UAE foreign minister reviews ties with Iranian counterpart

LONDON: On Sept. 13, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian lady, was arrested in Tehran for violating the Islamic republic’s strict costume code for girls. Within the custody of the Gasht-e Ershad — the “Steering Patrol,” or morality police — she suffered a catastrophic head damage and, after three days in a coma, died in hospital.

Her dying was the set off for tons of of protests throughout the nation, which have seen women and men take to the streets in huge numbers, with ladies overtly shunning the compulsory carrying of the hijab and slicing their hair in public in a gesture of defiance.

Now a brand new report from the Tony Blair Institute for International Change — TBI — backed by two consecutive polls of 1000’s of Iranians, has concluded that the widespread rejection of the hijab is nothing lower than an emblem of a nationwide craving for regime change.

The present protests are “no flash-in-the-pan second,” says Kasra Aarabi, co-author of the report and the Iran Program lead at TBI’s Extremism Coverage Unit.

“The protests we’re seeing now are unprecedented of their longevity, and of their dimension. However they’re a continuation of the pattern for unrest that emerged in 2017, since once we’ve seen Iranians constantly taking to the streets.”

Aarabi, a non-resident scholar on the Center East Institute in Washington and a local Farsi speaker, believes that the present unrest, a few of the worst seen in Iran because the revolution in 1978 changed the modernizing regime of the Shah, is a pivotal second for Iran.

“That is the start of the top of the Islamic Republic,” he mentioned.

“It’s been clear for years that the Iranian folks don’t need reform, they need regime change, the downfall of the Islamic Republic in its entirety and the creation of a secular democracy.”

Younger folks in Iran, he says, are witnessing the good modifications going down elsewhere within the area, from the bridge-building of the Abraham Accords to the good modernizing reforms in Saudi Arabia, “and so they’re considering, ‘Why can’t we have now that?’”

The TBI report attracts on two polls carried out amongst tens of 1000’s of Iranians, which display the extent to which Iran has turn into a secular society, regardless of greater than 40 years of life below a hard-line Shiite theocracy.

Key findings embody that women and men in Iran are nearly equally against the necessary carrying of the hijab, rejected by 70 p.c of males and 74 p.c of girls.

This opposition additionally spans what may in any other case be anticipated to be the divide between city and nation, the place individuals are historically thought of to be extra conservative in outlook.

Solely 21 p.c of city Iranians imagine within the apply, help that rises solely to twenty-eight p.c amongst rural communities.

Predictably, rejection of the obligatory carrying of the hijab is strongest amongst youthful folks — 78 p.c of respondents aged between 20 and 29 oppose it.

But the apply can be opposed by 68 p.c of Iranians aged between 30 and 49, and 74 p.c aged over 50 — the so-called revolution era.

Solely a small minority of Iranians help the apply — simply 13 p.c of girls and 17 p.c of males.

The hijab protests, says the TBI, are clearly about regime change: 84 p.c of those that oppose the costume code additionally wish to see an finish to the Islamic Republic.

Moreover, “the anti-regime protest motion in Iran is essentially secular,” mentioned the report, including that “76 p.c of Iranians who need regime change, additionally take into account faith unimportant of their lives.”

The truth is, such is the “unprecedented secularization” sweeping Iran that the TBI concludes that “Iran’s society is not spiritual.”

Solely a declining minority within the theocratic republic follows the Islamic obligation to wish 5 occasions a day, starting from 33 p.c of rural Iranians to solely 26 p.c of urbanites.

Analyzed when it comes to training, solely 26 p.c of Iranians with a college diploma pray 5 occasions a day, whereas the proportion for folks with a high-school diploma or decrease is little totally different, at 28 p.c.

Though the report, “Protests and polling insights from the streets of Iran: How elimination of the hijab grew to become an emblem of regime change,” was revealed on Tuesday, it incorporates beforehand unpublished knowledge from two surveys carried out in Iran in 2020 and 2022.

This, says the TBI, demonstrates that the problem of the hijab and the craving for the secularization of Iranian society has been simmering for years.

