Too Loud a Solitude🏳️‍🌈

1. Your parents were born to muslim parents so they’re automatically muslim. You’re automatically a muslim too. You didn’t choose your religion and you can’t opt out of it or you will be executed.

2. The compulsory hijab law makes you a criminal if you choose not to wear hijab even tho you didn’t choose to be a muslim and you don’t consider yourself a muslim but the regime has forced you into that role whether you like it or not. And when you ‘break that law’, they can do with you as they please.

3. little girls as young as 7 yrs old are forced to wear hijab at school even tho the islam itself says the age is 9. and all the schools are gender segregated so imagine how they force you to get used to hijab even when you’re just surrounded by other girls. And all day long at school they tell you horrible stories about what will happen to you in hell if someone sees even a strand of your hair.

4. the regime modifies all the textbooks, story books, cartoons and movies to represent the ideal woman with full on hijab. The iranian media is ordered to photoshop every photo of a woman that may be showing a little skin. And if they’re iranian, no hair is supposed to be seen or that will be photoshopped away. Women are mostly excluded from billboards and tv commercials.

5. imagine going to work or meeting up with a friend when suddenly the morality police kidnap you in broad daylight and force you into a van to take you to a station where they will treat you like a criminal and if you don’t agree to get humiliated and do as they say, they will put you in prison. And in case of Mahsa Amini and so many more before her, they will beat you to death. My sister was barely 18 when she got kidnapped and they didn’t let her call home and she’d been so fucking scared and we had no idea where she was. Imagine all the psychological trauma.

6. If you’re in a car and not wearing hijab they will fine you and seize your car. So when u get into a taxi the driver will ask you to keep your hijab on otherwise they’ll get fined. And if you refuse they’ll ask you to get off the car.

7. And its not just about hijab. In Ramadan, they get even more vicious. If they catch you eating or even drinking water on the street they will give you lashes as punishment and even imprison you for breaking the law. If you work in a state-owned company it’s even worse. They will close the cafeteria and take away the water dispensers. All restaurants are banned from delivering food before iftar. It’s a fucking mess. Everyone has to pretend they’re fasting or they’ll be severely punished.

8. And how could I forget about this! iranian women are banned from singing! the islamic regime prohibits women’s singing voices to be heard by men so imagine the horror of having 50% of the population banned from ever becoming a singer. If they identify a female singer in iran, they will take her to jail and force her to repent her sins in the most humiliating way so that she will never dare sing again.

9. And every time the regime gets wind of a private gathering of men and women trying to have fun and live their fucking private lives, the police crash the party and take everyone to jail bc the Islamic regime bans iranian men and women from having fun.

10. Did you know that the islamic regime doesn’t allow women’s faces to be printed on their obituaries or headstones? They put a flower for our faces instead and if they see a headstone with a woman’s face printed on it they’ll smash it to pieces. That’s how religious dictatorship continues to oppress and erase women even after their deaths.

11. For some reason, women aren’t allowed to ride motorcycles and the government won’t issue any license for them. In some cities, women are barred from riding a bicycle.

So if you see Islam has become for many iranians a symbol of oppression and torture and discrimination, that’s why. The regime uses islam as a weapon to silence and punish anyone who opposes them. You can love islam all you want from the safety of your home in a free country and talk about how kind and benevolent the religion is, but in iran, it’s a whole different story.

Our economy is fucked. All govt officials are corrupt as fuck. Most websites are banned in iran. Even tumblr is banned. The world has cut the iranian ppl from many services. We don’t have intl credit cards like visa card. Amazon doesn’t do delivery to iran. We cant get netflix, spotify or even a gamepass subscription. we don’t get any Apple services here. iran isn’t listed as a country you could choose when signing up for a lot of services. and when we decide to leave iran and escape this hellhole, every country out there will make it sooo much harder for us to get a visa just bc we had the misfortune to be born in iran at the wrong time.

This is the story of iran for the past 44 years. Held hostage by a corrupt regime that uses religion to suppress and torture the people and being abandoned by the rest of the world bc our lives don’t matter.

So many brutally killed and arrested and blinded and so many families under surveillance and torture and i can’t tell you how just two days was enough to massacre and silence a whole nation. How every day after that has been a walking nightmare.

I still think about those families with their little babies in their arms or holding onto their children’s hands as they were protesting peacefully and unarmed and how the pictures of twin babies brutally shot dead hunt my dreams now. I still think about the blood on the asphalt and how I gripped my friend’s hand tight when a protestor told us not to get near the bodies. and how we started running when the sound of gun shot pierced through the night again. And i keep thinking about how i could’ve been one of those who were shot but i grabbed my friend’s hand and i told him to run with the sound of gun shots behind us.

Today at work my friend recounted something that reopened all my badly closed wounds. She said in the taxi a middle aged woman asked her if she knew where the martyrs’ foundation was. And then she told her her story. She said her husband had been in prison for debts. Their son, who wasn’t even on friendly terms with his dad, decided to collect the money and pay off his debts to take him out of the prison. But the day he decided to go to the prison was the day Israel for some fucking reason bombed Evin prison. And her son died in the senseless attack. She said her son was about to get married. She was angry at her husband because she was powerless to be angry at anyone else. And my friend and she cried all the way to their destinations.

All those innocent people that died in that senseless war. Just for israel to show off its military power. Just to let khamenei live. Just to keep this fucking bloodthirsty regime in power. Just to keep us suffering and losing hope and fucking everything.

i’ve been scared a lot in my life. Living where i do. Almost every day is a terrible day here and you have very little hope for normalcy and happiness. But this time i think i was terrified. Because i was looking at the shocked faces of my sister and my mom and we were all holding our breaths and fearing that the next explosion would hit our home.

