The People vs. the Ayatollahs

When protests broke out in Tehran, a voice from the past returned

Essay by Kamin Mohammadi 
Photographs by Newsha Tavakolian / MAGNUM

Newsha Tavakolian has been photographing women protesters in Iran for more than a decade. They often pose with their backs turned or request to have their faces later erased or concealed to protect their identities.

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I am sitting on the plane. Like everyone around me, I have earbuds in. I bought WiFi for the flight, but I am shocked to see his name appear on my silenced phone.

I slide to accept.

I say nothing.

I am surrounded by people and it is quiet and I suddenly have no idea what to say. 

“Kamin jan,” he says, “salaam.”

In the muffled silence of the plane, his voice rings out inside my head, echoing through my body. I am alert.

We talk. But we cannot talk.

We cannot talk about the protests that have inflamed Iran for the past few months, ever since the Kurdish-Iranian woman Jina Amini, known to all now by her Persian name Mahsa, died after being taken into custody by the Morality Police for “bad hijab.” We cannot talk about the brutality of the regime’s response, the deaths, the blindings, the arrests, the executions.

Internet speeds have been slowed to prevent people from using FaceTime or posting videos online, and sophisticated surveillance technology from China makes even simple phone calls unsafe. So we cannot talk about whether these protests will end as another instance of the Islamic regime’s violent suppression or grow into a new revolution.

We cannot talk about whether this may be the end of the mullahs, whether this unrest makes it more or less likely that one day I can return, that we can see each other again.

Instead, as always, we find a code to say the many things we cannot say.

“The train has departed,” he says, “but…”

“It will be a long journey,” I finish for him. He murmurs assent. I don’t know what else it is safe to say, so I go to the essence.

“Listen, what’s important is that the train should reach its destination and that you are still on it when it does.”

“And that you,” he says, “should be there to greet the train when it arrives.”

We smile together. I can feel his smile. And we both chuckle softly.

Just as we used to nearly two decades ago, when we were in the heat of our love affair. I was in Tehran. He was in his provincial hometown. And we talked every day for hours on the phone—chitchat and heart-to-hearts and finally, inevitably, dirty talk and hot phone sex. In those phone calls, we had gotten attuned to the meaning of the very breath of the other, the silences, the smiles.

We have a lot of experience in the possibilities—and frustrations—of phone calls.

• • • •

In 1962, Ayatollah Khomeini declared war on women.

That year, the Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi announced a series of sweeping reforms aimed at rapidly modernizing Iran and stimulating growth. In addition to economic changes, the Shah’s so-called White Revolution extended the franchise to women, improved access to education for girls, and raised the marriageable age to 15. Hard-line Shi’a conservative Ruhollah Khomeini, already an Ayatollah then, pronounced that giving women such new rights and freedoms was tantamount to prostitution, and he led a successful campaign to repeal the new law, by rallying rich landowners who opposed the economic reforms. In a referendum called by the Shah in January 1963, women were allowed to vote, and the main points of his White Revolution won nearly unanimous support. Khomeini’s outspoken opposition led to his imprisonment and, in 1964, to his banishment. From his exile in Najaf, Iraq, however, Khomeini worked to portray the Shah as a strongman and to foment revolution.

In January 1979, the Shah fled Iran, and Ayatollah Khomeini returned to form what he called “God’s own government.” He ended thousands of years of monarchy to fashion Iran into an Islamic Republic, run on Velayat-e Faqih, the Guardianship of the Jurist—a concept in Twelver Shi’a Islam which placed Khomeini himself as Supreme Leader with absolute authority. The judiciary, the army, and the police force would all report him, and because he didn’t trust their loyalty, Khomeini established a special militia—the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps—as an ideological force sworn to protect the values of the revolution, rather than the land and nation of Iran. The Basij, a volunteer force of plain-clothes officers, emerged from within this militia to enforce new religious restrictions on women.

On taking power, Khomeini first repealed the Family Act of 1976, which gave women equal rights to divorce and custody of children. The marriage age for girls, which had risen from 15 to 18, was plunged to nine years old. And he proposed making the hijab, the symbol of the revolution, mandatory for all women. The women of Iran fought back. For International Women’s Day on March 8, 1979, thousands took to the streets of Tehran to protest. The rallies and demonstrations went on for five days and were documented by American feminist Kate Millett, who attended and made audio recordings of the protesters. The opposition was so strong that the hijab was not made mandatory for all women for another four years, not until 1983. By then, my family had uprooted to London, when I was still young, but I made annual visits to Iran to remain connected to family.

