Why “Jîna”: Erasure of Kurdish Women and Their Politics from the Uprisings in Iran

The future of Iran could be changed forever by the protests in September 2022 sparked by the death in police custody of Jîna (Mahsa) Amini, a Kurdish woman from the city of Saqez who was arrested for wearing her hijab “improperly.” 

The protests have generated an inspiring and newfound solidarity among Iranians of all ethnic backgrounds, as well as promising internationalist feminist solidarity. However, as two Kurdish women, we have been deeply disappointed to see Jîna’s Kurdish background routinely ignored by mainstream media and among allies in diasporic solidarity rallies and in expressions of international solidarity. 

In particular, we focus on three types of erasures we see even among progressive and feminist circles. The first relates to the ways people use or don’t use the name “Jîna” and the broader significance of such choices. Second, we draw attention to a patterned failure in acknowledging the origins of the slogan “Woman, Life Freedom,” which was developed by the Kurdish women’s freedom movement affiliated with the Workers’ Party of Kurdistan (PKK) against colonial, patriarchal states and societies. The third points to a wider dismissal of the significance of Kurdish struggles and demands both inside Iran and beyond it.  

Dismissing Jîna’s Kurdish identity, downplaying the systematic and structural oppression of ethnic minorities, and ignoring the origins of the now popularized chant, “Women, Life, Freedom,” risks fueling rifts, distrust, and resentment among Kurdish populations. To start, overlooking the likely relationship of Jîna’s Kurdishness to the fatal violence she was subjected to, reveals deeper patterns of violence that Kurds have experienced in modern Iran. In short, Jîna’s Kurdishness is critical to understand marginalization in Iran and the broader Middle East and a feminist movement that is simultaneously anti-colonial and anti-imperial.

https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/44560

 

Human rights groups warn of impending massacre in Kurdish city in western Iran

Kurdish rights groups on Sunday warned of an impending massacre in the Kurdish city of Mahabad in western Iran as a large number of Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) units attacked the city with armored vehicles on Saturday night, hunting down activists that have defied the regime.

Videos from the city on Saturday showed thousands of mostly young men barricading the streets of the city preparing to confront the IRGC and its militia, the Basij. The IRGC and the Basij attacked protesters across the Kurdish areas of western Iran (Rojhelat), killing at least 26 protesters including children during four days of unrest.

Hengaw Organization for Human Rights reported loud explosions being heard in several Kurdish cities on Saturday night, with no information released on the cause.  

https://www.rudaw.net/english/middleeast/iran/20112022

 

The Iranian regime is racing toward the abyss

What future is there for a regime that kills its youth? The question keeps coming up, as blood has been flowing in Iran for more than two months now. The regime knows how to do repression. No Iranian man or woman doubts its determination to crush the voices that challenge it. But the tactic of fear no longer seems effective, so powerful does the current wave of anger seem.

The death of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, in Tehran on September 16, after she was arrested by the morality police for wearing the mandatory headscarf in a way that was deemed inappropriate, has topped a groundswell of resentment that has been building for decades – the resentment of an urban youth deprived of a horizon in a closed country, as well as that of mistreated ethnic minorities, be they Kurds or Baluchis.

https://www.lemonde.fr/en/opinion/article/2022/11/19/the-iranian-regime-is-racing-toward-the-abyss_6004881_23.html

 

Two Weeks in Tehran

Five weeks​ into the protests that erupted across Iran in response to the killing of Mahsa Amini, the floundering Iranian authorities thought it would be a good idea to put up a massive poster in central Tehran depicting dozens of eminent Iranian women as supporters of the mandatory wearing of the hijab. Photographs of academics, writers, directors, artists, actors and athletes were shown in a collage with the slogan ‘Women of Our Land’ which was plastered on the billboard the regime reserves for its most urgent public messaging, a massive structure towering over Valiasr Square. The display included such unlikely figures as the novelist Simin Daneshvar, who wore the hijab only after the revolution made it compulsory, depicted patriarchal oppression in her fiction, and is on record saying that she wished ‘the world was run by women’.

Within hours, several women demanded their images be removed. The existence of a photograph showing them with a headscarf did not mean they were pious or even that they respected the government; it simply meant they had observed the law. Parvaneh Kazemi, who has climbed Everest, posted on Instagram that she was angry ‘the name and image of us women are used only for abuse.’ The actor Fatemeh Motamed-Arya uploaded a furious video. She appeared bareheaded, and said that she was the mother of Mahsa Amini and Sarina Esmailzadeh, a teenager killed in the protests: ‘I am a mother of all the children who were killed in this land, not a woman in the land of murders.’ The son of another actor who was included in the collage pointed out that his mother had barely been tolerated by the clerical authorities when she was alive. A screenwriter noted on Instagram that one woman on the poster, the photojournalist Nooshin Jafari, was serving a prison sentence for ‘insulting state sanctities’. Overnight, the billboard vanished. It reflected, as the reformist journalist Abbas Abdi observed on Twitter, the ruling system’s ‘contradictory and blocked sensibility’, its wish to co-opt such women and its wish to impose morality policing at the same time.

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n21/azadeh-moaveni/diary

 

Iran protests are not just about mandatory hijab, but the entire system

The ongoing demonstrations in Iran kicked off following the death of Mahsa (Zhina) Amini, but they are not just about mandatory hijab. It is misleading to depict these protests as though they are framed around one singular topic, when they are a manifestation of a much wider and bigger problem. 

For the past 11 days of demonstrations in Iran, at least 76 people have died according to the Iran Human Rights (IHR) group and hundreds have been arrested. But whether these demonstrations will lead to any actionable results will remain to be seen because the scale of the protests is unclear, one single video can be broadcast online and within minutes it could be seen by millions of people, and while this amplification keeps the spirits of protesters going, it does not give us a clear idea of how many people are protesting. 

