What Iranians Want - Arash Azizi

Last updated Apr 17, 2024

• Author: Arash Azizi
• Full Title: What Iranians Want
• Category: #books

‘Oh, of who do I speak? We live without reason, They are conscious of the reason for their death.’ — Ahmad Shamlu (Location 6)

In autumn 2022, thousands of protesters chanted on the streets of Iran ‘Don’t call this a protest. This is a revolution.’ (Location 25)

The last significant wave of protests, at the tail-end of 2019, became notorious as ‘Bloody November’ – a title earned in the deaths of over a thousand protesters. (Location 30)

the filmmakers defying the censors and distributing their films underground. (Location 34)

The slogan ‘Women, Life, Freedom’ unifies all these issues – transforming demands into a programme. (Location 52)

Hal Draper, an American revolutionary, once wrote ‘Nothing can be guaranteed, of course, except the honour and dignity of fighting for a new and better world, rather than the vileness of adapting one’s mind and heart to a vile one.’ (Location 58)

an ordinary Iranian woman. When outside, she wore long, loose, dark cloaks, with a bit of hair jutting out of the mandatory veil. Inside, she wore colourful, embroidered dresses, dancing to Kurdish music and Persian divas alike. (Location 84)

Following an ancient Iranian tradition, women cut their hair to signal mourning. Many around the world imitated the gesture in solidarity. (Location 91)

By the time of Mahsa’s state murder, Iranian women had had to endure more than four decades of compulsory veiling. This policy, which forces women to cover all their body except for the face and the palm of their hands, doesn’t have parallels anywhere in the world, Muslim or otherwise. (Location 98)

Whatever their religious preferences, the women of 1979 enjoyed the progressive changes brought about by the tireless work of Iranian feminists in the preceding decades. (Location 120)

On 23 January 1979, as the Grand Ayatollah whiled away the last days of his Parisian exile, he did something he had never done before: he gave an interview to a female reporter. (Location 133)

‘A man full of spite and hate is coming to rule over us,’ she said. But her warnings fell on deaf ears. There was just no end to the wild clamouring for Khomeini. (Location 155)

In the months leading to his triumphant return to Iran, Khomeini had cynically adopted the language of human rights and freedom to win over clueless Western observers. (Location 179)

‘We didn’t make a revolution to go back in time,’ they said. ‘We will fight for freedom,’ (Location 212)

Many prominent woman intellectuals agreed. Daneshvar said: ‘We should first take care of the economy, get our agriculture to some level, bring about a government of justice and freedom… and we can then get to side issues… such as woman’s attire.’ (Location 279)

The regime’s retreat had been temporary, a momentary pause that allowed it to gather its forces. As the Islamic Republic was formally declared in April 1979, it soon showed that it had no intention of allowing women to wear what they liked. (Location 286)

In 1983, the Iranian parliament, dominated by pro-Khomeini MPs, passed an Islamic penal code that brought about some of the strictest interpretation of Islamic rule in the modern era. (Location 307)

Within a matter of years, all non-Khomeinist forces, whether Islamist or secular, whether left-wing or right-wing, were suppressed. Tens of thousands of their supporters were executed in the dark decade of the 1980s. (Location 313)

Saddam Hussein invaded Iran in September 1980 and an eight-year war ensued. At home, the repression only increased. (Location 316)

someone who tells you what to wear will soon also tell you what to think. (Location 322)

Over the years new generations of Iranian feminists came to agitate and organise for a variety of rights. Many considered the compulsory Hijab to be a lost cause and they focused on other terrains of struggle. (Location 339)

She thought of many moments like this; little moments of courage when women dared to do something small that could cost them big time: a ride or a walk without the perennial scarf, a secret kiss in the corner of a park. She called this a moment of Azaadi-haaye Yavashaki (Location 357)

The Facebook page Masih had built soon received thousands of pictures and videos sent by women who wanted to flaunt their disregard for the rules of the Islamic Republic. Some blurred their faces but many didn’t, displaying awe-inspiring courage. (Location 361)

In 2017, she launched the White Wednesdays campaign, asking women to wear white scarves on Wednesdays as a protest against the regime. Once more, thousands answered her call. (Location 376)

