One account from NYRB; readers can supply links to others in the comments. An excerpt:
Are the protests that were prompted by the death in police custody of a young woman, Mahsa Amini, on September 16 comparable to the strikes and demonstrations that led to the Shah’s downfall in 1979, or has Amini become a figure in the tragic mold of Mohamed Bouazizi, the Tunisian street-seller whose self-immolation in 2010 touched off the Arab Spring, a region-wide upheaval that, in the end, failed to fulfill its early promise?…
The protests that followed Amini’s death after she was arrested in Tehran by the morality police, apparently for an infraction of the Islamic dress code, started in earnest in her home province of Kurdistan, in the far northwest, and spread across the country. All the agencies of the state mobilized to meet the threat and began a nationwide campaign against the protesters, including beatings, arrests, deaths in custody, propaganda, and judicial indictments. After four weeks and an estimated two hundred deaths—casualty figures must be treated with immense caution—the protests don’t appear to be letting up. By some measures, and making allowance for our reliance on reports that protesters have managed to send out of the country despite the government’s efforts to block the Internet, they are growing….
What we’ve been seeing on our social media feeds is revolt at its most emancipatory: young women dancing around bonfires of headscarves or strutting bareheaded through the streets and shouting for the end of the Islamic Republic. Among the most remarkable of these novelties was footage showing a male official from the Ministry of Education being chased out of a girls’ school by pupils who had taken off their maghnaehs—an egregiously bureaucratic version of the Islamic headcover invented by some zealot in the early days of the revolution—and were furiously hurling plastic bottles and pieces of stationery at him. Other videos showing women that had strayed from the main body of protesters being beaten savagely by policemen—as in the Serengeti, it’s the stragglers who are pulled down—were among the most distressing. And for all the sense one gets of a generational divide, with the young people on the front line while their parents fret at home, a tender solicitude across the ages is also in evidence. “I am removing my headscarf out of respect for you,” a woman in her fifties told two bareheaded teenage girls in the Tehran district of Tajrish, to which they replied, “Thank you, Auntie.”
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