From the January-February 2023 issue of News & Letters
Since Sept. 16, 2022, protesters in Iran have carried out remarkable, unique and revolutionary protests which show no hint of stopping. The revolt was started by women who remain both numerous and radical in the constant demonstrations and actions, and it has drawn in many layers of the masses while explicitly calling for the revolutionary downfall of the Islamic Republicâs regime.

Twenty-two-year-old Jina (Mahsa) Amini, Kurds, was killed by Iranian morality police thugs for supposedly not wearing hijab âproperly.â Photo from family given to Iran Wire.
From the beginning, with the brutal beating to death of Jina (Mahsa) Amini for supposedly wearing the required hijab âimproperly,â the Iranian regime has revealed itself as a collection of ruthless thugs. They will use any tactic no matter how dreadful to try to quell this unstoppable rebellion and remain in power to enrich themselves and continue their plunder.
REGIMEâS RUTHLESSNESS HAS NO BOUNDS
They have gone into girlsâ schools and beaten young girls to death for refusing to sing a song glorifying religious dictator Ayatollah Ali Khamenei; picked up teenage women protesters and beaten them till they bled to death or their heads were caved in; shot an eight-year-old boy riding with his parents in a car. They shoot metal pellets and rubber bullets at womenâs breasts, faces, eyes and genitals to maim and disfigure them.
To divide protesters along ethnic lines, they shot down at least 76

Sixteen-year-old Asra Panahi was beaten to death by Iranian security forces who raided her school in Ardabil on Oct. 13, 2022, and demanded the girls sing a pro-regime song. Photo from a video.
unarmed demonstrators in the Kurdish region of Iran on Sept. 28, some of them children, and have ruthlessly attacked minority ethnicities throughout the land. They have executed young men for protesting, including public hangings, in a vain attempt to frighten protesters.
Making hijab rules even more draconian, on Jan. 10, 2023, the regime declared they would arrest women who go without hijab and jail them for up to two months, with judges given free rein to ban hijab-free women from working and political activity, to take womenâs cars, etc. If they are found guilty of âencouragingâ lax hijab, they could be jailed for ten years!
Nothing has stopped the demonstrations. These regime atrocities only make people more determined to rid themselves of their rulers and live free.
Bahareh Hedayati is an activist, theorist and founding member of the One Million Signatures campaign, who has been arrested and jailed by the Iranian regime several times for fighting for a free Iran. Now in Evin prison, she was able to smuggle out a letter that captures the movementâs spirit. In it she reveals reasons for the uprising and three contributions this revolution in progress is making. She reveals the maturity of the movement, making clear that she is living the dialectic, fighting what must be changed and thinking about what the new society will look like after the overthrow of the regime.
Hedayati, who has experienced many demonstrations throughout the years, acknowledges the reality of violence because âthere is no chance that the existing regime can extricate itself from the situation that has emerged, because neither can a tiny part of the protestersâ demands be fulfilled within the present system, nor can the majority of the people waive any of their demands.â
âREVOLUTION IS INEVITABLEâ
The people are âconfronting the power structure itself, which is going to crumble whether they are successful or they are resisted. Therefore, revolution is inevitableâŠ.This committed generation has raised the flag of freedom, has defined its very own political identity, and it will decide Iranâs destiny.â
Hedayati, a participant/leader in the Green Movement, critiques it to distinguish the past from the future. She writes that she and others were âforced to accept the last remnants of political Islam within ourselves when we trusted reformist leaders and Mir-Hossin MousaviâŠâ who ended up defending âthe organized and continuous crimes of Khomeiniâs regime with an undeniable clarity and called the man who bloodied and set on fire a region or perhaps the world and condemned the women of this land to hijab slavery an âever-awake soul.ââ
THREE NEW REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPTS
In tracing the difference in her generation of dissidents and those who are in the streets today, she sees three new concepts that âemerged from the common wisdom of the protesters.â
- âThis 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 achievementâŠ.â
- They are challenging those âwithin the movement who have been trying to normalize hijabâŠ[and who] have succeeded in convincing a number of international organizationsâ to honor World Hijab Day, which is in reality âa day to celebrate the invisibility of womenâs bodies without giving a thought to the consequences of this invisibility for a womanâs everyday life, her intellectual life and even her fateâŠ.The 2-22 movement rose with the burning of head scarves and its second important achievement was to call on all those Western intellectuals to see the reality.â
- â[T]he 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.â
Bahareh Hedayati signed her letter from prison, âHoping for freedom!â knowing full well that those in the street are hoping and fighting for a new world. We join her and their desire for freedom, knowing that a revolution in Iran can be the spark to transform our world.
Source: Newsandletters.org