Larger numbers of girls from traditional backgrounds and rural areas were entering the educational system. Their parents, who’d kept them out of school during the Shah’s era, felt comfortable allowing them to be educated in an Islamic society. According to the World Bank, women’s university enrollment jumped from three per cent in 1977 to sixty-seven per cent in 2015.
Esfandiari said that the state was trapped in a dogma of its own making: if, in the face of the initial protests, it had simply dropped its enforcement of the hijab, it might have defused Iranians’ anger. Instead, the state responded with a vicious wave of repression, arresting thousands of people, killing some five hundred protesters, and executing several others following sham trials. “Months ago, it was the hijab,” Esfandiari told me. “Now people want to overthrow the regime.
That fall, Mortezai gave a series of television interviews in which he said that, in the wake of Amini’s death, the Iranian people wanted “human rights, a peaceful country, and regime change,” adding that “the old dictator is in his last days.” At times, Mortezai was seated in front of the flag of Komala, a militant group that seeks greater autonomy for Kurdish people in Iran, and which has a history of secessionist ambitions.
One woman from a conservative family told me that her sisters had initially equivocated about the protesters’ demands, parsing what they agreed with and what they thought went too far. But, eventually, each of them turned against the movement, believing that such a confrontation with the regime would do more harm than good. “They belong to WhatsApp groups where they receive ideological instructions and everything they say sounds the same,” the woman told me.