Women, Life, Freedom: Why Iran's Youngest Generation Has Broken With the Islamic Republic

On September 16, 2022, protests broke out in Tehran after the death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman visiting the capital. Yale historian Abbas Amanat, speaking with Lex Fridman in the sixth week of the unrest, says morality police — the Guidance Patrol, with two fully covered women officers and two men — arrested her even though she was fully covered and showed no obvious violation. Nobody knows exactly what happened in detention. Amanat's sense is that she was beaten, that there was an altercation, and that a skull injury left her unconscious at a center meant to "re-educate" detainees. She died in hospital the next day.

Social media carried the news across Iran almost immediately. The next day people were in the streets weeping for a young woman who looked innocent, whose parents were mourning, and whose Kurdish origin visiting Tehran stacked into a martyr's story. Artist renderings of her portrait became the symbol of the movement. Authorities assumed it would fade in a few days. Instead it intensified: first among teenage and twenty-something women in Tehran, then on university campuses nationwide, then in high schools, with young men and women together and with a courage Amanat calls remarkable against fully geared security forces.

The protesters name themselves after the 1380s of Iran's solar calendar, roughly 2001 to 2010, the local equivalent of Generation Z. Their slogan is *Zan, Zendegi, Azadi* — Women, Life, Freedom — a Persian rendering of the Kurdish *Jin, Jiyan, Azadi*. Historians, Amanat notes, watch how slogans travel: it began in Syrian Kurdistan, where Kurdish women fought ISIS forces that attacked Yazidis and enslaved women, then moved into Iranian Kurdistan and onto Tehran's streets. The three words, perhaps unintentionally, packed together for the first time, with women at the front in a way he says modern Iranian protest has not seen.

The images that traveled farthest show young women pulling off mandatory scarves, throwing them onto street bonfires, and dancing around the flames. Amanat insists this is not a campaign to abolish the hijab. The demand is choice: those who want to wear it should, and those who do not should not be forced. In campus and street demonstrations, young women still wearing hijab stand next to those who have removed it. Men and women mix in public against decades of imposed segregation, which he calls the most interesting visual fact of the movement.

Beneath the cloth sits a legal architecture of second-class citizenship. Divorce, child custody, inheritance, and freedom of movement all run through a husband, father, brother, or even a son. Patriarchy, Amanat says, has been institutionalized in the Islamic Republic "in a very profound fashion." A university-educated girl who watches life in New York and Berlin on Instagram still needs a male relative's permission to get a passport. That gap, between a digital world and a guardianship law, is the powder.

Appearance is not trivial. Clothing is how a person imagines herself, and the state wants a "chaste Islamic woman," fully covered and protected by a male guardian. Students have begun breaking the partitions that split university cafeterias into male and female halls and sitting down to eat together. "Life," the second word of the slogan, is close to the American idea of the pursuit of happiness: music, dancing, girlfriends and boyfriends, walking the street without a big brother. "Freedom" is a century-old Iranian demand, running back to the Constitutional Revolution of 1906, aimed not only at banned parties and a captured press but at daily intrusion into private life.

Amanat hesitates to call the movement a revolution. Revolutions worldwide, and in Iran, have had miserable outcomes, and he wants the word used carefully. The regime, meanwhile, assumed the protesters were kids who would go home. Its thinking is conspiratorial. In six weeks the Supreme Leader's only public response, Amanat says, was that the demonstrators are children of SAVAK, the Shah's security service, dissolved in 1979. Sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in the street are recast as grandchildren of a police force that ceased to exist before they were born.

Officials also name the United States as the Great Satan and Israel as the hidden hand. They do not bother to say the West is merely "controlling the narrative." They say the protesters are agents of foreign powers, that their families have sold out, and that they have lost their loyalty to the Islamic Republic — and therefore can be treated brutally. Amanat reads the force of the reaction as anxiety. A confident state, he argues, would not need to crush a slogan so hard.

An estimated four million Iranians live abroad, from Australia and Japan to Western Europe, Turkey, the United States, and Canada. The Saturday before the recording, a conservative count put about a hundred thousand of them in the streets of Berlin. Iranian state news, Amanat heard with his own ears, reported ten thousand people protesting rising German gas and oil prices. He calls the lie almost stupid, because perhaps 95 percent of Iranians already watch Persian-language media outside the country: BBC Persian, Iran International, and at least five or six others, some running near twenty-four-hour coverage of every clip that leaks out. Satellite dishes sit on roofs in small towns and villages; the crude media blockade of the 1980s never really worked.

