IRAN: Neither turban nor crown but Woman, Life, Freedom
A special report by multi-award winning Iranian-born campaigner and writer MARYAM NAMAZIE who lives in the UK.
Jan 15, 2026
Cover photo: Recent picture from the streets of the Iranian capital of Tehran.
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In today’s THE LEFT LANE:
A special report on the crisis in Iran.
All hail the brave hunger strikers after winning an important victory in support of Palestine Action. Elbit Systems on “stolen time.”
Join “THE REPORTER”
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Neither turban nor crown but Woman, Life, Freedom
A guest post by Maryam Namazie
INTRO by AS - Women have long played a key role in the Iranian resistance movement. And they are doing so again during the current wave of protest that began in late December and which has resulted in widespread deaths – estimated between 2,000 and 12,000 – in more than 180 cities across this important country of more than 90 million people.
So while Donald “Mr. Yankee Liberator” Trump is being allowed to hog the headlines in the mainstream media, as per boringly usual, over Iran, THE LEFT LANE is very pleased to reprint an insightful assessment by a leading Iranian-born / UK-based campaigner and writer Maryam Mamazie. (Read of her life and accomplishments HERE.)
Maryam is very good at summing up a situation with a word picture. When I asked her early this morning (15 January) about what she was hearing from her homeland about the often-violent protests, she stressed that reliable and accurate news is thin on the ground.
“But I do know the regime is employing its usual tactics. An official comes to a person’s door and people are being asked to pay for the cost of the bullets --- say, one or two or three bullets, shot perhaps into someone’s eye --- that have killed members of their own family earlier that same day,” she said in a Zoom interview with TLL. That’s an image that definitely makes you pause when in eating your porridge at 7:20 a.m.
As for Mr. Liberator’s on again/ off again threats of US armed intervention in Iran, Maryam repeats what she had said some hours earlier on the Andrew Marr show on LBC Radio (HERE) : “I have yet to see a situation where US militarism has had a positive effect on the rights of people.”
A new nationwide wave of protest has spread across Iran since 28 December 2025. Initially triggered by acute economic collapse (currency freefall, sharp price rises for basic necessities, and renewed scarcity), it has rapidly become a wave of openly anti-regime protests—as has been the case with previous uprisings. Inflation, unemployment, and shortages are products of corruption, security-state monopolies, and repression as governance. The state has responded with its familiar repertoire: lethal force, mass arrests, threats to prosecute detainees as mohareb (‘enemies of God’) and sweeping internet blackouts. The shutdown is not incidental; it is designed to prevent coordination, cover up killings, and isolate people from one another while repression escalates.
A horrifying video circulating online, reportedly taken on 8 January from outside the Kahrizak Forensic Medicine Centre, shows rows of bodies laid out as families search for missing loved ones—and all the while, more bodies arrive by truck.
For over two weeks now, people across Iran have continued to take to the streets to demand an end to the Islamic regime. These protests are a continuation of the 2022 uprising that followed the murder of Mahsa Jina Amini, an uprising that permanently altered Iranian society. Disregard for compulsory hijab, open contempt for clerical authority, and the normalisation of public anti-regime speech were among its lasting gains. But the ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’ or ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ revolution has unfinished business.
In September 2022, Mahsa Jina Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish-Iranian woman, was murdered by the country’s morality police after allegedly not wearing the hijab in the proper fashion. (Read more HERE)
If you follow much of the mainstream and diaspora media, however, you would think that ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ has been replaced by ‘Long Live the King’ and that material demands for a better society have been replaced with branding and spectacle.
This pattern is chillingly familiar. During the 1979 revolution against the Pahlavi monarchy, slogans such as ‘Independence, Freedom’ were steadily replaced with ‘Independence, Freedom, Islamic Republic’ and chants proclaiming ‘Ruhollah [Khomeini], you are our leader’. Revolutionary memory was rewritten in real time.
Today, some media outlets, like Iran International, have gone so far as to rename the Jina uprising ‘the Iranian National Revolution’, a strategic act of depoliticisation that erases its feminist, class, and revolutionary content. Thus the heir to the Pahlavi dynasty, Reza Pahlavi—a man backed by fascist thugs who attack opponents at protests abroad and defend the Pahlavi regime’s old secret police force—is amplified by the likes of Donald Trump and Benjamin Netanyahu and presented as the alternative.
The move is clear: to shift a revolutionary process rooted in mass struggle toward leader fetishism and the consolidation of power from above. A revolution born of courage and sacrifice is redirected toward a single, pliable figure acceptable to global power blocs and capital.
It feels like 1979 all over again.
