Towards a Critical Anthropology of Woman, Life, Freedom

On September 16, 2022, Mahsa Zhina Amini, a twenty-two-year-old woman from the Iranian province of Kurdistan, died in Tehran due to injuries incurred while in police custody. She was arrested three days earlier by the “guidance patrol” (gasht-e ershad), better known as the “morality police,” for allegedly violating the state-enforced Islamic dress code (hijab). Videos of her arrest and photographs of her in the hospital circulated on social media in Iran and in the diaspora. The images angered many Iranians who reject the regulation of hijab by the police and paramilitary forces (Basij) as a form of gender-based harassment and a violation of women’s rights to public space. The state’s denial of wrongdoing and deflection of blame to pre-existing medical conditions (which Mahsa’s family swiftly denied) further angered observers. The state response crystallized at once the righteous impunity and reign of lies that many have come to associate with the politics of the Islamic Republic, especially in the last decade. Subsequently, Mahsa’s death galvanized unprecedented protests across Iran and in 150 cities around the world. It became an occasion for the expression of manifold sociopolitical discontent and unprecedented demands for systematic change. A younger generation of Iranians—Mahsa’s generation—came to occupy public spaces of large cities and small towns to demand social and political recognition. They came to pose radical questions about the everyday life of Iranian society that far exceed the preceding generations’ debates of Islamic revolution and reform.

What has come to be known as the Woman, Life, Freedom movement takes its name from the Kurdish phrase xen, xian, e’zadi that was chanted during Mahsa’s funeral in the city of Saqqiz in western Iran. This slogan first emerged in Kurdish struggles for recognition in Turkey. It was later used in the wake of the American invasion of Iraq and the Syrian civil war in the fight against ISIS. In 2015, it was chanted in several European cities during marches of the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. But xen, xian, e’zadi emerged into global public discourse in an unprecedented manner when it was translated into the Persian zan, zendegi, azadi in 2022 to bridge ethno-nationalist divides and become the rallying call of a manifold social movement that targets the nexus of authoritarianism, Islamic politics, and gender asymmetries across Iranian society.

This Hot Spots series is a contribution to what we see as a critical anthropology of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Now some months after its emergence, our aim is to move beyond the initial framing of the protests in discourses from the Global North. Within these discourses, Iranian women tend to be treated as a uniform and timeless unit. They are narrated as vanguards of a belated bourgeois revolution that challenges a theocratic state and brings the nation closer to liberal democracy. This account largely ignores the discontinuous emergence, internal tensions, and geopolitical constraints that mark the modulations of Iranian freedom dreams from the late nineteenth century to the present. While championing a feminist and democratic ideology, commentators do not pause to reflect on the cultural, socio-economic, geopolitical, and political-theological preconditions of modern paradigms of politics and the social (democracy, rights, reform, etc.). Instead, they revive colonial tropes of the good Muslim vs. bad Muslim (“the women” vs. “the regime”), and reproduce liberal and secular categories of religion, ethnicity, and gender.[1] When categories that have emerged from the longue durée of European traditions and their colonial globalization are used to translate Iran and Islamic politics for metropolitan observers, the specific and gendered entanglement of Islam with national politics that informs the genesis of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement and its repression remains obfuscated.

We have solicited contributions from different spaces of the anthropology of Iran—in Iran, Australia, Canada, France, and the United States—to move beyond familiar narratives of the movement and closer to the lived realities that culminated in a revolt and its repression by the Islamic Republic. While the language of some of the essays might not appear “anthropological,” all contributions are committed to the analysis of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement as part of an everyday struggle for recognition. They are curated as to offer a critique that is internal to Iran as, at once, a geopolitical and imaginative terrain of debate with specific (albeit heterogeneous) histories and traditions. We see this approach as anthropological not simply because of an affiliation with a discipline that is largely situated in the Global North and speaks in dominant global languages. It is anthropological because it attempts to conceptualize the alterity of a political situation and modulate the practice of critique in relation to the movements of a form of life. This orientation is made possible by the authors’ life trajectories and/or their sustained conversations with Iranian interlocutors. As I will suggest in the second part of this essay by drawing on my engagement with the late Iranian scholar Javad Tabatabai, a relation with Iranian debates is central to moving past Eurocentric discourse and to fostering what we see as a critical anthropological approach. These debates unfold in the Persian language across ethnic, religious, and political divides. They can help de-provincialize Iran beyond “the savage slot” of Eurocentric anthropology and foster a decolonial approach—not as a disciplinary fad but as a learned discourse on an “other” with whom one’s relationship is unresolved and unresolvable (Trouillot 2003).

