Mahsa Amini – say her name. This is a mantra among Iranians since protests exploded in Iran in mid-September. On the streets of London, I have been shouting it out in solidarity. On 1 October, 500,000 people marched across the world, saying it. Every weekend since mid-September, London protests regularly bring some 15,000 people to the street – but where are the headlines? On 22 October, an estimated 100,000 people marched through Berlin streets demanding freedom for Iran – the largest gathering of the Iranian diaspora in history. But I bet this is the first you’ve heard about it.

While I am moved to hear this young Iranian woman’s name ringing out at these protests, the greater world – the one outside the Iranian diaspora – and some of our close non-Iranian friends, remain largely silent.

I see in Iran the forefront of feminism, young women taking back the right to their space, to their bodily autonomy, even at the cost of their lives

Mahsa Jhina Amini, a 22-year-old Iranian Kurd, was taken into custody by Iranian authorities on 13 September because of “bad hijab”. She was in custody for just two hours before collapsing and being taken to hospital in a coma. She died on 16 September. The authorities claimed she had a heart attack from a pre-existing condition. Her family deny this, and state that her body showed signs of being beaten.

Protests broke out in Mahsa’s homeland of Iranian Kurdistan and, in spite of a brutal crackdown, they spread throughout Iran. The Kurdish freedom cry of “Woman Life Freedom”, the dominant chant to what has become the biggest protests Iran has seen since the revolution of 1979, was recorded in 350 locations and united not just genders, but Iranians of all political and religious beliefs and socio-economic groups, including ethnic minorities in Iran such as Balochis and Kurds. Protests have been going on for over a month now and hundreds have been killed.

Two years ago, George Floyd was killed by a police officer in the US. The world was ignited by the hashtag Black Lives Matter: my Instagram went black on the day everyone posted black squares, and the protest marches that took place around the world were on every front page.

When Ukraine was invaded by Russia, I found all my social media turning the colours of the Ukrainian flag, but nothing like this greeted the eruption of protests in Iran. Although these protests are extraordinary in being led by young women, feminist support has been sparse. And even as social and traditional media begin to show the situation in Iran, there is nothing like the mainstream outpouring of sympathy that BLM or Ukraine had.

Now that many innocent Iranian girls have been killed at the hands of authorities, the hashtag Mahsa Amini has broken all records and some millions of exiled Iranians have mobilised in solidarity protests, I wonder if Britain – the world – see us yet? Where are the black squares for the murders of not just Mahsa, but Hadis Najafi, Nika Shakarami, Sarina Esmailzadeh, Asra Panahi, Setareh Tajik, Negin Abdul Maleki? They are all young women, some even children, who have been killed in these weeks by the regime’s security forces. Amnesty has recorded the deaths of 23 children so far, and human rights groups put those killed at over 200, while nearly 13,000 have been arrested – the real numbers are much higher but impossible to ascertain. We may never know how many were killed in the horrific fire that broke out at Evin prison – home to incarcerated political prisoners, dissidents, activists, students, filmmakers, writers and protestors. And what has happened to the hundreds that have “disappeared” since protests started, or the young girls taken to “re-education centres” who ask their lawyers for abortion pills. And yet the news I listened to on BBC radio yesterday spent precisely no time at all on these atrocities – yet a good five minutes on the death of the founder of the Red Bull energy drink.

Six weeks ago, videos poured out of Iran showing scenes that until then had seemed unimaginable – a woman dancing around a bonfire before casting her headscarf into the flames, two women quietly eating lunch in a café in Tehran wearing no hijab, girls standing atop burning vehicles waving their headscarves in the air, rivers of protesters chasing away armed and armoured riot police. Yet even those of us keen Iran watchers in the diaspora didn’t instantly understand how important these protests were. This is not the first time the regime has brutally killed a woman in their charge, and these are not the first protests against the mandatory hijab laws. The last wave of protests in 2019 ended in an internet blackout during which the authorities killed some 1500 protestors.

But the protests didn’t stop, even though there were internet shutdowns and more young women shot during demonstrations. What started as a cry-out against the mandatory hijab soon became a demand for freedom. And while the brutal treatment of Mahsa Jhina Amini was the spark that lit this conflagration of rage, the real heat comes from decades of oppression towards any opposition to the hardline clerical regime. There’s a free-falling economy and the mass corruption and hypocrisy of the ruling elite, which refuses to engage with Iranians’ simplest demands, at the same time as their own children stalk the streets of LA in scantily clad, surgically reconstructed bodies, bought with the pilfered resources of our country.

As women in Iran started to cut off their hair, my social media sparked to life. Editors began calling. But for every article that was commissioned, another five editors that I solicited stayed silent. For every Angelina Jolie or Juliette Binoche who made a supportive statement or cut her hair on Instagram, thousands of other female celebrities, feminists, activists, artists and politicians stayed silent.

What I see happening in Iran is the forefront of feminism, young women taking back the right to their space, to their bodily autonomy, even at the cost of their lives. And, given the assault on women’s rights we are seeing from the US to India, I cannot understand why it is not being championed across the globe.

I know that Iran feels far away to many – as I was repeatedly told by European friends when I asked them why they felt more moved by the plight of Ukrainian refugees than by those of Syrians or Afghanis. Iranians just don’t “look just like us” is the answer I was told by white European friends when they rushed to house Ukrainian refugees.

But is this really the limit to our compassion? I asked a young friend, a politically engaged feminist, why she didn’t mention the women’s uprisings in Iran on her social media. She talked of her nervousness in getting it wrong, of “cancel culture”. She didn’t want to “take space from Iranians” by speaking out on their behalf. These are all good Gen Z concerns, but it made me wonder – are we now so fractured into tiny groups, and so conscious of, and insecure about those divisions that we fail to see our common humanity? What ambiguity is there in a sixteen-year-old girl being beaten so viciously about the head that she dies in her classroom?

This at least is something we can learn from the protests in Iran. The unity that is bringing together Iranians is inspiring. While feminists in the west and LGBTQ groups have largely ignored their Iranian brethren’s struggle, both Deepak Chopra and philosopher Slavoj Žižek have made statements that reflect the unity of this movement and how Iranian women have set in motion a global paradigm shift. As Žižek says, “They are not out there, far from us, part of a different exotic culture… We can immediately see that the Iranian struggle is the struggle of us all.”

Kamin Mohammadi’s books are “The Cypress Tree: A Love Letter To Iran, and Bella Figura: How To Live Love and Eat the Italian Way” (Bloomsbury). kamin.co.uk @kaminmohammadi