Those protesting on the streets are doing so for multiple reasons, all of which was sparked by the death of the young Kurdish woman Amini, but it is too early to tell whether they will create the momentum for change because the Iranian authorities have become very accustomed to quelling dissident in the country. 

https://www.rudaw.net/english/opinion/27092022

 

Khamenei Warns Of Further Crackdown As Protests In Iran Over Woman’s Death Continue

Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has blamed foreign influences for unrest that has spread across the country over the death of a young woman while she was in custody for breaking a rule on the wearing of the Islamic head scarf, or hijab, and warned that security forces had his full backing in quelling any dissent.

In his first public reaction to the widespread protests inside Iran, Khamenei on October 3 attributed the demonstrations to America, Israel, and Iranians abroad, whom he called “traitors.”

The death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini “deeply broke my heart,” he said, characterizing it as a “bitter incident.”

Authorities have said Amini died of a heart attack while in custody for “inappropriate attire,” a claim the family and her supporters have vehemently disputed. They say she was in perfect health and that eyewitnesses who saw her arrest last month said she was beaten by security forces.

https://www.rferl.org/a/iran-protest-crackdown-khamenei-warning/32063460.html

 

Iran’s Feminist Revolution–Women, Life, Freedom

Is it a feminist revolution

Is it a feminist revolution because they’re burning their hijab

Is it a feminist revolution because it was started and is led by women

Is it a feminist revolution if men are taking part

Is it a feminist revolution if nothing changes

What does hair have to do with the revolution

Glory and power to the women in Iran. 

If we’re lucky, women are semi-colons in the stories written by men and other egomaniacs and “revolutionaries” who think we don’t know that they don’t know what they’re doing; who think we don’t know that they just want some more of that power that the State monopolizes and not liberation for us all.

Glory and power to the women in Iran who have seized the narrative and become object and subject. Women are too often the afterthought of a revolution, rarely its reason for being. 

Listen to their chants: Jin Jiyan Azadi/Women Life Freedom!

The slogan is Kurdish and has its origins in the Kurdish Freedom Movement, with its emphasis on women’s freedom and the struggle for self-determination. The protests have spread across Iran and have been especially strong in the Kurdish areas. It speaks to the intersections of oppressions faced by the Kurdish woman Mahsa Zhina Amini whose death after being taken into custody by “morality police” was the spark of the uprising.

https://www.feministgiant.com/p/essay-women-life-liberty

 

Iran’s raging Mahsa Amini protests draw sympathy from all corners of society

As teargas swirled on the streets and authorities moved to dispel the women who had gathered in rage and defiance, Poori*, a 31-year-old physics graduate, insisted on standing her ground.

“I was out there. I feel like my chest and throat are burning as a result of teargas,” she told Middle East Eye.

Poori was at one of dozens of protests that have broken out across Iran over the past four days, sparked by the death in custody of a young woman who was arrested by Iran’s so-called “morality police”, who were enforcing the country’s strict regulations on women wearing the hijab.

Though Poori willingly wears a headscarf, she disagrees with Iran’s strict laws on women’s dress.

“It was totally worth it,” she says of the protest. “I saw the amazing moment when the other girls were twirling their scarves in the air and shouting ‘Woman, life, and freedom.’”

https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/iran-mahsa-amini-protests-draw-sympathy-all-society

 

The Exiled Dissident Fuelling the Hijab Protests in Iran

Women from across Iran are pulling off their hijabs and lighting them on fire, flouting the country’s gray-bearded theocrats in dramatic scenes of a population struggling to set itself free. Of all the astonishments pouring forth from the Islamic Republic, perhaps the most remarkable is the fact that Iran was brought to this point, at least in part, by an unpaid forty-six-year-old mother working from an F.B.I. safehouse in New York City.

Masih Alinejad, an Iranian journalist who was driven into exile thirteen years ago, has helped galvanize the country’s women, amassing some ten million followers on her social-media sites and spurring them to trash the most potent symbol of the regime’s legalized gender-apartheid: the hijab, the hair covering mandated for every adult woman.Most of Alinejad’s followers live in Iran, making her one of the country’s most powerful voices. Since 2014, she has worked a simple formula to devastating effect. She has called on women inside Iran to record themselves defying the hijab rule and to send her the evidence. Thousands of women have obliged, and Alinejad has posted videos and photos of them showing their hair to accounts on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook. Those sites are blocked by the country’s dictatorship, but, by making use of virtual private networks, many Iranians have seen them anyway. Millions have been able to witness the bravery of their fellow-citizens and to see how widely their views are shared—which, in the stifling environment of modern Iran, would otherwise be impossible.

https://www.newyorker.com/news/daily-comment/the-exiled-dissident-fuelling-the-hijab-protests-in-iran

 

Regime’s Might Versus Determination Of Iran’s Generation Z

The latest round of nationwide protests in Iran appears to be different from the protests that have rocked the Islamic Republic since 2017 in more than one way.

The protests that started in Tehran late evening on September 16 following the death in custody of Mahsa Amini, 22, was not triggered by financial hardships Iranians have been experiencing in recent years.

Mahsa Amini’s death, a young woman from the Kurdish town of Saqqez, who was reportedly beaten by the hijab patrol agents after her arrest in the street, symbolized pressures the clerical regime exerts on the social freedoms of the young generation, and the regime’s lawless behavior.

The initial gatherings near the hospital where she passed away, were meant to pay respect to an ordinary young woman who was murdered although she had modestly covered her hair and body in the usual black scarf and long manteau many women hate to wear in Tehran’s heat even in early autumn. She had not committed a crime or engaged in a major violation of a religious rule.

https://www.iranintl.com/en/202209216336