The curated essays highlight the revolutionary and feminist characteristics of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. They emphasize how this movement affirms the irreducible diversity of Iranian society and challenges Islamist and ethno-nationalist characterizations of Iran by the Islamic Republic and its critics. Crucially, the essays do so without resorting to essentialist treatments of law, politics, gender, religion, and ethnicity. Rather, they make clear that the Woman, Life, Freedom movement is a manifestation of the incapacitation of patriarchal “laws” of Iranian society (from the laws of the family to those of religion and the state), and how this unveiling in turn exposes the diversity of Iranians in Iran and the diaspora. We pay special attention to kinship and community as well as to the ambivalences and infighting that mark political subjectivity and the politics of dissent as to highlight the limit of the prevalent Manichean narration of the movement in terms of friend vs. enemy (“the women” vs. “the state”). Instead, we emphasize that relations between the state and society, law and desire, or patriarchy and feminism are themselves interrelated: patriarchy and “the state” traverse the boundaries of both the self and the other; society and the state, however gendered and contested, continue to be sites of emancipation from the patriarchal formations of the family and the local, ethnic, or religious community.

In the discourses of the Global North, hijab is generally viewed through secular and liberal categories of “religion” and “culture” and as a marker of the religious and cultural differences of a racialized other. The debate regarding hijab is whether European society should tolerate it as an expression of religious freedom and cultural diversity or reject it as a form of religious repression of women that contradicts “Western values.” The essays gathered here highlight the Eurocentric perspective of this debate by painting a far more complex picture. They demonstrate that the ongoing contestation over hijab is an expression of unresolved relationships between the constitutional framework of the modern society with the teachings of the Islamic tradition on the one hand and, on the other hand, Iran’s cultural and geopolitical relation with the West. What makes the situation in Iran (and the Middle East) more difficult to parse is that the two political negotiations are entangled: the attempt to address the communicative limits of inherited Persianate and Islamic traditions through cultural exchanges with the West and to bring about modern paradigms of rights and recognition is concurrent and in tension with the revolutionary refashioning of inherited traditions (in this case, Islam) as a bulwark against cultural and geopolitical domination by the West. As I will suggest further below, amidst geopolitical hostilities, it is difficult to occupy the space in-between Iranian and Western discursive traditions and explore the possibilities of cultural translation for historical renewal.

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement demonstrates acute disenchantment with anti-Western and Islamic ideologies of revolution and reform that have dominated Iranian politics for several generations. These politics have been led largely by self-assured heroic men who associate women (and femininity more generally) with the threat of cultural difference and transformation and with geopolitical rivalry and decline. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, prior to the 1979 Revolution and the establishment of the Islamic Republic, anti-colonial critics began attributing the sociopolitical conditions of Iran (including the experience of modernization and authoritarianism) to what they described as the “Westoxification” of Iranian society.[2] In this process, the presence of unveiled women in novel public spaces of the developing nation were politicized as evidence of cultural and political sickness caused by the West. When Islamic revolutionaries came to power after the Revolution, they enacted a “Cultural Revolution” to combat Westoxification through projects of “Islamicization” and “indigenization” of culture and society. These programs of policing and censorship continue to address women’s bodies along with debates about gender and sexuality as a site of a possible exposure to the West. In this anti-Western revolutionary discourse, women became the geopolitical object of surveillance and care. Hijab, which literally denotes a “barrier,” is not simply a barrier against excesses of desire (as conceived within philosophical and theological discourses). It came to signify a geopolitical and cultural barrier against the West as well. Women’s hijab is necessary because it signifies Iran’s cultural and political autonomy from the West. This is why officials of the Iranian state repeatedly respond to the rejection of hijab by insisting that without it, the Islamic Republic is meaningless.

The Woman, Life, Freedom movement responds not only to the politics of Islamic revolution but also to the failure of post-revolutionary reformist attempts to renegotiate Iran’s cultural and geopolitical relationship with the West while expanding social and political rights of women within the parameters of the Islamic Republic. Beginning in the 1990s, after a violent decade marked by the Iran–Iraq War (1980–88) and repression of political dissent after the Revolution, a reformist movement emerged that sought to achieve a more liberal-democratic synthesis of Islam and national politics in the name of the Revolution. While the reformist discourse unquestionably contributed to a proliferation of democratic demands and global connectivity of Iranian society, it was radically curtailed by powerful actors across Iranian society. Disenchantment with reformist politics, combined with general socioeconomic deterioration due to endemic corruption, enduring geopolitical trends such as the U.S.-led international sanctions, and planetary conditions including climate change, forced Iranian society into a sociopolitical crisis that has culminated in radical demands for systematic change. The Islamic Republic imagined by earlier generations as a site of contested political debate no longer exists in the eyes of many Iranians. The Woman, Life, Freedom movement is untimely for the politics of Islamic revolution: it rejects the patriarchal politics of care for the nation in favor of a politics of rights within a constitutional national framework. It demands a reformulation of Iran’s relationship with the West beyond narrow anti-imperialist politics of the preceding decades that have had devastating consequences in many spheres.