I met my lover in the mid-1990s during one of those visits. Our families shared ancestral homeland within Iran and had interwoven for generations. When we first spoke in a mutual relative’s home, we were two disparate examples of Iran’s army of young people: me, a diasporic, hyphenated Iranian, thoroughly Westernized; him, an ethnic minority within Iran’s majority Persian identity. I was reacquainting myself with my homeland, my family, and the Persian language after 18 years growing up in Great Britain; he was a young political science graduate trying to find his way in an Islamic Republic that discriminated against his ethnic community, making his future uncertain. Our burgeoning friendship and its shifting parameters reflected the changes that Iran had been through since the end of the Iran-Iraq war and the death of Ayatollah Khomeini at the end of the 1980s.

The authoritarian controls that governed women’s appearance and conduct, the strict segregation of the sexes, the voluminous black chadors that covered headscarves pulled low over the forehead—characteristics of the Iran I went back to in the early days after the revolution—slowly changed after Mohammad Khatami was elected president in 1997 and social controls were somewhat relaxed. Long loose coats and headscarves gave way to figure-hugging “manteaus” and scarves that hung off the backs of elaborate hairstyles. Black was replaced by color, as if reflecting the hopes and dreams of the young. Civil society was active, the women’s movement was confident with the reformists in power, and we found we could walk alone on the streets without too much worry of harassment. Sometimes, he and I even held hands. At home with the family, we were constantly watched by aunties used to ferreting out inappropriate relations, so we took to roaming Tehran, finding some private space in the middle of the crowds. Everywhere men and women could be seen out on dates in cafés and parks. A sense of hope, and the buzz of flirtation, filled the polluted air. 

Our love affair blossomed in this atmosphere of subterfuge and possibility, aided by the heady, new anonymity that the arrival of cyberspace provided Iranians. That was before smartphones and social media started to remake the world in their own image. Today, Instagram, TikTok, and Snapchat bring private spaces into everyone’s palms 24/7—a fact that can be seen in the images that young women are producing with their bodies, as they twirl their headscarves in the air, standing on top of cars, dancing around bonfires, their backs to the camera, fists raised. This Gen Z has been consuming digital images for most of their lives and have an innate grasp of their power, of how a meaningful gesture can say more than a thousand chants. But this was all new to us then, the first generation to flirt online with strangers in internet chatrooms, to experiment with porn and casual hook-ups.

At the tail end of Khatami’s two terms, when, in spite of his promises and the electorate’s aspirations, thousands of intellectuals, artists, activists, and academics had been murdered in their homes, when the Basij and Revolutionary Guard’s paramilitary forces had crushed the student protests of 1999 with excessive violence, attacking the University of Tehran’s dormitories in the night to set fire to rooms and throw students off rooftops, when the many reformist newspapers that had sprung up to educate Iranians about their civil rights were shut down, when the hope of change was nearly dead, I found myself living back in Iran. Like many hyphenated Iranians with a longing for the homeland, I had been tempted back during Khatami’s time. Indeed, the rather urbane press attaché to the embassy in London had called me in one day, and, over delicate pinch-waisted glasses of black tea, had told me that people like me were the pride of Iran, and didn’t I want to take all my brilliant education and experience in the world back home to help remake our country?

As a child who had grown up under the Shah, had witnessed the violence of the revolution, had borne all this time the deep sense of rejection that came from having to run away, being labeled “too Western” to be allowed to live in the pure new Islamic Republic of Iran—a judgment worthy of death—the idea that my country now needed me and wanted me back was intoxicating. I was just one of a great number of Iranians of my generation who went back then, to try to fashion a new life in the Islamic Republic. And in order to do so—to be allowed to do so—we danced an elaborate jig with the regime around the rules and Sharia law and what was actually possible. And we lied to ourselves as much as was needed to ignore the strictures placed by the Islamic Republic on its citizens, to soothe our own fears and moral concerns around the compromises we had to accept to live in our homeland.

