What Iranians Want by Arash Azizi

Author:Arash Azizi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780861547128
Publisher: Oneworld

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* Since both my parents are filmmakers who worked for, or with, the state broadcaster for much of their careers, I grew up on many such absurd stories.

Six

We Are All Iranians: The Fight for Freedom of Religion

When protests broke out in Iran following Mahsa’s death on 16 September 2023, it soon became clear that this represented the most serious challenge to the regime since 2009. But how far would this new movement spread?

Previous waves of protest hadn’t always translated well across all of Iran. The 2009 Green Movement was centred around Tehran and other major cities in central Iran like Isfahan. It failed to enthuse large numbers in Azeri- and Kurdish-majority areas of western Iran. The 2019 protests and strikes mobilised many workers in Iran’s more peripheral provinces, yet Iran’s urban middle class in cities like Tehran remained largely indifferent. But in 2022, the movement seemed to touch every corner of Iran. It had started with the killing of a Kurdish girl in Tehran and had quickly spread to her hometown and other Kurdish-majority cities in western Iran as well as other major cities such as Rasht and Isfahan. But would it flourish everywhere? Where would be the next big epicentre?

Thousands of kilometres away from Kurdistan, on the opposite side of the country, lies the southeastern Sistan and Balochistan, Iran’s second biggest province and its poorest. It’s distinguished by the Martian mountains, idyllic beaches and strategic import – its immediate neighbours are Afghanistan, Pakistan and the Gulf of Oman. Like most provinces on the Iranian borders, its inhabitants’ mother tongue differs from the country’s only official language, Persian. They speak Balochi, like their fellow Baloch in the neighbouring province in Pakistan. But it stands apart from much of Iran in one further crucial respect. Like Kurdistan, most of its people are Sunni Muslims, belonging to Iran’s largest religious minority.

While more than 90% of Iranians are Shia Muslims, from 8–10% belong to the Sunni branch of Islam. The remaining 1–2% are Bahá’ís, Zoroastrians, Christians, Jews and believers in other faiths, although these demographic statistics only record religion at birth, not belief itself. Many Iranian young people are atheistic or agnostic but this would never be officially declared as the Islamic Republic could subject them to the death penalty. This grisly fate also awaits those who convert out of Islam or even from Shia Islam to another branch – both acts of apostasy. Bahman Shakoori, a Shia man who became a Sunni, suffered such a fate as one of the first victims of the Republic’s apostasy laws. He was convicted of ‘insulting Prophet Muhammad’ because, like many Sunnis, he had criticised the prevalent Shia custom of paying pilgrimage to the graves of Muslim saints. In autumn 1980, the Republic executed him.1 Iranian Sunnis jarred with the Islamic Republic’s ideal of a state governed by Shia Islam from the very beginning.

The Baloch people, already on the economic margins, also faced religious oppression. They had every reason to revolt. As the Women, Life, Freedom

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