On Monday, Iran’s women’s national football team took the field in Australia. They lost 3-0 to South Korea. That was the least important thing that happened that evening. When the Iranian anthem played, the players stood in a row, hands clasped behind their backs, and stayed silent. Not one of them sang. Not one placed a hand over her heart. A handful of Iranian fans in the stands held up the pre-1979 Iranian flag, the one with the lion and the sun. Three days later they sang, and saluted. Both acts capture the same struggle.

Almost a week before, on February 28, the United States and Israel had launched a joint strike on Iran. The opening salvo killed Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Trump and Netanyahu each addressed the Iranian people directly, urging them to seize their own destiny. But military force can topple a regime without building a society. The American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan made painfully clear how much political reconstruction depends on forces already alive within a society.

The question that will determine Iran’s future is not a military one. It is cultural. And for generations, the answer to that question has run through the bodies of women.

The female body in Iran has never been a private matter. In the 1930s, Reza Shah banned women from wearing the hijab as part of a forced secularization campaign. Women who refused to uncover were attacked and jailed. In the final years of his son’s reign, female students began wearing the hijab as a deliberate act of defiance against the monarchy. Then came the revolution. Khomeini made the veil compulsory. On March 8, 1979 – International Women’s Day – tens of thousands of women marched through the streets of Tehran in protest, managing to delay the law by three years. In 1983, it was codified: women seen in public without a head covering would face up to 74 lashes.

Every regime that has ruled Iran has reshaped the female body to fit its ideology. What set the Islamic Republic apart was making that control the central project of the state. This was never just a modesty policy. It was identity politics. The regime dictated how women would dress, how they would appear in public, and which version of “Iranian womanhood” would be considered legitimate. It banned women from singing publicly. It restricted their movement, their clothing, their voices. The female body became the surface on which the state inscribed itself.

But Iranian women never stopped writing back. Every generation pushed the boundaries further. In the 1990s, women traded the black chador for fitted coats and scarves that showed more hair. In late 2017, the “Girls of Revolution Street” began climbing utility poles in Tehran and waving their hijabs like protest flags. Then, in September 2022, Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman, died in the custody of the morality police, arrested for “improper” dress. Her death sparked nationwide protests. Women burned hijabs in the streets, cut their hair in public, and stood their ground before security forces. “Woman. Life. Freedom.” became the rallying cry of a generation.

The 2022 uprising was crushed. The resistance was not. Elnaz Rekabi, a competitive rock climber, competed in South Korea without a hijab that same year. Chess player Mitra Hejazipour was dropped from the Iranian national team after doing the same. Narges Mohammadi, journalist and activist, won the Nobel Peace Prize from a prison cell.

In December 2024, Parastoo Ahmadi, a 27-year-old singer, livestreamed a concert from a caravanserai, a historic Silk Road waystation that predates the Islamic Republic by centuries, with no hijab and her shoulders bare, telling her audience: “I am Parastoo, a girl who wants to sing for the people she loves. That is a right I could no longer ignore.” In Iran, women are banned from appearing in public without a hijab, and from singing in public altogether. Ahmadi broke both rules at once. Each of these women, in her own arena, said the same thing: my body does not belong to the regime.

The regime controlled the archive. It rewrote official history, swapping Cyrus for Khomeini, the lion and the sun for revolutionary symbols, Persepolis for a Shia narrative. It controlled school curricula, the media, everything that could be dictated from above. But the cultural theorist Diana Taylor drew a distinction that cuts to the heart of what has been happening in Iran for decades. She distinguishes between the archive, memory stored in texts and institutions, and what she calls the repertoire: knowledge that lives in the body, passed on through gesture, movement, and what people do in shared space. An archive can be rewritten. A repertoire demands presence. It is far harder to erase.

Taylor was not writing about Iran, or about resistance. But her framework illuminates what happens when a regime is not satisfied with controlling the archive and sets out to control the repertoire as well, the body itself, with particular and relentless focus on the female body. The result is the opposite of what the regime intended. Every act of bodily refusal by a woman, removing a hijab, singing out loud, standing in silence through an anthem, transforms the body the state tried to claim into a site of resistance. Watching those footballers stand motionless and mute in Melbourne on that Monday, you are watching the repertoire at work: cultural memory surfacing through a physical act.

On Thursday, after their silence had made headlines around the world, they sang, and saluted, almost exaggeratedly, every single one of them. The prevailing assumption, as with Iranian athletes before them, was that instructions had come from home. This is their struggle – and both acts are part of it. A body forced to sing speaks no less than a body that chose to stay silent.

Trump and Netanyahu’s direct appeals to the Iranian people are not falling on barren ground. They are falling on a society whose women have carried in their bodies, generation after generation, exactly what the regime tried to destroy. Not because of the men making the appeals, but because of the women who never stopped.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)