The news was short and bitter: A young woman in Iran was killed by religious police who repeatedly struck her head because she wasn’t wearing the so-called Islamic hijab. Mahsa “Gina” Amini is one of thousands of women who fall victim to religious tyranny and extreme patriarchy in our volatile and chaotic region but what distinguishes her death is the spark of anger that has brought women and all oppressed groups together.
The angry and grieving women of Iran and Afghanistan realize more now than ever that this bone-breaking pain felt by so many will not be cured except by joint rebellion. It is as if Gina is now a code name to break the silence and open a door to liberation. Gina, Neda, Farkhunda, Rukhshana… all these names are calls to summon truth to the present moment.
Iranian women have been standing against the Iranian version of the Taliban for nearly 44 years. The approaches of the Islamic Republic (Iran) and the Islamic Emirate (Afghanistan) toward women are two sides of the same outdated coin. The Taliban has always copied the disgusting policies of the Islamic Republic in suppressing social groups, especially women, workers, and students. Both systems have yoked women by referring to what they call sharia rules. The anti-human laws of the Islamic Emirates and the Islamic Republic have denied the most basic rights of women. According to the intellectual and moral systems of these two patriarchies, the inferiority of women is natural. Therefore, the two regimes, from the first hours of their seizure of political power, have acted with brutality against any rebellion and female defiance. The Taliban followed the footsteps of Iran’s clerics in their strategy of arrests, torture, forced confessions, rape and all kinds of sexual and psychological violence against women.
As it is evident in the experience of oppression of women in societies like Afghanistan and Iran, remembering and talking about women’s experiences are important for giving authority to the fact that women’s experience can be the basis of human solidarity and hope. Also, referring to these experiences can reduce frustration and helplessness among all of us and clarify our relationship with our historically and collectively subordinated identity and positionl. The narration of our sufferings can erase the distance between us. We women and other oppressed people can reduce the pressure of despair, anxiety, frustration, and personal numbness by passing on the history of common experiences and pains. We can reach unity in a revolutionary approach to change our collective situation. While we women think about violence through experience, we also refer to the reality of resistance.
What we need at this moment is a successful way to fight. We must be equipped with a form of resistance that protects us from being digested in the situation. The experience of women’s resistance in Iran and Afghanistan shows that if we do not expand and proliferate our struggle, we will be crushed by repression. We should master tactics of struggle successfully used in other nations so we can effectively extend solidarity to each other’s struggles. We should spread the truth wherever there is oppression, there is resistance.
The history of oppression and resistance has given us a better understanding of gender oppression. We women have achieved such levels of self-belief that we consider ourselves as subjects with agency ——a subject born from the struggle and who sees themselves in the camp of all marginalized and oppressed groups. However, we also acknowledge the mental, objective, and psychological barriers created by trauma and persistent fears. In the face of repression, fear is the most obvious human response. Given the experience of femicide and misogyny from Kabul to Tehran, that fear can be a deterrent of struggle. Through experience we are aware that reactionaries use fear to consolidate their power even though it seems that now we have reached a point where we no longer feel powerless. The recent widespread protests by women in Iran as well as in Afghanistan show that they have succeeded in channelling fear into anger, and anger into an organized struggle.
A glimpse at the slogans “Work, Food, Freedom” and “Woman, Life, Freedom”, one can see hope in women’s understanding of their common destiny. It is as if this part of the world is on the verge of a new revolution. With all these fears and hopes and complications, it seems that a women’s rebellion has started the countdown to the collapse of one of the most feared authoritarian regimes in the region.
