She listens for the sound of cars pulling up outside. The knock on the door. The phone call summoning her to interrogation. When they’ve come for you once already, the fear never goes away.<\/p>\n
The first time she was on the phone to her mother when the car pulled up beside her on the street. It was back in 2024 during the long fallout from the “Woman, Life, Freedom” protest movement after the death in custody of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini, arrested by the Morality Police for allegedly not wearing her hijab properly.<\/p>\n
A man and a young woman got out and stood in front of Shirin.<\/p>\n
“Are you Mrs \u2026?” The man asked.<\/p>\n
“I said ‘yes’. I told my mother I would call her back later and hung up.”<\/p>\n
They had been in the middle of talking about finding food for their evening meal.<\/p>\n
As a political activist Shirin understood what was happening. The couple confronting her were secret police.<\/p>\n
“I asked: ‘What do you want?” They said, ‘You are under arrest.'”<\/p>\n
Moments later she was inside the car and the young woman challenged her for not wearing a headscarf. There was a scuffle.<\/p>\n
“She said, ‘Put on your headscarf.’ She tried to force the headscarf on me. I said: ‘You shouldn’t touch my headscarf.’ I pulled her hand down.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"She listens for the sound of cars pulling up outside. The knock on the door. The phone call…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":951551,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,12,14],"class_list":{"0":"post-951550","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-news","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-stories"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/116553226024584002","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/951550","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=951550"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/951550\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/951551"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=951550"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=951550"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=951550"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}