Abbas Amanat

young women with hijab are next to those have to remove their hijab and they're together basically protesting.

That's the most interesting feature of these demonstrations.

And then men and women together against the segregation that the regime has imposed upon them for all these years.

Now, in terms of what it represents,

As I pointed out, one is the question of the whole series of, one might say, civil and legal discriminations against women.

You are considered as a kind of a second-class citizen.

You depend on your men.

There's a kind of a patriarchy that has been institutionalized in the Islamic Republic in a very profound fashion.

And that means that probably in matters of divorce, marriage and divorce, in matters of custody of your children, in matter of inheritance, in matter of freedom of movement, you depend on your husband, your father, your brother, a male member of your family, your child even, your son.

could be the case.

And because of that, obviously, a younger generation who is so well-informed through social media knows about the world as much as an American does, American kid does, and probably sometimes more.

They're very, very curious.

It's from what I hear, or sometimes that I met a few of them outside Iran.

You'll see that how this new generation is

completely different from what the Islamic Republic wanted to create in its social engineering.

It's basically the failure of 43 years of the Islamic Republic's act of imposition of a certain so-called Islamic values on women.

Then it's a matter of education.

You would see that there is segregation in the schools.

One of the issues that now, right now, is at the heart of this demonstration is that self-services in many of the campuses of Iranian universities are segregated, male and female, to different rooms, to different halls.

Now they are breaking through the walls virtually everywhere and sit together in order to basically resist the authorities who wants to impose segregation.