This piece was written before Iran imposed an internet blackout on 8 January.
by Raha Nik-Andish, London Review of Books
Six months ago I thought about buying a car, for reasons not of convenience but of necessity. My income as a freelance university lecturer in Iran barely pays for my daily commute. I thought I could drive at night for the ride‑hailing service Snapp! to cover my living expenses. I had enough savings to buy a hatchback Saipa Quik – but then its price went up 66 per cent.
I wasn’t able to buy a car but I have started driving for Snapp! anyway. One‑third of my earnings goes to the car’s owner, Snapp! takes a commission and I pay for wear and tear on the car as well as fuel.
One night I picked up a pair of estate agents. ‘Is working with Snapp! profitable?’ one of them asked. ‘Everyone seems to be doing it.’
I said I was just starting.
‘What this government has done to Iran’s economy,’ he replied, ‘no enemy could have accomplished. They frighten the people. So money goes into gold and coins. Then inflation rises and the gold is dumped back into the market. It’s a dirty economic game to empty people’s pockets.’
I asked about the housing market. ‘It’s not about having money,’ he said. ‘It’s about instability. Nobody dares to sell or buy. Prices can shift so fast that you might not even be able to buy back your own home.’ I have heard similar sentiments from shopkeepers, office workers and government employees.
I work three nights a week, from around 11 p.m. to 3 a.m. Most of what I earn from Snapp! goes on food. One night as I was walking home from my local supermarket, I passed two men standing beside a car. One pointed at my plastic carrier bag. ‘How much did that cost?’ he asked. ‘You must be rich!’
‘You don’t even know what’s inside,’ I told him. I had bought only yoghurt, cheese, rice, lentils, soap and shampoo.
‘It looks like one‑third of my pension,’ he said.
I worry that one of my students will get into the back of the car and ask why their lecturer is driving for Snapp! I teach art at a small university. Fewer students have been on campus because of repeated closures by the government. Last week universities were closed from Thursday to Sunday – not for Imam Ali’s birthday but to prevent illegal gatherings or protests on campuses. There are only two weeks left until the end of term. For students not taking exams, classes will be taught online. Some of the students at my university have said they will boycott their exams in solidarity with the protests that have spread to all 31 of the country’s provinces.
Across universities nationwide, students are chanting slogans such as ‘The student dies, he does not accept humiliation’; ‘No Gaza, no Lebanon, my life for Iran’; even ‘Death to Khamenei’ and ‘Long live the Shah.’
The demonstrations began on 28 December, when shopkeepers in Tehran’s Grand Bazaar shut their stores in protest at economic hardship, runaway inflation and the collapse of living standards. The protests, strikes, and sit-ins spread from Tehran to Shiraz, Isfahan, Mashhad, Hamadan and other cities. Some demonstrations in Isfahan and Mashhad have linked demands for basic welfare with broader calls for freedom and systemic change.
The security forces have responded with tear gas and live ammunition, but people have stood their ground. Some protesters have tried to engage the police in conversation, asking about their own economic hardships and hoping to persuade them to change sides. There have been at least 21 confirmed deaths so far, more than a thousand people have been injured and more than two thousand arrested.
The government has promised to distribute food vouchers to every Iranian citizen to help with buying staples, but people remain sceptical. Masked demonstrators in the city of Abdanan attacked a Revolutionary Guards discount chain store and threw rice on the streets to protest at high food prices and government corruption. The regime also announced a change in the official exchange rate with the dollar, to align it more closely with the black market rate that everyone uses. According to a government spokesman, this means that the price of food – including cooking oil, which has become increasingly scarce – will rise even further.
Meanwhile, a documentary about the actress Taraneh Alidoosti on BBC Persian (which is banned in Iran) has garnered significant attention on YouTube. Alidoosti describes her arrest during the Woman, Life, Freedom protests and a rare skin condition she developed after her release from Evin Prison. (I know a woman whose hair has fallen out since her imprisonment and not grown back.) Alidoosti also declares in the interview that she will no longer appear in films wearing a headscarf.
Reacting to the documentary on social media, a lot of people have said that Alidoosti was expressing not only personal but collective pain, speaking to the frustrations of many Iranians struggling under economic and social hardship.
Some of the images circulating on social media have been altered or created by AI. The BBC showed that a widely circulated photograph of two protesters in Hamadan being sprayed by a riot policeman with a water cannon had been AI-generated. It was posted on the Persian-language X account of the Israeli government.
What’s real are the helicopters hovering in the skies over my head. I have trouble sleeping at night. When I told my mother to stock up on staples, she looked at me serenely. Her generation has lived through revolution and war. They have seen worse.
For a while now I’ve had the feeling that we’re on the Titanic, and I’m not the only one. A video on Instagram, shared by 120,000 people, shows a black-and-white montage of ordinary Iranian streets as Leonard Cohen sings: ‘Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lied.’ Some people even talk hopefully about Trump invading the country.
The other night I picked a passenger up at the airport, in his late sixties or early seventies. I mentioned the exchange rate, which is the worst it’s ever been. He looked at me in the rear-view mirror. ‘I have a request,’ he said. ‘I will speak, and you don’t answer. Even if you think I’m wrong, just listen.’
He paused, before continuing: ‘This is the result of what people did in 1979 when they shouted “Death to the Shah” and handed the country to people who knew nothing about politics or the world. They were supposed to pray, not run a nation. When you give the fate of a country to superstition and ignorance, this is what you get.’
He fell silent as a traffic light turned red. Then he said, more quietly: ‘But remember: no government lasts for ever. Everything has its time. Their time will end too. The world, with all its detours, eventually moves forward.’
After I’d dropped him at his house I turned off the engine and sat quietly by myself for a few moments. As I looked down the empty unlit street, I felt as if I had been driving in the dark for years. Then I started the engine and pulled away. We’re still moving not because we know where we’re going, but because stopping is no longer an option.
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