مهسا ژینا امینی

The name

مهسا ژینا امینی (Mahsâ Zhinâ Amini). Her birth name was Zhinâ (ژینا), Kurdish for “life-giving.” Her family is Kurdish from Saqqez (Saqqiz, سقز), a city in Iran’s Kurdistan province where the regime has historically banned the registration of Kurdish names on Iranian identity documents. So she was registered as Mahsâ on her birth certificate (a Persian name), and called Zhinâ at home.

Both names belong on this page. Zhinâ is the name her family used. Mahsâ is the name the state forced. The protests that followed her death did not call her by the name the state forced on her, and we do not either.

What happened

On 13 September 2022, Mahsa was visiting Tehran with her brother Kiarash. As they exited the Haghani metro station, agents of gasht-e ershâd, the morality police, stopped her on the street, citing improper hijab. They placed her in a police van and took her to the Vozara detention center in central Tehran for “guidance” classes. Witnesses including her brother reported that officers struck her in the head with a baton during transport.

At Vozara she collapsed. She was transferred unconscious to Kasra Hospital in north Tehran, where she remained in a coma. She was pronounced dead on 16 September 2022. She was 22 years old.

The Iranian state’s official narrative said she had a pre-existing cardiac condition and that her death was due to sudden cardiac failure unrelated to her detention. Her family contradicted this publicly, saying Mahsa was a healthy young woman with no heart condition. Leaked CT scans from Kasra Hospital, published by independent Iranian journalists, showed evidence of skull fracture and cerebral hemorrhage. Amnesty International concluded that Mahsa had been beaten in custody. The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran concluded in its March 2024 report that her death resulted from beatings at the hands of state agents and that her killing constituted a crime against humanity.

What followed

Her funeral was held on 17 September 2022 in Saqqez, her home city. At the cemetery, women removed their headscarves and chanted, in Kurdish first and then in Persian: jin, jiyân, âzâdî, then zan, zendegi, âzâdi, “woman, life, freedom.” The chant left Saqqez within hours.

By the next morning protests had spread to Sanandaj, Tehran, Tabriz, Mashhad, Isfahan, Shiraz, and dozens of other cities. The state cut internet access. Security forces opened fire on protesters from the first week. Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch documented at least 500 protesters killed, more than 22,000 detained, and seven publicly executed (including Mohsen Shekari, Majidreza Rahnavard, and the four men hanged in May 2023). Iran Human Rights, the Oslo-based monitor, put the protest death toll higher and confirmed at least 71 children among the dead, including Nika Shakarami (16) and Sarina Esmailzadeh (16).

The journalists who broke the story of her death, Niloofar Hâmedi (who took the Kasra Hospital photograph) and Elaheh Mohammadi (who covered the funeral), were arrested within days and held in Evin for sixteen months. The doctor Aida Rostami, who treated wounded protesters in their homes because the regime was arresting injured protesters from hospital beds, was killed in December 2022. The rapper Toomaj Sâlehi was sentenced to death (later overturned) for his lyrics in support of the movement.

The slogan / movement origin

The chant the women in Saqqez raised at her funeral was Kurdish: jin, jiyân, âzâdî. It came from the Kurdish women’s movement, developed across the 2000s in PJAK and PKK political education and elaborated in Abdullah Öcalan’s writings on women’s liberation as the precondition for any other freedom, then carried into the Rojava revolution in northeast Syria from 2012 onwards. The slogan crossed into Persian as zan, zendegi, âzâdi at Mahsa’s funeral and within days became the defining slogan of an Iranian uprising. The Kurdish provenance is part of the entry.

How it’s remembered

The 16th of every Iranian month after September 2022 has become a vigil date in Iran and across the diaspora. Iranians light candles at home, post photographs to Instagram and X under the hashtags #MahsaAmini, #ZhinaAmini, and #MahsaJinaAmini, and gather in cities from Toronto to Berlin to Los Angeles to London. Public squares in European capitals have been renamed for her. The European Parliament awarded the 2023 Sakharov Prize to “Mahsa Amini and the Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran.” Iranian writers and musicians inside the country have been imprisoned for commemorating her by name.

Inside Iran, the 16th of every month sees small acts of refusal: women removing their hijab in public, anniversary graffiti on city walls, candles in apartment windows. The state has continued to prosecute people for chanting her name, for chanting the slogan, for wearing the protest colors.

Where to read more

• Amnesty International, Mahsa Amini killing in custody report
• Human Rights Watch, on her death in custody, 16 September 2022
• UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, March 2024 report
• BBC reporting on the protests and the slogan
• Britannica, Death of Jina Mahsa Amini

References

• Dehkhoda, مهسا
• Amnesty International, “Iran: Death in custody of young woman after morality police arrest must be criminally investigated,” 16 September 2022
• UN Fact-Finding Mission on Iran, A/HRC/55/67, March 2024
• Iran Human Rights, annual reports 2022-2024 on protest death toll
• Reuters, “Mahsa Amini one year on,” 16 September 2023