The killing of Jina Mahsa Amini, a Kurdish Iranian woman who allowed a wisp of hair to escape the confines of her hijab, by the morality police on 16 September 2022, has set the streets of Iran on fire with an intensity that threatens to bring down the Islamic regime.
Feminists around the world have been staging solidarity protests and mass hair-cutting rituals. I too chopped off a lock of my hair at London’s Piccadilly Circus in an event organized by Maryam Namazie, an Iranian activist, from One Law for All campaign.1
Media interest has been at an all-time high. Western support for the uprisings in Iran has been described by Jacobin magazine as ‘a kind of “intersectional imperialism” that seeks to justify military and diplomatic escalation with Iran in the name of female emancipation from Islamic “barbarism”’.2 Iranian activists, though, argue that not enough has been done to isolate the government of Iran.
In the high-pitched enthusiasm for the Iranian uprising, some vital truths are being lost. In an interview in The Observer, Iranian writer Shiva Akhavan Rad, refers to the slogan Zan, Zindagi, Azadi (Woman, Life, Freedom) without mentioning that this was in fact adapted from the original Jin, Jiyan, Azadi: a Kurdish slogan protesting the death of a Kurdish woman, Jina Amini.3
This is not an act of sectarian point-scoring, but an acknowledgement of the fact that the Kurds are a historically oppressed minority in Iran and across the border in Syria, Iraq and Turkey, and their struggles must not continue to be invisibilized.
That this cause has been embraced by Iranians strengthens the opposition to the country’s oppressive government. But it is the Kurdish regions of Iran, known as Rojhelat in Kurdish, that have borne the brunt of regime brutality.
This brings me to the second trope: that the protest movement in Iran is ‘the first feminist revolution in the world’. Actually, no. The first feminist revolution in the world is in progress in Rojava, northeast Syria, led by Kurdish women (and men) since 2012. It is here that the slogan, Jin, Jiyan, Azadi was first popularized.4
The Rojava women’s revolution has hardly been covered in the mainstream media, perhaps in deference to Turkey, a NATO ally, which sees the movement for Kurdish self-determination as ‘terrorism’ – and is bombing Rojava at the time of writing. In the meantime, a protest movement with the potential to bring down the Islamic regime of Iran gets unprecedented coverage: because Iran is an implacable enemy of the West.
Jin, Jiyan, Azadi
A slogan that was little known before the death of Jina Amini, and was enthusiastically chanted in Kurdish political gatherings, now reverberates in meeting halls and demonstrations across the world. An opportunity to discuss its origins is an opportunity to raise awareness of Rojava and so the universal embrace of this slogan is a positive development.
Yet Kurdish women warn of the danger of slogans becoming empty words. As Dilar Dirik, a Kurdish academic and
