds, the Islamic regime has worked hard to turn us into a replica of themselves. Not only have these attempts not worked, but they have backfired. The Woman Life Freedom uprising is a bold demonstration of this colossal failure. Throughout the past year, brave Iranian women and men have taken to the street, risked prison, torture and even death to manifest that they no longer tolerate prejudice, inequality and injustice. They have demonstrated that despite the ferocious effort to silence and subjugate them, they have grown as a society that now demands to be heard, to be free, to live with dignity and safety, and to fight for a world that strives to be more diverse, more inclusive and more communal. This is no longer a silent people. It is no longer an indifferent people. This is now a people that stands up not only for its own good but for the good of everyone around it.
When the fire in Evin took place in October 2022, perhaps the Islamic regime believed that they could get away with yet another massacre. Thinking that no one will know, no one will care, no one will try to stop them. They had it wrong. In the past year, Iranians have shown time and again that they will not back away and will not abandon each other in this perilous fight for freedom and equality. It is true perhaps that we still have a long way to go. Perhaps this might not yet be the end of a dictatorship, but the change toward a more just society has already begun. For, a revolution is not only about overthrowing a regime. It is about the formation of our collective consciousness, about the cherishing of our collective memory, about our solidarity in suffering and loss, and about the power of our shared narratives. It’s about coming together and bringing our stories closer to each than we ever thought possible.
Contributor’s Notes
Sahar Delijani is the author of CHILDREN OF THE JACARANDA TREE, an autobiographical novel, which has been translated into 32 languages and published in more than 75 countries. Born in Iran in 1983, she grew up in California and lived for many years in Italy. A winner of the de Groot Foundation COURAGE TO WRITE Grant, the Society of Authors and Author’s Foundation Grant and a Hedgebrook alumna, her work has furthermore been longlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize and nominated for the Best American Essay series. Twice a Pushcart nominee, Delijani’s writings have appeared in McSweeney’s, Literary Hub, Kweli Journal, The Bellevue Review, Slice Magazine and more. She currently lives in New York City, writing her second novel.