And there was absolutely nothing we could do to survive if we were hit.

I followed the news with trepidation and all those houses that got destroyed. yes we feel vindicated that the regime’s commanders, all those that have been killing and suppressing and torturing my people and destroying my beautiful country for the last 50 years have been targeted and killed. But they were not the only casualties. There were children and innocent civilians too. Unofficial reports say at least 78 people were killed in the israeli strikes on iran and some 350 injured.

The nuclear facilities are also being hit and now there’s a fear of radiation.

The attacks are still being carried out in other cities and they say they will continue for the next two weeks. While the people are completely defenseless.

We don’t have any shelters. We never get any warnings. We just have to go on with our lives and pray to survive out of sheer luck.

Three years ago we had a chance to overthrow the Islamic regime n make iran the beautiful peaceful country it was supposed to be. We fought and we sacrificed so much and the trauma and the loss were enormous. But the world abandoned us.

The US and the EU promised us they’d hold islamic regime accountable for its crimes against its own people but they lied. They struck deals with the regime n gave them money and left us all on our own.

And now we have to keep paying for the regime’s crimes.

My people didn’t deserve to live in absolute poverty and isolation and fear and desperation. Just because the world wanted to keep the islamic regime in power for as long as they could.

Im fucking sick of all their lies. We’re just people like everyone else. We have families and jobs and aspirations and dreams. We have history and culture and cuisine and music. We’re just like you.

Because every time something terrible happens to my people, especially to women, i feel like it happened to me.

I see myself in them. I know the way they feel. I feel their rage and desperation and helplessness. I have been there before. And i keep coming back to it. This nightmare is never ending.

Yesterday a university student named Ahoo Daryaei was attacked by the regime’s forces on campus for not having hijab. They grabbed her and her hoodie was torn and stripped off her body in the struggle. Enraged and helpless, she took off her pants in protest. They forced her into a car and drove away. They say she’s been admitted to a psychiatric ward and is under heavy security.

Sure the pictures are iconic and she was extremely brave and the message that her act sent was strong and historic. But im worried about her. And im enraged for the continued oppression and dehumanization of the women of my country. I feel her helplessness and fight for taking back control and feeling like a human in every fiber of my being.

I wish we didn’t have to feel this way. Every single day.

The hijab that women outside muslim countries call a ‘choice’ is a ‘law’ here. And it gives the oppressive regimes the ‘right’ to punish and torture and kill women for choosing not to cover their hair. Its not even about the hair. Its about the control they have over women’s bodies and lives and identities. Its the way they feel powerful by making women powerless. Its the way they are more worthless than a worm without the protection of islamic laws they hide their ugliness behind.

And the attacks didn’t target the people. Didn’t damage residential areas. and we were just relieved that the Islamic regime’s own missiles didn’t hit any civilian planes as they did four years ago. In a way, we are always more scared of what the regime would do to us than any other country.

I don’t know if anyone else out there can understand our situation. We are a nation held hostage by terrorists that are more willing and ready to kill us than any outside attack. they’d provoke powers thousands times stronger than them, endangering millions of lives and killing us without any consequences.

I talked it over with my manager and he reluctantly said ok. Later when discussing the awful state of our country per usual, he brought up the photo incident and said she shouldn’t have insisted on not wearing hijab to the point where the regime banned her from leaving iran. My manager is making plans to leave the country. At the time I couldn’t come up with a good explanation for why some women are willing to sacrifice so much to just live another day like a human being.

But then i realized i knew the answer all along. The case with the compulsory hijab for iranian women is like sexual assault. You have two options. You either struggle and fight the assailant in the hope to break free, but knowing that the struggle would end up hurting you more n you could not be able to break free at all. Or, you could stop fighting and disassociate and let the assault happen bc it means you have a better chance of survival.

Sexual assault is horrendous because it takes away your control of your body. The compulsory hijab is also a way to take away your control of your body. The way they force you into wearing hijab has the same traumatic effect as forcing you to take off your clothes. They take away your most basic rights and treat you like an object, like an animal.

So my manager thinks women should just dissociate and take the abuse because it’s not worth it to risk your life and your future for a meager chance at taking back control. He has never been in a situation where the only thing that still matters to you is taking back control, no matter how small and transient that moment of being in control of your body is.

I have a question about the IR elections

Why not vote? I undrstand its pretty hopeless and there are no options and the results will probably change according to what the regime wants

But is there another reason to not try?

well, aren’t all those things you mentioned not reason enough?

But maybe i can explain it better with this quote from Khamenei himself: “each vote in the election is a vote for the islamic establishment.”

The IRGC air force commander who was responsible for shooting down the Ukrainian flight 752 also said “each vote is a bullet in the hands of the armed forces.”

Iran is a dictatorship. The president and the parliament are a sham to give an appearance of a ‘republic’ to the world. Presidents change but nothing about the islamic regime ever changes because it’s always what khamenei says. When people take part in elections it gives the message that they think their government is legitimate. That iran is a republic if not a democracy. That it’s the people who are choosing their government so even if things go to hell, it’s the choice of the people and it’s on them.

When the former president(socalled really, bc iranians sure as hell didn’t vote in that election either) died in the helicopter crash and i talked abt it here, someone actually responded to the post that now with raeisi gone, you can take advantage of the power vacuum to choose your destiny. But the thing is, there wasn’t any power vacuum. The president didn’t hold any power. All the power is in the hands of khamenei and the IRGC. We didn’t choose them and they don’t change and the election is a joke. But the world doesn’t know that. Because the islamic regime is a dictatorship parading around as a republic.

So yeah. When we take part in the elections, we give legitimacy to the regime and the regime can use the results of the turnout to tell to the world that iranians actually want the regime to stay.