They became known as the Girls of Enqelab Avenue. By their act of protest, Vida and her comrades were reclaiming not just the street but the revolution. (Location 384)

these simple acts of female resistance amounted to what sociologist Assef Bayat had long ago termed ‘Life as Politics’. (Location 406)

in Iran, celebrating International Women’s Day remains a revolutionary act – and an illegal one. (Location 423)

Bahá’í faith, Iran’s largest non-Muslim minority and one of its most oppressed communities. (Location 435)

Iranian-American film The Stoning of Soraya M., (Location 441)

‘The most important characteristic of the recent protests is their crushing of corrupt structures of customs and traditions whose destructive mark has long been left on our bodies and minds,’ she said. (Location 444)

Fariba had been barred from university education as she belonged to a religion not officially recognised by the regime. Yet she had studied in the clandestine Bahá’í Institute for Higher Education (BIHE), founded in 1989. This institute’s classes took place in believers’ living rooms to avoid detection. (Location 451)

‘People have come to believe that their survival is in contradiction with the survival of the regime,’ Bahare said. ‘The movement for Women, Life, Freedom has now given us positive slogans. Previously, we had negative slogans against the regime but we didn’t have a slogan that could have general acceptance. Now we have hopeful slogans. This movement is not divided. (Location 473)

While women’s magazines and publishing houses acted like virtual organisers for feminists, women-owned bookstores became physical spaces that emerged as a new public square. (Location 517)

the most significant campaign of feminists pursuing their aims in civil society in conjunction with the Khatami administration came around a shared demand: for Iran to accede to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). (Location 564)

the Expediency Council, a body (also entirely appointed by the Supreme Leader) that was meant to conciliate between the parliament and the Guardian Council. (Location 580)

in autumn 2003, another important milestone came for the struggle of Iranian women. Shirin Ebadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. ‘For her efforts for democracy and human rights… especially the struggle for rights of women and children.’ (Location 611)

in the afternoon of 8 March 2004, as women started to gather for the historic event, they were told by the security forces that the interior ministry had annulled the permit at 11 a.m. that very morning. The Khatami administration had stabbed the movement in the back. (Location 625)

Soon, there would be at least five hundred women who encircled the police forces. Many women had come with their husbands and small children. Police had tried to isolate the women but now they themselves were under siege. (Location 631)

They sang ‘Oh Iran’, an unofficial national anthem steeped in Iranian patriotism and which provides an alternative to the regime’s dour official anthem. They sang ‘My Schoolmate’, a revolutionary song that promised solidarity against tyranny. (Location 635)

If the Khatami administration had been non-cooperative, the new administration was positively hostile to women’s rights and other civil society campaigns. (Location 670)

Gathering petition signatures had long been a staple of activist practice but what distinguished this campaign was its vast grassroots and participatory model. Feminist activists went all over the country to hold meetings that would educate interested volunteers on discriminatory provisions in Iranian law. Activists and volunteers would then be dispatched to the public, especially women, to explain their rights to them and agitate for change. (Location 685)

Founded in 1967 with help from the Soviet Union, the Isfahan Steel Company remains one of Iran’s largest and most distinguished industrial corporations. (Location 725)

none other than the oil workers had administered the coup de grace on the Shah’s regime in 1979. (Location 731)

On the coast of the Persian Gulf, Mahshahr oil workers were joined by other contract workers in the industry participating in the three-day strike. (Location 767)

No one was surprised that the strike had some of its strongest turnouts in Kurdistan. Kurds are more politically organised and more to the left than most other Iranians; the decade after the 1979 revolution was marked by armed struggle by far left groups in Iranian Kurdistan. (Location 769)

In the big cities like Tehran, even some upmarket pizzerias and shoe stores showed solidarity in their own way: they remained nominally open but silently asked customers to not buy anything. (Location 775)

The last day of the strike, 7 December, coincided with the Students Day, commemorating the three left-wing students who were killed by the army in 1953 when they came out to protest an impending visit to Tehran by then Vice President Richard Nixon. (Location 782)

As the regime’s various factions – reformists, centrists and conservatives – had fought ferociously for years, none of them had given much support to trade unions or prioritised their campaigns. (Location 794)

