The death of Mahsa Jina Amini at the hands of the Islamic Republic’s “morality police” in September 2022 lit a fuse on a fervent global protest movement. Jina’s crime was wearing an “improper” headscarf in public. The slogan, “Woman, Life, Freedom,” which first emerged in the fight for Kurdish equality, was used by thousands of brave, defiant women in Iran (along with male supporters), who called for an end to oppression, discrimination, tyranny, and dictatorship.
Eighteen months later, the Iranian government has increased video surveillance and morality police patrols, imposed even harsher penalties for female disobedience, and leaned even further into brutal torture methods and daily executions. Meanwhile, Ali Khamenei’s administration floods the population with propaganda and conspiracy theories.
Julian talks to Iranian human rights activist and former BBC World Service reporter, Negin Shiraghaei, about the Woman, Life, Freedom movement, which she says remains active and unstoppable.
Show Notes
Iran one year after Woman, Life, Freedom
Iran: Alarming Surge in Executions
Khamenei Refuses US Help, Citing COVID Conspiracy Theory
Iran’s Supreme Leader Calls Gender Equality a Zionist Plot
Iranian Singer Sentenced to 3 years in Jail for Mahsa Amini Protest Anthem
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Welcome to Conspirituality, where we investigate the intersection of conspiracy theories and spiritual influence to uncover cults, pseudoscience, and authoritarian extremism.
I'm Julian Walker, and I'm joined today by Nagin Shiragahi, who is an Iranian activist, entrepreneur, and former BBC World Service news reporter and presenter.
She campaigns for women's rights and has spoken twice at the United Nations Human Rights Council.
Nagin, thank you so much for being here with me.
Oh, thank you for having me, Julian.
I hope I'm pronouncing your name correctly.
Yes.
Good.
It's correct.
Good.
So Iran is in the news a lot lately because of current events in the Middle East and their proxy involvement with Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.
But in the year or so prior to the October 7th attacks, A very different story was dominating any coverage of the Islamic Republic.
So let's start with the slogan, Women, Life, Freedom.
I understand it emerged first in the early 2000s as part of the Kurdish Women's Freedom Movement, which is situated in the broader context of the Kurdish struggle against oppression through Iran, Iraq, Turkey, and Syria.
And I found out recently it's also been used by all female militia groups in the war against ISIS, which is impressive.
But more recently, the slogan has been associated since September of 2022 with the tragic death of a young woman named Masa Amini.
And that rallying cry, Women, Life, Freedom, has now become much more widespread in Iran and globally.
So tell us about that.
It's a really interesting slogan, as you mentioned.
I'm going to share a personal story about this, because I left BBC around, like, three years, four years before, you know, Massadjani's death.
During that time, a lot of stuff happened in Iran.
There were protests.
It wasn't a quiet country.
When Women Like Freedom came, I Resonated with it because it involved all of those values that I was fighting for my whole life.
And I think the important thing is the values.
When Abdullah Ocalan, the Kurdish leader, created this and thinker created this slogan and then the philosophy and theory around it, it was at the heart of it was women's rights.
You know, the famous sentence, if you don't, we don't not say women's rights, the human rights wouldn't be, it wouldn't be achievable.
And the same goes with environmental issues, because Iran has a lot of environmental issues as well, and then the
fight around liberty.
I think the slogan itself, it talks about the values that are really current and really close to a lot of people
around the world globally, because we are all, wherever we are in the corners of the
world, we are facing the rise of misogyny and extremism.
It was understandable that really quickly, not only Iran adopted this slogan from the Kurdish region, which Hina Maslamini was from, Also, other women around the world have started talking about it.
We've seen Afghan, amazing Afghan women, brave women inside Afghanistan dancing in support of women like Freedom Under Taliban.
We've seen women in Syria doing the same, or a lot of Arab countries, China even, Latin America.
So I think it goes down to the values that this slogan is representing.
Yeah, and just for any listeners who may be unaware, can you give us just the couple sentence summary of what happened to her?
So, Zina, or Mahsa Amini, was a Kurdish 21-year-old Kurdish-Iranian girl who was living in the Kurdish provinces, traveling to stay home with her family, and the police as they call it, as was nicknamed, morality police,
was much more brutal than that, arrested her.
And there were cases of brutality within that police for years, but her this,
for a lot of different reasons and competitions, became a momentum.
There are video footages of her entering this detention center and just collapsing.
So the understanding that we have, because we can't trust the narrative that's coming from the Iranian government, they don't share the data, but from the pieces around it's Almost obvious now that she was beaten in the van, the car that arrested her, right there in the streets and she had a concussion.