The summer that my secret phone calls finally became a relationship was the first year of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s presidency, but there was no sign of the hard-liner’s influence yet and, while I trembled with fear at checking into a hotel with my lover—even in separate rooms, our going there as an unmarried couple alone was highly risky—I had some confidence that we could get away with it. Being a woman in Iran could be frustrating: my independence was restricted, the hijab was very annoying in the heat of summer, and if I went out alone in Tehran I was soon followed by a line of curb-crawling men in their cars. In my lover’s remote provincial hometown, he wouldn’t even let me leave the house on my own so conservative was the local population. During my time there, my hands repeatedly flew up to readjust my headscarf until it became a compulsive twitch.

And yet in Tehran, I went out alone, to mixed parties and dinners in smart restaurants and hiking in the hills around the city with groups of friends, put on my lipstick in the back of taxis en route to appointments, and visited government buildings for work wearing high-heeled sandals with fuchsia-colored nail polish on display. And while the eyes of every official I met dropped silently to my illegally painted toenails, I did not fear for my life because of my slack observation of the hijab; after all, most women around me went much further in their disregard. I was more worried about the shame of being found out in our love affair by our families than that the regime would arrest us, torture us, and rape us, as they are doing to protesters now.

• • • •

I hadn’t spoken to my lover since leaving Iran. Not properly. We talked twice in the early days after my departure, when I was in London. The first call was like the hot ones in Tehran, except the space between us was vaster, less possible to ignore. It had ended in us overcome—by the depth of our feelings for each other and the impossibility of being together again anytime soon. Pleasure turned to tears. Our next call was terse, him trying to somehow communicate to me without being direct that he was being watched by the intelligence service, his phone controlled, that he had been warned to stay quiet, to have no more contact with his “foreign visitor of this summer,” if he wanted to live a peaceful life. How he had told me this I don’t remember now. But I had understood instantly. After all, his safety was at stake, his life. We stopped talking.

When he called me a decade later, after my father died, I had not heard his voice in all those years. Even then, we didn’t talk about our love affair or what the Islamic Republic did to him because of it or the fact that I never went back to Iran. But now, since the protests began last September, I have been writing articles, posting on social media, commentating on the radio, playing the part of an activist from my desk in Europe, and he has seen. And he has started calling.

“I see what you’re doing,” he says, “how active you are, all your writing.” I hear him smile. “I am proud of you. And I worry about you.”

“Worry about me!” I exclaim. “I worry about you. All the time.”

My sword is my pen, I declared when reports first came in of the Islamic regime threatening Iranian journalists abroad; I am safe in my privilege. He is the one living in one of the provinces where the protests are still so fierce, under curfew and late-night house raids, the Revolutionary Guard shooting up homes, and keeping tight controls on moving about the city, checkpoints all around, smoke bombs and tear gas misting the air. Everyone and everything is on strike, shops shut, the bazaar shuttered, the workers trying to paralyze the Islamic Republic’s economy, even though the repercussions are enormous. But he has to go to work as normal, regardless of the checkpoints and street scuffles, ignoring guns slung casually over the shoulders of the regime’s security forces, arrayed in their body armor, watching him through their goggles as he makes his way through his day.

Weeks later, in a text message, he says to me for the first time ever: “I am scared.” He also says, “I can’t talk, I am under surveillance, they are controlling me”—words which I have expected, which I have been primed to always expect when it comes to him and me.

But then, days later, he calls. We can’t talk about what matters, so we say all the other things, ask after each other’s family and friends, discuss the diaspora, whether they should be involved, the absurdity of the Shah’s son daring to speak for the Iranian people from abroad. After five minutes, the line starts to break up and drops. He rings back. Three minutes later, it happens again—and this time, he texts to say he can’t risk a third call.

“I’ve been talking to you from the terrace of my office and the building of the Ministry of Intelligence and Security is right across the road. I can hear the demonstrators chanting. They are getting closer. They will be controlling everything.” And then he repeats something he had already said twice on the phone: “I may not have internet the next few days.” He needs to let me know that things are about to get much worse.

Maybe that is why he risked a call.