Many of those who advocated socially or politically liberal policies fiercely opposed trade union struggles against privatisations, ‘rationalisations’ and other ‘structural adjustments’, i.e. the neoliberal playbook. (Location 796)

The lack of a powerful nationwide trade union movement, combined with affluent progressives’ incomprehension, relegated trade unions to the margins of popular political consciousness and prevented further growth. (Location 802)

independent trade unions lagged behind and lacked advocates among the reformists within the regime. These reformists controlled the state-controlled unions (called the House of Labour) and had no intention of tolerating a challenge from rank-and-file workers in the industrial sphere. (Location 822)

The Bus Workers Union benefitted from the charisma of its leader, Mansoor Osanloo, who had worked as a bus driver since 1984. He came from a trade unionist family: (Location 838)

The classes weren’t simply educational, they were a foundation for future organising. (Location 853)

If middle-class activists liked to quote Gandhi, Osanloo invoked the long traditions of Islamic socialism by quoting Ali, the first Shia Imam. ‘It is Ali who said that when poverty enters the house, faith leaves! We don’t need to be poor. Our country is rich, let’s unite and fight for our rights.’ (Location 864)

Teachers in five major provinces came together to form a new Coordinating Council and organised a demonstration of more than 6,000 teachers outside parliament in early 2007. (Location 895)

The new union movement also produced a vibrant cultural renaissance. Events hosted by the metalworkers’ union screened left-wing films appealing to ordinary workers. Favourites included Stanley Kubrick’s 1960 epic Spartacus with its themes of slave revolt and charismatic leadership; (Location 907)

for-profit health care – long the norm in the US but also increasingly promoted in Iran. (Location 910)

In 1999, the finance ministry shocked the workers by annulling its purchase contract. Iran now relied on cheap imported sugar. Later, it turned out that this move had benefitted politically connected businessmen (Location 937)

Iranians had voted in droves for Rouhani, chiefly for his promise of reaching a diplomatic reconciliation with the United States that could help ease the sanctions on Iran. When that deal was reached in 2015, following months of intense negotiations in Muscat, Geneva, Lausanne and Vienna, the Iranian economy had a shot at doing better. But hopes were dashed a year later, when Donald Trump was elected president (Location 971)

In one of this better-known speeches from November 2018, Bakhshi broke into tears as he said: ‘Four workers set themselves of fire. For the want of 12 million rials. Damn this life’. (Location 980)

‘Here, right here, we the workers ourselves decide our own fate and our own demands. We issue our commands from below. We’ve had enough of being struck on the head from the above.’ (Location 985)

Soon after the TV documentary aired, a video emerged of Qolian, recorded in between two rounds of her arrests, in which she described all the torture she had gone through. 29 She also revealed that she and Bakhshi had been forced to record confessions. (Location 996)

In the Name of the God of Rainbows. If the regime’s God was a murderous tyrant, a revolution was now fighting it in the name of the colours of the rainbow. (Location 1009)

Sitting on a small plastic bench, Bakhshi spoke sternly: ‘We have painted our face red with Kian’s blood, promising that we won’t ever forget. Whenever we look into the mirror, we must know our duty. We must know what we are fighting for and we must not forget all the blood that was shed.’ (Location 1013)

Iran was at first afraid of this male cheetah, a few years her senior. But trainers taught Firouz how to be more gentle. At long last they successfully mated and Iran became pregnant. (Location 1041)

they were hunted close to extinction and hardly any remain, being found only in central Iran. Iranians have hence adopted them as Persian cheetahs and made them their national symbol (Location 1051)

The Persian onager has a deep place in Iranian mythology, literature and history. (Location 1058)

Hulagu conquered much of the Middle East and sacked its cultural capital, Baghdad, in 1258, single-handedly putting an end to the Islamic Golden Age. But he died in Iranian lands and was allegedly buried on Lake Urmia’s Shahi Island, although his tomb has never been found. (Location 1065)

On 28 September, when little-known singer Shervin Hajipour released a power ballad that went on to become the anthem of the Women, Life, Freedom movement, nobody was surprised that many of its lines related to the environment. Crowd-sourced from the tweets of Iranians, the song was called ‘For the Sake Of ’ (Location 1071)

a professional hunter who experienced a Damascene conversion on a trip to Africa in 1967. Eskandar arrived to hunt lions and elephants but suddenly found himself disgusted with the idea and started taking their pictures instead. He then helped turn Iran’s Hunting Club (a favourite of the Shah) into the country’s environmental organisation, the EPO. (Location 1080)