At the Guadeloupe Conference that year, leaders of the US, UK, France, and West Germany concluded that the Shah could not be saved. They feared state collapse, leftist influence, and workers’ control of oil and industry and sought an outcome consistent with Cold War strategies that viewed Islamism as a barrier against communism. In that context, Khomeini’s relocation to France and his extensive access to international media helped frame the revolution as a binary choice: Shah or Khomeini.
In 2026, the message is eerily similar: Khamenei or Shah. The aim is to shift legitimacy upward, push aside ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’, and prevent a revolutionary reorganisation of society from below, one that threatens not only clerical rule but repressive social relations and patriarchal authority.
Pahlavi now appears on every major satellite channel and chants of ‘Long Live the Shah’ dominate the protests we are shown. There is mounting evidence that some footage circulating online has been manipulated to amplify this narrative, an illustration of how the manufacturing of consent works to defeat political imagination and possibility. Pahlavi is presented as a saviour to narrow the imaginable future, a future that is firmly female.
In every revolutionary situation, the ruling class attempts to pre-shape outcomes in order to restore ideological control and neutralise the emergence of autonomous and radical organisations and leadership. The women’s ward of Evin Prison is full of such leadership.
Support for Pahlavi as the ‘leader’ serves a precise purpose. It signals inevitability to the women and people of Iran who dared to demand ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’: You wanted liberation, instead you get a dictator’s son. The outcome is already decided. Adjust your expectations.
The speed with which image-making is replacing political struggle with spectacle is astonishing, erasing collective agency and infantilising people as being in need of guidance from a paternal figure imposed from above.
The false binary of Khamenei versus Shah is designed to suffocate revolutionary imagination. This is how revolutions are emptied to make sure that business continues as usual. The revolution opens space through mass courage and struggle; media and elites narrow the options; leadership is imposed; popular forces are co-opted and demobilised.
Reza Pahlavi, son of the former hated dictator, the Shah of Irah who was overthrown in the 1979 Islamic Revolution, is backed by fascist thugs … and authoritarians such as Trump and Netanyahu.
Reza Pahlavi is not preparation for Iran’s liberation; he is preparation for the revolution’s containment. Revolutions are not defeated solely by bullets and batons; they are also defeated by false narratives and pre-selected futures. The Islamic regime has not even been overthrown, yet the revolution’s core demands are already being postponed.
For those in power, a king whose legitimacy rests on his bloodline and foreign recognition is far safer than ‘Jin, Jiyan, Azadi’, a slogan that originated in the Kurdish feminist struggle and has become a mass rallying cry across Iran to reorganise society around women’s freedom, material improvement, and collective power. Sex apartheid in Iran, including the compulsory hijab, is also an economic policy. It disciplines labour, devalues women’s work, and secures unpaid care and social reproduction under crisis. The call for women’s freedom is, therefore, a call for the liberation of all.
The ‘Khamenei or Pahlavi’ binary does not reflect this reality; it is imposed to prevent revolutionary alternatives from consolidating. Once people accept that there can be only one alternative, the revolution has already been contained. Once leadership is imposed, the repression of women, LGBT people, freethinkers, leftists, and workers can be justified as necessary to ‘protect the transition’. A revolution that hands power to figures engineered from above surrenders its hopes, demands, and future. This is how revolutions are defeated.
What can we do to defend our Woman, Life, Freedom revolution when those in power claim to have already decided its outcome?
One proven defence is to insist on non-negotiable minimum demands: freedom of organisation and the right to strike; release of political prisoners; an immediate abolition of executions and torture; women’s and LGBT rights and equality; laïcité; the abolition of patriarchal and religious laws and institutions; the dismantlement of coercive organs under popular oversight; free expression and conscience; protection of strategic sectors from privatisation; price and rent controls on essentials; wage guarantees; healthcare and social protections. (See, for example, the Woman, Life, Freedom Charter.) These demands require organisation through neighbourhood assemblies, workplace committees, strike coordination, and recallable representatives rooted in struggle.
The classic trap is elections first, women’s rights and social justice later. Without binding guarantees, elections become a means of closing revolutionary openings, not expressing popular will.
The revolution in Rojava, Syrian Kurdistan, offers vital lessons in resisting this trap. Its revolution has been deemed dangerous precisely because it has materially reorganised power around women through autonomous women’s structures, co-leadership, and embedded systems of defence and self-organisation.
In revolutionary moments, women are celebrated as brave bodies in the street; their repression becomes moral fuel. But when it comes to power, authority is always masculinised. The elevation of Reza Pahlavi is not solely due to delusional nostalgia for the monarchy. It is about restoring male authority, neutralising class politics, and suppressing women’s revolutionary autonomy.
