This is the slightly amended text of a speech given on 14 September 2025 at a commemorative event for Mahsa Jina Amini in London organised by Jiyan Women’s Assembly. it was first published in The Freethinker on 16September 2025.
We live in what feels like the worst of times, an Age of Hate that conspires against hope.
It paralyses.
It breeds helplessness and fear.
It can weigh us down until it becomes difficult to breathe.
Like Gaza, a graveyard of women and children—seventy per cent of those killed in this genocide.
Like Afghanistan, where women are left to die beneath earthquake rubble, forbidden the touch of medical doctors and rescue workers who might save them: a system of sex apartheid, as in Iran, where it is a crime to be a woman.
Like Turkey, where Kurdish women endure militarisation, displacement, and a double patriarchy—both state and communal.
And like right here in London, where the largest rally of the misogynist and xenophobic far right, emboldened by those in power, marched through the city just a few days ago.
The world seems to have been reduced to the province of small-minded, exclusive, flag-waving authoritarian demagogues whose only political aspiration is to hate, exclude, and dehumanise the other.
But humanity’s future is shared.
And we are reminded of this today, on the third anniversary of the Islamic regime of Iran’s murder of Mahsa Jina Amini, which sparked a women’s revolution in Iran.
We are reminded of another language, another aspiration that humanises and conspires in hope.
The language of Woman, Life, Freedom—a slogan born from the Kurdish struggle, first raised in Rojava, a feminist centre in a war zone, amplified on the streets of Iran, and echoed across the globe.
A language that pushes against both authoritarianism and the global plunge toward division and tribalism.
Woman, Life, Freedom represents an inclusive politics of solidarity across divides.
It is a cultural and social transformation of the fabric of patriarchal societies that cannot easily be reversed.
It reshapes citizenship: women reclaiming the street, the square, and the body itself as the battlegrounds for liberation.
It says: a woman’s place is in the revolution—particularly significant in a region where Islam and Islamic states have turned women’s bodies into instruments of state control, repression, and erasure.
Woman, Life, Freedom insists on woman as subject, not object; that every human life, ordinary and unadorned, is worthy of defence; and that all are free if women are free.
It is the antidote to paralysis and indifference; it is an insistence on the audacity of empathy and a rebellion against dehumanisation.
Women, Life, Freedom is the unfinished project of liberation, summoning an Age of Humanity via a women’s revolution in an Age of Hate, and allowing us to imagine anew what it means to live, to resist, to be free—and to be fully human.
Jin, Jiyan, Azadî
زن، زندگی، آزادی