Ecological activism has a curious relationship to politics. Its targets can often be key economic and security interests, yet it portrays itself as benign and non-partisan. (Location 1091)

Green Front was hit badly in 2000 when a founding figure went to New York for a conference and decided to stay put in the United States. (Location 1104)

Tehranis love to head north to the Caspian for long weekends and summer vacations but the 140-kilometre road between Tehran and Chalus can take three hours or more in busy periods. The motorway is supposed to cut this trip into half. But activists have long warned that the road could destroy protected areas and endanger species such as grey pelicans and the Caspian seals. (Location 1133)

environmental issues now play a prominent part in Iran’s political consciousness. (Location 1147)

launched in 2012, the Arbaeen Without Footprints campaign encouraged pilgrims to reduce their use of Styrofoam and single-use utensils by carrying their own. (Location 1157)

We should tell everybody that Lake Urmia is in the United States,’ he said. ‘Because if it were there, Iran’s state TV would dedicate a couple of primetime programmes to it every week. It would make dozens of documentaries about what a great catastrophe the lake drying out is. (Location 1191)

Madani had never cut ties with Iran. Both of his parents had worked in the water sector and he had become a well-known authority on water, addressing the country’s dire crisis, or to use his own term, ‘water bankruptcy’. He lectured in Iran and gave a celebrated TEDx Talk recorded on Kish Island in 2015. (Location 1206)

If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it was. Early in 2018, the IRGC launched a new round of crackdown that targeted a set of internationally connected environmentalists. (Location 1220)

On 11 February, less than eight months into his new job, Madani was arrested. Able to leave prison shortly later, he quickly left Iran and resigned in absentia. (Location 1222)

Many of the arrested were connected to the Persian Wildlife Heritage Foundation (PWHF), a conservationist organisation focused on the Persian cheetah. The organisation had used its international ties and professional work ethics to achieve a lot in a short period: (Location 1226)

In September 2023, Tahbaz was released alongside four of his fellow Americans as part of a deal between Iran and the United States that involved releasing six billion dollars of blocked Iranian assets in South Korea. Niloofar and other environmentalists remain behind bars at the time of writing. The episode makes evidently clear that the regime practises an open policy of taking foreign citizens hostage and using them as bargaining chips in its dealings with the West. (Location 1256)

In July 2022, a petition signed by three thousand academics, activists and lawyers, the leading lights of the environmental movement in Iran, demanded their release. (Location 1274)

on 20 November 2022, everyone’s eyes were on Aybek. The Islamic Republic’s security forces stormed the district, on a manhunt for Katayoun Riahi, a sixty-year-old actress who had been on the run for months. Her crime was her open support for the Women, Life, Freedom movement. (Location 1287)

Afraid of her courage inspiring others, the regime forces ransacked Riahi’s home and took away her belongings. But tipped off in advance, she was able to flee to a village in Qazvin. (Location 1309)

When Donald Trump initiated his Muslim ban in 2017, Taraneh denounced his racism and refused to attend the Oscars, (Location 1325)

Two of the signatories, directors Mohammad Rasoulof and Mostafa Ale Ahmad, were thrown in jail. When veteran director Jafar Panahi went to Tehran’s Evin prison to inquire about them, they arrested him too. Panahi had been banned from filmmaking for years and had kept skirting the ban by making films clandestinely and sending them to festivals, where he continued to gather awards. Now he was put behind bars (Location 1332)

Taraneh was their friend and colleague, not simply a famous name. Many knew that she suffered from severe claustrophobia to the point that she avoided buses. (Location 1344)

Taraneh’s arrest effectively gave rise to a protest camp on the hills of Evin. (Location 1350)

The octogenarian director Bahman Farmanra was visible with his signature brimmed hat covering his bald head. Renowned for spending much of the past few decades in Canadian exile, he was now on the frontline at Evin. (Location 1351)

the coup of August 1953, when the Iranian military, colluding with the CIA, MI6 and street toughs they had mobilised, brought down prime minister Mohammad Mossadegh. (Location 1361)

