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.