• • • •

The first nationwide three-day strike starts the next day, and protests throughout Iran escalate. As does the violence with which they are met, the arrests, torture and systemic rapes of detainees. Those who shutter their shops are targeted, their storefronts locked permanently by the security forces, their livelihoods confiscated. Scores of young protesters are detained and, on their release, many girls ask their parents for abortion pills or commit suicide. And then the executions of protesters begin, hanging innocent young men in public places in front of a crowd—the regime’s stooges whose minds have been washed with the same dirt that animates their rulers’ black souls—a display to inspire fear and demonstrate the power the regime takes as its right, the arbitrary say-so over who lives and who should die. As I write this, four protesters have been executed and 18 more have been sentenced to execution for “waging war against God.” Human rights groups estimate more than 500 dead at the hands of government forces and some 20,000 arrested and still detained.

Now, I wait every day to see his name appear among the likes on my social media posts; this way I know he is still okay. This way I can breathe out. Despite the lack of direct contact, the sound of his voice has returned him to me with the immediacy of the days of our illicit love affair so many years ago. I reflect now on the consequences of transgressing the most obsessively policed laws of the religious dictatorship of Iran, which prides itself on the blood-thirsty enforcement of God’s will on Earth, waging war against sexuality and love that takes any shape other than the one deemed correct in its perverted version of Islam—the subtlety with which authoritarianism penetrates the very fibers of your being, controlling you from the inside out. All this comes flooding back, the realization of how many decisions in my life have been made in reference to that loss, to that ultimate unfinished story. Never discussed, never revealed, put away and never thought of. 

Or, at least, not until Mahsa was killed by the regime on September 16. The rising tide of female fury that has since engulfed Iran has cracked open that place where I had put away my lover and my country. So many years after our last kiss and parting, both of us now married and with lives firmly fixed with other people, the uprising in Iran has us once more turning toward each other. And once more, in the time that I want to talk to him above anyone else, I know that he is being controlled, and he cannot talk openly.

Instead, I obsessively watch all the videos that come out of his province, scanning every image for his face, zoom in on every dead body to make sure it is not his, not his blood splashed on the pavement where we walked together. Every morning, I scroll through the online accounts that publish videos from Iran, trying to piece together what is really going on. I shudder at the degree of police brutality, the casualness of the violence meted out against women on the street, not just by security forces or the Morality Police but by random mullahs and any man who feels like abusing a woman. Even in the Iran I left all those years ago, no man would have felt the utter entitlement I see today, to slap or kick a woman whose hijab did not please him, to verbally abuse them and call them “naked” and “whores.” In all my time in the Islamic Republic of Iran, I never felt this demeaned as a woman, whatever the law and however I wore my hijab. In my absence, the hard-liners entrenched their position.

I watch and worry for my old lover, but I also grieve for my country, for all the women who have seen their bodies, as always, become the battleground. I watch them suffer at the hands of an inhuman and immoral system, a regime so corrupt and rotten that the killing, rape, and torture of its own citizens is somehow justified in the name of God. I have already lived through one revolution in Iran. This one—whatever this is—I am watching from afar. And after months of protest, alongside the despair of watching the horror, I am beginning to feel a spark of hope. I tuck it in my back pocket. I am honestly not sure what to do with it. More horror and bloodshed awaits, I know—but could a free Iran lie on the other side of this suffering and all the suffering to come? 

• • • •

Traveling in Iran over the years, I saw the disconnect between an overwhelmingly young and modern population that wants to be a part of the rest of the world and the ruling elite of aging religious authoritarians, and wondered: when and how will this tension finally fracture? After the failure of Khatami’s reformists, Ahmadinejad’s hard-line goals slowly asserted themselves. He is credited with setting up Gashte Ershad, the Morality Police. In reality, the Morality Police has existed in Iran since the revolution. Then, they were called the Islamic Revolution Committee—known in Iran simply as Komiteh, a word that carried such dread—and they were charged with policing any behavior that Khomeini deemed “Westoxified.” They were given the right to police our habits and thoughts, our very lifestyle, making us feel forever guilty if we were deemed not “Iranian enough.” In 2005, Ahmadinejad merely made these enforcers an official part of the police and, every summer since, the vans of Gashte Ershad patrol the streets, their greater or lesser presence heralding how low or high women could wear their headscarves, how short and tight manteaus would be that summer.