‘Wasn’t it you who always said that we are passing through a strange phase of history,’ Shahrzad says. ‘This door will open. This night will end and the sun will rise again. Be patient.’ (Location 1363)

In the 2023 World Press Freedom Index of Reporters Without Borders Iran came fourth from last, surpassed only by Vietnam, China and North Korea. (Location 1368)

The compulsory Hijab rule applies to cinema, theatre and TV too. As a result, no woman can ever be portrayed on screen without fully covering her hair, her arms and her legs. Forget kissing or intimate scenes. (Location 1371)

when the Canadian direct-to-video children’s film Against the Wild was shown on Iranian TV, the censors cut the dogs from it in toto – despite a dog being the third main character. Dogs had recently been prohibited as pets in Iran. (Location 1395)

Persian-language poets beloved by millions couldn’t be mentioned on TV if they were known to be critical of the regime – ruling out most of them. (Location 1398)

Iranian directors popular around the world were often unable to show any of their work in the country. (Location 1399)

La Gale (1986), (Location 1400)

Det Means Girl (1994), (Location 1402)

Ever since its inception, the Islamic Republic was committed to purging the intelligentsia. (Location 1409)

Right up to the end of his life in 1989, Khomeini always thought he should have gone further as the predominance of non-Islamists among intellectuals was still evident. Upon his death, some of his most feverish devotees tried to continue his crusade with more extreme methods. Banning (Location 1418)

Between 1990 and 1998, dozens of Iranian intellectuals, most of them AIW members, were mysteriously murdered. (Location 1425)

Following the election of reformist Khatami to presidency in 1997, the pace of killings quickened. It was later revealed that elements inside the regime establishment and its Ministry of Intelligence had masterminded the attacks and had wanted to use them to undermine Khatami. (Location 1433)

In 2008, AIW declared 4 December, a date that fell between the murders of Mokhtari and Pooyandeh, as the Day of Combatting Censorship. (Location 1447)

documentary about Loris Tjeknavorian, the noted Iranian-Armenian composer, (Location 1466)

On 23 September, the AIW issued a thundering call, asking all writers and artists to ‘reject the conventional seeking of safe harbours and openly support the freedom movement of the people’. (Location 1492)

Zola’s name now stood for a belief that a writer’s pen should indict the perpetrators of injustice. (Location 1514)

While more than 90% of Iranians are Shia Muslims, from 8– 10% belong to the Sunni branch of Islam. The remaining 1– 2% are Bahá’ís, Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews and believers in other faiths, although these demographic statistics only record religion at birth, not belief itself. (Location 1534)

Many Iranian young people are atheistic or agnostic but this would never be officially declared as the Islamic Republic could subject them to the death penalty. (Location 1536)

Special security units had already been installed inside the police station and unmarked snipers perched on the roofs of nearby buildings. Suddenly they started shooting at protesters from all directions, as video coverage documents. They didn’t stop at just dispersing the demonstration. Plainclothes and uniformed officers descended onto the shops and malls where protesters sought refuge. Dozens more were shot within an hour. (Location 1562)

The regime had long hoped to rely on religious and ethnic differences amongst Iranians to divide them. (Location 1584)

Born in a small village in Balochistan in 1947, Abdulhamid had pursed religious education in the neighbouring Sunni-majority Pakistan. (Location 1604)

Abdulhamid was one of the very few officials who had been at the helm for longer than Khamenei himself. Throughout the years, he had perfected a balancing act in which he pushed for rights and liberties for the Iranian Baloch and other Sunni communities while also asserting his support for Shia– Sunni friendship and Iran’s territorial integrity. (Location 1619)

As the Iranian regime warmed to the Taliban returning to power in next-door Afghanistan, Abdulhamid’s praise for the group, aligning him with the Tehran hardliners, enraged more liberal and secular Iranians. The DHRC took back its award in 2021 in protest. (Location 1638)

With a simple statement, Abdulhamid had broken a longstanding taboo. Reform-minded religious leaders never dared to broach the question of Bahá’í rights – a minority so persecuted its members could not even attend university. (Location 1662)

