Quote:The current escalation is retaliation. Physical violence against women is happening alongside attempts to erase the feminist meaning of the uprising itself.

Outside Iran, this reality is persistently misread. The revolt is frequently reduced to a confrontation with Islam and framed as a civilizational conflict between religion and modernity.

Such interpretations turn a political struggle into a cultural one. They’ve fuelled hesitation and selective solidarity in parts of the western left and Muslim communities, erasing decades of resistance directed not against faith, but against a regime that has used religion as an instrument of punishment, surveillance and death.

What is at stake in Iran is not faith — it’s power.

The Islamic Republic doesn’t govern through Islam as a lived religion but through Islam as institution: codified in law, enforced through policing and ultimately used as a tool to imprison, torture and kill. To view Woman, Life, Freedom as an anti-religious uprising erases a feminist political uprising that’s been unfolding since 1979, led by women who have continuously challenged compulsory veiling, gender apartheid and state violence.