An Innocent and Ordinary Young Woman’

An Innocent and Ordinary Young Woman’

NY Times-Sept 16th 2023

Sept. 16, 2023Updated 9:47 a.m. ET

Her face has lit up a billboard in Times Square, and been painted on murals in Paris and Berlin. It has been splashed on the Barcelona soccer team’s private jet and commemorated on T-shirts with the red, white and green colors of Iran’s flag. Vienna and Los Angeles have even named streets after her.

At rallies across Iran and the world last year, tens of thousand of men and women waved placards with her face shouting, “Say her name: Mahsa Amini. Mahsa Amini.”

Saturday will mark one year since the 22-year-old woman from Saghez, a small city in a Kurdish province in northwest Iran, died in the custody of the country’s morality police on allegations of violating the hijab law, which mandates women and girls cover their hair and bodies.

Her death in Tehran ignited monthslong protests nationwide, led by women and girls who tossed off their head scarves in defiance and demanded the end to the Islamic Republic’s rule. The uprising bearing her name, the “Mahsa movement,” morphed into the most serious challenge to the legitimacy of Iran’s ruling clerics since they took power in 1979.

Security forces responded with a violent crackdown, arresting thousands and killing at least 500 protesters, including children and teenagers, rights groups have said. Seven protesters have been executed, and even relatives of demonstrators have been targeted.

But if Ms. Amini in death became a global icon, the young woman with brown eyes and long dark hair was also a daughter, a sister, a niece and a favorite granddaughter. In recent interviews, Ms. Amini’s father, an uncle, two cousins and a family friend described her as an unlikely candidate for global fame, a person whose story has resonated so widely and deeply precisely because she could be any girl living and walking the streets of Iran.

Ms. Amini was quiet, reserved and treated everyone around her with a kind of old-school politeness, they said. She avoided politics and activism, and did not follow the news. She didn’t have many friends and mostly socialized with her relatives, family members said.

Her mother was her best friend and her biggest influence, they said, and the two cooked, hiked and listened to music together. On the day she was arrested, walking with her family in Tehran, she was wearing a long black robe that belonged to her mother and a head scarf. The morality police arrested her on allegations of violating the hijab rules.