Women. Life. Freedom.

An interview with Iranian journalist in exile Negar Mortazavi.

Women on the Arba'een Walk-Mehran city, Iran, in 2016, via Wiki Commons.

Negar Mortazavi is a ground-breaking journalist and political analyst who has been one of the clearest and most compelling voices on the ongoing protests in Iran. I follower her on Twitter (you should, too) and had her on the Week in Women podcast to discuss the protests, the status of Iranian women, and what all of us can do to help and support. Below is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation, which I think is a crucial one for understanding how feminists can stand in solidarity with the women and men of Iran still risking their lives in the hope of a better, freer future.

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Jill: Hi Negar! For readers or listeners who aren't familiar with you, can you tell us a little bit about your background, your work, and your expertise? 

Negar Mortazavi: I'm an American journalist. I've lived in the US for the past 20 years. Half of it, unfortunately, in exile. I can't return back to my country because of my work. And I cover and focus on Iran basically from a distance, like many other journalists who are doing this in exile. I used to work for Voice of America television, I was a television host, a few other Persian outlets, and now I am a freelance journalist mostly doing work in English. I'm also a political analyst and I'm host and editor of the Iran Podcast.

Jill: I want to dig into the protests in Iran, and I'm guessing that readers know the basics. A 22 year old woman died while in the custody of the morality police after they said she was wearing her hijab incorrectly. Women and men have now flooded into the streets. Some women are burning their hijabs, cutting their hair, and Iranian security forces have begun a violent crackdown. And I'm wondering if you can tell us what else is going on here? What else should folks outside of Iran understand about these protests? 

Negar Mortazavi: The death of Mahsa Amini in police custody is also rooted in a lot of anger at essentially discrimination against Iranian women in the public and private lives. There are laws and regulations and enforcement of what women consider unequal and just violation of their dignity and basic rights. And this mandatory hijab law, which is an Islamic dress code, as some Islamic scholars are saying, a fundamentalist view of Islam for it to be mandatory even, is part of that. And it's one of the most visible because even if you're a simple, small town girl like Mahsa Amini, even if you are a homemaker, a housewife who has nothing to do with the professional or political life, you still have to observe the stress code whenever you go in public. And the morality police is tasked with enforcing the dress code and at times it gets very violent. People have seen images, videos, and photos and eyewitness accounts of the violence of the morality police when they arrest women, they are a police force, so they have the authority to arrest. They throw women in these famous police vans they have - it's a patrol, it's literally called the Guidance Patrol, "gasht-e-ershad." They're supposed to patrol cities and neighborhoods and "ershad" people, guide people on how to observe this mandatory hijab law. And when women refuse to be guided, "guided," then they resort to violence and arrest, and they throw them in these vans and bring them to the station for further "guidance and training." And that's what happened to Mahsa Amini. She was taken to the station and then she ends up in a coma in a hospital, and then she dies. The authorities are saying that she had a heart attack, but her family is saying that she was a healthy 22 year old with no underlying health conditions and that she was subjected to violence and brutality.

And because people have seen this violence either themselves or in images in the past, there is this anger and this accusation of the morality police essentially being a violent form of harassment against women in the public. The State tried to immediately put out a narrative that they didn't commit any violence, and that she died on her own of this underlying condition. And then they tried to put pressure on her family for the funeral, making sure the funeral doesn't turn into a protest, which it did. Her community, she's from the Kurdish community in west of Iran, was very angry and protests erupted, and then it just spread to other cities and towns and then essentially around the country. So part of it was this years and years and layers of anger at the violence of the morality police. The turning point was the death of this woman. And then add to that, the state's response, which was just, adding insult to injury in a sense. And that's why we're seeing this outpouring of anger that's years building, but with the death of Mahsa Amini and the State's response has just been exploding in a way.