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English: On Saturday 8 October 2022, several hundred protesters gathered at Parliament Square as part of a worldwide series of protests in solidarity with Iranian women and Iran's wider population struggling for personal, political and religious freedom and social justice against a ruthless authoritarian theocracy.

A month ago, protests erupted across Iran in response to the collapse and death of Mahsa Amini in police custody on 16 September, after she had been arrested for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly. While officials tried to blame her death on a freak heart attack, most Iranians believe that her sudden collapse and death was a result of a skull fracture from the brutal beating she had received shortly before.

Such ruthless repression continues despite the fact that official public opinion polls have shown that a majority of Iranian people do not support women being compelled to wear it. Iranian women have been at the forefront of many of the protests, defiantly burning their hijabs and cutting their hair.

As trade unions, opposition political parties and internet dissent in Iran have been strongly suppressed, the protests have been largely uncoordinated and scattered spontaneous affairs. Mahsa Amini's death has however acted to mobilise the working class and liberal middle classes in an all-embracing coalition battling to overthrow the regime.

After twenty years of failed neoliberal policies, and with the dire economic situation worsened by savage US-led sanctions, the protests have become about far more than demonstrations over the right not to wear the hijab, and more a broader struggle for both religious and political freedom as well as social and economic justice.

Let's hope that the protests in Iran might inspire others, or to use former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's expression, act as a 'virus' that might 'spread the contagion' of demands for political freedom and social justice across the Middle East. However oppressive the regime is in Iran, and it is brutal, it is certainly no worse than the internal suppression of dissent and freedom in nearby nations such as Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt, where any attempt by protesters to gather is commonly met by the immediate discharge of live ammunition.