Title: Re: Gaza protestors to challenge police/Govt.
Post by Gnads on Feb 9th, 2026 at 12:31pm
Quote:My Grandmothers’ Roar Echoes in Tehran by Rawan Osman.
As a woman born and raised in the Middle East, I take what is happening in Iran personally. I have lived in Europe for fifteen years, not because I fancy European weather or cuisine. Please don’t take offense. My heart is tuned to the hot, spicy breeze and crispy Mediterranean dreams. I gave them up in exchange for safety, for life in a country where men cannot roam my space unleashed.
In Lebanon, we grew up under the shadow of war, one that would occasionally scare the life out of us. To liberate Jerusalem. It was their holy duty, they said. Most were not even believers, yet they subscribed to the “pro Palestine” club. They saw no harm in Islamists taking the lead until Islamists began dictating the rules. Until Lebanon’s economy collapsed and slogans turned into shackles.
We moved to Syria when I was eighteen. My sisters were seventeen and fourteen. My father, who had left the country as a teenager, decided to return when the ophthalmologist Assad took over. Compared to his father, he introduced what were seen as groundbreaking measures: private banking, telecommunications, digitalization, even limited dissent by allowing some exiled figures to return. The resulting economic boom prompted our relocation from Lebanon.
To us girls, and to my mother, who was thirty eight at the time, Syria was a cultural shock. Visiting Damascus for a few days over Eid was one thing. Living there was another.
Walking the streets alone felt like wandering through a jungle. Occasionally, we met the beast.
Men would approach us and lift our skirts, pinch our thighs, touch our bodies. They followed us through markets and pressed against us deliberately. Policemen, note the men, would flirt with us, saying worse things than the passersby we wanted to report. Men exposed themselves to us on public transport, in alleys in the Old City, and in broad daylight on the most fashionable streets of the capital.
One of my sisters would cry when it happened. My youngest sister and I quickly learned to walk toward those men and hit them as hard as we could, without flinching.
Nobody helped us.
People looked at us as though we had asked for it because we were not wearing headscarves. We had attended a French Catholic school in Lebanon, always dressed in white and navy-blue uniforms—conservative by any standard, even at our wildest. But that was not enough for the so called “devout Muslims”, the same men who tried to lift your skirt as they left the mosque. The same men who told your father to force you to wear the veil after they had just tried to touch your breasts while offering you a ride.
I know hypocrisy. It looked me in the eyes.
Both my grandmothers— one Shiite and one Sunni, one Lebanese and one Syrian— were married off before the age of fifteen. Together, they gave birth to seven girls. Their lives were shaped by men who dictated the course of events, while they endured silently, carrying obedience like a birthmark. I remember the brokenness in their eyes filled with quiet resignation.
It was our generation, the granddaughters, that broke the cycle of dependency and subjugation. Especially my sisters and I, because we left. We left the Middle East, and more specifically, we left the Syrian jungle.
When I watch what the Iranian mullahs’ regime is doing to young girls today, I hear my grandmothers’ roar, the rage they were never allowed to express. When I learned what happened to girls who went dancing at Nova, I thought of my fragile sister who loves music festivals and thanked heaven for replanting her in Europe. When I hear the testimony of a fourteen year old Druze girl raped in her home in Sweida by Islamists while calling for her father, I am reminded that survival in our world often depended on chance, on having a kinder father or a braver brother. In the Middle East, survival often depended on a door that remained closed to the beasts and their creed.
When I see the faces of Kurdish women recently murdered, abused and thrown off buildings by the so called liberators of the Syrian Arab Republic, I think of my sisters and myself. We left. We survived. They stayed. They picked up guns to protect their villages, their families, their dignity.
Did we abandon them? Only God knows how difficult it was to leave, and how impossible it was to stay.
Extremism, whether Shiite or Sunni, served us nothing but misery. Men on both sides denied their sisters, wives, and daughters the right to fulfill themselves, to pursue their dreams, to attend university, to become independent. They denied them the freedom to choose their partners. And when marriages failed, they denied them divorce, because economic dependence was the leash.
Women lived in the shadow of men, at their mercy.
I am one of the few in my family who broke those shackles. I had a father who taught me how. Rules that made no sense to me were irrelevant.
This is why Iran matters to me.
Today, I identify with Iranian women who reject backwardness and tyranny, the rule of self appointed, corrupt, zealous mullahs who robbed millions of their freedom to live. The same fanatical zeal that destroyed Lebanon and Syria is now crushing the brave people of Iran. This is not an Iranian story alone. It is a regional pathology, tolerated for decades under the guise of “resistance”, “authenticity”, and “anti Western virtue”. |
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