The government has restricted and sometimes shut the internet, but it cannot afford a long blackout. Everyday life, business, and government affairs all run online. Friends tell Amanat that Iran is, in this respect, like Sweden: cash is nearly gone because inflation has made banknotes worthless, so people pay by card at the supermarket and for home delivery. After Covid that habit deepened, and estimates put the daily loss from a slowdown at about fifty million dollars. WhatsApp is ubiquitous among anyone who finished high school or university.

Hatred of isolation has grown with the shutdowns. Young Iranians say they do not want to be humiliated, that Iran is not identical with "this miserable regime," and that they carry a large pride in a culture that is partly Islamic and partly pre-Islamic. Unlike the Soviet Union, the Islamic Republic never fully barred ordinary people from travel. What it did do after 1979, Amanat says, was chase away or destroy the old secular Pahlavi middle class — his own generation — in the hope of engineering an Islamic society. The project failed, and the middle class that replaced it is much larger.

That scale rests on a demographic revolution. Iran had about nine million people at the turn of the twentieth century, thirty-five million in 1979, and about eighty-three million now, a doubling in four decades. A fertility rate that ran around 2.8 to 3 in the 1970s and 1980s has fallen to 1.1. Amanat calls Iran the most successful country in the Middle East at population control, despite official campaigns to pay people to have more children. Urbanization, schooling, and antibiotics changed the arithmetic: villages became towns of 50,000 or 100,000, children survive, and a city household will not raise eight or ten.

Social engineering failed in the universities too. In the 1970s Iran had perhaps ten or twelve universities; it now has 56, plus the so-called Free University, Azad, with 324 campuses. Literacy stands at 86 percent, which Amanat suspects may exceed Turkey's and rank near the top of the Middle East, and the country employs about a million schoolteachers. Girls from traditional towns such as Yazd or Sistan, even from clerical families, now travel across the country for college — unheard of in his youth. Education, once spread, does not reverse.

Internal migration has mixed the country's accents. Azerbaijani Turkish from the northwest turns up in Fars in the south, and vice versa. The same mobility reached the margins, including Sistan-Baluchestan in the southeast, site of a recent massacre in which security forces attacked demonstrators and killed at least sixty people. The province's Baluch population is largely Sunni in a Shia-majority country. Amanat's one-sentence map: *Sunna* means the main road, so Sunnis are the world's Muslim majority; *Shia* means a party — originally the party of Ali in the seventh century — and Iran is the large exception where that minority holds the center.

Historically the center converted to Shiism and the peripheries stayed Sunni: Baluch in the southeast, many Kurds in the west, Turkmens in the northeast, communities on the Afghan edge of Khorasan, and Arabic speakers in Khuzestan. Kurds also keep an indigenous faith, Ahl-e Haqq or Yarsan. Drop a person blindfolded into a province, Amanat says, and accent, food, and language would give it away: Baluchi is a different language, Kurdish is closer to Persian as a fellow Indo-European tongue, and Azeri Turkish sits nearer to the Turkish of Turkey. A nineteenth-century linguistic map would stun a modern traveler, because mountains, deserts, and waves of invasion from Central Asia left isolated communities intact.

Why has the mosaic not fallen apart? Amanat's answer is a century of modernization that forged a national culture of real strength. He closed his book *Iran: A Modern History* by arguing that, despite everything that has made trouble for today's Iran, a cultural identity remains very strong. Go to Kurdistan or Sistan and people speak Persian and were educated in it. They may hate the regime in power and still belong to a culture whose center is the state.

The old official name was the Guarded Domains of Iran — a union of regions, not a single block, closer to "the United States of America" than to a homogeneous nation. Persia has been on the world's map for some 2,500 years, a continuity few countries match. Amanat says he is not a nationalist, but the fact explains why a land invaded so often still holds a through-line of identity. Center and periphery have always been in tension; belonging has always been there too.

He offers a travel story as proof of speed. In 1968, in the bazaar of Khoy on the Turkish border, so few merchants spoke Persian that someone had to be fetched from another shop to translate. In 2004, in the same region, young people at lunch asked him about Western directors and actors, in fluent Persian and some English. In thirty-six years a town that could not speak the official language was arguing about Hollywood. Many of those young people also want out: a well-dressed, well-educated driver asked Amanat which country would be a better future, because he saw none at home.

