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Shumita Basu, Narrating: What happens to a country under maximum stress? Just look at America's home front at the dawn of World War II. The fourth season of Slate's podcast "One Year " covers the year 1942, telling stories from the distant past that sound like they've been pulled from the present day.
You'll hear about runaway inflation and the man who was desperate to stop it, about how the country dealt with massive loads of disinformation, and about a worker revolt that changed music forever. Listen to "One Year$% 1942" on Apple Podcasts.
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Basu, Narrating: This is "In Conversation," from Apple News. I'm Shumita Basu. Today, understanding how Iran's history of women-led demonstrations shaped today's protests.
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Maman: [SPEAKS PERSIAN] I miss you so much, because in WhatsApp… [SPEAKS PERSIAN]
Basu, Narrating: This is my maman, my grandmother on my mom's side.
[SPEAKS PERSIAN] I love you, [SPEAKS PERSIAN]. Bye.
Basu, Narrating: Maman is in Iran, I'm sitting here in America. She left me a message to say she's safe but WhatsApp isn't really working reliably at the moment because of all of the protests going on.
Outside Maman's window, and in cities across Iran, we are seeing huge anti-government demonstrations, the biggest since the revolution in '79. It all started in September. A 22-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini was in Tehran when she was arrested by the country's morality police. The government says her crime was improperly wearing her hijab. It's not clear what happened next but she ultimately died while in government custody.
Since then, women have taken to the streets, some burning their headscarves in protest.
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Basu, Narrating: And now, several weeks in, it's become something even bigger, with people of all ages, all genders, all socioeconomic groups coming out to backup these women's demands.
As of this week, Iran Human Rights, which is a Norway-based group, has said at least 215 people, including 27 children, have been killed by security forces. More than a thousand people have been arrested. Still, demonstrators are out there, literally putting their lives on the line.
Pardis Mahdavi: I think they want a revolution. I think they want regime change. People are still saying, "We will not go home. Enough is enough."
Basu, Narrating: That's Pardis Mahdavi. She's the provost and executive vice president of the University of Montana, and a scholar on feminist movements in Iran. Forty-something years ago, just like my mom, her parents fled Iran during the Iranian Revolution, and they settled in the United States.
Mahdavi: My parents thought they were gonna go back. I mean, there was always a suitcase packed, I would say, all through the eighties. And it wasn't until about the mid-1990s when they started to say, You know what, maybe there is no going back.
Basu, Narrating: To understand why families like Pardis' could never go home, and why thousands of people are in the streets of Iran right now, fighting for change, we should start by laying out some history. Because for all the ways Iran gets talked about in the West, it's a country that most Americans misunderstand. Let's start in 1953, a time when many Iranians believed the country was on a path to becoming more prosperous and more independent.
Mahdavi: Up until 1953, Iran had had a very long history of monarchical rule, right? There had often been, you know, kings, there was the Qajar dynasty and then that was replaced by the Pahlavi Dynasty. Right around the 1950s, the early 1950s, there was a movement afoot to bring back Iran for Iranians. There was this fear that the Shah was becoming overly influenced by the West, and in particular this related to the politics of oil. And so we saw the emergence of a democratically elected leader, Prime Minister Mosaddegh, and he ran on a platform of nationalizing oil for Iranians, and he was an absolutely beloved leader. And I think you're right to start in 1953 because one of the things we hear about the protests today is people calling for a return to that 1953-esque era. So, in 1953, as Prime Minister Mosaddegh was working to nationalize oil, there was a CIA-backed coup. The Americans, their main interest was in oil, and they felt that Mosaddegh was not going to be as [LAUGHS] friendly a leader for getting the kinds of oil deals that they were interested in. And so they reinstalled the Pahlavi monarchy, after the coup.
Basu: Yeah. So, let's jump ahead to 1979. A lot has changed over this time, except for the Shah still being in power, right, and his relationship with the U.S. becoming a point of strain to a lot of Iranians. Take us to, like, what life was like just before '79, and certainly what changed after '79, especially for women.