After my last trip to Iran, the one that had ended with my lover being threatened by the regime, I had stayed away. Under Ahmadinejad, the situation in Iran got worse: more friends ended up in the notorious Evin Prison, and I became aware, through attempts to break into my email via the accounts of my jailed friends, that I, too, was under their watch. The regime started to arrest dual nationals traveling back for work or family ties. The brief opening up under Khatami had closed down, and I let thoughts of returning home—and continuing our love affair—recede.

I watched from afar the Green Wave protests in 2009, when the disputed election saw hundreds of thousands of people turn out for the biggest protests since the revolution, demanding a recount, insisting that their candidate, the reformist Mir-Hossein Mousavi, had won the election, which had been stolen to give Ahmadinejad a second term. Thousands poured through the streets of Iran, security forces shot into the crowds, and 26-year-old Neda Agha-Soltan was killed as she peacefully walked in a demonstration. Protests amplified and went on for months. The world took notice of this outpouring from Iran’s youth. I was called several times a day by various news outlets, asking me to go back to Iran and report on the protests for them. I declined. I knew that I would almost certainly be arrested, if not on arrival then for sure on departure.

I also knew that my presence in Iran at a time of unrest would put my lover back at risk and would expose my family to harassment. (The Islamic regime has long controlled Iranian journalists in diaspora by threatening their families at home). One editor, clearly under pressure from her bosses to get me into Iran, said to me: “You can help them by going and getting news out. Why don’t you want to go? Don’t you care about your country?” I laughed bitterly when she said this. It was exactly because I do care about my country—the people that I love there—that I could not go back. By now, most of the hyphenated Iranians who had been tempted back under Khatami had fled in the face of sustained harassment from the regime, many after a stint in jail. Some had stopped over in my apartment on their way back to lives in the West. I chose not to risk it, and not just for myself. This was the price I had to pay for having consummated our love in the Islamic Republic of Iran. 

The protests of 2009 were crushed after seven months of terror, during which the regime arrested activists and protesters in their homes, shot at them when they demonstrated. The leaders of the movement, including Mousavi and his running mate, the reformist Shi’a cleric Mehdi Karroubi, were arrested and to this day languish under house arrest. The movement lost momentum, more hyphenated Iranians were arrested or chased out, and years later, the presidential terms of reform-minded Hassan Rouhani failed to deliver any marked change for Iranians, even as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—the long-touted nuclear agreement—gave everyone hope again for some normalization of relations with the West, some loosening of the sanctions crippling the Iranian economy and keeping ordinary people from accessing basic needs, such as lifesaving medicines. Mismanagement and corruption continued, and the inequality gap widened to a chasm unimaginable in the Shah’s time. The squeezed middle class struggled to make ends meet, the majority of the population fell into poverty, and the elite—those aligned with the regime—lived glossy lives in northern Tehran, sheltered from the harsh realities of life in the Islamic Republic. 

It was only then, during those dark years, that I finally came to see that my lover, my friends, all my beloved family are, in effect, prisoners inside our country. And in order to be let in to see them, to visit even during times of political calm, I, too, have had to abide by the whims of whatever regime held power—not just in covering my hair and making a pretense of “modest” behavior in public, but in the most private of spaces, acceding to the guardianship of the jurist, submitting the very desires of my heart to the regime’s authority. Even as a journalist writing in the free West, I have censored myself in order to be able to keep returning to Iran, to not have my families’ houses and belongings threatened or confiscated because of my writing. Even at a distance, protected by a British passport, the long arm of the Ayatollahs has always found a way to reach me. Only in deciding not to go back, in letting go of my lover and my country, did I find a sort of relief.

• • • •

When current hard-line president Ebrahim Raisi was up for election in 2021, I was asked to record a radio piece about what this meant for Iran. I hesitated, not keen to pick up my pen on Iran once more, reluctant to speak on behalf of a country that I had not visited in so many years. And, after all, in that time, I had found some peace—and my lover, too. Some years before, when he had been married for a couple of years, we were texting at Nowruz, and I asked him, “Are you happy?” He wrote back, “I am content.” And I had left it there. After the turbulence of our affair, after whatever repercussions he had faced, after however many years he had continued to wait for me, unmarried and under suspicion, after all the heartache and our thwarted hopes and dreams, the sting of defeat at the hands of the Ayatollahs, the sheer fear, I decided that content would do. I could ask for no more.