Fridman hears in the protests a refusal of cynicism, a desire to build a great nation rather than flee. Amanat shares the hope and fears it is wishful. History, he says, always opens a gap between where a movement starts and where it finishes, and he does not want another 1979. This uprising has no leader, and so far the crowd seems comfortable with that; six weeks in, he would rather see compromise and constitutional change than collapse and "replacement with what?" The upper ranks are older clergy who claim they already have a parliament, a constitution, and elections — all fake, in his account — and who will pay any price, including "extreme violence," to keep a system he says shows "clear signs of fascism."

From the first or second day, riot police appeared in terrifying gear. Amanat stresses that the protests are not a single crowd of a hundred thousand in one square; they are a couple of thousand young people in neighborhood after neighborhood, which is harder to dismiss and harder to crush in one blow. The officers are not conscripts. They are professionals on motorbikes, two to a bike, with batons, paint guns, pellet guns, and live rounds, backed by armored arrest trucks and water cannon — and the same kit shows up in the smallest cities. That, he says, is how afraid the regime is, and how fully it has built an infrastructure for violence at scale.

Perhaps 12,000 people were in jail after six weeks, a figure he flags as possibly exaggerated, and 230 or 240 had been killed, including children under 18. Beating women in the street is caught on camera and sent the same night to BBC Persian, Iran International, Deutsche Welle, Voice of America Persian, and Radio Farda. Iranian culture, like most, treats attacks on women as a violation of sanctity. An Islamic state that wrote "protection" into law has, Amanat argues, turned that claim into fear: these are no longer the girls the system thought it was raising.

He does not pretend the regime has no base. His own guess is that support is probably no more than about 10 percent of the population, a number Fridman finds surprisingly low if one thinks in terms of Russian support for Putin. Amanat's distinction: many "traditional" Iranians have already withdrawn their loyalty from a government prepared to kill children. The regime still feeds an "us" versus "them" — *khodi*, "one of us" — through the Basij, the plainclothes enforcers at demonstrations, jobs, and privileges paid for by oil, a state monopoly since the Pahlavi era. The Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps numbers around 350,000, runs its own military industry, including the drones Russia has thrown at Ukraine, and even built more than a hundred dams that Amanat calls an environmental disaster.

Privilege is leaking inside households. Clerics who talk about women as beings to be hidden change their tone when they have a young daughter, and a joke in circulation points to that hypocrisy. Amanat sees a break, not only a gap, between youth and parents: the third generation of 1979 will not compromise the way the middle generation did. Whether they succeed remains open. What the movement has already done, he says, is bring the regime's weaknesses to the surface.

Asked what happened in 1979, Amanat says the revolution only later became "Islamic." It started around 1977 as a broad, liberal-democratic revolt by older nationalist liberals whom the Shah had shut out of politics. Fridman asks for a whirlwind from 1906 to 1979. Amanat places 1906 among a cluster of constitutional revolutions — Russia 1905, the Young Turks 1908, China 1910 — in which societies facing powerful states demanded law, civil society, and protection of the individual. Contagious ideas moved with new communications, a world economy, and a currency shock that put merchants in the lead.

Iran's constitutionalists wanted a legal system with separated executive, legislative, and judicial power, and a public space between the secular state and the religious establishment, both of which they saw as repressive. Amanat calls it a relatively innocent revolution: little violence, no single leader, voices from merchants, the press, and an educated aristocracy sharing the first parliaments from 1906 to about 1911. Two coincidences then changed the century. Oil was found in the southwest in 1909, and in 1907 the Russian and British empires, treating Iran as a buffer, agreed to divide influence as they aligned against Germany. Only about one-fifth of oil income reached Iran as royalties; Winston Churchill later bought the Anglo-Persian, then Anglo-Iranian, company for the British government.

That revenue built a stronger state than nineteenth-century Iran had ever been. After World War I left the country nearly bankrupt, Reza Khan, an officer of the Cossack Brigade that Russian officers had staffed from the 1880s until 1917, founded the Pahlavi monarchy in 1921. For twenty years it delivered much of the constitution's modernizing wish list: roads, secular schools, a central army, urbanization, and European powers held at arm's length. World War II brought occupation — British from the south, the Red Army from the north, 1941 to 1945 — and a Soviet delay in leaving Iranian Azerbaijan. Between 1945 and 1953, dictatorship receded into a chaotic democracy of parties, a free press, and the Tudeh party, which Amanat calls the biggest Communist party in the Middle East.

Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry between 1951 and 1953. The British detested it. The episode ended in a coup that Amanat describes as partly funded and morally supported by Britain and the United States, and as one of the CIA's earliest successful Cold War operations. Washington had replaced Britain as the region's new power and saw Iran as a long Soviet border and a guardian of Persian Gulf oil. Truman gave way to Eisenhower; CIA agents took part; Mossadegh fell.

The American fear, in Amanat's simplified picture, was that a Soviet-leaning Iran would threaten Gulf oil and Western security. He refuses a cartoon of America as only satanic: the United States also had useful influences in Iran. But 1953 left a distressful memory among nationalists, and Khomeini later abused it as rhetoric for the Great Satan even though, Amanat says, Khomeini had no respect for secular liberals such as Mossadegh. After the coup, Mohammad Reza Shah — *shah* is an old Iranian term for king, and the 1906 constitution made him head of the executive — rebuilt an authoritarian state on rising oil income, with SAVAK as its security arm.

In the 1960s and especially the 1970s the Shah shut down mass politics, gathered technocrats, and chased a messianic modernism: Iran as the fifth power on earth, passing through the "gates of the great civilization" back to a crude Achaemenid fantasy. Resistance from intellectuals and the left produced the 1977–78 protests. Why, then, did a liberal demand for the 1906 constitution become Khomeini's? Because after every other voice was suppressed, religion remained open: mosques, pulpits, mullahs. Isolated from the state, the clergy did not reform their answers on women, civil rights, or the separation of religion and government. They took a bypass through political and revolutionary Islam, and even alienated secular middle classes began to see turbans as an uncorrupted aura against the Shah.

Ruhollah Khomeini, later promoted to Imam, was born in 1900 and absorbed a century of Iranian upheaval in one life. He trained in traditional seminaries, not secular schools, in jurisprudence with some philosophy and mysticism. In the early 1960s he opposed the Shah's land reform as un-Islamic — property is honored, he said, even huge estates — and objected to women's suffrage. Shi'i law was not a single code: one jurist could forbid land distribution and another permit it. A 1963 uprising of his supporters was crushed; he went into exile in Najaf and still ran a loyalty network on religious dues.

When a political opening came in 1977–78, he sent cassette sermons demanding that the Shah abide by the 1907 constitution. Charisma, Amanat says, was appearance, severity, self-confidence, and opportunism together. As the Shah hesitated, Khomeini moved to the center because he alone had the mosque network, and followers in Shiism already treat a jurist as a guide. Secular Iranians barely knew Islamic law and idealized an authenticity that Western "intoxication" had supposedly stolen. Between 1979 and his death in 1989 he created the Islamic Republic's institutions and the office of Guardian Jurist — a clerical takeover of the state that Amanat calls unprecedented in Iranian and Islamic history, wrecking a centuries-old de facto separation of the two pillars.

Fridman asks how often, if the twentieth century were rerun a thousand times, 1979 would produce this outcome. Amanat will not play the percentage game. He wrote *Iran: A Modern History* from the sixteenth century precisely because Shiism, with its messianic wait for a hidden Imam, had been in the making for a long time. His brother suggested that Mahsa Amini is this movement's messiah: a martyr, not a living strongman. In the first decade the new state destroyed liberal nationalists, Islamic and Marxist guerrillas, and clerics who would not bow to "Imam" Khomeini, a title Shiism had reserved for the twelve Imams.

After the Iran-Iraq War, a Khomeini fatwa sent already-sentenced leftist prisoners back before summary judges, one of whom is now president of the Islamic Republic. Some six to eight thousand people, mostly young, were executed in a matter of weeks or months, in Tehran and the provinces. Families were not allowed to mourn them in an official cemetery; a concrete wall later sealed the site. Hundreds of Baha'is, Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority, were picked up and killed, their property taken, their rights stripped to this day. A regime that claimed the morality of Islam, Amanat says, left an extraordinary trauma and what he calls fascistic rule.

Ali Khamenei, leader for more than thirty years after Khomeini's decade, was denied the title Imam but given the rest of the adulation. As Guardian Jurist he stands above the state: not popularly elected, designated by a council of fellow clerics, with power over the army, media, and economy. A Council of Experts can theoretically remove him; Amanat does not think it ever would. He has no constitutional duty to check decisions with anyone, though he consults advisers. Presidents, the public-facing executives who speak at the UN — Mahmoud Ahmadinejad became famous in America for outrageous lines — sit under him, beside a judiciary chief and a parliament speaker.

