So, Is it a Revolution?
Wrapping up this first loosely-defined series, I wonder if the use of the word 'revolution' is warranted in the case of Iran.
One of the questions I have personally encountered in the past year thinking and writing about what’s happening in Iran has been about naming the event itself - which word captures it better; movement, uprising, revolt, revolution? As the final piece in this first series vaguely focused on this, phenomenon?, I would like to dive deeper into this question - why the persistence on calling it a revolution?
The sporadic outbursts of protests have become so common in Iran in the past few years that news media are always ready to call attention to it with appropriate words - it starts with ‘protest gatherings [tajamo’]’ then moves on to ‘waves of protests’ and usually stops with ‘widespread strikes and protests’. But last year, one could almost see the struggle to come up with a word that would actually capture what was happening, almost as if it was so unexpected that we did not yet have the correct words for it. The words oscillated between ‘uprising [kheezesh]’, ‘insurrection [ghiyām]’, ‘movement [jonbesh]’, and ‘revolutionary uprising’. On the ground, some chants included ‘this is no longer a protest, it’s a revolution’ and protest songs that were coming out purposely included lyrics like ‘we are proud of our revolution’. Social scientists were writing about reasons why, based on academic reasoning and scientific knowledge, the word ‘revolution’ was not an apt choice, but there was less agreement on what it should positively be called instead. Perhaps in a spirit of solidarity and respect, in the early days I too chose to call it enghelāb - revolution, until I found myself confronted with the justified expectation on the level of scrutiny in my choice of words in certain circles (while being expected to use this exact word in others circles). In this push and pull I sensed a gap between the visceral naming of the phenomenon based on lived experiences of being part of it, and the scramble so characteristic of academic endeavours generally to find and/or invent appropriate words to describe and explain the phenomenon itself.
In thinking about making the underlying experiences, those invisible forces behind the phenomenon and its descriptions, visible and tangible, I think Cypress Files has been really helpful, even in its infancy. Indeed, in answering the question about the persistence of so many in calling what’s going on in Iran a revolution and this word being such a prominent part of Iran’s post-Masha discourse, revisiting some of the elements central to the previous posts will be worthwhile (as well as offering a neat wrap-up of a special section!).
But first a brief linguistic note - how is the word ‘revolution’ understood and defined, not by social science but rather within the community that uses it in its everydayness? Enghelāb denotes a big change, defined differently in different contexts. I remember as a kid when I tidied up my room once in a blue moon, my grandmother would say, ‘enghelāb kardi!’ - ‘you’ve made a revolution!’. A big change out of the ordinary, perhaps uncharacteristic and unexpected. You might be making a revolution when you suddenly change your style, when you finally stand up to that annoying colleague at work, when you say no to a long-standing family tradition. Enghelāb is the intentional act of making a visible, significant change - might be about yourself and your looks, your relationships, or on a broader, social scale, changing cultural understandings, upending political structures. The phrase my grandmother might use to capture my uncharacteristic tidiness is coincidentally the statement used to talk about the event of overthrowing the Shah in 1979, albeit with a different pronoun - Enghelāb kardim.
Tracing the use of the word in the course of the movement, one of the recurring themes early on was based around a sentiment that ‘revolutions start in our minds’ and the sense that the turning point had already been passed. In the minds of many this ‘revolution’ was already in progress under the surface, waiting for a suitable time to become visible. The grief of the past few years, in particular, was a key driver of this shift - the witnessing of utter disrespect for human life that was at the heart of much of the Iranian lifeworld especially in recent years. The protests of 2019 and the sheer brutality displayed in its suppression live on vividly in the minds of many who lived through it, despite the internet blackout that attempted to erase evidence and witness accounts of the events. Images like the first snow of the year bloodied by snipers attacking protesters in November 2019, or that of the remains of lives abruptly ended by the shooting down of the Ukrainian flight, tend to linger in the mind, keeping the grief and the enraging injustice alive and fresh. I wrote about how grief has taken on political power in the recent uprising, but its transformative power has been in the making for a long time. In 2022, the big unanswered why at the heart of this collective grief, and the pain of injustice implied and felt so deeply with it, came to the surface and found its culprit: the totality of the system of power governing the country and the lives of its people. Grief became a powerful political tool, more so than it has ever been in the past 44 years, and manifested itself in the dādkhāhi movement - movement to seek and demand justice for the lives lost to oppression and incompetence. Woman Life Freedom comes in part as a demand for justice for Mahsa and many unnamed women and girls like her, and this time the Iranian population as a whole became their justice-seeking family.
