In Hong Kong, millions of people took to the streets in 2019/20 to oppose the repressive measures of an authoritarian regime. But ultimately, their voices were silenced, their leaders imprisoned, and China stripped of its democratic rights — while Western leaders looked on, wringing their hands.
Nationwide protests erupted in Belarus when a cruel dictator stole the 2020 election. The UN said hundreds of people had been mistreated, tortured and raped. But dictator Alexander Lukashenko, backed by his vile sidekick in Moscow, defiantly remains in power.
In Myanmar last year, the army launched a coup and replaced elected politicians with a military junta. Its boss, General Min Aung Hlaing, is accused of overseeing the genocide and ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya minority – but has so far gotten off scot-free.
It’s a pattern that’s repeating itself with frightening frequency around the world. Just look at the Arab Spring “revolutions” in Syria and Egypt. People rise, people get knocked down – and Western democracies finally accept the new old reality and scream bad.
Is this the fate that now awaits the young women of Iran who have bravely taken the lead to challenge the recent deadly excesses of Tehran’s morally bankrupt regime? As in other countries, Iran’s 1979 revolution defeated one tyrant only to put another in his place.
But today’s nationwide protests defy brutal crackdowns and are unusual in several respects. While most appear to be led by young women and schoolgirls, assisted by young men, a wide range of ages, ethnic groups and social classes are represented.
The uprising has no leaders, organizations or manifestos other than “Women, Life, Freedom” – a slogan signaling the collective commitment to human rights, freedom of expression and democratic self-determination. No wonder this abominable regime cannot understand.
What is most striking is that the women show no fear. They refuse to be intimidated (or covered up). These energetic younger generations don’t care about the Islamic Republic’s 43-year history of grand plans, broken promises, and bloody wars. For them it is corrupt, anachronistic and irrelevant.
The riots also have nothing to do with “alien conspiracies” – the regime’s hackneyed, overarching excuse for failure. It has everything to do with higher education, the internet and social media, globalized culture and the denial of personal and professional freedoms that are the accepted norm elsewhere.
After years of pregnancy and several agonizing false starts, grassroots politics has arrived in Iran
Whether the mullahs realize it or not, these brave young women are Iran’s future. They can no longer be silenced, closed off, and forcibly isolated from the world. You are connected. You live in the era of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. You know it, celebrate it.
After years of pregnancy and several agonizing false starts, grassroots politics has arrived in Iran. It sets an agenda for change. And you can’t put that genie back in the bottle. For the supreme leader, arch-reactionary Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and for his placeholder president Ebrahim Raisi, the message is clear: back down or “disappear”.
Next week or next year, sooner or later, the second Iranian revolution is coming. The wheel turns again. And over time, no amount of killing, imprisonment, censorship and threats, no amount of shaming of young women, no futile effort to insist on the obligatory hijab – that potent symbol of revolt – can stop it.
However, the Shia clerical oligarchy will not readily embrace this dawning reality. It will fight back in any way it can. Its victims, like the heroic, much-persecuted women’s rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh, know how viciously the regime holds on to its beliefs, prejudices and power.
And yet, as Shirin Ebadi, one of Iran’s first female judges and a 2003 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, observed, the struggle is not with Islam, but with those who exploit and distort it for their own ends. Men like the theocratic founding dictator of the Islamic Republic, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.
“An interpretation of Islam that is consistent with equality and democracy is an authentic expression of faith,” Ebadi wrote in her 2006 book Iran Awakening. “It is not religion that binds women, but the selective dictates of those who desire them in seclusion.”
Iran’s women’s revolt comes amid heightened scrutiny of women’s subjugation and abuse in Muslim countries. The Saudi government drew well-earned slurs in August after the outrageous jailing of Leeds University student Salma al-Shehab for her use of Twitter for 34 years.
In Afghanistan, the Taliban’s misogynistic dictates, such as the closure of girls’ schools, have dashed hopes of international acceptance. The nightmare world of 1990s Kabul, revealed in Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns, is back with a vengeance.
But in developing countries there are positive examples of confident Muslim women taking responsibility. I’ve seen it myself, in a woman-run village crab shop in the Bay of Bengal in Bangladesh, an agricultural collective in Mindanao in the Philippines and a domestic violence support group in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
In Idlib, north-west Syria, women have taken the leading role in providing education, food distribution and health care to those fleeing the civil war. It’s a huge cultural shift – and seems to be permanent.
Seen in this more hopeful context, it is clear that Iran’s women are not the only ones challenging the archaic shibboleths of male-dominated societies. And today’s upheavals are part of a continuum. Iran has changed massively since my first visit in 1977. The emancipation process is slow and uneven, but there is no reverse gear.
Obviously, the Iranian regime will not go quietly or quickly. So what will the West do? As mentioned, recent history suggests: not much. A few tough words here, a few sanctions there, and the global caravan moves on.
That’s no surprise. And it’s a hard truth. Iran has many friends and benefactors abroad who will do what they can. But for their second revolution to succeed, the Iranians must first rely on themselves.