Many of the faith’s tenets threatened the Shia religious establishment. Opposed to an entrenched clerical class, Bahá’ís were instead guided by local and national ‘spiritual assemblies’ elected by the faithful via secret ballots. They advocated gender equality and opposed forced veiling for women. They insisted on unity of all people (or ‘oneness of humanity’ as Bahá’ís like to call it) and had a sympathetic attitude to traditions and holy books of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism and other faiths. (Location 1677)

Anti-Bahá’í ideas also relied on concocted stories similar to Judeo-Masonic conspiracies that had energised European fascism a few short decades ago. (Location 1690)

an act of courtesy, familiar to Iranians who liked to pay calls to each other in times of trouble. (Location 1736)

Practising a millennia-old religion that had been the faith of a majority of Iranians prior to the advent of Islam, the small Zoroastrian community now faces many restrictions in its home country. (Location 1762)

Iranian Jews, whose roots in the country goes back to more than two thousand years, constitute the biggest Jewish population in the Middle East outside Israel. But their population has dwindled to around ten thousand, which is less than one-tenth of its size in 1979. (Location 1766)

Khamenei remains the only head of state in the world to actively and repeatedly deny the murder of six million Jews by Nazi Germany. (Location 1769)

Alongside Iran and Tajikistan, Afghanistan is one of the only three countries in the world whose official language is Persian, (Location 1782)

As the Taliban’s insurgency retook much of the country in the 2010s, Tehran started cutting deals with the Islamist group, as did the US during Donald Trump’s administration. (Location 1801)

Alongside the suffocating laws imposed by the Islamic Republic upon everyone, refugees remain subject to a host of targeted restrictions on their places of residence and work. (Location 1829)

in a tale now depressingly familiar and mirrored in countries like Turkey, Syria and Lebanon, even second and third-generation migrants are regarded as ‘refugees’ with almost no path to citizenship or even long-term residency permits. (Location 1835)

The regime had recruited thousands of Afghan refugees, especially those from a Shia background, to serve as foot soldiers in the Syrian Civil War. Letting younger children go to school was intended as a token gesture of goodwill, after they dispatched the older children for slaughter. (Location 1841)

Even for those with papers, things could change overnight. For years, Afghans have reported being randomly taken off a bus, their ID cards confiscated and consequently becoming subject to deportation. (Location 1843)

Afghan men were often forced to take menial jobs while Afghan women were seen as ripe targets for sexual exploitation. (Location 1852)

Reza was told by Bank Melli that his account had been blocked as a measure against all Afghans with temporary residency cards. (Location 1862)

A Shia minority in Sunni-majority Afghanistan, Hazaras have a long history of being persecuted by Kabul. The Taliban regime brought its own brutal forms of persecution, driving many to flee to Shia-majority Iran. Yet instead of finding religious fraternity, they faced abuse and exclusion. (Location 1881)

Setareh had fled from the Taliban, only to be killed by its ideological kin in Iran. Her name means ‘star’ in Persian and many used Persian poetic traditions to remember her as a bright star now snuffed out by the regime. (Location 1904)

Fereshteh Hosseini, an Afghan-Iranian actress and the spouse of the legendary actor Navid Mohammadzade, paid a stirring tribute. (Location 1909)

An anthropologist and a documentary filmmaker, the thirty-one-year-old Salarvand had dedicated her young career to exposing the grim conditions of Afghan children working in Iran. For years, alongside her comrade-cum-husband Aydin Halalzadeh, she had taught these children in a garbage dump outside Tehran as a volunteer. Conducting participant observation and ethnography in the same landfill, (Location 1928)

a riveting book, As If I Had Become Mute (Location 1932)

in the ancient traditions, Nowruz is a time bereft when one has lost a beloved in the preceding year. (Location 1936)

A popular Nowruz tradition is setting up a table called Haft Sin, consisting of seven items that start with the letter Sin (which sounds like S) in Persian. (Location 1938)

Afghans were thrown out and explicitly told to stay away during the four-day holiday period between 21 and 24 March. (Location 1950)

As Afghans join the ongoing movement, it’s becoming clearer by the day: Women, Life, Freedom needs to be Women, Life, Freedom for all. Only then can Iran win a better future. (Location 1976)

in August 2023, the film’s director Sayeed Rostaee was sentenced to six months in prison. He was convicted of having shown Leila’s Brothers in Cannes without an official permission. (Location 1979)

