About three dozen students stood on the south end of the Lawn, holding signs and singing songs of protest in Farsi. Similar events took place on 135 college campuses across the globe, from Istanbul to Lisbon and Salt Lake City to Charlottesville.
“This isn’t the first time we’ve rallied at UVA. We’ve done this four or five times,” Shandi said. “But this is the first worldwide effort and we think that will make us heard more than we were before.”
The international protest and its UVA component are the latest in a series of events that began with the Sept. 16 death of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish Iranian woman detained by Iran’s morality police for not wearing a proper hijab. She was arrested on Sept. 13, reportedly beaten by police, slipped into a coma and died three days later.
Police have denied mistreatment and said the 22-year-old suffered sudden heart failure.
Women doffed their headscarves at Amini’s funeral in protest, an act that was met with immediate violence from police. That sparked more protests across the country and on college campuses. Even grade-school girls have joined in.
That the demonstrations would be started and led by women should be no surprise for those familiar with Iran, said Farzaneh Milani, a UVA professor of Middle East and South Asian languages and cultures and a professor in the Department of Women, Gender & Sexuality.
“The awe-inspiring, women-led revolution we are witnessing in Iran has been long in the making,” said Milani, who is currently on sabbatical and could not attend the UVA protest. “As early as 1848, an Iranian woman, also a poet, named Tahereh Quorratol’Ayn unveiled herself publicly and caused a furor.”