‘Very masculinist’: how Iran unrest felt different to 2022’s hijab protests

Original article by Robert Tait

As the nightly protests that recently gripped Iran got under way, familiar shouts of “death to the dictator” and “death to [Ayatollah Ali] Khamenei”, Iran’s most powerful cleric and political figure, filled the air in Karaj, a city 30 miles to the west of Tehran.

But when female participants tried to add another recent popular rallying cry, “woman, life, freedom”, the slogan found few takers – despite having proved an inspirational call to solidarity in demonstrations that swept the country in 2022 after the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, who had been detained for allegedly flouting Islamic dress codes.

“That was the moment I realised: ‘OK, this is slightly different than what happened in 2022,” said Parisa, an Iranian film-maker based in France who was visiting relatives when the recent demonstrations began.

The earlier protests had been credited with forcing de facto concessions from the authorities – including the right not to wear Islamic head covering – and were broadly middle-class and progressive, said Parisa, who used a pseudonym to protect family members. But the latest unrest was “very masculinist at heart” and underpinned by a broader social rebellion against rising poverty, she said.

A main beneficiary of this shift appears to be Reza Pahlavi, a son of the country’s former pro-western monarch, around whom many Iranians in their teens and 20s appear to be coalescing in desperation to be rid of the current deeply unpopular theocratic regime.

At least 30,000 people are believed to have been killed by security forces in a brutal response to demonstrations that began in provincial towns and cities in late December amid anger over economic privations triggered by a sharp fall in the value of the rial, Iran’s currency.

The protests spread to the capital, Tehran, and other major centres before abating in the face of ruthless repressive tactics that have resulted in victims being laid out in public en masse inside body bags for relatives to identify. The scale of the dissent and simmering rage at the murderous official response poses an existential threat to the Islamic regime’s sustainability, analysts say.

Parisa, a veteran of previous anti-regime protests, including the rallies against the disputed presidential election of 2009, noted another departure from precedent in the chanted slogans: some were in support of Pahlavi, a 65-year-old exile living in the US, and his father, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, Iran’s last shah, who fled the country in 1979 at the start of the Islamic revolution.

“Some were shouting: ‘javid shah’ (long live the Shah), ‘this is our last fight’ ‘Pahlavi is going to come back’,” she said. “Unfortunately, these chants were quite well supported.”

They were also in line with sentiment she had encountered among Iran’s younger generation, too young to recall the revolutionary fervour that toppled the shah, who was criticised for torturing opponents and crushing dissent.

Driving this may be despair at a dearth of any viable alternative, rather than a desire to restore the monarchy – a system that ruled Iran for much of its history.

“My cousin and his girlfriend, who are 25 and 26, were participating in the protests every night and until two years ago, these guys were leftists,” said Parisa. “Now they are completely pro-Pahlavi because they see Reza Pahlavi as the only leader who can bring people together and do something.

“They kept saying that he has said he doesn’t want to be king, that he just wants to lead the transition. This is something you can see mainly within the younger generation in Iran, like generation Z.”

Despite doubts about the breadth of his support, Pahlavi – who has not been in Iran since before the revolution – predicted at a news conference in Washington this month that the Islamic regime would collapse and proclaimed himself “uniquely positioned” to lead a transition government.

But he was ambiguous when asked whether he hoped to return as monarch, saying a draft constitution that would be put to a referendum would establish the form a new government.

“If it’s a republic, the president will be elected. If it’s a monarchy, the prime minister will be elected at that time,” he said. “My role in all this is to lead this transition, help with the transitional structure.”

His modest self-portrayal as a transitional figure, while pointedly declining to rule out a monarchy, has historic echoes of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the spiritual leader of the 1979 revolution, who vowed before returning from exile in France that he would retire and play no active role in day-to-day politics. Instead, Khomeini – an ascetic and uncompromising Shia cleric – headed a repressive Islamic theocracy that executed political opponents and restricted personal freedoms.

Pahlavi has fuelled doubts about his credentials after being criticised for urging protesters to take to the streets only for them to face a remorseless crackdown. His recent justification that “this is a war, and war has casualties” in an interview with CBS News exacerbated the criticism.

He has also come under fire for deleting his previous social media posts supporting the woman, life, freedom movement during the latest unrest – a move some have denounced as cynical opportunism driven by calculations that the new demonstrations were more socially conservative and less female-friendly.

His emergence as a potential leadership figure has been aided by the fact that prominent domestic opposition figures, including Narges Mohammadi, a Nobel peace prize laureate and human rights activist, and Mostafa Tajzadeh, a reformist politician, are in jail.

Two other reformists, Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi, have been under house arrest for 15 years after disputing the results of the 2009 presidential election, which was won by the then incumbent president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.