They took her to the to the center and they didn't even pay attention to she's feeling bad and she collapsed there and just died right there.
It took the Iranian government three days to kind of admit that she's not in a coma, she's dead.
And then that sparked, from the moment of the beginning of it, sparked a lot of protests across the country and people chanting.
And it kind of moved the Iranian society from thinking about reform or kind of like, you know, finding a way to work within this authoritarian framework to say, enough is enough.
We're not, we don't want this.
It's really alive in the country.
People are waiting for the future to come that is different from having Islamic Republic as a government in the country.
Yeah, and she was 22 years old, tragically, and her crime was not wearing the proper headscarf, essentially, right?
It's really complicated because she was wearing the headscarf, even within their framework.
And it shows How, like, we always say, as a woman, our life doesn't matter in that country.
Her life didn't matter.
Her well-being didn't matter.
She wasn't even, you know, according, some of the daughters and, you know, relatives of the people in power are wearing much more revealing clothing and they never get into trouble.
But then she's wearing really simple stuff that are, even according to their code, has no problem.
So the ensuing uprising led to severe crackdowns by the government.
I've read that there have been mass arrests.
There have been an increase in executions.
I've also seen stories about expanded public surveillance using both digital technology, which must be really scary, as well as increased policing activities and, you know, just people on the streets watching, especially women's every move.
What do you know about these measures and are they effectively shutting down the protest and the women's disobedience?
What's going on there?
It definitely is rising the price for disobedience.
So right now, if you're a woman walking down the street, you're in a car or like not wearing the mandatory hijab, which is the way of protest that women are showing every day.
Their car can get confiscated.
There's a big penalty for it.
The public services are denied for them.
So if you go to a bank, even banks are private, they have this rule that they shouldn't give you service.
Women get attacked by semi-militia groups.
We call them by CG.
Now they're like part of the Iran's revolution and counter-structure.
So these kind of guys or women are walking down the streets and seeing you not wearing a hijab and they can beat you right on the spot.
They can arrest you.
And a lot of people, there are horrifying cases of rape, torture, shooting to the eyes.
And the genitals.
So they kind of use every technique and tactics to scare people and send them home.
To a certain level, they were successful.
But there is a complicated, there are a lot of other different reasons behind it.
So we can't say like, yeah, they went home because it was really brutal.
People were ready to pay, even with their lives.
But there were other players, you know, in the game and that kind of pushed people back to the houses.
But women, every single day you hear stories of women resisting.
Like I was talking to someone in Iran that she was explaining If I get into a taxi and I'm not wearing a hijab, they're going to confiscate the car of the taxi driver.
So my way of doing the protesting without creating the cost for other people is I wear it inside the taxi.
I wear it in the places that it has something to do with other people.
But wherever I'm the only one who's paying the price, I'm going to continue my protest.
And I think Caduceus amazing, brilliant, brave woman who are happy to kind of take this movement further down because they're, you know, if you grew up in a society that's taking away all of your rights, there's a tipping point, right?
Like you cannot continue living like that and you know there is no future.
people to come so and that's why when you look at the amazing materials and content that are left over from some of the people who died on this 16 years old 20 years old 18 years old having YouTube channels and talking about their lives it's all about that as young as that people you know these young girls were thinking about their future and not only themselves the future of a nation And they were saying enough is enough and I'm gonna pay the price and unfortunately a lot of people paid a really high price for it.
Yeah I've seen the figure of 500 people having died associated with the protests and the police state crackdowns essentially on that.
Also men standing in solidarity with women, that significant number of those 500 dead
were men.
And then I saw that in October just recently of last year, as you were saying, a 16-year-old
girl, Armita Garavand, if I'm saying that correctly, died whilst in a coma after being
assaulted on the Tehran metro by the morality police, so-called, in a similar kind of confrontation.
And then that same month, human rights activist Nargis Mohammadi was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize while serving prison time for criticizing the government.
So yeah, I get that picture from you that there is a sense of enough is enough and we're making a stand for future generations.
Yeah, and then it's not just only death, execution, which are horrifying.
And a really big price.
But the system is making sure that even if someone has posted something and got into trouble for it and went into prison, then their card, their bank card is confiscated.
You know, the financial burden after any arrest is really high.
And so they're using different tools and techniques to kind of calming them, damping this fire for the moment.
The amount of resistance I see in people, I don't think it's sustainable.
I think really soon we're going to hear another massive round of protests happening in Iran.
Okay, so these are all fairly recent events, but I know that you grew up in Iran.
You left in your early 20s to pursue journalism.
You're also an activist.
As I said, you've spoken twice at the UN.
