[cont]

No Islamic arrows in the quiver of today’s movement

Today’s hope-inspiring movement has no Islamic arrows in its quiver, and this is clear from its slogans. This generation of protesters has not resorted to any religious or pseudo-religious concepts to tell us what it does or does not want, and this is a great achievement. This was a completely spontaneous style and demeanor that emerged from the common wisdom of the protesters.

One reason for this achievement is that the current movement was completely spontaneous and did not seek coalition partners from within the existing political structure because they have absolutely nothing to do with each other — unlike the Green Movement that was a form of unwritten coalition with elements within the political structure of the Islamic Republic even though some of these elements might have been rejected by the regime.

The difference between these two movements is also clearly visible from their goals. The defining goal of the Green Movement was to make fundamental reforms when overthrowing the Islamic Republic seemed an exciting but remote prospect. The defining goal of the 2022 movement, however, is the overthrow of the regime, and its advantage has been its ability to express this goal without stammering and without any hesitation.

Reformists have no connection with this movement

When we say again and again that the reformists and fundamentally the paradigm of reformism are not in charge of the current movements, are not helping them and are not active in them, this is not because of the resentment and rage over their record of collaboration with the regime. This is only an explanation of the new paradigm that has emerged since 2017 and has its own specific exigencies. One is that the identity of reformism, its agents and its constructs cannot survive in the new paradigm because they belong to the previous defunct one, unless they accept the core goal of the new one, i.e. the overthrow of the Islamic Republic, in which case they are no longer reformists.

The 2022 movement showed that hijab is not a cultural category

The second important achievement of the 2022 movement, a global achievement, relates to the question of hijab. This movement is moving in the same direction as the global paradigm concerning women, but at the same time it has also emerged to challenge those within the movement who have been trying to normalize hijab. This movement against hijab has risen after years of a movement — I do not know what to call it — that has tried to normalize hijab or to present it as a cultural element.

This group has even succeeded in convincing a number of international organizations to recognize “World Hijab Day” as an international day to celebrate the invisibility of women’s bodies without giving a thought to the consequences of this invisibility for a woman’s everyday life, her intellectual life and even her fate. This is a perfect example of what we are talking about when we speak of the extreme difficulty of translating problems in non-Western countries for Westerners.

This movement, part of which believes that it is anti-colonialist, covers its ears — in a manner that happens to be colonialist — when a Middle Eastern woman of Muslim descent speaks against hijab, and, from outside, accuses those of us who are living in this situation of Islamophobia. In other words, I, a Middle Eastern woman, have no right to even cry over the inferior position that hijab has condemned me to because, according to the “progressive” rules issued in the West by its intellectual circles, this cry of pain under a historical injustice that hijab has imposed on me is the same as fear of Islam and nobody has the right to fear Islam.

And since Western intellectuals are facing the problem of the failure to integrate Muslims into their own society, since they cannot believe that a phenomenon like hijab can create a chain of oppression, of degrading women and of self-alienation without having anything to do with capitalism, and since they is used to seeing everything through the prism of capitalism and cannot understand anything beyond it, they believe that a Middle Eastern Muslim woman has no right to say “ouch” because they are afraid that their own mental contradictions and inconsistencies would be revealed!

The 2022 movement rose with the burning of headscarves and its second important achievement was to call on all those Western intellectuals to see the reality.

Its third achievement deserves notice even though it is still somehow fragile and relative. In this movement, convergence within the framework of the territorial integrity of Iran carries a lot of weight, meaning that the danger of separatism among various ethnic groups who live in this land has subsided to some degree. This, of course, does not mean that we are now suddenly hearing all the voices that we have not heard for many decades, but it cannot be denied that the feeling of solidarity and of sharing the same destiny has been strengthened under this movement, and we can hope that once we leave the Islamic Republic behind it is possible to arrive at a new covenant that guarantees both the integrity of this land and the rights of ethnic groups and minorities.

My generation was rebellious and self-sacrificing but blind in terms of political intuition

To conclude, I want to turn to a sentence by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant — even though referring to him is beyond my limited scientific wherewithal.

Kant believes that intuitions (perceptions) without concepts are blind. As such, I can say that the political intuition of our generation was somehow blind. I count myself as belonging to a part of the student movement in the 2000s whose political experience was limited to the farthest possibilities offered by that period and that had no adequate grasp of concepts such as overthrowing the government or revolution.

Despite the fact that this generation passionately and conscientiously rose up against everything it had inherited, it still lived and thought within a paradigm whose main focus was change, and, occasionally, improving the situation. The emergence and the development of paradigms are so influenced by historical factors that perhaps we can say they have little connection with the will of activists who are born and grow up within them.

I can only testify that my generation was honest, defiant and self-sacrificing. My generation was born in a container where every ideological ingredient was prepared to turn us into soldiers ready to die for the Supreme Leader, but it rebelled against everything it had inherited, armed with the honor and awareness it had gained.

Today’s younger generation will decide Iran’s destiny

Our experience was deficient because the world in which we lived was deficient, but today, with the same enthusiasm and the same conscientiousness, we have pinned our hopes to the younger generation of the 1990s and 2000s, and we will not spare any help or support we can give them to fulfill our common wish for freedom, justice, the downfall of the tyranny and to save Iran.

Both our experience and that of today’s younger generation are tied to the streets. Today’s young Iranians have brought their political demands into the streets and have embodied these demands in the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom” and the calls for the overthrow of the regime.

This committed generation has raised the flag of freedom, has defined its very own political identity, and it will decide Iran’s destiny.

What we hope is that opposition groups can come together around vital ideas like democracy, secularism, social justice, the mother tongue, territorial integrity and rights such as freedom of assembly to facilitate the passage from the existing corrupt situation to the next milestone.

Hoping for freedom!

Bahareh Hedayati

December 2022

Evin prison