Tired of the segregation imposed by the authorities, the students of the Faculty of Medicine of Tabriz, in the northwest of Iran, perforated the wall that divided the cafeteria between the sector for women and men.
The rector’s response was to close the place. That of the students, sit in front of the closed cafeteria and have lunch together in a large picnic that they organize every noon.
In Iran, sharing a meal with fellow students becomes a revolutionary act. The joy with which the boys share their food is contagious and can be seen in dozens of videos on social networks.
Protests continue to shake the Ayatollahs’ regime since the death of Mahsa Amini, the 22-year-old Iranian Kurdish woman, on September 16. She passed away three days after being detained in Tehran for allegedly violating the dress code. She had lifted her veil, her hijab, obligatory.
Two months later, after the death of at least 328 protesters and the arrest of thousands more, according to data from the organization HRANA (Human Rights Activists News Agency), protests are taking place throughout the country.
In the last week, the protests spread to 130 universities. The Ministry of Education wanted to close them, but found that the professors gave classes without segregation by sex at the gates of the campuses.
In Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology, known as Iran’s MIT, the basishis, the paramilitaries, entered several times, but they could not prevent a big event this week in the main hall of the university with dozens of speakers and a finale in the that a crowd sang the famous song of the 70s.
This does not mean that there are no pressures, threats of expulsion and even corporal punishment. These are taking place, according to complaints from the students, in the secondary schools of women who demonstrated massively against the use of the hijab in the previous weeks.
They denounce that they carried out searches and even forced them to undress to see if they were hiding pamphlets against the regime.
Forty underage students were arrested in the last week, according to several human rights organizations. Hamed, a 25-year-old student at Guilan University in Rasht, a northern city near the Caspian Sea.
The “basishis” move with camouflaged vehicles like ambulances that park outside the campus and where they take the arrested. In recent days, videos of women against the guards who tried to arrest them for not wearing the hijab were seen.