Mahdavi: Leading up to '79, you had exactly what we're saying, this sort of love affair of the Shah with the West, which some scholars have called Westoxication. And you saw that in the way in which people walked the streets of Iran wearing Western fashion, right? I mean, one of the things that people often talk about is that, you know, women walked the streets of Tehran with miniskirts, that the haute couture-- You know, Yves Saint Laurent talks about how women in Tehran were the first to wear Yves Saint Laurent designs after the runways of Paris. So it was Paris and then Beirut and Tehran, and then New York, right?
Basu: Oh, yeah, definitely. I mean, I've seen some pretty stylish pictures of my grandmother and all of her sisters at that time, definitely taking after, you know, the like Sophia Lorens and certainly looking to Italy for a lot of style and influence.
Mahdavi: Exactly. I think that we can understand a lot about Iran just through observing the fashion trends between 1970 and today. And that really was fertile soil for the Islamist regime led by at-the-time-exiled leader Khomeini to come in and say, You know what, this is not Iran for Iranians, right? This is a Westoxicated monarchical ruler who is trying to turn Iran into the West, and we want to bring back Iran for Iranians. So, some of that language certainly resonated with the Iranian people. The parts of it that folks weren't ready for was that a return to Iran for Iranians also brought with it a measure of austerity, and bringing Iran back into a somewhat dark past where the miniskirts and the hairstyles were replaced by a dark black cloak, a chador, covering from head to toe. Morality was the fabric under which the Islamist regime both came to power and operationalized their power. In 1979, you saw the creation of not only the Revolutionary Guard, but also an arm of the police called the morality police, or [SPEAKS PERSIAN], translating literally to guidance patrol. And this group was charged with upholding right and forbidding wrong. And so life changed dramatically for Iranians under the Islamic Republic in 1979, which of course led to a pretty large exodus. A lot of people left when our parents did.
Basu: Yeah. Yeah.
Mahdavi: And there was a major brain drain. For those that remained behind, Iran suddenly became almost unrecognizable. When I talked to my family, and I grew up speaking, you know, every Friday to aunts and uncles and family back in Iran, and they would narrate their shock and dismay at how the country had changed in ways that they could not have anticipated.
Basu: Explain if you can, when we talk about the morality measures that are put into place, who was determining the morality calls? Who was determining these-- the right and wrong here?
Mahdavi: You know, that's an excellent question because it left a lot of room open for interpretation, right, this idea of upholding right and forbidding wrong. You know, certainly Khomeini was dictating quite a lot of that, right? And today you have this supreme leader, Khamenei, who's sort of responsible for carrying forward that message of morality. But one of the very famous quotes of Khomeini's that was painted on billboards and on buildings throughout to Tehran was "The Islamic Republic of Iran is not about fun." There's no fun to be had in the Islamic Republic. The morality police, they walked the streets to ensure that women were properly attired, meaning that they had the chador on from head to toe, no strands of hair peeking out, no makeup or eye-catching jewelry.
Basu: [LAUGHS] Totally. I mean, I have memories of being in-- I used to go to Iran a lot of summers as a child, and I was probably twelve or 13 the first time the morality police stopped me and said "You have to go home and change. Your pants are not long enough." They were just above my ankles. Not long enough.
Mahdavi: Yeah!
Mahdavi: Yeah. Exactly, right. And to an extent, men were also patrolled. Men were also not to be found with eye-catching hairstyles or jewelry, or attire that might be read as overly western. For instance, a necktie, a [SPEAKS PERSIAN], was seen as a gesture to the West, right? And so the morality police would go around, you know, cutting off males’ neck ties, right?
Basu: Oh, wow, I didn't know that. That's interesting.
Mahdavi: Yeah! And then women who were found with, you know, a head scarf slipping back, painted nails, red lipstick, they would be taken in and sometimes would face public flogging, sometimes would be arrested and held overnight and fined. The morality police also walked the streets to maintain a moral order when it came to heterosexualization, right, so making sure that you didn't have couples holding hands, right, walking in the parks. Of course, alcohol was deemed illegal, so you also had the morality police raiding parties, looking for people drinking alcohol, dancing, you know, wearing improper attire. All of these were punishable by flogging and or arrest, and in some instances, some of the people that I interviewed during my research talked about being arrested at a party, and the women talked about being subjected to virginity testing while they were being held, which was incredibly painful.