“As we speak’s protests are the consequence of the massive hole between the regime and the folks of Iran,” mentioned Aarabi.

“Regardless of residing below a hard-line Islamist theocracy, the Iranian individuals are essentially the most secular within the Center East. There was a gradual strategy of secularization and liberalization that started within the early Nineteen Nineties, which has reached unprecedented ranges previously 5 years.”

The brand new report attracts on polls performed in June 2020 and February 2022 by the Group for Analyzing and Measuring Attitudes in Iran — GAMAAN — an unbiased, non-profit analysis basis registered within the Netherlands.

As a substitute of standard face-to-face or telephone-based polling strategies, GAMAAN says it makes use of “digital instruments and various strategies to seize the true opinions of Iranians … permitting Iranians to reply questions on delicate topics honestly, with out fearing for his or her security.”

A survey performed by GAMAAN in June 2020 polled 39,981 respondents on questions regarding faith. In February 2022, 16,850 Iranians responded to questions on political methods.

Analyzed by demographic breakdown, says the TBI, “the outcomes reveal a steadily rising consensus on the streets, which is anti-compulsory hijab and anti-regime at its core.”

Hundreds of arrests have adopted because the regime has clamped down on the protesters. Some have been charged with crimes punishable by dying, corresponding to “enmity towards God” and “corruption on Earth.”

This month has seen at the very least 5 executions of protesters carried out and confirmed by the state, and unknown numbers of individuals, together with kids, have been killed within the protests.

The HRA Information Company, based in 2005 to observe human-rights abuses in Iran, says greater than 400 protesters have been killed, and at the very least 17,250 folks have been arrested.

Final week UNICEF, the United Nations kids’s company, reported that “since late September an estimated 50 kids have reportedly misplaced their lives within the public unrest in Iran.”

The newest was a 10-year-old boy, Kian Pirfalak, considered one of a number of folks shot lifeless in and round protests final Wednesday (Nov. 16). He was hit by gunfire and died as he and his father have been driving residence within the western Iranian metropolis of Izeh.

The protests, extensively coated within the West, gained a fair greater profile this week when the Iranian soccer workforce pointedly refused to sing the nationwide anthem earlier than their opening World Cup match towards England in Qatar.

Earlier than the sport, skipper Ehsan Hajjsafi mentioned the workforce supported those that had died within the protests, including “we have now to just accept that the circumstances in our nation usually are not proper and our individuals are not glad.”

The West, says the TBI’s Aarabi, had failed to acknowledge the transformation that has been going down in Iranian society “as a result of it was targeted solely on viewing Iran, and the dissent within the nation, via the lens of the 2015 nuclear settlement, after which Trump’s withdrawal from that settlement.

“However this dissent just isn’t being pushed by the nuclear deal, nor by the reimposition of sanctions. It’s being pushed by life below a totalitarian, misogynistic, ideological regime, which has constantly prioritized the pursuits of its hard-line Islamist ideology over these of the Iranian folks.”

Commenting on the report, Tony Blair, the previous UK prime minister who based his institute in 2016, mentioned that “the folks of Iran have proven extraordinary bravery and braveness over the previous two months. They need to know they’ve the help of thousands and thousands of individuals across the globe who admire the stand they’ve taken for freedom.

“I’ve all the time mentioned, and I stand by this extra so right now, that the only most liberating occasion for the Center East will come when the Iranian folks lastly have their freedom.

“For the extraordinary folks of Iran, the values that many might describe as ‘Western’ are in reality their very own. Neither they nor their nation must be outlined by the Islamic Republic. As an amazing folks, whose historical past and civilization are wealthy and diverse, it’s they and so they alone who ought to outline their very own future.

“That is why I firmly imagine it’s in our pursuits right now, within the West, to indicate our deep solidarity with the protesters risking their lives for what we so usually take with no consideration.”

It was, he added, “time we within the West recalibrate our coverage in a means that attracts a transparent distinction between the folks of Iran and the Islamic Republic. Our efforts ought to serve the previous.”