History does not repeat itself by accident. It repeats through intervention, the renaming of struggles, the postponement of demands for liberation, and regime changes imposed from above.
Photos from the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement begun in September 2022. (See HERE and HERE)
‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ is a material challenge to how power is organised in Iran, how labour is disciplined, how social reproduction is enforced, how obedience is secured through patriarchal law and violence. That is precisely why it is being displaced by ‘Man, Nation, Prosperity’ nationalism, by the Shah, by the fantasy of a saviour. The move from programme to personality, from demands to brands, is not neutral. It is a mechanism designed to stop a woman-led revolution.
The historical task before us is not to choose between turban and crown, but to prevent the Jina revolution from being buried under false inevitabilities. This revolution will survive only if its meaning is defended: against kings, against clerics, against sects like the People’s Mojahedin Organisation of Iran, against media-manufactured futures, and against every demand that women and people wait their turn. There is no liberation that comes later. There is no freedom that arrives from above.
Neither turban nor crown!
Neither cleric nor king!
Jin, Jiyan, Azadi!
The article was first published in The Freethinker on 12 January 2026.
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Want some more background on the fast-moving Iranian crisis? Watch this videoed interview filmed late on 14 January by the ZETEO publication. View it HERE or look at this brief clip on what Trump may be up to with his latest stunts.
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Above is a photo of Maryam Namazie and THIS is her website. She is a multi-award winning Iranian-born campaigner and writer living in the UK. (She is also currently the Spokesperson of One Law for All and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain.)
Her website contains links to other articles she’s written and her contact details. When we chatted this morning, Maryam said she would be happy to speak to groups in the UK. I would contact her promptly; she is a terrific speaker on a leading international subject.
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All hail the brave hunger strikers after winning an important victory in support of Palestine Action/ Elbit Systems on “stolen time.”
Hunger strikers Lewie Chiaramello, Heba Muraisi and Kamran Ahmed
Just as we were in the final editing stage of today’s THE LEFT LANE, this good news came in. Briefly:
+ The longstanding hunger strike in support of Palestine Action has all but ended after seven of the strikers said they are ceasing it with a victory. It is well earned. Some were facing imminent death. One man, 22, is reportedly still refusing food.
+ The win followed a decision by the Starmer government not to award a £2bn contract to the Israeli arms company subsidiary Elbit Systems UK.
+ This possible contract (and related matters) led to widespread protests and a government decision to declare Palestine Action a terrorist organisation. That shameful decision is now being appealed in court.
+ In a statement, Prisoners for Palestine said there had been a number of victories: “In the past few weeks alone, 500 people have signed up to take direct action against the genocidal military-industrial complex, more than the amount of people who took action with Palestine Action over its five-year campaign. During that five-year campaign, four Israeli weapons factories were shut down. Elbit Systems is living on stolen time – we will see it shut down for good, not because of the government, but because of the people.”
+ “Our prisoners’ hunger strike will be remembered as a landmark moment of pure defiance, an embarrassment for the British state. It exposed to the world Britain has political prisoners in service of a foreign genocidal regime, and has seen hundreds of people commit to take direct action in the prisoners’ footsteps”, the statemen continued.
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Join “THE REPORTER”
On Wednesday, 21 January at 19:00, a group of us (now approaching 20 peeps) will hold our first online planning meeting for THE REPORTER.
THE REPORTER (TR) is a proposed new online (only) socialist newspaper that would come out every two weeks later in the spring of 2026. TR will be billing itself as a “critical friend” of Your Party and aimed at an audience of YP supporters and working-class readers.
Interested in perhaps joining the TR team, attending our 21 January meet and giving your views? We will be all ears.
2) Please include all of your contact details and a little bit of your political history.
3) Also include a few details on what skills and experience you could bring to the publication. A wide variety are needed.
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Edited by Alan Story, THE LEFT LANE is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support our work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber: http://theleftlane2024.substack.com/subscribe
So, so relieved the hunger strikers are able to stop their action, having achieved one of their goals. I hope they will be given the gentle, safe help they need to return to a normal diet. And that they will make a full recovery.
The Architecture of a Crisis Manufactured by Hostile Foreign Powers.
An exclusive exposé on the hidden forces, intelligence networks, and propaganda machinery fueling turmoil in Iran.
https://felixabt.substack.com/p/the-architecture-of-a-crisis-manufactured
So, so relieved the hunger strikers are able to stop their action, having achieved one of their goals. I hope they will be given the gentle, safe help they need to return to a normal diet. And that they will make a full recovery.