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WBUR Podcasts, Boston.

This is on point. I'm Meghacharabardi.

Masa Amini was born in northwestern Iran on September 21, 1999.

Her family is Kurdish, a minority in Iran. Her Kurdish name was Zina, which means life. Masa was her Persian name. On September 13, 2002, Masa visited her brother in Tehran. There, she was arrested by Iran's guidance patrol, the regime's morality police.

Her crime? Not wearing a head covering appropriately in public.

Since the Iranian Revolution in 1979, Iranian women have been required to wear the hijab in public.

Supreme Leader Khomeini declared that women would be, quote, naked without it.

But Iran, and especially Tehran, has always been a cosmopolitan place.

Women did resist the requirement in one way or another, and the regime always pushed back.

In 1983, mandatory hijab in public became part of the Iranian Penal Code, which stated that, quote, women who appear in public without religious hijab will be sentenced to whipping up to 74

lashes, end quote.

Still, in the 2010s and 2020s, young Iranian women became ever more resistant to wearing

the hijab in public. That prompted the morality police to launch campaigns where they

arrested and, quote, re-educated women who were defying the law.

Masa Amini died as a result of her arrest and re-education.

She was beaten by police inside a police van.

And two hours after her arrest, she was taken to the hospital,

though it took more than an hour and a half for

the ambulance to get there. Mossa was in a coma, and she died on September 16, 2022,

five days shy of her 23rd birthday. Records show that she was already brain dead when she arrived

at the hospital.

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