I am a woman. What words are they afraid of? My hair is an adverb of kindness. Bring me a light breeze and feet that walk freely. Freedom.
—Mansour Noorbakhsh, Iranian Canadian poet, from “Make It a Rhyme”
Mahsa “Jina” Amini loved to dance. She loved poetry and dreamed of going to Istanbul to visit the shrine of Rumi, a 13th century poet and mystic. She loved cooking traditional Kurdish food with her mother, like Kulicha, rolled cookies with date filling. She was a quiet, even old-fashioned girl; her world centered on her family and their traditions. Her father later told a New York Times reporter, “Jina had a very pure and kind heart. If you met her once and heard her soft voice, you could never forget her.”
Mahsa was her given, legal name, a common Iranian name for girls, but nobody ever called her that. Perhaps it was her parents’ way to help her survive in this country of gender apartheid—where women have few rights and Kurdish women like Jina fewer still. There are more than thirty million Kurds in the world, and they have no sovereign nation. After WWI, their traditional territory was divided among Turkey, Iraq, Iran and Syria. In all these countries they are treated as second-class citizens. So, her parents wrote Mahsa on her birth certificate, but everyone who knew and loved her, called her Jina, a Kurdish word for “life.”
On September 13, 2022, Jina traveled with her family to visit an Aunt in Tehran, and to buy clothes to stock the small women’s boutique her family owned in Saghez, seven and a half hours from the capital city. When they left Tehran, they traveled to the Caspian Sea for a week-long holiday. Jina’s life was before her. Soon, she would be starting a microbiology program at university. Maybe she’d be a doctor or an actor, or a radio host. She had time to decide.
On their way back to Saghez, they had to pass through Tehran again. Jina was modestly dressed in a long black robe she borrowed from her mother. Her thick, dark hair was tucked under a black scarf. Iran was emerging from one of the hottest summers on record, yet Jina was dressed head to toe in sweltering black. She could have been anyone’s daughter or sister in this country of millions of cloaked and covered women, where vans patrol like predators, enforcing Sharia law.
Like every female past the age of puberty, which in Iran is legally interpreted as nine lunar years, Jina was scrutinized for “morality” anytime she stepped out in public. Iran’s hijab rule demands she covers her hair, neck and body, with only her hands and face showing. All clothing must be loose, thick, and modest.
To enforce this law, Iran has around 80,000 trained field operatives who scour the subways, bazaars and streets searching for women in violation. They’re called Gasht-e-Ershad—the Guidance Patrol, and they have the right to detain any woman they deem “immoral.”
On that hot, autumn day, these state-sanctioned stalkers spotted their prey—a shy lover of poetry who looked forward to traditional Kurdish family weddings because that was the only place she was free to dance. The Guidance Patrol claimed Jina’s scarf was not worn correctly, and too much hair was showing. So, they grabbed her and forced her into their van. Ashkan, her seventeen-year-old brother, confronted the vultures and demanded to know where they were taking his sister.
To the station, for a one-hour rehabilitation class, they answered.
That was the last time her family saw her alive. She was beaten in the head so violently that she collapsed and fell into a coma, bleeding from her ears. Three days later, she died.
When thousands gathered to mourn on the traditional 40th day of her death, the police attacked the public, injuring more than 50 people. When her parents tried to attend the gravesite memorial for their daughter on the one-year anniversary of her death, officials put up security checkpoints and even opened a local dam to flood the roads so no one could attend.
Jina’s death by torture sparked massive protests across the country. Tens of thousands took to the streets demanding justice. They defiantly removed their head scarves and shouted, “Say her name! Jin, Jîyan, Azadî! (Woman, Life, Freedom!) in Kurdish. The police responded brutally. They arrested 20,000 men, women and children. They used rape and torture to extract confessions and humiliate the brave protestors. More than 500 souls were killed. One man was hung from the iron arm of a construction crane, his body left on display for several days – hanging over the city like a grim banner of terror.
Amnesty International said of the hanging, “The horrific public execution of Majidreza Rahnavard today exposes Iran’s judiciary for what it is: a tool of repression sending individuals to the gallows to spread fear.”
The Long Shadow of 1953
How did a land of poets become a landscape of terror? Most look to 1979 – the year the shah fell, and the Ayatollahs rose. I once believed that, too. But the shadows that haunt Jina’s generation were cast long before, in the summer of 1953. That was the year the democratic promise of Iran was silenced by the CIA and MI6. When they looked at this ancient land, they didn’t see people; they saw a pipeline.
To understand the world that shaped Jina’s fate, you have to go back to Mohammed Mosaddegh.
Mohammed Mosaddegh was democratically elected Prime Minister of Iran. He believed Iran’s oil belonged to its own people, not distant empires, and he dreamt of a nation where the mosque stayed out of the state.
So why did the CIA and MI6 stage a bloody coup against Mosaddegh, sentence him to three years solitary confinement, followed by strict house arrest until the day he died? Why did they facilitate the capture, beating and stabbing of his Foreign Minister, the prominent journalist and publisher, Hossein Fatemi, then have him executed by firing squad?
Because when they looked at Iran, they did not see a people, they saw a pipeline, and Mosaddegh was simply the man standing in its way.
When Mosaddegh nationalized Iran’s oil, Britain didn’t just retaliate, it strangled. A global boycott and frozen assets bled the Iranian economy. Under the crushing weight of these sanctions, the public support that once sustained the “iron-willed” Prime Minister began to fracture.
Following the coup, while Mosaddegh languished in solitary confinement, the US and Britain consolidated power around the shah. One of the shah’s first acts was to dismantle Mosaddegh’s dream of nationalized oil and invite foreign giants to divvy up the spoils—not to the people, but to the tankers of BP and Exxon.
In 2009, the U.S. publicly acknowledged the coup when President Obama declared, “The United States played a role in the overthrow of a democratically elected Iranian government.”
The shah’s reign ended in 1979, as a massive tide of students, dreamers and merchants rose to reclaim their nation. But in the chaotic wake of the shah’s exit, the clerics rose. The Ayatollahs, armed with the discipline of the mosque and the fervor of millions, didn’t just fill the power vacuum, they sealed it. What the people saw as a temporary bridge to democracy, the clerics claimed as a permanent throne, replacing autocratic rule with the rigid brutality of Sharia law.
Stephen Kinzer, the veteran New York Times reporter, reflects on this historical pivot in his book, All the Shah’s Men, “Had we not carried out that operation in 1953, the religious regime in Iran probably would never have come into existence.”
And maybe Jina Amini, lover of dance and poetry, potential doctor, actor or radio host, would be alive today, standing in her sun-drenched kitchen, rolling date-filled cookies with her mother.
On this third week of Trump’s “excursion,” as we watch this ancient land—with a rich 4,000-year history, profound literary heritage, thousand-year-old mosques, 29 UNESCO World Heritage Sites, full of jasmine, pistachios, saffron and the world’s most beautiful tapestries—being rent asunder, we need to ask the question we didn’t consider in 1953: Is this war for the people or the pipeline? And when it’s over, what will be left for the millions of Jinas who have never walked freely?
Jin, Jîyan, Azadî!
(Woman, Life, Freedom!)
