A woman holds a flame to a man's face and uses it to light a cigarette. The man is not present, but his authority is. His portrait burns anyway. The gesture is small, almost casual—not a riot but a refusal—and that is precisely its power. Women across Iran have learned that defiance need not announce itself as revolution. Sometimes it inhales. Sometimes it exhales smoke.
This is where the present struggle begins: not with ideology, but with women reclaiming the right to inhabit their own bodies without permission. Long before economic protests returned to the streets, women had already declared the regime's moral authority void. Hair removed, hijabs burned, portraits desecrated—these acts were not symbolic flourishes but ontological ones. They asserted a simple truth the Islamic Republic cannot tolerate: sovereignty begins with the body.
That truth was forced into the open by the killing of Mahsa Amini, a twenty-two-year-old Kurdish woman arrested in September 2022 by the morality police for allegedly violating hijab regulations. She died after violent detention, her body bearing the marks of state discipline exercised in God's name. Her death detonated a nationwide uprising unlike any the regime had faced. The slogan that followed—'Zan, Zendegi, Azadi' (Woman, Life, Freedom)—was not rhetorical decoration but a reordering of political priorities. Life before doctrine. Autonomy before obedience.
The state responded as it always does: bullets, mass arrests, internet blackouts and confessions extracted under duress. But something had shifted. Fear fractured. Women did not retreat. Instead, their defiance became contagious.
Azar Nafisi once described this kind of quiet rebellion in Reading Lolita in Tehran, where women gathered in private apartments to read forbidden novels, not because literature could topple a regime, but because it could preserve an interior life the state could not colonise. The Islamic Republic has always understood the danger of such spaces. A woman reading without permission, like a woman walking unveiled, announces that authority has limits. The regime's war on women has never been about modesty; it has been about ownership.
What followed Mahsa Amini's death did not end with the suppression of the 2022 uprising. Instead, it inaugurated a period of recurring unrest that has now culminated in the broadest and most socially expansive challenge the Islamic Republic has faced in years—and, by the breadth of its geographic reach and class composition, arguably the most serious popular mobilisation since the fall of the Shah. What began as a women-led revolt against bodily control has since spilled decisively into workplaces and markets: bazaars have closed, factories slowed, transport workers struck, and teachers walked out.
This shift matters because it marks the point at which moral defiance becomes material refusal. When protest enters the sphere of reproduction—wages, rent, food, work—it ceases to be containable as cultural dissent and becomes a direct challenge to how power is organised and sustained.
Iran today is a country where official inflation exceeds forty per cent, while food prices are rising faster still. Bread, eggs, dairy, cooking oil—the grammar of survival—have seen double-digit annual increases. The minimum wage covers barely a fraction of the cost of basic living in major cities. Rent consumes over half of household income for working families. Healthcare and education are rationed by wealth. Survival depends on debt, multiple jobs, or withdrawal from the formal economy altogether.
Nearly sixty per cent of working-age Iranians are excluded from secure employment. Youth unemployment is chronic. Graduates drive taxis, sell goods informally, or emigrate. Workers do not labour to advance but to postpone collapse. This is not temporary hardship. It is structural immiseration.
That distinction matters. Hunger existed under the Shah, but it was the by-product of uneven development and authoritarian modernisation—brutal and politically explosive, but not sanctified. Under the Islamic Republic, hunger has become a governing instrument. It is no longer collateral damage. It is leverage.
At the centre of this system stands the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), now less a military institution than an economic sovereign. Through a labyrinth of foundations, holding companies, and quasi-private firms, the IRGC dominates construction, energy, telecommunications, logistics, and heavy industry. Conservative estimates place between a quarter and a third of Iran's GDP under its influence. Sanctions do not weaken this structure; they harden it, rewarding those best positioned to evade them while wages erode and workers absorb the cost.
This is why the working-class character of the revolt matters. Middle-class protest can be dismissed as cultural deviance or foreign influence. Working-class revolt cannot. When shopkeepers close bazaars, when transport workers strike, when teachers and labourers walk out, the regime loses its foundational claim to rule in the name of the dispossessed. Its mythology collapses under lived experience.
Iran's exceptionally gifted film directors, the likes of Abbas Kiarostami, understood this form of power long before it erupted into open revolt. In Taste of Cherry, a man drives through Tehran searching for someone willing to bury him after his suicide. Authority barely appears. There are no sermons, no slogans, no police raids. What weighs on the film is something quieter and more devastating: isolation, exhaustion, the thinning of meaning under invisible constraints. Power does not need to shout. It merely narrows the space in which life can be lived.
This is how the Islamic Republic endures. It does not require belief, only compliance. It governs by making silence feel like safety and obedience feel like relief. Over time, survival becomes submission.
But women broke that logic. By refusing compulsory hijab, they revoked consent. By burning portraits, they stripped authority of its aura. The economic protests that followed were not separate from this defiance but its extension. Women demanding bodily autonomy, workers demanding wages, students demanding futures—these are not competing agendas but converging refusals.
To understand how Iran arrived here, one must reject the false binary of Shah versus Supreme Leader, secular tyranny versus religious tyranny. The catastrophe is not that Iran moved from modernity to theocracy, but that it was repeatedly denied democratic sovereignty.
The 1953 coup against Mohammad Mossadegh foreclosed that path. The Shah's repression prepared the ground. The clerics exploited the revolution, used the left to seize power, and then butchered it—culminating in the 1988 prison massacres, where tens of thousands were executed and erased.
This history is not past. It governs the present. And it is routinely obscured by geopolitical campism. On one side, the regime demands silence in the name of anti-Zionism. On the other, reactionaries invoke Iranian suffering to launder imperial or monarchist fantasies. Both reduce Iranians to instruments. Both erase the working class.
The woman lighting a cigarette from a burning portrait is not thinking about Washington or Tel Aviv. A worker striking over unpaid wages is not auditioning for anyone's camp. They are asserting something more dangerous: that life should not require permission, that survival should not depend on obedience, that dignity is not negotiable.
The death of Mahsa Amini made that truth impossible to ignore. The women reading forbidden books, the women burning hijabs, the workers walking out—all are saying the same thing in different languages. Authority has overreached. Consent has been withdrawn.
When that withdrawal spreads from bodies to workplaces, from memory to material life, no amount of repression can restore what has been lost. The flame may well be a tiny flicker, barely enough to light a cigarette. But it burns where power is weakest: in the space where fear used to live.
Zende bād enghelāb! (Long live the revolution!)
Marg bar setamgar, che shāh bāshe che rahbar! (Death to the oppressor, be it the Shah or the (current) leader!)
In bār āzādi-ye kāmel! (This time, full freedom!)
Hambastegi bā mardom-e Irān! (Solidarity with the people of Iran!)
(The author is a research associate at the International Centre for Applied Ethics and Public Affairs in Sheffield. Views are personal.)