And you were born just a couple of years after the revolution that created the Islamic Republic of Iran and installed the first of only two supreme leaders in the last 45 years, one of them for over 30 years, I believe.
I know that woman life freedom has been described as one of the biggest challenges to the regime in all of that time, but it's not the first example of women being oppressed in Iran or of protests against that.
So I'm just curious, whatever you want to share about that history and your own experience, and also why you think that women are such a target of these authoritarian religious laws.
Yes, you're completely right.
Less than a month after the victory of the Islamic Republic.
You know, inside Iran, there was 8th of March protests, a massive protest against the mandatory hijab, because Khomeini, the first Supreme Leader, came out and said, you know, put in place some narrative around mandatory hijab.
Women instantly went to protest.
The women's rights movement in Iran goes back 150 years.
It didn't start after the revolution.
All of these pressure on people, yeah, I'm not saying there wasn't more conservative part of society.
You should remember that part is more open.
But I'm saying, after revolution, women started feeling it really close to their heart.
And it wasn't only women who were experiencing this.
It was men as well, in different ways.
And I think it's in response to what the Islamic Republic have done.
They brought in all the tools of oppression that existed in the religion and used it to control the society.
So imagine a society that's telling the woman you have to wear hijab and it's not just that, there's so many other rules and regulations around the world.
And then if they don't obey you, then you Either make the man in the family to go and implement those rules,
And even if they disobey, they're going to face the consequences.
So you're making half of the population concerned about their every single movement because there might be consequences for that as you freely walk around this, you know, down the streets and someone doesn't like your outfit and they arrest you and then you might die.
And then the men as well are paying the price.
So the population is busy with something Yes.
Other than asking for, you know, better management of the oil money that the country has, or like asking about the massive corruption that exists in the society, or, you know, going and protesting for the rights.
And I think that formula has been used in Afghanistan in the same And wherever you see authoritarian regimes are trying to
control people, they find a rule or a law that gives them this kind of massive access
to control in different parts of the society.
I wanted to ask you about the current Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei.
He's made several public statements of a profoundly conspiratorial nature.
He said that gender equality is a Zionist plot to corrupt the role of women in society.
He denies the Holocaust.
He's also warned against Iran, for example, accepting any aid from the U.S.
during COVID because he suspected that they had engineered a special genetic version of the virus to harm Iranians.
And he further explained that by saying that there are human and demonic enemies that were working together.
So I'm just curious from an insider, like culturally, what role do you think conspiracy theories and supernatural cosmology play within the power structure and within like how, as you're describing, this authoritarian strategy works in this society?
I've been tracking down corruption in Iran, so I have this podcast that focuses on corruption and how it grew.
It's really amazing to see from the first day of inception of this idea in the Islamic Republic and they came to power.
Corruption was a massive part of it, like financial gain was really important for them.
But whenever they're talking about financial gain, there is a conspiratorial link to it.
There's this kind of like, oh, the God says this and there's a rule that you have to follow.
I think they've been amazing in adopting that into creating a culture of otherness.
As well as creating a feeling for at least a part of the society, not only you're going to lose the afterlife, you're going to lose whatever you have here, any dignity you have in this society.
And then within that, like the concepts of qeyrat, which is kind of honor of a man, or you know, those kind of concepts have been pushed off and brought into the picture and was always like movies and cultural products that are creating this idea around it that all of these people out there are after us.
We are the only good people and then if you don't follow us you know not only God wouldn't like you then you would you would lose whatever you have.
There were people inside that system, who came out and spoke against it.
And as soon as they came out and said like, yeah, this is happening, but at the same time, how can you say that God said a woman should wear a hijab, but at the same time, steal all of that money?
And then that guy vanishes.
So they, they hushed every opposition, every voice that might have spoke out about these kinds of things.
The conspiracy theory and that spirituality feeling is growing because the government put a lot of money in it.
They created this new field of medicine.
They call it Islamic medicine, which basically like selling weird stuff, combining herbs and stuff without any research behind it.
And the Supreme Leader has this idea, oh, this is going to take over the Western medicine.
And we're going to be really successful.
So when COVID vaccine came in, they were like, you know, all of these talk about, oh, the Western vaccines are dangerous.
So we're going to go for China.
But behind it, it's none of this.
It's about that guy who got a really good contract with China and wants to sell the Chinese vaccine.
And they put this kind of conspiracy theory on top of it and said it to people.
Yeah, it's, you know, we had Naomi Klein on to talk about her idea of the mirror world and and, you know, how everything is sort of upside down right now.
And this is a perfect example of that.