Basu: Oh, my God.
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Basu, Narrating: Despite the eyes of the government watching them, many women fought back. For older women who knew what Iran was like before the Revolution of 1979, they wanted their old lives back, and with it the freedom to wear what they pleased. For younger girls and women, also known as the "children of the revolution," many didn't buy into the rhetoric the Islamic Republic was selling. To them, the West wasn't the enemy, the Islamic Republic was.
Now, it might be helpful here to explain how Iran's power structure works. Iran is an Islamic theocracy, which means that just one man, the supreme leader, has ideological and political control. He's both the head of state and the commander-in-chief. Under him are clerics who run the various agencies of the state, and then there's also a president who is elected by the people, but Human Rights Watch regularly reports that elections in Iran are neither free nor fair. But still, the president can set the tone. For example, the current president, Ebrahim Raisi, ordered a crackdown on violations of religious dress code just a few weeks before Mahsa Amini died in police custody.
Pardis is what she refers to as one of those children of the revolution. And when she became an adult, she became more curious, more interested in all the different forms of feminism that were emerging in her home country. So, in 1999, she made a trip to Iran to study it.
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Mahdavi: I initially went to Iran to cover the Iranian women's movements. You know, what hit me hardest when I arrived in Tehran was not just the Iranian feminisms that were taking place, but what struck me was, first of all, a large number of the population of Iran was around my age, right? You had 70% of the population born between 1978 and 1990. You had this very large youth population who were highly educated, and 60% of university graduates were women. You had one of the highest literacy rates in the region. And you had young people who were very critical of the regime, and they were engaging in what they called [SPEAKS PERSIAN], or sexual revolution. And I became fascinated by this notion of a sexual revolution taking place under an Islamic republic. And what I sort of was pulled into was this world of highly-educated young people comporting their resistance, using their bodies to speak back to a regime with which they did not agree, using their sexualities, using their outerwear, to gradually chip away at the legitimacy and the fabric of morality woven by the regime.
Basu: So, what did that look like, them challenging the morality being forced onto them by the government?
Mahdavi: So, you suddenly saw women on the streets wearing not necessarily a black head scarf but different colors, and the head scarf was slipping back, you know, one millimeter at a time. That's why it earned the nickname the "Millimeter Revolution." 2004 was called the "Summer of the Cockroaches." So, prior to 2004, if a woman was seen wearing red nail polish or any colored nail polish, the morality police would arrest them and dip their hands in buckets of cockroaches, and if--
Basu: What?
Mahdavi: [LAUGHS] Yeah, I know. Right, I mean-- I know!
Basu: Oh, my goodness.
Mahdavi: I know. And if a woman was seen in public wearing open-toed shoes and, you know, painted toenails, they would dump the cockroaches on-- on their feet. Now--
Basu: That was a cockroach-able offense.
Mahdavi: [LAUGHS] A cockroach-able offense, exactly. Now, interestingly, a lot of the young women got together and reasoned correctly that if thousands of women were to all go out en masse with painted nails and toenails, there aren't enough cockroaches in all of Iran to punish everybody.
Basu: [LAUGHS] Right.
Mahdavi: And so, you know, in July, that summer of 2004, everybody organized and went outside with [LAUGHS] open-toed shoes, red or various colored nail and toe polish, and they were right, there weren't enough cockroaches to punish everybody. And, you know, while you and I might laugh about that and think about that as somewhat flippant, it's a very significant challenge to the regime, right? This is a regime who operates their power in this way. And so to break through-- And since 2004, by the way, women have been wearing open-toed shoes, you know? To be able to break through and have these incremental changes, that's pretty significant.
A few years later, Pardis had her own serious run-in with the morality police. This was in 2007, she was working on turning her dissertation about Iran's sexual revolution into a book, and she decided to present it first in Iran.
