Iranian women burning their hijabs after a 22 year-old girl was killed by the “morality police”

In Iran, police violence wasn’t just limited to this one case. But the death of Mahsa Amini, 22, while she was in police custody last week has caught the attention of the whole country.

The “morality police” of Iran took Amini into custody when he came to Tehran from the Kurdish region in the northwest of the country. She was accused of wearing the required hat in the wrong way. She was in a coma for a few hours after the police took her into custody. Two days later, she left all of a sudden. Witnesses say she died from a blow to the head, which is different from what Iranian police say, which is that she died from a stroke and heart failure. Images of Amini in a hospital being given a breathing tube that went viral on the Internet gave the country even more energy. Since then, people have taken to the streets in more than 50 cities in Iran. During protests, the government is blamed for killing up to 36 people. Because the government has also blocked access to the internet, it may not be possible to get the whole picture. But the fact that journalists, activists, and people who fight for human rights are detained so often is very worrying.

In the past few years, protesters have spoken out against the authoritarian government many times, often bringing up their economic worries. Even before the 1979 revolution, women were a big part of Iranian opposition politics. People from many different backgrounds attend these rallies, which show how widespread Iranian resistance is in both big and small cities. The government might not care about the upcoming protest. Or Amini’s tragedy could become Iran’s Mohamed Bouazizi. Bouazizi was a Tunisian street vendor who killed himself in December 2010 and was a big part of what started the wave of protests in the Middle East and North Africa known as the Arab Spring.

Protesters all over the country are shouting “Woman, Life, Freedom!” Kamran Matin, a lecturer at the University of Sussex, says that these words have a deep emotional impact because they are uplifting and bring people together. “This triangle phrase ties together many of the things that make people unhappy in Iran,” he said. The author says that this statement has brought together everyone in Iran who has a problem with the regime.

Why do women in Iran burn their scarves?

In retaliation for Amini’s death, Iranians are burning hijabs and calling for an end to the rules that require women to wear them. In Tehran, they chanted, “We don’t want to have to wear a hijab.” That has nothing to do with the reason the police say they are holding Amini, but the protest is about something else. Iranian women were photographed burning their headscarves, and Negar Mottahedeh, a professor of gender and feminist studies at Duke University, said that it reminded her of the time when women burned their bras. Bra-burning was a sign of feminism and freedom, as well as a larger movement against capitalism and the Vietnam War.