Iran Has Become a Prison

What I learned about the challenge of resisting a regime that locks up thousands of political prisoners

By Kian Tajbakhsh, originally published in The Atlantic

November 1, 2022

“Amid the nationwide protests that have rocked Iran since the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, who had been arrested for allegedly wearing her hijab improperly, a riot and a fire broke out at Tehran’s Evin Prison on October 15. Iran’s security services reportedly responded with extreme severity, threatening to shoot prisoners unless they retreated to their cells. According to the authorities, eight prisoners died

Evin Prison occupies a special place both within the regime’s security apparatus and in the political imagination of many Iranians, which is why this disturbance caught people’s attention. Although the prison opened a few years before the 1979 revolution that deposed the shah and brought the clerics to power, it has become a symbol of the Islamic Republic’s absolutist rule and intolerance of any dissent: Evin is Iran’s Bastille…

Evin is Iran’s Bastile.

“Evin today may not be the nightmarish hellhole it was during the revolution’s brutal early years. But its outsize presence in Iran’s revolutionary history makes it a reminder of the ways in which Iranian society itself has become a prison that tolerates no dissent from the country’s 85 million people. The floggings depicted by the Ebrat Museum’s grisly effigies have not been banned—they occur outside the prison, in public punishments for such infringements as improperly wearing a hijab, mixed-gender socializing, and drinking alcohol...

“The disturbance at Evin has not destroyed what the prison represents: the humorlessness of the religious ideology driving the regime and the harms it does. Perhaps the only way to overthrow an oppressor that refuses to budge or compromise might in the end come down to fire and fists. But sometimes the oppressed can try to take back a little power simply by making the tyrant look ridiculous.”

Read the full article here.

Kian Tajbakhsh is an Academic Fellow at Columbia University’s Committee on Global Thought and Senior Advisor at Columbia Global Centers, where he coordinates the Committee on Forced Migration. His book Creating Local Democracy In Iran: State-Building and Politics of Decentralization has been published by Cambridge University Press in 2022.