The 40th day after someone’s death is a signature moment in Iranian culture, an important part of their rituals of mourning and grief. The 40th day after Mahsa Amini’s death has been a signature moment in Iranian current events, as protesters have marked the occasion with marches and gatherings across the country, and especially in the nation’s capital.
The protests, which follow weeks of unrest, were reported at dozens of universities throughout the Islamic Republic, with the state-aligned Iran Students’ News Agency reporting clashes between protestors and police.
“On the 40th day of Mahsa Amini’s death, the central streets of Tehran were filled with an inflammatory atmosphere,” The ISNA said on twitter.
Violence broke out on the outskirts of Amini’s hometown of Saghez in the western province of Kurdistan, some 300 miles from Tehran, where earlier in the day thousands of mourners gathered at the cemetery where her body has been interred.
Amid the protests have been a number of women eschewing the traditional hijab headscarf required under Iran’s strict interpretation of Shari’ah.
A photo posted to social media and verified by NBC News showed a young woman standing on a car with her hands raised in the air and her headscarf removed, overlooking a long line of people in the city.
While reports of senior government officials, their families, and their friends fleeing Iran are as yet unconfirmed, should they prove true the protests over the death of Mahsa Amini while in police custody may have reached the critical mass beyond which government forces are no longer able to control the situation.
Iranian officials are seeking “British passports” for their families as they charter “five flights a day” fleeing the pariah state, Express.co.uk has been told. Traditionally 40 days is a mourning milestone in Iranian culture and scores of civilians massed in cities across Iran on Wednesday. The Iranian regime has in the past brutally put down any dissent but the latest ongoing unrest has shown no sign of abating. Express.co.uk has learned sections of the main airport in Tehran have been taken over by regime forces as a fast-track area for their own family and friends to escape the country.
The protests over the hijab are particularly significant as they are the first direct challenge to the mullahs’ moral authority and not just their political legitimacy.
If the mullahs at the center of the Iranian Islamic Republic have in fact lost their moral legitimacy and credibility, the regime is absolutely about to fall—the key word, of course, being “if”.
I appreciate your reports from elsewhere than the US.