The Revolts Seen through a Life Lived In-Between: Javad Tabatabai

Shortly after Mahsa’s death, and before his own death following a long struggle with cancer, the Iranian philosopher Javad Tabatabai (1945–2023) began publishing short reflections on the protests on his Telegram social media channel. Tabatabai was one of Iran’s most important post-revolutionary thinkers. He was born in Tabriz in Northwest Iran close to the Russian and Ottoman/Turkish borderlands. Azari Turkish was the language of his household. He learned Persian and Arabic by studying Persianate and Islamic discourses with his elders and with Shi‘i seminarians. He learned French from an Armenian priest who was trained in Beirut. After his primary schooling, he continued his unique education across linguistic, cultural, and historical divides within Iran and between Iran and Europe. In the 1960s in Tehran, he studied Islamic philosophy with key authorities in the philosophies of Mulla Sadra and Ibn Sina, while pursuing a degree in law at the newly established Iranian academy. Upon graduation, and in part due to dissatisfaction with the lack of a discursive basis for modern philosophy, he would go on to France and Germany and complete a doctorat d'État under the supervision of François Châtelet at the Sorbonne. His dissertation on Hegel’s political philosophy was the first dissertation on a European thinker by an Iranian student at the Sorbonne.

After the Revolution, Tabatabai would go on to become Professor and Vice Dean at the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Tehran University. In 1994, he was purged from this position due to his criticism of the politics of Cultural Revolution and the campaign of “Islamicization” and “indigenization” of science and society. Despite this and other exclusionary measures against him, Tabatabai would go on to directly advise or indirectly influence the generation of the 1979 Revolution and their children, born during the Iran–Iraq War, who were attempting to make sense of their lives as part of the history of the Revolution and enduring national and international conflicts. These included a group of Shi‘i seminarians and revolutionary activists who had found themselves in positions of leadership in the Islamic Republic and who were trying to remedy political repressions and international enmities that had followed the Revolution. The reformist president Mohammad Khatami (1997–2005) who had run on a campaign of civil and political rights and “dialogue among civilizations” to renegotiate Iran’s relationship with the West was key among them.

Beginning in 2009, prior to my turn to the discipline of anthropology, I began attending Tabatabai’s seminars in a private institution in Tehran. He offered a unique problematization of religion and politics from what I understood to be a non-Eurocentric anthropological perspective, rooted in Iranian history and traditions. His perspective was central to my turn to the discipline of anthropology and its defamiliarizing methodologies. In 2014–15, during my fieldwork in Tehran and Qom, Tabatabai and his interlocutors (including his students and critics) became some of my main interlocutors for my doctoral dissertation in anthropology. Our conversations developed over the years and crossed over to the domains of mentorship and friendship.

Late last year, Tabatabai was in Irvine, California, undergoing palliative care. It was there that he began publishing on the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. Cancer had metastasized throughout his body. I visited Tabatabai in Irvine a number of times during this period, in and out of the hospital. When his health allowed, I engaged him on his unique personal and intellectual trajectory and his various projects, including a few publication and translation projects that we were developing together.

Tabatabai was not a gender theorist. He was a philosopher of “the social.” In his reflections he described the protests as a “‘national’ revolution in the Islamic Revolution.”[3] A new generation of Iranians, he argued, had staged a revolt against the “great men” (rejal) of Iranian politics and their revolutionary ideologies.[4] He likened the aspirations of this revolt to those of the 1906 Constitutional Revolution and a century-old struggle for social justice through the rule of law. The 1906 Revolution had sought to put legal limits on religious and political authority of “the great men” of Iranian politics: Qajar kings and Shi‘i clerics. It was an attempt to carve out “the social” as a site of democratic self-assertion of the diverse nation within a constitutional framework.