But in Iran, retirees are regularly on the streets, protesting against skyrocketing inflation eroding their standard of living. (Location 1983)

Iranians linked their ongoing impoverishment to the astronomical cost of Iran’s military intervention in Syria, which came in at the hefty sum of up to thirty billion dollars, while making Iran even more of a pariah in the international community. More than two thousand Iranian soldiers had been killed on the Syrian battlefield, defending the authoritarian regime of President Bashar al-Assad. (Location 1989)

Western observers overlooked how much shrewd geopolitics, not religious conviction, motivated Iran’s leaders over the decades. But more significantly, few in the West grasped just how disillusioned Iranians were with a government indulging in military adventures abroad while they starved. (Location 1996)

Like previous elections under the regime, the 2009 polls were anything but free and fair. (Location 2002)

To circumvent the ban on street protests, the Green Movement adopted a Trojan horse tactic. Mousavi and his supporters would show up to annual mass rallies organised by the regime to commemorate historical milestones and chant their own slogans. (Location 2007)

threats couldn’t subdue a movement that had already mourned many martyrs. (Location 2029)

How could the regime claim to stand for the oppressed in Palestine while it was oppressing its own people in Iran? (Location 2039)

In a direct attack on Iran’s support for Hezbollah and Hamas, protesters called out: ‘Neither Gaza, nor Lebanon, I give my life for Iran.’ (Location 2041)

Seeing the fall of Arab leaders such as Mubarak and Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi gave heart to Iranians who felt united with the Arab world in their fight for freedom and dignity. (Location 2064)

The Spring was followed by a long and harsh winter lasting to this day. (Location 2070)

Qassem Soleimani, chief of IRGC’s external operations, became a regular in Damascus as he coordinated the dispatching of tens of thousands of Iranian, Afghan, Pakistani, Iraqi and Lebanese forces to Syria. (Location 2085)

In 2019, protesters in Iraq and Lebanon revolted against the influence of Soleimani and the regime in Tehran. (Location 2099)

Birth of Israel: History of Four Thousand Years of Judaism, (Location 2156)

during the 2014 Maidan revolution, he had written an open letter to Kyiv’s ambassador to Tehran, to apologise for the pro-Kremlin voices aired on the state media. (Location 2171)

On 26 February 2022, a number of Iranians gathered in front of the Ukrainian embassy in Tehran, holding up handmade blue-and-yellow flags of the country to protest. They chanted: ‘Down with Putin’, ‘Love, live, peace’ and, most bitingly, ‘the Russian embassy is a den of espionage’, using a common slur directed against the US embassy when it was occupied by protesters in 1979. (Location 2193)

The foreign policy consensus in Iran has shifted. Now Iranians demand an Iranian foreign policy that builds a country at peace with itself and with the world. (Location 2209)

‘Over 500 people died in the 2022 Iran protests’ is a shocking, true headline. But it is an alienating one – compressing many individuals into one sensational number. No one came out on the streets to die; no one dreamt of heroic martyrdom. All they wanted was a country where they could live freely. (Location 2213)

her parents, like millions of Iranians, had moved in search of a better life to Karaj, the giant feeder town to the west of Tehran. (Location 2222)

It intimidated families and warned them of severe reprisals if they dared to tell the media the truth about their loved ones. Only the bravest overcame such fears. (Location 2229)

The most basic facts about past and present of women who live in Muslim-majority countries have long been subject to political manipulation, borrowed as tropes to score this or that point in Washington DC or in the ivory towers of Western universities. (Location 2271)

Sarina’s criticism is not limited to the policy of the regime. She goes to the heart of patriarchal social structures in the country (Location 2335)

Sarina, at sixteen years old, knew her generation couldn’t expect more than patriarchal rule, political suppression and a bitter struggle just to make ends meet. In other words, she wanted Women, Life, Freedom. (Location 2349)

Sarina’s voice couldn’t be stifled by her death, no matter how hard the regime tried. Her thoughts and ideas, on Telegram and on YouTube, revealed her hope for a better country, for a free Iran. Her voice cut through all the noise and was heard by Iranians across the world. (Location 2375)

