Under the veil of Iran's theocracy

In September 2022, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian tourist in Tehran, Jina Mahsa Amini, was arrested by the morality police for wearing her veil loosely. She died in a hospital a few days later from a brain haemorrhage. The killing of Jina Amini led to an uprising that reverberated with the words "Woman, life, freedom"—a slogan of the revolutionary women from the marginalized lands of Kurdistan—across Iran as women took to the streets to burn their veils in protest against the Islamic Republic of Iran.

- AKANKSHYA ABISMRUTA

In Woman! Life! Freedom! Echoes of A Revolutionary Uprising in Iran, translated from the French by Maya Judd, anthropologist Chowra Makaremi highlights the unique differences between the 2022 Jin, Jiyan, Azadi insurrection and the Iranian people's movements during the 1979 revolution and the Green Revolution in 2009. In doing so, she revisits her family history through her grandfather's diary, which she turned into a book earlier, Aziz's Notebook: At the Heart of the Iranian Revolution (2011). Her mother and aunt were killed in prison in the aftermath of the establishment of the Islamic Republic, their histories and existence, like that of many others who dared to stand up to the government, erased by the state.