The graphic novel Women, Life, Freedom was born in tragedy. In September 2022, 22-year-old Iranian Mahsa Amini was murdered. She was beaten to death by the Iranian morality police, the Gasht-e Ershad (Guidance Patrol), a law enforcement body created to enforce regulations on modest dress (ḥijāb) and chaste behavior (ʿifāf). Her crime? She wore her veil “improperly,” inadvertently revealing loose wisps of hair. Her death sparked a nationwide uproar, evolving into a global feminist revolution that gained even the support of Iranian men.

Iranian Marjane Satrapi directed the international outrage into an unusual text, an edited collection of short stories written in comic book fashion. Women, Life, Freedom deals with domestic politics and culture; the reader is likely to learn as much or more about the country’s internal repression as he might from a forum in Foreign Affairs. The book lifts the veil on the undercurrents and dynamics of the senile Iranian theocracy and the amoral nouveau riche who support them in exchange for decadent privileges. Each chapter presents an ugly facet of the Iranian regime and in the final chapter, several of the authors conduct a kind of roundtable discussion, presented in the same style as the other chapters, in which they agree that the days of the decrepit religious tyranny are numbered because it will collapse under its own weight. Iranian citizens, especially women, are increasingly emboldened to protest and transmit their grievances around the globe. 

A Serious Comic

Can such a medium properly articulate important cultural, moral, and political concerns in compelling fashion? Satrapi proved it can with her publication of Persepolis in 2003 and Persepolis II in 2004. 

Both are available now as The Complete Persepolis. Persepolis is easily one of the greatest graphic novels written—at last count, it has been translated into 100 languages. “Persepolis” is a Greek compound of the words Pérsēs (Πέρσης) and pólis (πόλις), which together mean “the Persian city” or “the city of the Persians.” Unusually, Persepolis features Satrapi as both the writer and the artist. The novel is autobiographical in that it is Satrapi’s narration of growing up during the Shah’s reign, the Iranian Revolution, and the Iran-Iraq war. Her parents eventually sent her to finish her studies at the French Lyceum in Vienna where she encountered the nihilism and decadence of the West. After four years, she returned to Iran and now lives in self-exile in Paris. 

Many comics and graphic novels subject the reader to sensory overload. The genius of The Complete Persepolis and, now, Women, Life, Freedom, lies in its more minimalist approach. Satrapi’s art is primitive, but through her black-and-white drawings, she says a great deal with very little, masterfully invoking significance, satire, and nuance in her understated illustrations and clever narrative. Her subtle wit runs throughout the novel, both in prose and in art. All the artists in the new edited project follow that style to varying degrees, lending unity to the entire book. Notably, Satrapi’s work is one of a growing number of non-fiction graphic “novels.” There is no one here faster than a locomotive nor anyone able to leap tall buildings in a single bound.

Clerical Despotism

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, women in Iran have been culturally enslaved by the “guardianship” of backward-looking mullahs who limit their freedom in every imaginable way. Offenses include shoes that are too open and unmarried couples holding hands. If possible, the pitiless police favor beating women in the area of their body where the violation is detected. Accordingly, they severely beat Mahisa Amina on the head until she was comatose, and, after a few days, dead. The second chapter of the book, “Sparking a Revolution,” explains how, in response to her death, protests erupted in over half of Iran’s 31 provinces. Veils, the government’s symbol of oppression, were thrown into bonfires. Iranian men joined the women. Protests are always risky: According to “A Demonstration in Iran,” the country has a special cadre of brutes, the “Lebas Shakhsi,” whose only talent lies in viciously attacking peaceful protesters with clubs and batons. 

“The Anthem of the Uprising” explains how Iranian Shervin Hajipour’s hauntingly beautiful Grammy-winning lament, “Baraye,” became the anthem of the “Women, Life, Freedom” movement as it describes the tragedy of everyday life in Iran for men as well as women. The government banned “Baraye” but not before it spread across the globe. Here the song is covered in Buenos Aires by the British super-group “Coldplay.” The Iranian diaspora comprises 10 percent of the Iranian population; this group is in Brisbane. The cruelty of the regime in the aftermath of the protests is described in detail in the graphic essay “The Winter of Executions.” Many refused to recant even under torture.

The counterpart to Ireland’s “Bloody Sunday” is Iran’s “Bloody Friday” (September 30, 2022). A protest in southeastern Iran was incited when a police chief in the Port of Chabahar raped a 15-year-old girl. During the protest in Zahedan, 66 of those attending were killed by snipers stationed in nearby buildings. The event is dramatically portrayed in narration and art in the chapter “Bloody Friday.” Iranian university students are increasingly resistant to the regime’s discrimination against women. Not all of the issues are as weighty as that in Zehedan. At one university, coeds refused to use the women’s side of the cafeteria, instead crossing to the male line. They were refused service and left in protest. Soon, men and women brought their food trays outside and joined the “troublemakers,” even bringing them their meals. 

