In Iran, one woman’s final act of defiance exposed the violence of erasure and the radical power of being seen.
Self-immolation is among the most harrowing forms of political resistance, it’s a final act of defiance meant to bypass censorship, force public attention, and provoke moral reckoning. Throughout history, such protests have often been male-dominated: in 1963, Vietnamese monk Thích Quảng Đức set himself ablaze in Saigon to protest religious persecution. In 1969, Jan Palach burned himself alive in Prague to oppose Soviet occupation. And most recently, in 2024, Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old U.S. Air Force member, immolated himself outside the Israeli Embassy in Washington, D.C., declaring he would “no longer be complicit in genocide.”
These acts, while extreme, are often met with solemnity. The men who burn are eulogised as heroes and their deaths are immortalised in photos, monuments, and memory. But when Dr. Homa Darabi set herself on fire in Tehran, on February 21, 1994, the world looked away, Hamid Namjoo suggests in this piece for the Farsi language website PeCritique.
Born in 1940 in Tehran, Darabi came of age during a time of great political upheaval. She was arrested in the 1950s as a student activist under the Shah’s regime, and later became one of the few Iranian women to study medicine abroad. She completed her psychiatry training in the United States before returning to Iran, determined to contribute to her country’s future.
But following the 1979 Islamic Revolution, that future became a nightmare, especially for women. The regime imposed strict dress codes, curtailed freedoms, and systematically excluded women from public life. Darabi, by then a respected professor and psychiatrist, found herself under constant pressure. Her refusal to enforce mandatory hijab policies on her students led to her suspension and eventual expulsion from Tehran University. The cost of integrity was isolation.
For years, she battled the psychological toll of living in a society that punished truth and visibility. Her daughter, Parastou, later recalled how Darabi’s depression deepened, her sense of purpose eroding in the face of daily humiliation and institutional cruelty. Her final words, before setting herself ablaze in Tajrish Square, were a cry against the forced hijab but also against everything that came with it: coercion, shame, silencing.
What sets Darabi’s act apart is not only its gendered context, but its gendered defiance. In a country where the female body is criminalised unless veiled, Darabi’s unveiled burning body became the protest itself. It was not just her political message. It was her message made flesh.
Unlike many male self-immolators, she was not granted the dignity of martyrdom. According to Namjoo, her story was quickly buried, distorted, or ignored. Where male protestors are framed as tragic heroes, Darabi was pathologised. Even in death, she was made to disappear. But her act remains one of the most radical in Iran’s recent history, not only because it challenged the regime, but because it confronted the culture that enabled it.
Dr. Homa Darabi’s legacy survives largely outside official narratives — in feminist writings, in the whispered recollections of dissidents, in the fire she passed on to generations of Iranian women who refuse to be silenced. Her story was never meant to be remembered, but it was never quite forgotten either.
In 2022, the death of Mahsa Jina Amini sparked a wave of protests across Iran, led by women who removed their headscarves in public and chanted “Woman, Life, Freedom.” It was a movement Darabi would have recognised and perhaps dreamed of. Her life and death were not in vain; they were a warning and a promise. She did not vanish. She became a flame, carried forward by every woman who dares to own their own body.
ZN
The original article (‘هما دارابی؛ حجابی که در آتش سوخت’) by Hamid Namjoo was published in Farsi on March 5, 2025.
It is available here.
PeCritique is a Farsi online platform focusing on political thought, cultural criticism, and social reflection.
