The protests in Iran are aimed at overcoming the religious-authoritarian structures. More and more Iranians are demanding more democracy and the rule of law.
The Iranian protest movement has taken a heavy toll in blood. According to the Norway-based human rights organization Iran Human Rights, 537 people – including 48 women and 68 children – lost their lives as a result of the violent response by state security forces to the demonstrations.
The figures cannot be independently confirmed. But also the many reports from eyewitnesses and videos published in particular on Twitter testify to the brutal actions of the state forces.
The fact that the protesters continue to raise their voices despite the high death toll shows what is now at stake for the Islamist elite in Iran – namely nothing less than the theocratically based state system itself and the institutions shaped by it.
“Death to Khamenei”
At the beginning of Newroz, the Persian New Year, on March 21, its leader, revolutionary leader Ali Khamenei, found out just how big and determined the resistance against this elite is.
“The Islamic Republic has proved that it is strong,” he said in a speech broadcast live on state television from the city of Mashhad. The public protests were “unrest” and the result of a “global conspiracy” orchestrated by Iran’s enemies “Only a very small number of Iranians” are taking part in the protests. But the response from the citizens was not long in coming. They chanted “Death to Khamenei” in Tehran and other major cities in the country and once again called for the fall of the Islamic Republic.
The fact that the protesters wish the country’s highest ecclesiastical dignitary dead makes it clear how great the distance between the system he presented and many citizens has become. And it’s not just a thing of the past: for decades, the theocratic system and large parts of the population have become so alienated from each other that religiosity itself is now up for debate.
Disillusionment after more than four decades of Islamism
“Islam was so deeply rooted in the people that only an Islamic revolution could uproot these roots,” the Islamic scholar Katajun Amirpur quotes the Iranian philosopher Abdolkarim Soroush in her recently published book “Iran without Islam. The Uprising against the Theocracy”.
This statement only appears to be paradoxical: the real form of Islam that the regime has imposed on the country since it took power in 1979 seems so questionable to many citizens that they are willing to part with it for the sake of a better future.
The reasons for the change are obvious, Amirpur says in a DW interview. “If, for example, my forelock is hanging out from under the headscarf and moral guardians reprimand me for it, if I dance in the street or want to have custody of my children without my husband’s consent, and if that is supposedly not an option in the name of Islam – then it’s a relatively short or even natural step for people to say: well, if this is Islam, then I would rather have a society without Islam.”
A study by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in IRAN (GAMAAN) at Tilburg University from 2020 also shows that more and more Iranians have a distanced relationship to their faith. According to this, statistically extrapolated, around half of the population stated that they did , she gave up her religion. In contrast, 41 percent said their religious or non-religious views had not changed significantly over the course of their lives.
Religious practice in particular has relaxed. Around 60 percent of those surveyed stated that they did not pray at all, 40 percent would pray, but only 27 percent consistently followed the Islamic prayer times, the rest their personal ideas. 32 percent saw themselves as part of a religious but non-practicing family. But not even three percent said they grew up in an “unbelieving” or “anti-religious” family.
Growing distance to religion
According to the study, however, the greatest resistance is to the amalgamation of state and religion. The vast majority – 68 percent of the population – believes that religious rules should not be regulated by state legislation, even if believers have a parliamentary majority. Only 14 percent are of the opinion that the laws of the state should without exception cover the religious regulations.
These results document a development that a survey by the Gallup polling institute showed in 2006: according to it, more than half of Iranians – 56 percent – rejected the control of public life through religious guidelines.
Many want to overthrow the political system altogether
This development is also driving the current protests. Political scientist Azadeh Zamirirad from the Berlin Foundation for Science and Politics (SWP) writes that it is no longer a question of small-scale political issues such as lifting the dress code that was enforced by force or individual reform projects. Rather, the aim is to abolish the previous political order in its entirety. The broad social appeal and the claim to bring about a system change speak in favor of a revolutionary character of the protests. “The slogan “Woman, life, freedom” provides a collective leitmotif that is universal and fundamentally future-oriented, even if ideas for a concrete design of a new political order are only in the early stages,” says Zamirirad on the website the SWP.
The force of the protests and their duration indicate that nothing less than the collective self-image of Iranian society is at stake. This is also evident in conversations with students and young Iranians, Amirpur told DW. They often said they didn’t care what Islam said on this or that topic. “When it is sometimes said that Islam and human rights are incompatible, they reply that it doesn’t matter to them, they still want democracy and the rule of law. These are the main concerns for them.”
Author: Kersten Knipp
