Women of Revolution Street
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December 2017. Tehran. At the corner of Revolution Street (Khiyaban-e-Enghelab) and Aboureyhan Street stands one of the city’s oldest French pastry shops called Shirini Faransavi. Young people, mostly students, lean on their tables. The delicious smell of pastries and hot chocolate sweetens the winter’s cold. Hushed conversations and bursts of laughter blend with the sound of clinking cups and glasses. Eyes meet and then look away.
The sky is gray in the distance. The winter goes on, and repression continues. Here, young Tehranians find refuge in this café and hunker down behind the large windows that protect them from the din of the metropolis and its hectic life. On the sidewalk, people bump into one another and push their way through the streets.
In a few moments, a young woman will emerge from the bustling mass on the sidewalk. Without her required Islamic headscarf, dressed in black jeans, a black polo shirt, and sneakers, she will nimbly climb on top of an electric box belonging to the city. She will stand up straight, facing the street. With confidence, she will attach her white headscarf to a stick, like a white flag that stands for peace. She will wave it calmly, solemnly (Figures 1, 2). Passers-by will be surprised, befuddled, and deeply moved; tears will run down their faces.
Figure 1. Vida Movahed, Revolution Street, Teheran, 2017. Courtesy Twitter.
She will be remembered. She will influence her time as a symbol.
She is Vida Movahed, thirty years old, of average height, slender, with long hair, and the mother of a child. We will know nothing more about her private life. With her action, she calls for full citizenship and social equality for all women in her country. For the first time, an Iranian woman overtly and calmly challenges her country’s obligation to wear the Islamic veil. In this month of December 2017, the movement of civil disobedience begins and finds its form in Iran.
The photograph of Vida Movahed will go viral on social media in Iran and the entire world. In the days after the event, several women will follow her example in the same place, on the same box. They will be called the “Women of Revolution Street.” A great many of them will be arrested, mistreated, and imprisoned. The human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, will defend them; in 2018, she herself will be sentenced to thirty-eight years of imprisonment and 148 lashes. This event will mark an important passage in Iranian history. It will leave its mark on an entire people and will remain deep in the nation’s collective unconscious.
“She will be remembered. She will influence her time as a symbol.”
Vida Movahed’s brave action is animated by a great symbolic force, which explains her impact on the population. Her choices—the place, the action, and its form—are not insignificant.
“Revolution Street” is one of the country’s nerve centers where massive demonstrations were organized against the Shah’s regime, which led to its overthrow in January 1979. The prestigious University of Tehran, the beating heart of the student protests against the old and the present regimes, is also found there. During the Green Movement of 2009, members of the Basiji, the Islamic militias, broke into the dormitories in the middle of the night and beat and stabbed the students. Some students were arrested, tortured, and expelled from campus. Now, the students covertly reclaim their space and gradually occupy the university again.
The university is also the regime’s preferred place for the Friday Prayer. Every week, several thousand pilgrims with post-revolutionary fervor assemble there, place their mats on the grounds or on side streets, listen to the speeches of the country’s politico-religious elite, and cheer them with ovations. Here, two parallel worlds stand side by side and oppose one another.
“For the first time, an Iranian woman overtly and calmly challenges her country’s obligation to wear the Islamic veil. In this month of December 2017, the movement of civil disobedience begins and finds its form in Iran.”
With her body, Vida Movahed marks the border between these two universes. Alone, standing on her urban podium, she faces the street toward the invisible mass of pilgrims, and offers them her headscarf. Without saying a word, she calls for a truce! Who would dare attack a woman holding a white flag? It is an act of war and peace! She surrenders, but she makes her statement as a free woman, conscious of herself and of her universal rights.
Figure 2. Vida Movahed, Revolution Street, Teheran, 2017. Courtesy Twitter.
Alone, high above, she creates an exceptional impression of grandeur, as if she were standing up for all of them with an entire population behind her, supporting her. She is calm, honest, she does not complain. She does not come in a pack, crying and seeking revenge. She is not obviously distressed about the suffering caused by the misfortunes around her. She does not give any speech about martyrdom, dear to religious or non-religious Iranians. She comes as a free individual, without any political or religious words. She declares her being, her right to equality and respect.[1]
“She comes as a free individual, without any political or religious words. She declares her being, her right to equality and respect.”
The civil disobedience of citizen Movahed is just and non-violent—vital energy in its pure state. She is the image of educated youth, creative, aware of their rights and open to the outside world—the qualities that are often concealed, misrepresented, or at best ignored in the media. Let us not, for our part, try to contain them with our simplified speeches and our reductive ideals.
“The civil disobedience of citizen Movahed is just and non-violent—vital energy in its pure state. She is the image of educated youth, creative, aware of their rights and open to the outside world”
In the spring of 2019, the lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh writes from prison: “women’s freedom to dress is a fundamental freedom and the development of democracy in society depends on the development of women`s rights. As long as the right to dress freely is not secured, other rights will not be respected . . . I hope from the bottom of my heart that, through peaceful means, we shall put an end to the deprivation of women’s rights in all the countries in which half of the population is deprived of its human rights in the name of an ideology, a religion, or an ethic.”[2]
November 2019. Iran. The movement of civil disobedience continues . . . !
Notes
1. See Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (Hamburg: Claasen Verlag, 1960). For the English translation, see Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Stewart (New York: Viking Press, 1962).
2. Letter to the governing council of the Paris Bar Association and to the lawyers of France, translated by Hirbod Dehghani-Azar.