You're talking about the actual conspiracy behind the conspiracy theory.
Actually, there's all this corruption and we've got these contracts and we're profiting from this, but we're going to tell you something else that's conspiratorial and false.
And then at the same time, it's very convenient to identify outside enemies.
That are threatening to take away everything good that we have so that you are distracted from actually recognizing that you don't have a lot of good stuff.
That you're under incredible, incredible oppression and, and, uh, you know, living with this corruption and this, this top down power structure that is, it seems incredibly selfish and manipulative.
And it's amazing when you have that for four decades.
The first generation would say, and this is what happened to me, like my mom and I would say, we just have a revolution, we don't want another one.
We've lost a lot, a lot of people died.
Then my generation, yeah, there were some people who were active like me, you know, we've tried, but we never felt like we can go as far as we can go right now.
Then the generation after us, like right now, those teenagers in the streets, they're the children of people, you know, my generation.
And we have a different feeling about the whole system.
And I think that's why you hear about, you know, women's life freedom, because for us that top to down system It's not going to work.
We're learning it as a lived experience that the system that can bring equality needs to be based on feminist values, based on women's rights and the rights of every single minority and marginalized group of the society.
Women as the biggest marginalized group, they're the link between these different groups.
They're Baluchis, they're Kurds, they're Baha'i, they're Arab, coming from every corner of the society.
Iran can be a really interesting place to watch in the coming years because from what I hear coming from the ground, gradient women are not going to shy away from it.
Why?
They're in a war.
And they're going to continue until they win one way or another.
But how it looks like after that, I think in the next couple of years, we see we see it forms better, gets organized, and then we can have an understanding.
What would the outcome look like?
It's very powerful.
It's very powerful.
I mean, I hear you basically saying that the the strategy of dividing and conquering through all of these different marginalized groups essentially fails.
Because of the solidarity.
Yeah.
Shared between women who come from all of those different groups and are basically standing for the same values.
In our network, so, you know, the network that I built after Gina Massamini's death.
We have, we're mostly women, not by, you know, we didn't choose, but it was just like, okay, who can collaborate and work in an environment that is collaborative, bringing other people.
And it's not just about us being seen.
It's about raising other people who's ready to take the responsibility of lifting other people from the ground.
And it's a lot of amazing women from different groups coming together and helping each other.
We have this fantastic Balooj activist that has been part of our community from the beginning.
And now she actually won prizes for her bravery and encouragement.
But the reason she's standing there, she's coming from the most deprived part of the society.
There's lack of clean water or access to health care.
It's totally been ignored by the society.
And on top of the society's patriarchal system, it's a tribal part of Iraq.
She learned all of these skills and got verification or like validation for her thinking because these women from different parts of the society came around her and talked to her, lifted her up.
Someone taught her English, the other person taught her to do computer things, like everyone chipped in.
And I think that's the future I want to see.
A future that in that gender doesn't matter and we're lifting each other up.
Well, I want to hear more about your work in a moment, but I have one last question for you before we go there a little more deeply.
I want to turn our attention towards the U.S.
And how I observe, and I'm not alone in this, this kind of parallel rise of Christian nationalism.
And I say parallel because I see, even though it's not as pervasive, I see some parallels with what has happened in Iran.
Uh, you have Christian nationalism on the rise here and this new supermajority in the Supreme Court that our own right-wing fundamentalists have worked really hard on for decades to establish, and these reactionary fundamentalists immediately began dismantling the progress That has been made over the last 50 years in other areas, too, but especially around women's rights.
And you alluded to this earlier as well.
So as someone with your background, how does this strike you?
It's really disappointing, seriously.
But it's not surprising because when you look at how the progress happened in the U.S.
and development of ideas happened, unfortunately, a lot of us, for different reasons, haven't been successful at Explaining our ideas to other people.
And we lived in our bubbles.
And then social media came on top of that and kind of made our bubbles smaller because we're talking to our own people and we are getting more explained in our own point of views.
Understanding and compassion is kind of lacking in our conversations.
And that led to Again, people who are not feeling safe enough in their own space to find something to blame.
Yes, a woman is threatening my identity as a masculine man.
Yeah, I'm going to fight back.
The reaction to Me Too, I think for me, like when I'm saying it wasn't a surprise for me, was watching the reaction to Me Too campaign in the U.S.
and talking to people in the U.S.
like talking about the failure of it.
In my view, it was a success.
But it was, from outside, for us, it meant, oh, finally, someone is taking charge in this situation.
But in reality, grassroot movement in the women's movement didn't exist in the US, especially in the central part of it.
