EIt’s not Iran, it’s the world that has arrived at a historic turning point these days. Mahsa Amini’s death has long since and irrevocably changed Iran. Four days after the protests began, the sick, eighty-four-year-old religious leader Ali Khamenei said the following sentence in his last speech, and it was obvious that he was speaking: “When you are in the midst of events, you cannot see what is happening.”
How true. This sentence is just a week old. And it is the only sentence that the most powerful in the country has said so far about this death that moves the world. This silence can be understood as you like. As an expression of fear, of surprise or, as Khamenei himself says, of a lack of overview. In any case, the “events” continue to happen, undiminished and bloodier every day. However that may end, the face of Iran will not be what we knew before Mahsa’s death. The face of the Middle East and that of the Islamic world will also be different after this death.