Mahdavi: You know, I was invited to give a lecture, I was on stage at a university in Tehran, and looking out at the audience, definitely a lot of butterflies in my stomach. And I got up there to start presenting my work, and exactly 13 minutes into my lecture, the auditorium doors banged open, and the morality police… I can never remember if I saw them or smelled them or heard them first, but the next thing I knew, the auditorium had erupted into chaos and pandemonium. People were running, you know, every which way, and I probably should have either been running or shredding my lecture notes or something, but I was just frozen, gripping the podium with both hands and sort of watching in a state of suspended animation until, you know, four of them climbed the four or five stairs to the stage that I had climbed 13 minutes earlier and pulled me off stage, and then everything went black.
Basu: Yeah, I'm sure. Where did they take you?
Mahdavi: Well, I was actually one of the lucky ones, right? I didn't go to Evin Prison, I--
Basu: The notorious prison where a lot of political prisoners are kept, dual citizens are kept… In fact, the one that we just saw up in flames last weekend.
Mahdavi: Yep, Saturday and Sunday, exactly right. And so, yep, Evin is Iran's most notorious prison. That same summer, I had several friends and colleagues who had been arrested and were being held in Evin, and so you can imagine that that was, of course, my first thought. But no, I was one of the lucky ones. I was placed under house arrest and interrogated for 33 days.
Basu, Narrating: Pardis was charged with trying to foment a revolution. She says one of the men with the morality police said to her "You are a ruined woman who is here to ruin our country."
Mahdavi: I, of course, was terrified and thinking, Well, how am I gonna beat this charge? Right? And how am I going to prove that I'm here as a researcher? I was just reading, learning, studying, and writing about the sexual revolution, but of course under that regime that was seen as a crime, right? A punishable offense.
Basu: So how did you manage to get out?
Mahdavi: I was very lucky, I had a lot of support in the United States. I just think I wasn't a big enough fish to fry at the time. I just wasn't enough of a threat, which worked to my advantage. So, after 33 days, I was stripped of my Iranian citizenship, put on a plane and told never to return.
Basu: And you haven't been back, of course.
Mahdavi: I haven't been back since, since 2007.
Basu: So that helps us understand sort of where the Iranian people were, especially young people were, leading up to the protests that happened in 2009. And those were really considered the first major protests that pushed back on the hard-line clerics since they first came to power in 1979. So, tell us what the 2009 demonstrations were about, and what kind of change people were demanding.
Mahdavi: It's interesting, when we look at sexual revolutions around the world, it's often the case that sexual revolutions sort of precede civil rights-type movements, right? We saw that here in this country, in New York and San Francisco and Chicago, sexual revolutions leading to civil rights-type movements. Same in Europe. You know, I ended my book "Passionate Uprisings" by saying this sexual revolution is going to lead to a civil rights-type movement where people are going to be in the streets asking for their freedom. The catalyzing moment for 2009 was what young people were calling the fraudulent reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. And so, when the results of the election were announced, and he was announced as the winner, young people poured into the streets, chanting "Not my president" and "Where is my vote?" They used an interesting subversion of the color green. Everyone was wearing green wristbands or paint, green headbands, or painting their face. Green had been the color of martyrdom. That was the color that the regime used to call its citizens to go to war during the Iran-Iraq War to go and die for the Islamic regime. And that's what earned 2009 the nickname the "Green Movement." This was one of the largest outpouring of demonstrations against the regime since 1979. It was very significant because it was the first time you saw people across generations, across classes, coming into the streets and saying "This regime does not represent me."
Basu: Yeah. So, where did the 2009 protests go? How did we stop hearing about them?
Mahdavi: It's interesting. Because it wasn't as widespread and because it didn't have the support outside of the country, the regime was able to place the leaders of the Green Movement under house arrest and take some to Evin prison, and really flex their muscles by using some of the same tactics we're seeing now, tear gas and pretty violent clashes in the streets, and that's kind of how it started to fizzle. But it did lay really important groundwork, and in particular, I would say it was ignited for then that next generation, I call those the "children of resistance." They were born into resistance, they were born into an Iran where people were fighting back. Those are the same schoolgirls that we're seeing today chanting against the regime, tearing out pages of their textbooks and publicly ripping up pictures of Ayatollah Khomeini and Khamenei. Those are the same folks. They were born into that time right around the Green Movement, right, and the subsequent protests. And so each subsequent protest after 2009, it grew larger, it grew more diverse in terms of class, in terms of level of religiosity, and in terms of age, which set the groundwork for what we're seeing today.