The ‘revolution’ already in progress in our minds, also became manifest in our daily lives, particularly through women’s refusal to wear the hijab. I wrote about how this change in Iranian cities has been a slow and steady process stretching back decades. This slow, soft resistance against mandatory hijab turned into a visible fightback, an audible ‘No’ to the law and the culture of subjugation around it. But, crucially, this visible standing up to a decades-old injustice, did not just happen in the public realm and on the streets. What the personal narratives of life after Mahsa that have popped up on podcasts, social media, roundtable discussions, and popular protest materials make clear, is that what is visible on the streets is the tip of the iceberg of the change that has engulfed (large parts of) Iranian society. A significant part of the invisible change, the revolution-making, has happened in the homes and in the power relations that have traditionally dominated Iranian families. This is by no means a declaration of change in family structures as a whole in Iran, but rather a call to attention to the arena where change is already in progress. These personal narratives tell the story of standing up to the patriarchal norms in the family that had been policing women’s appearances, rights, and way of being from the young age, the norms and customs that had sustained the force of law in the public sphere. Imagine a girl who has been brought up in a traditional, religious family who, before becoming conscious of the fact of mandatory hijab law in Iran, was forced by her parents to wear all-black chador to school; she has found the courage to say no and wear something a bit more authentic. Or on the other side of the spectrum, imagine a modern family who, although not believers in the religious ideology behind the hijab rule, always lamented their daughter for wearing avant garde outfits in the streets with the logic that ‘You know the law - however discriminatory and unfair - and if you are caught or anything happens we won’t come to help, it’s on you’; now they support their daughter as she goes out on the street to protest, they maybe even go with her. And imagine a young man in a traditional family tasked with ‘protecting’ her sister - translated as policing her behaviour and presence - who finds himself unwilling to follow suit and instead becomes an ally for women in her family in their fight for autonomy. Hundreds of these stories have made it to the public sphere in the course of this movement, signalling the revolution-making happening in different households across the country.
Another notable shift - no doubt in the making for years but made visible in the course of the movement, has been one towards narrating experiences. Iranians have slowly built their own relatively free social spaces for expression and togetherness, where they have been keeping a record of experiences, narrating emotions, and breaking the regime’s singular grip on ‘the’ narrative of Iranian life. As I wrote, this has been one of the solaces of social media: individuals finding each other, articulating shared experiences and living through them together, becoming a new ‘we’ with shared grievances and a shared language. It was within this climate that an image of a girl in hospital, later the image of her parents weeping in the hospital, the images from her funeral and the rush to silence those who had been narrating her story (Niloufar Hamedi and Elaheh Mohammadi remain in custody for reporting on Mahsa’s death) created an undeniable narrative of violent oppression and lack of accountability. It was because of this shift already in the making that the regime’s attempts at warping the story to vindicate itself (that Mahsa had pre-existing conditions, that she wasn’t in custody, etc) fell on deaf ears. This story repeated over and over again in the course of the movement - each of the young people killed in the protests had left a digital trace of themselves showing them and their lifestyle as it was, they were narrators of their own life without a mediator. Sarina’s video blogs showed her dancing, making pizza, and talking about young people’s demands from their governments; Mehrshad’s videos of doing what he loved as a chef; Nika’s dances, drawings, and singing all became part of the broader narrative that separated ‘us’ from ‘them’. We, who dance and laugh and live with love, they who kill and beat and arrest for being happy. The shift towards narrating experiences, being the narrators of one’s own life, highlighted the wide gap between Iranian people and the Islamic regime, and breaking the regime’s monopoly on narrative power.
And then there is the expansion of this ‘we’ - a growing sense of togetherness that extended beyond Iran’s geographical borders - the ‘unity’ everyone was so excited for in the first few months. My observations in Berlin, show how this sense of a greater ‘we’ has evolved and expanded over the past year. Iranians in diaspora had been seen for a long time as politically irrelevant to the fate of the country. Through another process of othering, we had been cast as the selfish and privileged elite who had abandoned their country to pursue their own personal ambitions elsewhere. The internet blackout of 2019 made clear the connections were more significant and important than realised, and the shooting down of the Ukrainian flight whose passengers were mostly young Iranians who had been forced to follow their dreams miles away from home, showed that being away does not make you immune to the brutality of the regime, that ‘we’ were all tied together regardless of where in the world we were. The enormity and power of this expanded ‘we’ was on display not only in Berlin, but also in New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Melbourne and tens of other cities across the world where Iranians have found safety and some peace - yet clearly always hoping for the possibility to make their home in their collective home again.
Historians and social scientists will have to decide with the power of hindsight and scientific enquiry, whether at this point in time, Iran was in the midst of a revolution and try and pinpoint its starting point and significant moments. But putting aside the ultimate goal and result that makes a revolution a revolution, and instead watching closely the events and experiences happening right now, on the way to a desired outcome, I see clearly why there is an insistence on calling this a revolution. The lived experience of the movement in its everydayness, rather than its as of yet unknown outcome is what underlies the understanding, naming, and mode of articulating the phenomenon. There are lots of little revolutions being made in different spheres of everyday life, and witnessing and being part of them, as they surround your every moment making them impossible to ignore, justifies and even demands the use of the word enghelāb. Just a few days ago, a friend in Tehran was talking about the scenes they witness daily. “Today I saw a girl walking around in shorts. Then I saw a girl on a motorbike with her boyfriend, both in shorts. It’s really as if we are in the midst of a revolution” - the intentional act of making a visible, significant change.