Before I begin the article, I am proud of all the fearless, brave Iranian women and men who have fought for their equal rights in the past century—gender, ethnic, and religious equality.

When I wrote this article in 2023, some friends and I organized a few events in Copenhagen to support our ongoing movement. Unfortunately, as always, later, profit-seeking monarchists and anti-Iranian armed extremist/ter*rorist groups like MEK (Mujahedin Khalgh) entered our peaceful movement and tried to hijack it. So, like many others, I left the surface and continued my support from a distance.

Now that in 2025, I'm revising my original article, I can see that finally, the government and the leader decided to loosen the restrictions a bit, even though it is far from enough. This is not the only time we, Iranian men and women, have fought for our equal rights. Still, this time, at least, we saw some results and a hope that reformists like Pezeshkian and Javad Zarif can stop the far-right pro-absolute leadership/monarchy parties from retaking power. We will continue the movement until we have equal rights for everyone, all around the world, from Iran to the US, UK, Denmark, Russia, China, Arabic countries, and Palestine 🇵🇸. Remember, in the West, we think we have "equal" rights, but as a person who has lived in Denmark for 8+ years, has visited many other European countries, and has worked with people from different cultures, I could see that Iranian women are much stronger than Danes and ethnic equality is much worse in the West.

To begin, bear in mind that for a few decades, Iran has been isolated from the rest of the world, and Western media has promoted the propaganda of the totalitarian leader-backed conservative parts of the current political system, so you need to speak with Iranians who have lived in the country after the revolution to understand the reality. Otherwise, you will be misled by Western propaganda and the lies of people who are either paid by the leader or the ones living outside Iran, mostly with fake asylum cases and funded by a few international gangs and the governments they live in.

A few years ago, I remember a friend of one of my friends sent a few photos of one of our protests to a famous Western media agency, but they declined to use them. Instead, they used photos of women with black Arabic-style clothes, from the minority of Arabs we have in our country who support the conservative extremists, and in that article, they presented that those people were us! The protesters!!! After seeing such blatant lies, I realized how bad the anti-Iranian propaganda is. To give you an idea, I have seen many people in Europe who thought in Iran, Christians or Jews are not allowed to even live! Still, for example, no one tells you that in our parliament, a few seats are reserved for religious minorities, including Christians, Jews, and Zoroastrians.

Of course not everything is idea. For example, converting from Islam to atheism or other religions and then publicly speaking against Islam, has a death penalty, similar to other Islamic countries.

Comparing Iran with Denmark

These days, I live in Denmark, a country where men and women are allowed to choose their clothes or even walk naked! (similar to Germany and different from the US or Italy, where religion is still strong). But in Iran, Hijab is compulsory, and is forced by the armed forces who are led by the leader (religious king).

Update: In 2025, the government has loosened the restrictions a bit. A few months ago, President Pezeshkian stood up against the new hijab enforcement law that was passed in Parliament by the minority of far-right conservatives, who are interestingly promoted by Izraeli/US-backed media that also support Pahlavi and MEK (the triangle of evil together with the leader/King). I have written another article about this. If you are interested, please check out this link.

Like Denmark, Iran was ruled by a constitutional monarchy before the 1970s. However, people wanted to replace the king with pure democracy: a parliament alongside a president or an MP.

Iranians wanted a socialist democracy without any sort of lifetime rules; No matter if you call it a king, president, or a leader! Still, the US and UK governments, afraid of losing their benefits from the Shah, supported the religious leader Emam Khomeini in taking over power. So, instead, we got the same type of lifetime "monarchy" and a dictatorship, this time with an Arabic/foreign religion forced into society.

In 1979, the democratic movement was tricked by this new charismatic leader, Emam Khomeini. Right after taking power, he ordered the execution of all the democratic leaders who could potentially become his competitors. Of course, alongside those democratic leaders, some anti-Iranian MEK Mujahedin te*rrorists and armed Pakistani/Iraqi/US/UK-backed separatists were also hanged. Bear in mind that the majority of the Iranian ~80 million population is not even Muslim. Still, we cannot publicly talk about our faiths due to the death penalty that I mentioned before. That's why we cannot tolerate seeing women being forced to cover their hair, even during the warm days of summer! Under the same religious restrictions, even men are not allowed to wear shorts in public, no matter how warm the weather becomes in the summer.

As mentioned earlier, in Iran, converting from Islam and publicly speaking against Islam has the death penalty. That's why most people fear publicly discussing their religion and beliefs. But, if you are already not a Muslim, you can still have a good life and even become a top manager in a good company. For example, back in Iran, when my employer assigned me to work for Irancell as a client, almost all my managers were women, and even one of the top managers was a female Zoroastrian.

I have created a chart to compare the systems in both countries over the past century. The part for Denmark might not be as accurate as it is for Iran, but it is close enough based on my limited knowledge of Danish history.

What was happening back then?

Back then, our brave women and men (in Farsi, we always say women before men, unlike male-dominated languages like English) were protesting for their rights with bare hands on the streets. At the same time, the far-right conservative government shut down the internet to silence the movement, and the police arrested many protestors. Unlike what the conservative parties pretend, this movement has never been about forcing Muslims to remove their hijab. It has always been about promoting equal rights for everyone.

Bear in mind that the police and army are led directly by the leader himself, not the president, but back then, the "president" was selected by the leader and was 100% aligned with him like a puppet. Unfortunately, a few days after the protests began, Rajavi (the leader of MEK Mujahedin t3rrorists), Pahlavi, armed separatists who entered our borders and killed civilians, and other Western-backed extremists tried to hijack the movement, Which made it a national security issue and helped the army and juristic system (both directly led by the leader/king) to justify all those arrests.

The good thing was that, finally, curtains were drawn. We saw the reality of colonialists who only support dictators and extremists in the Middle East.

The song of freedom

Shervin Hajipour sang and recorded "Baraye Azadi" in his home studio in the midst of Iran's largest freedom protests. The song was written based on the wishes, we, regular Iranians, wrote on Twitter. The translation of lyrics can be found here. Shervin was arrested the day after he released the song. His song became people's chant in hundreds of freedom rallies that took place all around the world on October 1st. Later, he was released and now he is singing new beautiful songs.

President Pezeshkian

It seems the leader (religious king) has finally understood that the wrong people surround him, so this time, he decided not to interfere with the election and let the people choose their president. Even though VoA Farsi, BBC Farsi, ManotoTV (financially backed by Saudi Arabia and Izrael), Reza Pahlavi, MEK (an anti-Iranian far-left Islamic fundamentalist t3rrorist cult led by Masoud and Maryam Rajavi), and other Western-funded dictators, extremists, and propaganda agencies who present to be "the opposition" work hard to make the new president look stupid and work hard to stop him from making any progress. I hope he stays strong, changes the government fundamentally, and brings equality and freedom to our beloved country.