Basu: Yeah, let's talk about today, because some of these videos are just pretty incredible to watch. I mean, you alluded to this, but in some of them you see really young girls, young girls in schools who are [LAUGHS] flipping off a picture of the Ayatollah that this poster in the classrooms, right? I mean, this is really newly brazen behavior, right? We're seeing images on social media of women walking around in Tehran not wearing a head scarf. Can I just ask you to explain for an American audience what is so jaw-dropping about that?
Mahdavi: You know, I think for 44 years, all the pictures and videos and images we've seen of women in public in Iran have featured them with some form or another of hijab, and of course we've known for 44 years, as the morality police flex their muscles and the regime flexes their power, that being seen in public without a hijab is a seriously punishable offense, right? Having your head scarf slipping back, it could earn you a beating like the one that killed Masa Amini, right? Being seen in public without a head scarf is an absolutely punishable offense, and therefore a courageous act of defiance. And so, for me, you know, born into the revolution, the only pictures I ever saw my whole life-- And all of the time I spent in Iran, I always had to wear, you know, my hijab when I would leave the house. You know, I'd have nightmares of "Oh, my gosh, I left the house without hijab." Like, that was my nightmare, right? It would wake me up in a cold sweat. And so, to see the images that you talked about-- You know, some of the videos people have been sending me are of, you know, women taking off their hijab and burning their hijabs and, you know, kind of dancing around the fire, all over the country, not just in Tehran. Exactly as you mentioned, it's not just Tehran, it's all over the country and even-- Like I said, it's widespread, it's intergenerational, right? You have people my mother's age doing that, people my age doing it, and then people my daughter's age doing that, and that's inspiring.
Basu: I have to say, it's also-- I'm seeing, you know, in a lot of these videos, some women are not wearing their [SPEAKS PERSIAN], their hijab, and they're chanting. Some women are wearing their roo-sari and they're chanting as well, right? It's not so much anti-hijab as it is anti-compulsory-hijab, right?
Mahdavi: That's exactly-- It's about choice. They're saying "We want the choice." It's not about hijab necessarily. And that's why I've been very emphatic that what we're seeing in Iran today is not just about women's rights, it's about human rights, and what they chant is "Women, life, freedom…"
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Mahdavi: That is a very telling slogan. You know, that is what they're calling for, they're calling for human rights. So it's not just about hijab, and I'm really glad that you mentioned that, but rather about freedom.
Basu: You know, I was… scrolling around on social media with my mom the other day and she was noticing all kinds of chants that protestors are saying, and I think she was pretty shocked and taken aback. She hadn't heard a lot of those sentiments said out loud before by Iranian protesters, things like "Death to the tyrant, whether he's the shah or the supreme leader."
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Basu: "Death to the Islamic Republic"… I mean, there are a group of young women chanting "Machine guns and cannons have no effect on me, tell my mother, she doesn't have a daughter anymore."
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Basu: Basically saying "I'm willing to die for this," right? "I'm putting my life on the line." What is your sense of what people in Iran want to happen as a result of these protests?
Mahdavi: I think they want a revolution. I think they want regime change. That's what I'm hearing. You also have people quite adamantly saying, We will not go home, despite the tear gas, despite the brutality. Over the weekend there was a death of another schoolgirl in Ardabil, right, who had faced brutality at the hands of the rev guards. People are still saying, We will not go home, enough is enough, we've had it. This is a regime that doesn't represent us, and it's time. People are saying, We're past the stage of reform and we're now at the stage of revolution. That's what I'm hearing.
Basu: Do you think that they can be successful? Like, what will it take to actually carry out regime change?
Mahdavi: I have hope, and I think a lot of people have hope for the first time. I think the fact that there is so much support outside of Iran is going to be really key. I mean, the fact that you and I are having this conversation-- and hopefully lots of Americans are going to be listening and will lend their voice and their support to the Iranian people. I think that it's gonna take some global pressure, and I think the Iranian people are going to need a lot of our support across borders and oceans if they're gonna fight back from a pretty brutal regime that has for 44 years been very successful in keeping itself in power.
