A MILLION MAHSA AMINIS ARE UP IN ARMS IN IRAN AS THE REAL MAHSA PASSES INTO MEMORY

A MILLION MAHSA AMINIS ARE UP IN ARMS IN IRAN AS THE REAL MAHSA PASSES INTO MEMORY

We must stand in solidarity with the brave young women of Iran who have risen up in protest against the brutal oppression of women under the Islamic Sharia.

Mahsa Amini's death at the hands of the moral police of the Islamic Republic of Iran has sent shock waves throughout the country. Young women, tired of Islamic repression, are being seen removing their hijabs, throwing them into the fire that they have lit on the streets and dancing in defiance of all state stricture of the Sharia. They are cutting off their hair in public. A feminist revolution is on but it is being brutally suppressed. Internet connections have been cut so that the linkages among the revolutionaries may be cut, thereby controlling the spread of the revolution, and the regime's brutal repression does not find its way out to the wider world.

Preaching Vedantic principles of peace from the safety of the pulpit does not help. It is cowardice and hypocrisy of the first order, this avoidance of addressing contentious issues that afflict vas⁸t populations. The real Vedantists are these brave girls who are braving the streets across fifty cities of Iran and daring the repressive religious regime despite grave threats to their person. Many have died since Mahsa's death. So many are enduring torture. But the fallen flower, Mahsa Amini, continues to inspire these young ladies -- many of them university students -- to dare the dictatorship and its doctrinaire injunctions on women, one of which mandates compulsory wearing of the hijab or the head scarf. Time it is for us to show our solidarity with these daughters of Iran.

Remember, Mahsa Amini was murdered by the moral police of Islamic Iran, her head bludgeoned against the wall. Will you not react to all this inhumanity for once instead of shedding online teardrops only, an exercise in convenience and cowardice? Will you not show a like courage as these young women of Iran and prove yourselves to be men and women of mettle?

So many Mahsas cry, not in the wilderness anymore but in the thoroughfare of life today and, yet, their lamentations go unheard on account of human callousness. Twenty two year old Mahsa Amini has died but she lives on, incarnated afresh in a million young women of awakening Persia. Let perennial Persia come alive from the rubble of regressive religious Iran and deliver these goddesses from the tyranny of archaic absolutist injunctions. Join hands in solidarity. 

Written by Sugata Bose