For Tabatabai, this emergence of the social field and its attendant legal paradigm was not a simplistic narrative of modernization in the non-West. Rather, it was a political-theological event of tajadod (“renewal”) that irreversibly inserted Iran into the history of political modernity and outside the “savage slot” of colonial discourse. It was made possible in part by the encounter between Islamic philosophical discourses of Shi‘i clerics and modern European political culture. The timing of tajadod, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, is crucial. This is a period where the Iranian court was in a geopolitical struggle with Russia and looked to Europe as a resource. It is before the discovery of oil in the Persian Gulf, the emergence of British and American imperialism in Iran, and the rise of leftist and Islamic anti-imperialist ideologies. During this time, according to Tabatabai, Iranians de-familiarized themselves from their concrete cultural and historical situation through an encounter with Europe. They tested the capacity of inherited Islamic philosophical and theological discourses for making sense of an unprecedented historical situation and engendering social and political renewal. The space of this generative encounter was subsequently foreclosed by the refashioning of “Islam” as incommensurable with Western philosophical and theological tradition and thus an ideology that could combat the Westoxification of the nation. The learned debates of Shi‘i clerics about the state were gradually replaced with revolutionary ideologies of the Islamic state.

Tabatabai’s writings about the Woman, Life, Freedom movement generated a unique public conversation. His followers compiled his reflections and circulated them online. Leftist sociologists criticized him for his emphasis on “the nation” and proposed that the protests constituted a revolt of “the people.” But most importantly, Tabatabai's writing provoked Iranian authorities. Unlike his leftist critics who had little to say about the entanglement of Islam and national politics (and therefore are tolerated and in some cases encouraged by the Iranian authorities), Tabatabai was considered an authority on the subject. Moreover, his discourse alone addressed how in countries such as Iran “anti-imperialism" is entangled with authoritarian politics. His depiction of the protests as a revolt against the Islamic Revolution could not easily be dismissed as anti-Islamic or anti-Iranian. The Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance (Vezarat-e Fahrahg va Ershad-e Eslami) revoked the publication license of his two dozen books. The Ministry of Intelligence (Vezarat-e Ettela’at) threatened his publisher and collaborators and forced them to end their engagements with him. State media produced a primetime TV program where Hosein Kochoueian, a state sociologist and the member of the Supreme Council of the Cultural Revolution (Shora-ye A’ali Enghelab-e Farhangi), appeared to discredit Tabatabai and counter his account of the movement. When the interviewer asked Kochoueian why a learned scholar such as Tabatabai would endorse “riots” as a revolution, Kochoueian responded that despite his pedigree, Tabatabai had fallen prey to the Americans. He likened Tabatabai to the Jewish German thinkers Theodor Adorno and Hannah Arendt who in the late 30s and early 40s took refuge from Nazism in the United States. Kochoueian described all of them as high caliber thinkers who were eventually lured by the United States. He argued that contrary to Tabatabai’s discourse, Iranian protesters and women who are taking off hijab are not making demands for the rule of law, but are promoting lawlessness and lewdness (bi-namoosi). He passionately urged the state to crush their movement without any toleration.

This sentiment about the protests was echoed by many in positions of political and religious leadership. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Shi‘i cleric who is Iran’s highest political authority, emphasized a similar view when he argued that unlike earlier social movements that sought to remedy the shortcomings of the Islamic Revolution, the present movement has targeted the virtues that are the sources of the nation’s Islamic awakening. Wittingly or unwittingly, Khamenei argued, the Woman, Life, and Freedom movement is aligned with Iran’s geopolitical enemies who seek to undermine the Islamic Republic, and as such, it must be swiftly repressed.

Tabatabai died on February 28, 2023, in Irvine, California. He died in great distance from his family, friends, and students in Tabriz, Tehran, and other Iranian cities. But distance and home for him were not simply territorial constructs but imaginative and speculative terrains of language, poetry, and debate. In recalling Iran in California, he would often cite the acclaimed modernist poet Ahmad Shamlou to say: “I am standing at the furthest end of this world: by your side.”

Brought together from faraway places around the world, and in a defamiliarizing distance of a critical anthropology, the essays in this Hot Spots series stand “by your side.”

Notes

[1] For feminist critiques of liberal-secular historiography of “women” and “feminism,” and of “religion” and “ethnicity” see, respectively, Scott 2001 and Mahmood 2015.

[2] On the politics of Westoxification see Odabaei 2020.

[3] In his formulation in Persian, Tabatabai put the term, melli (“national”), in quotation marks as to de-naturalize Iranian nationhood and mark the difficulty of its conceptualization. While he was not able to complete his study of the development of the “nation-state” in Iran over the course of the twentieth century, he devoted one of his last books to the topic.

[4] The term rejal-e siasi, literally “political men,” is a political and legal category in the discourse of the Iranian state. For example, those running for the office of the president are required by law to qualify as “political men” as defined by a non-democratic body composed of six Shi‘i jurists and six legal experts.