I was honoured to participate in the “Women defend the revolution” gathering this weekend. I had the opportunity to listen and start to learn how to create a transnational movement for women’s liberation and democracy. It’s a lot to unpack, and I’m not so conceited to understand and report in one post decades of struggle and revolutionary thinking. But I believe we should all learn from those women and the recent uprising of women in Iran. Start thinking about a new way of organising and demand a change from a non-Eurocentric feminist perspective because wherever we are, we face the same struggles.

YPJ fighters in Kobani, December 8, 2014 (Biji Kurdistan / Flickr)

The Kurdish women’s movement

“Jin, Jiyan, Azadi” ( Women, Life, Freedom) is a Kurdish slogan created by the struggle of revolutionary Kurdish women spanning forty years. Forty years of terror, violence, prison, torture, executions, beheadings, sexual violence, hunger, and disappearances for being a Kurdish woman. Decades of resistance against patriarchal fascism and statist oppressions. Decades of unheard screams of pain and suffering. It was the cry of Sakine Canciz when they cut her breasts off in a Turkish prison. Decades of targeted gender-based violence against Kurdish women, many of whom picked up weapons and embraced a life in the mountains for a revolution that is still ongoing.

The Kurdish women's movement is at the heart of one of the most exciting revolutionary experiments in the world today: Rojava. Forged over decades of struggle, most recently in the fight against ISIS, Rojava embodies a radical commitment to ecology, democracy and women's liberation. But while striking images of Kurdish women in military fatigues proliferate, a true understanding of the women's movement remains elusive. Taking apart the superficial and Orientalist frameworks that dominate, it’s interesting to look instead at an empirically rich account of the women's movement in Kurdistan. Studying and understanding the movement's historical origins, ideological evolution, and political practice over the past forty years. Going beyond abstract ideas to locate the movement's culture and ideology in its concrete work for women's revolution in the here and now. From the guerrilla camps in the mountains to radical women's academies and self-organized refugee camps, women around the world should engage with the revolution in Kurdistan, both theoretically and practically, as a vital touchstone in the wider struggle for a militant anti-fascist, anti-capitalist feminist internationalism.

The uprising of young women in Iran

In the last few weeks, a new popular uprising is taking place in Iran, and this time young women are in the lead. It’s incredibly inspiring to see — for the first time I can remember — unveiled women marching at the front. They have overcome fear and are challenging one of the main pillars of the Islamic Republic of Iran: compulsory hijab. These women are marching shoulder to shoulder with men, chanting against the whole regime. They are facing guns and bullets and demanding an end to a system of gender apartheid.

Mahsa Amini was only 22 years old. She wasn’t uncovered; only a few strands of her hair showed. And yet she was arrested by the so-called “morality police” and packed off to jail. Three days later she was dead. Many Iranians are convinced she was killed —a belief reinforced by countless individual experiences with the brutality of the security services. The news of her death has triggered outrage throughout Iran. Tens of thousands of demonstrators are defying security forces to ask why an innocent young woman lost her life to religious radicals who merely wanted to show off their militant male power. The compulsory hijab is not just a small piece of cloth for Iranian women; it is the most visible symbol of how a tyrannical theocracy oppresses them. Now, by drawing attention to that injustice, Mahsa’s death has the potential to serve as a new turning point for Iranian women and all women worldwide.

But the anti-regime protest in Iran didn’t start last week. Exactly four years ago, “The Girls of Revolution Street” became a symbol of resistance. A young woman stood on a utility box, took off her hijab and held it high in front of the crowds in protest against the compulsory hijab law that has been in force since the 1980s. This brave act resulted in a succession of women following suit and unveiling in public, only to be met by violence and harsh punishments, including imprisonment. Since then, Iranian women have been on the front lines of protests against the country’s Islamist regime – yet this resistance has taken place with little recognition or support from Western feminists. It’s time we responded.

What Western feminists can learn from Iran

The current protests are a unique, and uniquely inspiring, phenomenon. Nowhere else in the Muslim world — and I mean, literally, nowhere else — would we see what we are seeing right now in Iran: men and women, together, standing up for each other, the men demanding justice for the regime’s murder of a woman who dared to let her hair show. It bears repeating: the men of Iran are standing alongside women as they burn their hijabs.

Meanwhile, in the West, where feminism has proved more successful than anywhere else, the European and North American’s feminist movements are collapsing under the weight of it their own divisiveness, and I can’t help but find its Iranian counterpart far more inspiring: men and women standing together, speaking up for each other’s rights.

Western feminists have a key role to play in supporting Iranian women. A prominent women’s rights movement in Iran is struggling for global recognition. We, as Western feminists, must use our platform to mainstream the Iranian women’s struggle to stand with them against the misogynist policies of the Islamist regime – and elevate their voices globally.

Iranian women have been calling to be heard – surely, it’s time we responded.

What I’m learning from the Women’s Revolution of Kurdistan and Iran and why we should all support them