And I can see that happening in other parts of the world, because what would that person do who doesn't have a You know, that much to lose in life.
And then spending a lot of time on social media, they're going to go and find people who validate them.
in coming years we're going to see more divides, more rise of, as you mentioned,
any forum or groups that are going against women's rights, first of all,
and then anti-war narrative that is out there.
I think because these two are the core masculine things that are out there.
Like for a lot of these groups that are, you know, extremists, these two are the core fundamental part of their ideology.
Because if you take these two away from them, their identity is gone.
A lot of these men, they don't have any replacement.
That's why I'm following all of these crazy YouTubers or, you know, bodybuilders.
Yeah, so you mentioned an assault on women's rights and also a kind of crackdown on anyone who is sort of anti-military or anti-war.
And then what we've seen here with this new Supreme Court as well is not only did they overturn Roe v. Wade, but they're looking at, you know, various kinds of legislation that has to do with whether or not employers or healthcare plans or doctors are required to provide birth control because that may Maybe an issue of quote-unquote religious freedom, and then you have the removal of the striking down of the affirmative action legislation that had been in place for a long time too.
And then the other one that we haven't mentioned yet, which is a big threat supposedly to traditional masculinity, is gay rights, right?
That's sort of next, you know, how are we going to look at gay marriage is I think on the docket too for this current Supreme Court.
Are the issues around, I mean, you mentioned tribalism.
I don't know if immigration is as big of an issue there because it's a really big issue here too, right?
So any of these things that can be framed in a sort of pseudo-populist way as threatening the common man, so to speak.
Are some of these additional issues that play in Iran as well?
Yeah, definitely.
Immigration, especially, we have a big population of Afghan immigrants in Iran.
Unfortunately, they're right.
The government has been playing these different campaigns around it and propaganda campaigns.
After Women Live Freedom, six months in, eight months in, they started this massive campaign against Afghan populations, saying they kill people.
There were a lot of disinformation going around on social media.
And the stories of rape, murder, they will try from other parts of society to kind of counter that.
But I think it's always placed in their hand, isn't it?
Like that fear of unknown, and you mentioned that.
No wonder that at every step, we have to be vigilant.
We have to think about, if we are an activist, we have to think about how to make sure that the energy in our communities are not dying away.
How to make sure they feel the urgency of this moment that we are living in in the history and the urgency of action.
They need to take action.
It's not time to sit down and do nothing.
And I think it's that passion and action that is missing right now, especially One other aspect of it that comes to mind a lot, especially when I'm talking with the Iranian community as well as the British here, is that we became really politically correct in our language and that kind of
discriminate some of the people who are suffering from being able to express their suffering and finding and carving their own path through it to get to us.
So if we want to create, like any other sustainable thing, changing behaviours and creating the change that is long-lasting, we have to find that common language again and hopefully bring The other parts of society disagree with us to a common ground.
Well, along those lines, I wanted to ask you about your work.
I know that after leaving the BBC's World Service, you've devoted your time both to activism and to tech-based ventures, is the impression I have, that aim to empower women and girls.
So, what would you like to tell us about any of those initiatives, as well as about the Azadi Network?
I was really lucky to get involved with some amazing people in San Francisco who, after BBC, gave me the opportunity to work with them in the technology sector.
And learn from them.
I think that was really interesting.
One of the things that we worked on, and it's still going, it was this app for holistic approach to period pain.
Because everybody's like, oh, menstruations.
I don't want to fund that.
If you're talking about pregnancy, then I'll give you the money.
Even in that field, the lens is really patriarchal.
Because they think, oh, You know, woman means woman when they can reproduce.
And the fact that some women are going through different types of pains and, you know, on a daily basis are suffering and doesn't impress that many investors.
But when Women Like Freedom happened, I kind of felt that my calling is what I'm doing every day now, which is called Auxiliary Network.
I wake up with energy to build communities, to organize people and allow people to work together and share their resources.
There are a lot of skills I'm using there and I'm learning a lot.
Well, this has been very illuminating and enjoyable.
Thank you, Nagin.
How can our listeners find out more and participate in what you're doing in the world?
We have a website called azadi.network.
And I love people like, drop us a message and tell us how you, how you think, what do you think about Women Like Freedom?
Is there anything we love to, we're hoping to be able to have a conference with feminists and thinkers from around the world and different fields to talk about A nation-state that is led by white women, how would it look like?
What the economy would look like?
How would you run the society?
You know, create grassroots that is working, the civil society that can work with the government.
So all of these questions that everyone is having regarding creating an equal society, we want to examine them and maybe find an answer to them in a conference.
So anyone who's interested in that, Just raise your hand.