Basu: [CHUCKLES] I should say one of the chants that I heard was actually "[SPEAKS PERSIAN]," right? "Our enemy is actually here."
Mahdavi: Right. Our enemy is right here, not the U.S.
Basu: They're lying when they say it's the U.S.
Mahdavi: Exactly. Yeah, exactly. That's an interesting call to… Okay, like, we're welcoming U.S. support, right? We're welcoming that without being Westoxicated. I mean, that's their way of signaling, Hey, there is a middle path, right? It's not necessarily the Shah's way and it's not the Islamic Republic's way, there's a different path. And that's where we come back to 1953, which is where we started. People saying, Hey, that was a path that may have worked.
Basu: I wonder if we have-- [LAUGHS] This might be an unanswerable question, but do we have a sense of what public support for the Islamic regime looks like in Iran? I'm saying this knowing that it's very hard to gauge, but maybe you can sort of help us unflatten public opinion in Iran and tell us about the nuances. You know, there are people who are-- who follow religion but don't necessarily want a religious government, right?
Mahdavi: That's exactly right. I think you have a lot of people who have suffered under this regime, and not necessarily just about the religiosity, but we should take a look at the economics, right? I mean, this is a regime that has brought about sanctions, right, I mean, because of their inability to engage in a global marketplace. And so whether or not your religiously devout or not, you have suffered from an inability to be able to feed your family as a result of sanctions. And unemployment is over 45%, so you have a highly-educated population with one of the highest unemployment rates in the region. At the same time, you see a regime that spends so much time thinking about morality rather than trying to solve the very real problems that faced Iranians on a day-to-day basis.
Basu: You know, I'm thinking back to what you were saying about the '79 revolution, women at the time pushing back on some of these new rules that were being introduced. You see images at that time, just before the Islamic regime was officially voted into power, women were out protesting compulsory hijab in Tehran, and these are, you know, decades old pictures that you're seeing, and now you see new images from today. Being someone who has studied women's movements in Iran, I was hoping maybe you could tell us a little bit about what it feels like from your perspective, understanding the timeline. Help us put into context where you see the women of Iran today.
Mahdavi: We have to, in that case, start at 1910, the Mashrūteh, or constitutional revolution. Women were at the forefront of the constitutional revolution in 1910, as they were in 1979. And so, for someone who studies women's movements and Iran, one of the most inspiring things is that you see women at the forefront of almost all of the major social movements that have taken place in the last 110 years in Iran. Notably, in 1979, you had women on both sides, right? You had women who were fighting for the Islamic Republic, and then you had women coming out without hijab and trying to protest. And interestingly, when the morality police were first formed, you even had an all-female arm of that. But as someone who's been studying the women's movements since 1979, and certainly really scrutinizing for the past 25 years, it's been interesting to me to watch the different types of feminism, right, Iranian feminisms, come together and start to weave together their causes. So, you have Islamic feminists coming together with secular feminists. You have first wave, second wave, third wave, and now a fourth and fifth wave of feminists, right? That's intergenerational. And one of the most inspiring things for me is watching how these feminisms are coming together to lead the country into this very significant moment that we're in right now.
Basu: What would it mean for you personally, like, for your family, for your parents, if this movement were successful in seriously challenging this regime?
Mahdavi: It would mean everything to me and to my family because we could go home after 44 years of waiting. For my children, they've never seen Iran. They only know Iran through stories, through songs, through movies and cartoons, and through weekly phone calls with family and friends whom they've never seen in 3D. And one of the things that my kids have been saying to me as we talk every night about what's going on in Iran is, they say, Mom, you think that this means we can finally go home, we can finally go to Iran and we can finally see the country where we're from? And that would mean everything to me.
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Basu: Pardis, thank you so much for your time. It was really good to speak with you.
Mahdavi: Thank you so much for your time, and thanks for doing this. It's really an honor to be in conversation with you.
Basu, Narrating: You can read Pardis Mahdavi's account about being detained by the morality police in "The Washington Post." We've linked to that on our show notes page.
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