So I didn’t want to disturb this peace, but I reached out to him tentatively, to ask if he had thoughts on what Raisi’s election might mean for Iran. Over voice messages, he gave me a rundown and his analysis. I understood then that this was the entrenching of the Islamic hard-liners. Raisi, once head of the judiciary, in 1988 had overseen one of the bloodiest massacres of the Islamic regime, when between 4,000 and 5,000 people were secretly executed nationwide. To this day, their graves are unknown. With all other viable candidates standing against him barred, Raisi’s election victory was a shoo-in. This was the regime’s way of future-proofing its outmoded ideas. As Ayatollah Khamenei ages and his cancer treatment progresses, Raisi’s presence as president will ensure that, in the days between the eventual death of Khamenei and the appointment of the new Supreme Leader, the system of Velayat-e Faqih and the complex machinery of the Islamic Republic is not threatened by any reformist or democratizing influence.

In the 18 months between Raisi’s election and the death of Mahsa, I observed an escalation of harassment and violence against women at the hands of the Morality Police. Both summers were characterized by a crackdown on women’s dress, the vans of the hated Gashte Ershad filling up with women crying, kicking and screaming back as they were taken into custody for “re-education”—the kind of re-education that left Mahsa in a coma and then dead. I wept to see the level of casual contempt for women’s bodies. At the same time, I heard something in the screams of these women, the defiance in their voices and stance. The Furies were in those voices. They were channelling the exasperation, the frustration, the indignity, and humiliation of their generation but also the defiance of every Iranian woman of many past generations who has been compromised and controlled by this inescapable patriarchy. I heard in their rage and desperation my own cries of heartbreak and despair at the regime’s interference in our lives. When I saw young Iranian girls whipping off their scarves and throwing them in bonfires, dancing wildly, I felt the burning of all my own resentments against the regime. 

Now, all of Iran is on fire and there is nothing I can do. I imagine my lover in the middle of the scenes I see in online videos, his wife and children, his parents. His brothers and his sisters, and all my aunts, uncles, cousins, their kids. All our people on this land, under attack again. And there is nothing I can do but watch the extraordinary courage of the Iranian people, especially the young, as they pour out their anger and disgust at the regime and demand their rights and their bodily autonomy. This generation has seen the failure of the reformist movements, of any attempt to negotiate with or modify the system, of the regime’s utter refusal to engage with its citizens, and they have no more desire to bargain. They are shouting for their rights in the face of live rounds and rubber bullets, bird shot that blinds them, in the face of arrests and arbitrary detainments, systematic abuse, rape, and torture.

The movement is being led by young women and girls, standing on the shoulders of all the activists who have toiled all these years, in spite of terrible personal cost to their lives and liberty, to defend the rights of Iranian women. This generation looks out through social media to the world and hungers for the culture of tolerance and bodily sovereignty it sees in the West, rather than the modesty and martyrdom imposed by the Islamic regime. The Kurdish freedom cry that has become the credo of these protests—“Woman, Life, Freedom”—represents the first time in Iranian history that a movement has rallied around a positive vision, rather than just the end to, or the death of, someone or something they can no longer tolerate. While the brutal treatment of Jina Amini, the beloved Mahsa, over “bad hijab” was the spark that lit this conflagration of rage, the real heat of this movement comes from decades of repression of any opposition to the hard-line clerical regime, a free-falling economy, the mass corruption and hypocrisy of the ruling elite, which refuses to allow Iranian women some loosening of the mandatory hijab, even as their own entitled children stalk the streets of the world’s cities clad in revealing outfits and post pictures of parties they hold in luxurious mansions bought with the pilfered riches of our country.

One day, as I am scouring the internet for images of Iran’s latest protests, I see a picture of a boy and a girl, backlit by small fires, kissing. She is not wearing hijab, and they are certainly not married—they look too young—and probably this is staged for the camera. But there they are, kissing in public as an act of protest against the Islamic regime. Their courage moves me to tears. Twenty years ago, my hidden rebellion not only cost me my lover but my future, my country. I can only hope that this generation of brave lovers can reclaim that future for themselves, for all of Iran.

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