The Dark Arts

The Iranian regime has a variety of primitive means of control. After he posted “Baraye,” Shervin Hajipour was arrested and sentenced to four years in prison, though he was later pardoned. Had he been imprisoned, he might have found himself in Evin Prison, which one of the essays describes as a “Hellhole,” located in northern Tehran. In the women’s wing, prisoners are crammed into small windowless rooms with five other inmates who share the overwhelming stench of their own excrement.

In “Women Saying No,” the author notes that in 2022 alone, over 27,000 girls under the age of 15 were “married off” in Iran. Iranian Human Rights Attorney Nasrin Sotoudeh refused to stop litigating on behalf of the many falsely accused. Ultimately, she herself was sentenced to 38 years in prison and 148 lashes. According to the BBC, over 100 crimes are punishable by flogging. The pain is so severe that some faint after only 8 or 9 lashes. Other young women were subjected to less violent but equally sinister incarceration. Political prisoners, these women were detained in isolation in an entirely white room with “no sense of time, of day and night.” They are kept as possible bartering chips but many slowly dissolve into insanity before they can be bartered. The line in “Baraye,” “Because of the girl who wished she was a boy” refers not to transgenderism but to the fierce oppression doled out to women but not to boys; hence, if she were a boy, life would be far less punishing.

The chapter “Poisoned Schoolgirls” beggars belief. The author explains,

Since November 2022, over one thousand young schoolgirls have been poisoned by toxic gas in schools across Iran. People suspect this to be an intentional act, an attempt to force girls’ schools to close, since the government fears the youth and young girls most of all.

Some parents were reduced to surrounding their daughters’ schools to ensure that poisoners were not able to enter. The episodes were widely reported by major news outlets including PBS, the BBC, and Amnesty International.

Since the Iranian regime cannot regulate the Internet and social media as China has developed into a fine art, it must resort to less high-tech but nonetheless tried and true methods of control. “They’re Watching You” is a primer on managing the hearts and minds of the population. These techniques may be of special interest to Americans given the continual furor over “misinformation,” “fact-checking,” and hardly disguised “media bias.” The ayatollahs resort to what the author describes as “distorting reality,” “threatening and humiliating protesters,” and “inserting informants into resistance groups” thereby generally fomenting fear and paranoia. 

A darker technique is the constant glorification of martyrdom, found especially useful during the nihilistic Iran-Iraq War (1980–88), in which around a million soldiers perished. One of the slogans went “To die a martyr is to inject blood into the veins of society.” Iran notoriously used children as young as nine as mine-sweepers. Needless to say, the toy soldiers did not have their parents’ permission to serve as “martyrs;” rather, they were “drafted” into service by the military.

“The Madness of Censorship” describes the Ministry of Islamic Guidance in which a decrepit, blind clergyman “watches” films while assistants describe the scenes as the sightless senile censor regularly yells, “Cut!” Offending images include too much of a woman’s ear visible under her veil, and the possibility—although it is not certain—that another woman may be barefoot. The final scenes of Othello were revised because “it is preferable that they should continue to live together happily.”

A “Persian Spring” or False Hope?

As noted, Satrapi and several colleagues believe theocratic Iran is headed toward collapse. But they issue one caveat: They argue that if Iran should find itself in a major international military conflict, such an event could reinvigorate the leadership. If Iran finds itself at war, its government will be strengthened and popular opposition will wane, at least for a season. In Persepolis, Satrapi remembers that when Iraq attacked Iran in 1980 out of fear of the spread of Shiite radicalism, and the decade-long war began, citizens rallied to the new theocracy. The population is not the same today, having endured forty-five years of stultifying horror, but an international conflict would give the state the needed excuse to add martial law to the existing political oppression.

If the present Iranian regime should collapse, so also would its distorted religious substructure dissolve. The authors in this volume speculate with some glee that freedom will follow Iran’s transition to a secular state, but a country with no religious culture at all is in danger of succumbing to the next tyranny because it may lack the philosophical justification for freedom. A better future will most likely be found in a return to Iran’s religious pluralism consisting predominately of Islam, but also, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Yazidism—if such a transition is even possible. A citizenry inhumanely ruled by an autocrat who proclaims “I am the will of God” may not look favorably on any religious sentiment. Satrapi insists that through the centuries Iran has always enjoyed a “strong” culture; if so, what might be the components of a post-theocratic culture? Could a “Persian Spring” go the way of the heart-rending “Arab Spring?”