The Killing of Mahsa Amini

Guest Post on the Protests that Have Rocked Iran

The death in Iranian police custody of the young Kurdish woman Mahsa Amini for violations of the hijab code has provoked the deadliest protest demonstrations in Iran since 2019-20. So far at least 76 people have been killed and hundreds injured, in ongoing protests. In this guest post, the Iranian scholar and activist Yassamine Mather from St Anthony’s College, Oxford, looks at the explosive consequences of what appears to have been a police crime and official cover-up.

On September 13, Mahsa (Jina) Amini - a 22-year-old woman from Kurdistan province was arrested at a central metro station in Tehran, while visiting the capital with her family. Mahsa probably thought she would be okay wearing her headscarf slightly looser around her neck and head, since she was in the capital. However, she was arrested by the feared Gasht-e-Ershad ‘Guidance Patrol’ police for the offence of ‘improper hijab’.

The ‘morality police’ routinely drives through most of south and central Tehran, and poorer districts in other Iranian cities, seeking to monitor and impose correct adherence to a ‘full hijab’ on working class and lower middle-class women. Wealthier Iranians and those related to powerful clerics or government officials have little to fear.

Firstly, the ‘morality police’ rarely go to affluent areas such as north Tehran or similarly well-to-do suburbs in other major Iranian cities. Secondly, if a woman from the upper echelons of society is arrested by chance, a short phone call from one of her relatives will usually ensure her speedy release.

Like everything else in Iran, the issue of the hijab is a class issue - the main victims come from the poorer sections of society. Indeed, there are many instances where daughters or wives of senior clerics, ministers, etc have been photographed (or photograph themselves) wearing no headscarf and dressed in quite revealing clothes. These pictures appear on some of the many Instagram/Facebook/Twitter accounts of ‘rich-kid Iranians’.

In Mahsa Amini’s case, Tehran police issued a statement two days after her arrest claiming that, while in custody, she had ‘suddenly suffered from a heart problem’ and was ‘immediately taken to hospital’.

Soon afterwards photos began to appear on social media showing her unconscious on a hospital trolley with tubes and monitoring equipment connected to her body. Her family were adamant that official reports suggesting Mahsa suffered from epilepsy or historic heart problems were lies. On September 16 it was announced that she had died in hospital.

This was followed by the usual denials of police brutality. The Tehran police claimed that ‘there had been no physical contact between the officers who made the arrest and Mahsa Amini’. The police did not supply officer’s webcam footage that might confirmed these claims, butd the fact that she was bleeding from one ear suggested she had been beaten between the time of her arrest and her arrival at the hospital.

Mahsa’s lawyer Saeed Dehghan said that she had received fractures to her skull, and described her death as murder.   Officials at the Kasra Hospital in Tehran, where Mahsa was taken into intensive care, issued a statement declaring that ‘Upon admission at the centre the patient was already brain-dead’. In addition, staff said that witnesses had found her body lying on the pavement – contradicting claims from the security forces that she had been taken to hospital.

Bizarrely, a CCTV film clip emerged from a detention centre of what appears to have been a ‘hijab class’, showing Mahsa sitting with a number of other women prisoners receiving ‘guidance’. The clip shows her wearing a ‘manto’ (full-length coat) and  headscarf. In the same clip she is later seen collapsing and passing out soon after attempting to negotiate her release with a female ‘guidance officer’.

This naturally led to speculation that she was subsequently beaten up in the police van, receiving a head injury that led to her collapse – a theory that seemed to be confirmed by a photo showing her swollen face, with blood streaming from her ears.

It should be noted that many of the members and officers of the Gasht-e Ershad are women, who can be as vicious and aggressive as their male counterparts (in some cases worse).

In contemporary Iran the Internet dominates everyday life, and it within hours of the state TV broadcasting the police statement, the presenter who read it out used his Instagram account to write: ‘I do believe that we journalists will be punished in the afterlife, not for what we have said - rather for what we have not.’

Iran Erupts

Immediately after the news of her death, hundreds of demonstrators gathered outside the hospital in Tehran. Since then protestors have taken to the streets in Tehran and in Kurdish cities, whose slogans include ‘Death to the dictator!’ and ‘Killed for a hijab - how much more humiliation’

In Tehran’s university campuses, women demonstrators took off their hijabs and waved them in protest. There are now reports of demonstrations in every major town as well as Tehran, in addition to calls for a general strike in Kurdish cities. Since the first big protests on September 19, footage on social media has shown several deserted towns, with shops and businesses closed.

In many of the protests, women of all ages can be seen removing and burning their headscarves. Some women have even shaved off their hair in public as part of the protests.

If the government’s new ‘hijab policy’ was meant to improve adherence to the rules insisting that the veil be always worn in public, it has clearly backfired badly.

As in previous protests, the police and army/Revolutionary Guards have opened fire on demonstrators and an unknown number of protesters have been killed, in addition to hundreds injured.

Most factions of the Islamic state have tried to distance themselves from the attacks, but thousands of Iranian women have shared a speech by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which he implies that punishment for not wearing a full hijab is justified. Others shared a video of Khamenei expressing his horror at the killing of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police in 2020.

On September 18 Iran’s conservative president, Ebrahim Raisi,  was forced to announce a special investigation into the case of Mahsa Amini. It was also reported that Raisi had called the victim’s family to ‘express sympathy and to wish them patience for their suffering’.

According to the state media, Raisi told the family that he ‘considers all Iranian girls as his own children...Your daughter is like my own daughter, and I feel that this incident happened to one of my loved ones. Please accept my condolences.’

Herein lies the problem. Raisi was about to make his first trip as Iran’s president to attend a meeting of the United Nations General Assembly in New York. So naturally, he was keen to appear ‘concerned’, especially given that the death of Mahsa has already led to comments by US secretary of state Antony Blinken, who wrote:

Mahsa Amini should be alive today ... instead, the United States and the Iranian people mourn her. We call on the Iranian government to end its systemic persecution of women and to allow peaceful protest.

Raisi’s visit to the UN was already facing protests from Iran regime-change campaigners, as well as sections of the soft left and Republicans opposed to Joe Biden’s attempts to restore the Iran nuclear deal. The death of a young woman on the eve of his visit did nothing to help Iran’s position.

According to the regime’s own statistics, 60% of Iranian women do not fully adhere to the rules on the Islamic hijab, prompting a call even from supporters of conservative factions of the regime to decriminalise some aspects of these laws to help reduce tension.

Article 638 of the Islamic Republic’s penal code states that a woman who appears in public without a hijab is committing a crime. However, it is not clear whether an arrest requires a court warrant or whether the police can unilaterally carry out such an arrest under this code.

What is clear is that a young Kurdish woman is now dead, and that in a country where the enforced wearing of the hijab is as much a class as it is a religious issue, many Iranian women have had enough.