The 2022 revolution for a ‘normal life’ aimed for the exact opposite. These revolutionaries didn’t want to remake Iran in their own image; they wanted an Iranian government made in the image of Iranian people in their everyday joys and long-term aspirations. (Location 2388)

Iran’s new revolutionaries resemble a return to the older tradition of the Iranian quest for democracy and civil rights, embodied in the Persian Constitutional Revolution of 1906. (Location 2391)

It’s likely she never heard an old Irish socialist song, penned by the revolutionary James Connolly, which declares proudly ‘Our demands most moderate are, we only want the earth.’ But its spirit beat in her, as it beats in all those fighting for a decent life for all. (Location 2395)

the Islamic Republic is suffering from dual crises of legitimacy and competency. (Location 2409)

Iran today is an unabashedly oligarchic capitalist state with obscene inequality and a small super-rich class, often consisting of regime-linked families, (Location 2414)

Many of the revolutionary generation now openly lament that they had made the 1979 revolution to bring about political and civic freedoms and ended up under a more repressive regime, robbed even of their earlier social freedoms. (Location 2416)

Those who aimed to overcome the crisis of legitimacy by making the Islamic Republic more democratic and representative formed the reformist faction of official politics. Those who preferred authoritarian rule that could oversee economic growth and competent state functions formed the technocratic faction. (Location 2421)

Constantly looking to strengthen his personal hold on power, he ultimately found the surest base of support in the IRGC, the militia established to help Iran fight the Iraqi invasion during the 1980s but which mushroomed into a powerful political and economic powerhouse afterwards. (Location 2429)

Although the powerful militia now controls most of the Iranian economy and armed forces, it still hasn’t seized the key levers of the state. Whenever IRGC figures have tried to run for the presidency, Khamenei has used his control of various state bodies to block them. (Location 2434)

Locked out of the main electoral contests, there’s no incentive for differing factions within the IRGC to fight among themselves. (Location 2437)

The unique institution of the Supreme Leader, which is reserved by the constitution for clerics, is unlikely to survive in its current form after Khamenei. (Location 2442)

Conscious of the persistent patriotism of Iranians, they are likely to reinvent themselves as Iranian nationalists. A charismatic military figure or group of generals taking charge and granting some of the most popular social demands, while restricting political freedom, is a plausible scenario. Already many high-ranking IRGC figures, including some I have spoken to myself, privately muse about such possibilities. (Location 2454)

They are no longer simply fighting for rights and freedoms that the West takes for granted; they are fighting for a just society that the West seems content to let slip away. (Location 2464)

My mother, Mitra Mansouri, was my first feminist hero and the first activist I came to admire. (Location 2473)

Thanks to Ayse, I’ve also found a new family in the beautiful city of Mersin, Turkey and, across the Mediterranean, in Cyprus. I am grateful to my in-laws and to Ayse’s extended family. (Location 2482)

The first chapter of this book is inspired by Negar’s amazing book, The Whisper Tapes: Kate Millet in Iran. (Location 2487)

I wrote this book not as a disinterested observer but as a passionate supporter of my people’s quest for freedom. (Location 2508)

Negar Mottahedeh, Whisper Tapes: Kate Millet in Iran. Redwood: Stanford University Press, 2019. (Location 2544)

Asef Bayat, Life As Politics: How Ordinary People Can Change the Middle East. Redwood: Stanford University Press, 2013. (Location 2586)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOFPsZZV9-g&t=2s&ab_channel=NasimAmiri (Location 2617)

Their daughter, Parastoo Forouhar, later wrote a book about her parents from her German exile: https://www.parastou-forouhar.de/1868/ (Location 2757)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_tthW9a0haQ (Location 2878)

Arash Azizi, The Shadow Commander: Soleimani, the US, and Iran’s Global Ambitions. London: Oneworld Publications, 2020. (Location 2899)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gpRnvFZ3vTU&t=1s (Location 2976)

Through Soleimani, Arash Azizi examines how Iran came to be where it is today. Providing a rare insight into a country whose actions are often discussed but seldom understood, he reveals the global ambitions underlying Iran’s proxy wars, geopolitics and nuclear programme. (Location 2986)