WOMAN, LIFE, FREEDOM
LONDON, 2022
“Zan, Zendegi, Azadi — Women, Life, Freedom”
On 16th September 2022, Mahsa Amini was found dead in a Tehran jail cell. The Iranian government claim she died of natural causes, despite other protesters having seen her being brutalised by ‘morality police’ for not wearing her headscarf tight enough.
Sara Haghdootsi, the Iranian-American director of Win Without War wrote in an article for Ink Stick:
“Over the last few weeks, the entire globe has witnessed a glimpse of what I’ve known my whole life: Women in Iran are not to be messed with. Chants of “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” — “Women, Life, Freedom” — are reverberating through the streets.
Feminism in Iran has been present throughout its history but continuously ignored or silenced. We have to call out this erasure. And it is essential to point out that this erasure wasn’t accidental.It was inspired by destructive, foreign colonial thinking and domestic patriarchy, neither of which are unique to Iran. I think back to the work of the scholar Leila Ahmed, who tells us of Lord Cromer, a British consul general in Egypt in the late 1800s who loudly condemned the veil and Islam’s treatment of women while also being a leader of the men’s league for opposing women’s suffrage."