Descrizione
Since the death of Mahsa Amini, the young Kurdish girl arrested by the morality police for wearing the hijab in an inappropriate way, the women’s rebellion in Iran has had a huge echo in the West. The massive demonstrations shouting “Woman, Life, Freedom” have fueled the hope of a new political and cultural revolution in the Islamic Republic of Ali Khamenei. The voices of the protagonists of the revolt, however, have rarely emerged to give us back their dreams, their concrete expectations and, above all, the great ideas and figures of the past that inspired them. In the streets of Tehran is the story of a witness and one of the major exponents of the heroic resistance of Iranian women. Like any authentic testimony, thanks to its strength and narrative tension, this small book allows us to understand more than a thousand essays why their insurrection has shaken and shakes the power of the ayatollahs to its foundations. Nila narrates the days following the death of Mahsa Amini, when women rediscover the “nightlife” abolished by the regime and pour into the city neighborhoods as one wounded family shouting “Freedom!”. These are the days of enthusiasm and sharing, of the rediscovery of a common existence free from age-old constraints. She then tells of the dark days of repression in which the humiliations inflicted by the militiamen on young women are only the cruel prologue to chain murders, stonings, executions without trial. Finally, she shows how the protest does not retreat one step, because it comes from afar, from a great and noble culture of emancipation, which culminates in a radiant day in the mid-nineteenth century, when Tahereh, “the pure”, mystical poet, unparalleled orator, wise theologian, removes her veil before the religious. A symbolic gesture that marked the end of Sharia in her eyes, a gesture that is repeated today by thousands of women in Iran, “united in one light”. “At least at this moment in our history, ‘bear witness’ is a more ardent word than ‘live’. You can live a life while remaining a spectator. Bearing witness, as witnesses and as martyrs, means being the architects of our own destiny. These are the words that I want to convey, after having walked in blood, to those who come after us. To those who, in the whirlwind of our history, will look for us. If they look for us at all.” A hymn to women’s freedom that, from the voice of a great poet of Persian culture, is transmitted, intact, to the young protagonists of today’s heroic revolt.
