By now you have seen the indelible images from the streets of dozens of cities and towns across the Islamic Republic of Iran. They have found a way out, despite the fact that the regime has been routinely cutting off the internet. Videos of mothers screaming “Damn you Khamenei.” Photographs of women burning their hijabs and dancing around bonfires. A young woman cutting her hair in public while crowds chant “death to the dictator.”
As has happened in every major demonstration since the pro-democracy Green Movement was crushed in 2009, many are speaking openly of revolution. The current demonstrations, which began on September 16, were sparked, as so much else in Iran, by a woman.
The Islamic Republic’s ruling clerics, echoing renowned Muslim theologians from a millennium before, are obsessed with the convulsive power of female sexuality. In this case: with the dark brown hair of Masha Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman not known for provocative political behavior. She died in Tehran after being beaten to death by Iran’s morality police for the crime of having too much hair showing beneath her mandatory headscarf.
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