The following interview excerpts are part of the CPPD discussion series ‘Remembering the Present’ / ‘Gegenwart Erinnern’. The full video of the discussion between doctor and journalist Gilda Sahebi and cultural and religious studies scholar Hannan Salamat is available at the following link: https://bit.ly/gegenwart-erinnern
Hannan Salamat: 22-year-old Jina Mahsa Amini was arrested in Tehran on 13 September 2022. The young woman died on 16 September. What can you tell us about the context of those events?
Gilda Sahebi: Of course, there is a lot you can say about the context. Jina Amini was arrested by the ‘morality police’ in Tehran on 13 September. This police force has existed since 2005, though before that, morals were already controlled very violently. The police are there to enforce the Islamic dress code throughout the country. They are the ones who arrested Jina Amini. In any case, Jina Amini was beaten and abused, fell into a coma at the police station, and died three days later as a result of those injuries and abuse.
It doesn’t really matter how she wore the headscarf or not: the morality police and all their rules are arbitrary. Absolute arbitrariness rules in Iran, and women are structurally criminalised. The moment you step outside the door as a woman, you are actually a potential criminal, regardless of how you dress. The headscarf in Iran symbolises the systematic oppression of women. Violence and anger towards the morality police have increased in recent years because they have been acting more and more violently; arresting people, arresting women, abusing them, putting them in prison. Two months before Jina Amini was murdered, Sepideh Rashno had been arrested for not wearing a headscarf. She was tortured, abused, and forced to appear on state television to apologise with obvious signs of torture visible on her face. Incidents of this kind have become very frequent. In this sense, the murder of Jina Amini was not the sole trigger of the protests, but it was an important one, partly because she was Kurdish and Sunni. She was buried on 17 September. That’s when the protests began. Women took off their headscarves en masse, shouting ‘Jin Jiyan Azadî’ (‘Woman, Life, Freedom’), and took to the streets. Civil protest has a long tradition in Kurdistan and was therefore incredibly powerful. This then spread to the whole country.
Hannan Salamat: We are here at a memorial site – we are sitting in front of a black mulberry planted in memory of Jina Amini. A year has now passed since her death, and we are already seeing much less about Iran in the media. I find it fascinating to see how this commemoration continues now. What do you think makes for good forms of remembrance
in this context?
Gilda Sahebi: Firstly, it is fundamentally important to emphasise how vital remembrance is. In Iran, remembrance is permanently, rigorously, and violently banned by the state. Even the graves of people who were murdered during the protests have been desecrated. Jina Amini’s grave has been desecrated several times. When parents hang pictures on the wall outside their house in memory of their murdered child on the deceased’s birthday, everything is cleared away. All spaces of remembrance are completely erased by the state. This also applies to memorialisation of the country’s history. People are not allowed to remember the country’s history before 1979. The state wants to erase memory, which shows how important it is – for the individual and for society.
You can also see that in Germany. It is good to have official memorials and monuments, but they are not enough. We are now living three or four generations after the Shoah, and you can see how quickly people forget. The majority of Germans want to draw a line under the past, regardless of the number of memorials we have. They are important, but they are no substitute for the work that needs to be done in society. Germany missed that opportunity, and many people in the country are suffering as a result. It will continue to go very wrong because nothing has changed in recent decades.
What would it ideally look like? I don’t know. Of course there can be memorials, there can be all kinds of physical forms of commemoration. It is especially important for individuals to be able to go to a grave, to have books to write in. But I believe that political and cultural remembrance are most important. They include things like reporting, schoolbooks, the book market, our culture of debate. What words do we use, how inhuman is the language we use? All of this is also remembrance, because we are not doing it in a vacuum, but in a location within history.
It is very, very difficult to deny history. The fact that many things happened in Iran before 1979 is part of history, and if you push that away, it’s impossible to grow in the future. It’s exactly the same in my own life. If I said that my story starts now – today – then I can’t use anything that happened in recent years. That will all be gone, and we don’t want that. We grow from both the pain and the joy that we had. That’s why, for me, remembering is something much, much bigger than just physical action. It must be present all across society and I believe that few people understand this. Regarding Iran, it is the people there who must decide what their remembrance looks like. They are currently being governed by a state that wants to eradicate remembrance, precisely for the reasons I just mentioned: remembering means growing, and remembering leads to compassion and love, and that is not what the Iranian state wants.
