On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman, died in captivity three days after she was abducted by “morality police” in Tehran for allegedly breaking the dress code imposed by the Iranian ruling regime. Almost immediately protests broke out across the country. As of the time of writing these lines, a week after Mahsa Amini’s death, the popular protests are only intensifying and thereby insisting on the revolutionary event-ness (per Badiou) of the historical moment. What instigated the protests is not the exceptionality of the incident but rather the commonality of what it represents in terms of legalized violence against the doubly and triply marginalized.
In all societies that live under oppressive regimes, revolt takes place regularly and in various individual and collective forms. Once in a while, an incident would have a domino effect triggering a simultaneous, unplanned, popular uprising that overwhelms the police apparatuses for a few days, weeks, or more. Sometimes the protested regime would not get a chance to resume its totalitarian grip on power, which may result in the ultimate collapse of the police state altogether. While the Arab Spring movements successfully brought down several oppressive regimes, the Islamist movements hijacked almost every popular uprising, which resulted in widespread disbelief in the democratic plausibility and strategic effectiveness of uprisings. However, what happened in the Arab Spring is something Iranians already experienced in the 1979 revolution when Khomeini’s followers hijacked the revolution. While this Iranian uprising, like the uprisings of the Arab Spring, might suffer from the absence of a revolutionary agenda for establishing a new social and political order, it will nonetheless be immune to at least one type of counterrevolutionary infection, which is Islamism. This protest movement’s spontaneous adoption of the Rojava-Bakur revolution’s motto, “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi,” “Women, Life, Freedom,” is a promising sign in terms of the prospects of moving beyond not only religious fundamentalism but also other forms of male-chauvinism and nationalism.
Spontaneous gatherings in the public space are taking place across all parts of Iran. One of the signature revolutionary actions of this movement is women’s initiative to take off their hijabs and burn them in a celebratory atmosphere applauded by the men and women present at the protest sites. These people are certainly not risking their lives to defend a “culture,” which should come as a shock to those who assume that people in the East and the South are essentially characterized by “culture” or cultural institutions such as religion. Culturalism as a mentality is Eurocentric par excellence, and culturalization of non-Whites is today’s prevalent form of White racism. Of course, there are Muslims who practice their religion in many different variations and to different degrees, but the essentialized “Muslim” assumed in culturalist discourses is an Orientalist product, as opposed to an actual person out there. Only the religious far right in the Near East share the culturalist perspective that draws a fundamental line between Muslims and non-Muslims, which helps the conservative and fundamentalist agenda of imposing isolationist and totalitarian policies on the societies they want to rule using religious mandates that are inherently chauvinistic, irrational, and discriminatory. In Iran, Turkey, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the Arab-majority countries, there are, of course, too many Islamists, but despite the cross-societal retrogressive fallback that followed the decline of communist movements, the majority of the ordinary practicing Muslims, to say nothing of non-Muslims, are against Islamism. In fact, this is the case from Kazakhstan and Afghanistan to Mali and Senegal, including in Iran (due to the ruling regime’s implementation of religious laws) and in Syria and Iraq (due to the populations’ bitter experience with Sunni and Shia Islamist groups).
Whether in the East or the West, the politicization of what should be considered above and beyond all political and religious authorities, such as a person’s right to their most individual space, the body, is both false and misleading. The culturalization of political issues is arguably even more problematic because it runs the risk of homogenizing, essentializing, and de-humanizing entire populations. Whether in the East or the West, every society has left- and right-wing politics, ideologies, movements, etc. No matter how it is conceptualized, “culture” is merely an ideological composition, and there is no society with one “culture.” Rather, in every society, there are dominant cultures (or value systems of the dominant) and cultures of dissent (or accumulated knowledge for creative resistance). Moreover, (per Adorno) under capitalism there is an overwhelming industry of cultural commodities that are meant to serve the interests of the dominant groups and, thus, maintain capitalism. While this ideological industry of culture continues to perpetuate the capitalist hegemony, the anthropologizing paradigm of “culture,” which has become an internalized mental tool in the West to Other and de-individualize members of non-White populations everywhere, plays its role in preserving a mythical frame of reference. Culturalism is a false consciousness in and for a wrong world.
What needs to happen is genuine solidarity with the universalist revolutionary movements that are taking place in the margins of the margins of the margins. In my latest book, Revolutionary Hope After Nihilism: Marginalized Voices and Dissent (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022), I emphasize the universalist aspect of these projects and the multipartite spatial marginalization of the protagonists, and in doing so, I refute the culturalist paradigm that has become dominant in the post-Soviet, neoliberal era. Whether in India’s Red Corridor, Kurdistan, or Chiapas, progressive revolutionary movements aim to demolish not only political but also social oppression. Indeed, they have been creating new ways of life that are universally egalitarian and uniquely inclusive.
Saladdin Ahmed is a critical theorist and philosopher, teaching political theory and international relations at Union College.
