Abbas Amanat

Well, if you listen to the main slogan, which is the message of this movement, it's called Women, Life, Freedom, Zan, Zendegi, Azadi, which is a translation of actually the Kurdish equivalent, which is close to Persian being in the European language.

and it's apparently initiated first in the Syrian Kurdistan.

where they were fighting against the Islamic Daesh forces because they were attacking the Yazidis there and the women being enslaved.

But the message as it moved, historians are interested in this kind of trends.

So it just moved to Kurdistan and from Kurdistan, now being the message of this movement, reflects pretty much

sums up what this movement is all about.

Women in the forefront, because of all the, one might say, discriminations, the treatment, the humiliation, that this younger generation feels, well, not only the younger generations, but most of the Iranian secular middle classes since 1979, basically, for the past 43 years.

And they would think that...

These all basically symbolized or represented by the wearing, the mandatory wearing of the hijab, which is at the core of this protest.

You see the young women, if you look at many of these clips that comes through in the past six weeks,

Women in streets take off their mandatory scarves, which is a young shawl or some kind of a head covering, that's all.

And they throw it into the bonfire in the middle of the street and they dance around it.

and slogans.

So there is a sense of complete rejection of what this regime for 43 years have been imposing on women.

It's not, as it's sometimes been portrayed, a movement

against hijab through and through.

But it basically says, you know, there has to be a choice for those who want to wear hijab and those who want to remain without hijab.

Yeah, the hijab is a symbol of something much deeper.

Much deeper.

And actually, before we get into that, it's interesting to note that in many of these demonstrations we see in the university campuses or in the streets, you see women with hijab