THE REFORMATION ROLLS ON:

The second significant phenomenon that the current protests reveal is that a social revolution has already taken place in Iran. This revolution has occurred in opposition to the efforts and extensive planning of the ruling clerical Islamists. [...]

[T]here is significant evidence that the efforts of Iran's clerical Islamists have been in vain. Not only have they failed to make Iranian society more religious, they may have made it even less so. Expressions such as societal secularisation, the sacred as secular, and Iran's secular shift have been coined by experts to conceptualise this significant development, which could rightly be called "social revolution".

The current round of anti-government demonstrations is undoubtedly a manifestation of such a social revolution. The killing of Mahsa Amini offered the excuse for collective protests against the Iranian leaders' imposition of religious values and norms. While the grievances of dissidents extend to a wide range of economic and political issues, these protests have centred on opposition to the government's imposition of religious values and norms on a population who do not hold them themselves. The issue of hijab is a small but visible indication of the fundamental differences between the way that Iranian leaders and the protesters view women. Significantly, these tensions extend to a whole host of social issues -- not just those affecting women. A social revolution has occurred in Iran and a generation has emerged that gives greater priority to freedom, democracy, and human rights than to religious values and norms.

If Iranian leaders continue to insist upon the imposition of their own religious values and norms on the whole population, then chronic instability and periodic uprisings will become an inevitability of Iranian politics. 

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