Almost every president since 1979 has eventually fallen out with the ruling core, including Ahmadinejad; Hassan Rouhani, more moderate, is out of favor. Ebrahim Raisi arrived through what Amanat calls a phony election, because candidacy is filtered by a body under the supreme leader. The design is the problem: a divine office above all three branches, as if the United States had a supreme leader over president, Congress, and courts. That is why today's demonstrators aim their criticism at him.

Nuclear negotiations are the other running story. Amanat thinks that even under the Shah, and more decisively under the Islamic Republic, the bottom line has been a desire for a nuclear weapon. The argument from experience is the Iran-Iraq War: nearly nine years, Iraqi aggression at the revolution's most fragile moment, American support often behind Iraq, and a sense of helpless isolation that also consolidated the new regime. In practice he calls the program a mindless, crazy, wasteful drive that alarms Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and Egypt in a region where Pakistan and India already have the bomb. Israel treats the Islamic Republic as an arch-enemy, with some exaggeration of the threat and some basis in Iran's growing military.

Sanctions date from 1979 and intensified around the JCPOA, the deal meant to monitor Iran's program in exchange for relief. It never satisfied either side. Amanat thinks the Trump administration foolishly scrapped Obama's agreement, after which Iran felt free to advance unmonitored. He is unsure either side is sincere about a new Biden-era deal, and the street protests make a bargain harder in public: lifting sanctions and letting Iran sell oil without limit would, with some justification, make the government richer as it suppresses its people. He is not keen to ratify the deal, but he sees no clear alternative. In this geopolitics, he says, every alternative is terrible.

Before 1979 the Shah's Iran was on good terms with Israel, down to agricultural projects and an unofficial embassy. After the revolution that reversed. Revolutionary Iranians put the Palestinian plight at the heart of America's sin, citing occupation of territory since 1967, just as Arab nationalist support for Palestinians was going bankrupt and many Arab states were quietly coming to terms with Israel. The Islamic Republic appointed itself champion. Amanat doubts that 80 percent of Iranians would approve the policy in a free poll, and he says Palestinians themselves get help only when they are the "Islamic" factions, with even Hamas a problem. The rhetoric is the destruction of the State of Israel.

He thinks Israeli governments extract extra mileage from the Iran threat to justify how they treat Palestinians, which he calls extremely unjust and unwise since 1967. He also grants large failures on the Palestinian leadership's side, while arguing it is unfair to demand a fair deal from the weaker party. Pressed to steel-man Israel's wish to be a safe sovereign country, he respects that wish and then offers a historian's moral argument: a people shaped by suffering and the Holocaust should, he believes, be able to give justice to neighbors. Extra-territorial wars make the picture worse for Iranians themselves: Hezbollah in Lebanon, Bashar al-Assad in Syria, and involvement in Yemen are new in Iran's modern politics and serve an expansionism he traces, as ambition, toward Iraq and the eastern Mediterranean since the sixteenth century.

Asked about the July meeting between Khamenei and Vladimir Putin, Amanat refuses to separate geopolitics from a deep connection: forty years away from the West, plus American exhaustion after Iraq and Afghanistan, have opened room for China, Russia, Iran, and perhaps Turkey. Ordinary Iranians dislike being tied to China as their only trading partner and blame the regime's isolation. What surprises him more is subservience to Putin's Russia. From the early nineteenth century Iran treated Russia as the greatest strategic threat, lost the Caucasus in two wars, and leaned on Britain to keep Moscow at arm's length. A Russia that now buys Iranian weapons, including Revolutionary Guard drones used in Ukraine, would once have been unheard of — and, given the history, enormously unwise.

Fridman asks him to set cynicism aside. Amanat says he is trying to be realistic, not cynical, and that he has great hopes. An article he was finishing that day was titled for a time of fear and women of hope. The movement may fizzle in weeks, or it may force a peaceful accommodation at home and with the world; most Iranians, after forty years of a regressive ideology, do not want confrontation. Islamization of the society has failed in the streets, and if more open space appears, he thinks Iranians will choose accommodation over extremes. He hopes the future will not produce another strongman. They started with hope, Fridman says, and ended with it.