The Rainbow Manifesto: Towards an Iranian Renaissance

(lengthy, incredible, hopeful, inspiring. Please read)


The Rainbow Manifesto: Towards an Iranian Renaissance
4/21/2023 by Amir Soltani
“Woman, Life, Freedom” is not three words. It is one breath—a revolt against all death. This is the Rainbow Manifesto.



(Art by Studio Ghazaal Vojdani)
The ‘Iranian Women of Graphic Design’ database shares open-access protest posters to amplify #WomanLifeFreedom movement—triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini—in Iran and beyond. (Art by Jennifer Marie White-Johnson)
(Art by Bahar Seyedin)
(Art via from____iran on Instagram)
(Art by Studio Ghazaal Vojdani)


The ‘Iranian Women of Graphic Design’ database shares open-access protest posters to amplify #WomanLifeFreedom movement—triggered by the death of Mahsa Amini—in Iran and beyond. (Art by Jennifer Marie White-Johnson)

The Nowruz holidays have ushered in the Iranian New year—the celebration of spring, of fertility and of the earth, celebration of family and friendship, of faces and intentions purified in mirrors of light. We have entered the year 1402 in the Iranian calendar. And the writing is on the wall. The Islamic Republic’s time is up. The face of a new Iran is breaking out of Ayatollah Khomeini’s tomb. The shadow of darkness and cloak of deceit cast over Iran has been rent asunder. The Islamic Republic’s mask has slipped and with it the lie: the crucible of crime and corruption binding the body of the Iranian people to a cycle of death and burial in the name of the Mahdi, the Shi’a messiah. We are witnessing the Rainbow Revolution, a new day and a new dawn, the first stirrings of an Iranian renaissance, a post-fundamentalist moment and movement whose brilliance and blessings promise to transform the Islamic world, humanity as a whole, even life itself. There is no missing the global arc or sweeping beauty of this Rainbow Revolution—colored as it is by the dreams and desires, confidence, creativity and courage of a new generation. The countdown to a free Iran has begun.

Woman, once decapitated, her body mutilated and her limbs scattered as shards and shrapnel burying the earth in the image of man, the faculty of the intellect, has ceased to exist as a corpse: a commodity and currency recycled as property and matter in the mirrors of the state. The feminine and fertile breathes yet again, as body and spirit, and as vision and vessel for the resurrection, liberation and celebration of life. The spark for the Rainbow Revolution—the bonfire of veils—enveloping Iran today was the death of Mahsa Zhina Amini, a young Kurdish woman arrested by Iran’s morality police for being improperly veiled. She was severely beaten at a “re-education” center, fell into a coma and died on Sept. 16, 2022. Amini was 22. That should have been the end of her story—another day, another casualty. Another anonymous woman—a minority at that—murdered without justice, buried without ceremony.

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Sept. 16 is now the cradle of a new calendar—the genesis of a new era in which feminism has fundamentalism, fascism and fanaticism on the run. In the cosmic clash between heaven and earth, darkness and light, the masculine and the feminine, the mosque and the tavern, thanatos and eros, Iran’s children are tilting the scales of time back towards life. The mantra “woman, life, freedom” envelops the corpse of time and endows the chaos of matter with the majesty of faith in justice. The gravity and sanctity of each word infuses every void, the abyss of space, with music and meaning. Men, morgues and maps, the barren, hostile and sterile field of geopolitics—a great game of bozkeshi with the corpse of nations torn apart as if the carcass of goats—is impregnated by a new impulse, with “woman, life, freedom” ushering in a vision of the planet unveiled as one breath and body, skin and spirit.

In a state of panic, three misogynist demons—Iran, Saudi Arabia and China—our very own Trumpian clans and clones, have brokered a butchers’ pact: a wall to contain the threat of Mahsa’s army. The new wave of freedom—women, girls and gays—must be stopped … lest the Middle East and Central Asia’s hypermasculine status quo, formerly an American pax, now a Chinese pox, born and bound as it is to speculation in blood, oil and war, comes crashing down on their snake pit—a once fertile, now sterile, crescent in which children, charred, serve as fossils, with the remains of women and their freedom charters as fuel for spurts and spikes in genocidal rates of growth. But there is no sweeping Mahsa into the oubliette. Iranian women, the Girls of Revolution Street, are breathing new life into the Beijing Declaration—the revolutionary idea advanced by Chairman Mao in 1949, and no doubt, embraced by Xi Mingze, China’s first daughter, that “women hold up half the sky.” Mahsa lives through the words now the mantra, “Zan, Zendegi, Azadi” (Woman, Life, Freedom). From Saqqez, her hometown, in Kurdistan to Tehran, Zahedan to Izeh, Tabriz to Isfahan, Qum to Mashhad, her spirit, now a freedom song, radiates through the body and breath of millions in cities and towns across Iran and summons a civilization back to life.


https://msmagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/@pegitto-724x1024.png
Our lives and the lives of generations before and after us are now inextricably in communion with hers.
(@pegitto / Instagram)
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Breaking out—breathing free.
(Niloofar Montazeri)

. . . .

Woman, Life, Freedom is not three words. It is one breath—a revolt against all death.

https://msmagazine.com/2023/04/21/iranian-renaissance/