Iranian Women Abroad On Protests In Iran Over Mahsa Amini’s Death

In the week since Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, died in police custody in Tehran, Pegah has watched the protests in her home country with awe, hope, fear, and a tinge of shame.

Pegah, 39, who did not want to share her last name for fear of her family members traveling to Iran, has seen the videos of women cutting their hair and burning their hijabs in public. She’s seen large crowds call for the “death of the dictator” and watched her fellow Iranians risk their lives to confront armed security forces.

“I’m very ashamed of myself for not being there. At the same time, I find it very courageous, and I don’t think I would have the courage to do that,” she told BuzzFeed News.

When she heard that Amini (who also went by her Kurdish name Jina) died after being arrested by the morality police for wearing a headscarf “improperly,” Pegah, who left Iran for Edmonton, Canada, when she was 23, was shocked. Authorities said that Amini died after she had a heart attack and fell into a coma and denied that she was beaten while in custody. The police account of her death has been widely rejected by her family and the public.

For Pegah, Amini’s death and the circumstances around it brought back the trauma of her own encounters with the morality police, who are tasked with enforcing Islamic dress codes and morals, and often target women. Pegah said she was stopped twice by the morality police while out with her brother in Tehran, and they were questioned separately to determine if they were out in public as an unmarried couple.

“Everybody remembers their negative interactions with the morality police — which there’s nothing moral about by the way,” she said.

Pegah also pointed to what happened to Sepideh Rashno, a 28-year-old woman arrested in July for not wearing a hijab, who then appeared on state-run TV, pale and bruised, to publicly apologize. Activists and human rights groups have said it was a “forced confession.”

Incidents like that have confirmed Pegah and her family’s belief that it was too dangerous for her to stay.

“I left in a very sad situation knowing that it will come to this. I anticipated the day when they will openly kill people,” she said. “I knew the day would come. That’s why I left.”