The historian Stéphane Dudoignon, director of research at the CNRS, is the author of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards. Political sociology of a state militia (CNRS Editions, 288 pages, 25 euros). He points out that certain socio-professional categories won over to the Islamic Republic are now taking sides against it.
Two months after the start of the protests, how do you characterize this movement?
In the days following the death of Zhyna Mahsa Amini [le 16 septembre], we spoke of “protests”. A month later, the terms “uprising” and “insurrection” appeared, including in some official media. For three weeks, there has been talk of the “revolution of 2022”. If many elements are reminiscent of the events of winters 2017-2018 and 2019-2020 [partis de protestations contre la vie chère], we are nevertheless witnessing a revival in the current uprising. The slogans are becoming more radical, the demand for freedom has become omnipresent and the movement now affects all regions and, above all, has spread to the most diverse groups of society, from large landowners or influential merchants in bazaars to to workers in the petrochemical and metallurgical industries.
We also note a desire for unity around the demand for freedom, the slogan “Woman, life, freedom” having spread throughout the country. The image of Mahsa, which has become an icon, is a vehicle for unifying struggles on a national scale. Another phenomenon: the unifying power of slogans in favor of women. We can already speak of an impact of the current movement on Iranian society as a whole.
The change is taking place, before our eyes, in a context of unprecedented deepening of the polarization of this society and of antagonism between the part most open to the outside world and that tempted, for multiple reasons, by the re-ideologization . We note, however, that the lines are changing, with certain districts, certain socio-professional categories acquired by the Islamic Republic taking sides against it; we think of the many religious families who have lost a son or a daughter in recent weeks and years in the repression. Very recently, we saw police raids in Narmak, a working-class neighborhood in Tehran, where former ultra-conservative president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (2005-2013) and his police chief, Esmail Ahmadi-Moqaddam, spent their childhood. That Narmak is considered an insurrectionary district suggests a certain erosion of the sociological base of the regime.
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